The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Or perhaps the friction was merely the result of the much discussed tension between slaves who worked in the fields and those who worked in the master’s house? Scholars have rightly cautioned against calling house slaves “privileged,” mainly because the term does not take into account the views of the enslaved. It just assumes that they would have thought spending their days around white people a desirable thing, that being “chosen” to be in proximity to white masters was a sign of good fortune. White slave owners may have thought so, but that was only their view.

  It also assumes that the relative “easiness” of housework when compared with fieldwork dramatically outweighed all other considerations. While house slaves like the Hemingses may have generally been exempted from more physically challenging fieldwork, there were some advantages to being outside the constant eye view of white masters and mistresses. Enslaved people who worked away from the master’s house had greater personal autonomy and the chance to commune with one another in the manner they chose—they could more easily say what they wanted, the way they wanted. Every moment spent away from white masters and mistresses gave them the chance to fashion and maintain their own sense of identity in matters of family, religion, and other social practices. The things most real and important about slaves’ lives were the things most hidden from the white world. In the field, even with an overseer making rounds, slaves were largely free from too intimate involvement with the whims and personalities of their oppressors. For some, this could well have been a psychological relief more precious than the extra calories burned and effort expended in tending crops.

  We must remember that, in the society in which the Hemingses existed, family was all. This was as true for blacks as for whites. Importantly, during the Hemingses’ time at Monticello, family at its most elemental level was about blood ties. The Hemingses’ situation vis-à-vis other slaves in their community was especially complicated because they were slaves in a household where they were genetically related both to one another and to those who held them in bondage. Because of that connection, the master of that household chose to treat them in a way that separated them from the rest of the enslaved population—for example, letting some of its members hire themselves out and keep their wages, exempting the women of the family from any hard labor, freeing only people from that family, giving certain of its males virtual free movement, and selecting them for special training as artisans. The master then chose a woman from the Hemings family, had children with her, and arranged for the freedom of that nuclear family. Any enslaved member of that community who knew the history of Monticello would have known that the only route to freedom (one traveled only infrequently) was the possession of Wayles, Jefferson, or Hemings blood. No one else had a chance. It is doubtful that other members of the community could have avoided seeing the Hemingses as different from themselves. It is also unlikely that members of the Hemings family could have avoided seeing themselves in something of a special light, even if the harsh reality of slavery might have served to check the tendency to see themselves as completely separate from other enslaved people. These and many other issues must be considered as we examine the Hemings family’s progress through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  History is to a great degree an imaginative enterprise; when writing it or reading it, we try to see the subjects in their time and space. Imagining requires some starting point of connection. Even though we acknowledge that the connections will not be perfect—we cannot really know exactly what it meant to be a Hemings at Monticello, or a Jefferson, for that matter—we have to reference what we know of human beings as we try to reconstruct and establish a context for their lives. Historians often warn against the danger of “essentializing” when making statements about people of the past—positing an elemental human nature that can be discerned and relied upon at all times and in all places. Warnings notwithstanding, there are, in fact, some elements of the human condition that have existed forever, transcending time and place. If there were none, and if historians did not try to connect to those elements (consciously or unconsciously), historical writing would be simply incomprehensible. Think of attempting to read a foreign language in a script you had never seen before. You could stare at the pages for an eternity, but without some point of commonality between the unknown script and something you already know—a connection—no matter how long you stared, you could never crack the code.

  Therefore, we should not be afraid to call upon what we know in general about mothers, fathers, families, male-female relationships, power relationships, the contours of life in small closely knit communities, as we try to see the Hemingses in the context of their own time and place. This will require thinking of the family members in a way they were not thought of during their lives and, it must be said, during most of the period that Monticello has been the object of scholarly attention—as fully formed persons with innate worth and equal humanity that links them directly to us all, no matter what our race. I asked in an earlier work, “In what universe could the humanity, family integrity, and honor of slave owners count for more than the humanity, family integrity, and honor of slaves?” My answer was that we Americans have lived in that universe since the founding of the country, and have only recently begun the process of moving beyond its boundaries. I hope this work adds to the momentum of that journey.

  The lives of the various members of the Hemings family, which must include the white men who had children with Hemings women, provide important windows through which to view the development of slavery and the concept of race in the Virginia of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While there was much about the Hemingses that made them unique—Jefferson and Monticello—like other enslaved people, they were subject to all the insecurities and deprivations associated with that condition. It seems especially appropriate to tell one part of the story of slavery through life at a place that holds such symbolic importance for many Americans—Monticello. For it is there that we can find the absolute best, and the absolute worst, that we have been as Americans. We should not get too far into the twenty-first century without looking back at the Hemingses and their time to remember and to learn.

  PART I

  ORIGINS

  Some images in this ebook are not displayed owing to permissions issues.

  1

  YOUNG ELIZABETH’S WORLD

  ELIZABETH HEMINGS BEGAN life when America was still a colonial possession. She lived through the Revolution in the home of one of the men who helped make it and died during the formative years of the American Republic, an unknown person in the midst of pivotal events in national and world history. Hemings lived at a time when chattel slavery existed in every American colony, but was dramatically expanding and thriving in the Virginia that was her home. She was, by law, an item of property—a nonwhite, female slave, whose life was bounded by eighteenth-century attitudes about how such persons fit into society. Those attitudes, years in the making by the time Hemings was born, fascinate because they are at once utterly familiar and totally alien.

  Most Americans today admit the existence of racism and sexism, even as we often disagree about examples of them. When we encounter these practices while studying the eighteenth century, we react knowingly. “These are the things,” at least some of us say, “that we’re still working to overcome.” We also know that hierarchies, based on any number of factors, exist in every society, enriching the lives of some and blighting the lives of others.

  Yet, slavery is a different matter altogether. There are workers all over the world who live desperate lives with little hope of advancement for themselves or their children. There are women who are held in bondage and forced to work as prostitutes or to clean others’ homes and care for others’ families while their own families go unattended. None of these conditions approach the systematic degradation and violence of American slavery sanctioned by state and church. People were bought and sold against their will. They were defined in statutes as chattel or real estate. With
the law’s protection they could be beaten to death as part of legitimate “correction.” They were denied legal marriage. Slave women were unprotected against rape. Forcing a slave woman to have sex against her will was considered a trespass against her owner. If her owner raped her, it was no crime at all. What the violation meant to the woman was irrelevant. The law prevented slaves from giving testimony in courts against white people. It was a world where one could pick up the daily newspaper and see advertisements touting “Negroes for sale” and descriptions of “runaway slaves” complete with stock caricatures that made them instantly recognizable to all readers. These and all the other depredations of the slave system present a world that seems far removed from daily life in the United States in the twenty-first century. Though we hear echoes of that world and understand that its effects are still present, much about this time feels otherworldly.

  Understanding the path of Elizabeth Hemings’s life requires some consideration of the contours of the community into which she was born, an elastic place with boundaries that expanded, contracted, shifted, and evolved over time. At the broadest level, Hemings was part of a large Atlantic world, comprising Europeans and Africans on both sides of that ocean whose lives were shaped by the demands of slavery. While the characteristics of that world must inform our view, a thorough investigation of all parts of it is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we will draw the circle around Hemings more closely to look at the world she would have known most intimately—the world of an enslaved woman in eighteenth-century Virginia.

  To say to an American that Elizabeth Hemings was “born a slave” is to call forth a particular image of who she was, how she lived her life, and even how she spoke and carried herself. That is because slavery lives in the minds of most Americans as a series of iconic images: a slave ship packed tight with human cargo, a whip, the auction block, slaves speaking one universal and timeless dialect, black figures toiling in cotton fields. That last image—the cotton field—has most strongly influenced our view, freezing the institution in its antebellum period when cotton was “king” and when slavery had, in the view of one influential historian, been thoroughly domesticated.1 By the time “King Cotton” arrived in the nineteenth century, enslaved Virginians of African origin, and those of English extraction whose ancestors introduced slavery into the Old Dominion, had long since become Americans, and the institution that defined their existence together had adapted itself, it seemed, for the long haul.

  What had gone before, the process that brought those two groups into their “Americanness,” is largely the province of scholars of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. There are many reasons for this, but several immediately come to mind. First, American slavery at its beginnings—obscure, distant, and tragic—is probably for most people a less attractive point of focus than the story of the discovery and political founding of the American nation. If you like your history heroic—and many people seem to—the story of slavery in the early American period is simply not the place to go looking for heroes, at least not among the people most commonly written about.

  Second, with the exception of periodic bouts of “founders chic,”2 in which the men credited with drawing up the blueprint for the United States are pitted against one another—Hamilton was really better than Jefferson, Madison was better than Adams, and Franklin was better than all of them—the colonial and Revolutionary period in America has so far failed to capture the cultural imagination the way the Civil War era has. There is no Gone with the Wind for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, no literature wallowing in the romance of defeat, no passionate attachments to divisive symbols that live on to poison contemporary race relations and threaten the American future. The Civil War is over, but the politics that fueled it and helped design its aftermath are still very much with us, playing out in various racially charged and seemingly intractable disputes about desegregation, affirmative action, even the continued use in the public sphere of a Confederate battle flag that once flew against the United States of America. The years running up to, during, and after the Civil War mark the beginning of the America we know today—a modern country, powered by the market and free labor, multiracial in its composition (if somewhat uneasily), and at its most fundamental core, united.

  It is not as if no heroism or romance were to be found in the colonial period. Schoolchildren are told an uplifting story about English men and women escaping religious persecution to build their own cities upon the hill in what would become New England. Who could not identify with the urge to live one’s life in peace and freedom, and not admire people willing to cross an ocean to do it? That some of the later immigrants to New England were Puritans, who almost immediately went about the business of persecuting those who did not toe their particular version of “the line,” does not diminish the attractiveness of those early aspirations. It was the idea that counts. We can (and do) without embarrassment draw a direct line from the dreams of those Americans in the making to our dreams today.

  Elizabeth Hemings’s Virginia, however, presents a real problem. It is hard to associate the earliest Virginians who controlled society with any aspiration loftier than that of making a killing. The colony was, after all, founded by the Virginia Company. It was from the very beginning a moneymaking enterprise, a place for men seeking their fortunes with limited reference to spirituality, with no nod to sentimentality and, apparently, very few limits on how the moneymaking could proceed. In one historian’s words, the people who settled the colony were all adventurers “in the fullest sense of the term,” men “seeking the main chance for [themselves] in that part of the new world which…seemed to offer [them] the best chances.” The term “adventurer” doesn’t really do justice to the men who helped usher in this world, for we must instead think of what those high-stakes gambles actually entailed. Voracious land grabbing and land speculation, aided and abetted by the manipulation of public offices, made a relative handful of people wealthy.3

  Those who had to rely chiefly on their physical labor to amass property were at a distinct disadvantage. By the end of the seventeenth century, the white indentured servants who came to the colony hoped that, in a not too distant future, they too could own enough land to do more than subsist. Their dreams, however, were very seldom realized. That this economic and social system eventually came most fully into its own on the backs of enslaved Africans adds depravity to the overall picture of venality. Unless one is willing and able to overlook extremely important details about the fundamental nature of this society, the story of Virginia’s origins does not lend itself to romanticizing. This is probably why for most Americans the national narrative begins at Plymouth Rock instead of Jamestown, even though the Virginia fortune seekers arrived more than a decade before the Pilgrims.

  All this seems worlds away from where we are now, but despite its comparative remoteness, the colonial period in America, as experienced in both the North and the South, in very critical ways helped define who we are today. For one thing, it was during that period that the basic meanings of “whiteness” and “blackness” were in the process of being defined for the American population. However it has been expressed over the years, the association of whiteness with power and privilege, blackness with relative powerlessness and second-class status, began to take shape in this time and has been a persistent feature of life in America ever since. It has survived Revolution, Civil War, massive immigration, two world wars, the Cold War, and the tremendous social upheaval during the latter part of the twentieth century. Because we are still living with this, it is worthwhile for us to consider the world that greeted the matriarch of the Hemings family in the mid-1700s.

  The Africans and the English

  By the 1730s, the decade in which Elizabeth Hemings was born to an African mother and an English father, the institution that would define her life and those of her descendants for years to come was firmly in place. Virginia was a full-fledged slave society 116 years after a small number of Africa
ns (“negars”) arrived at Jamestown, the English colony on the James River. It was during those years that white Virginians transformed their laws, culture, and economy to make slavery based upon race the very foundation of their way of life.4

  The transformation was hardly instantaneous. Slavery in Virginia did not spring up overnight. It took time—spanning the last seven decades of the 1600s—for the English colonists, or the leading lights of the colony, to define the terms of engagement between Africans and the English in that corner of the New World. What they settled upon foretold a life of pain and struggle for the Africans and their progeny over many generations, and prosperity (or at least the hope of it) for the English and their descendants. Scholars have long debated the reason for this turn of events, why the Virginia colonists turned away from the labor of white indentured servants and decided to enslave Africans. Some have cited race and religion as the deciding factors, allowing men who jealously guarded their liberty to obliterate the liberty of others who were of a different color and different faiths. Other scholars suggest it was a straightforward economic calculation. Still others assert that it was some combination of these and other influences.5