The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Madison Hemings, one of Elizabeth’s many grandsons, said one such complication arose early on in young Elizabeth’s life. Hemings, speaking about his grandmother’s origins, said that the disjuncture between having an enslaved black mother and a free white father was the source of conflict in Elizabeth’s early childhood. Her father, “the captain of an English trading vessel,” met Elizabeth’s mother, described as a “full-blooded African, and possibly a native of that country,” at or near Williamsburg. Captain Hemings wanted to buy his daughter, whom he had acknowledged as his “own flesh.” Even though he offered “an extraordinarily large price for her,” Hemings’s owner, identified as “John Wales,” refused to sell the child. When this happened, Captain Hemings plotted to “take the child by force or stealth.” His plans were thwarted when “leaky fellow servants” of Elizabeth’s mother alerted “Mr. Wales,” who then brought mother and child into the “great house,” where he could keep an eye on them. Hemings explained that his grandfather refused to sell his grandmother because he was interested in how this mixed-race child would turn out. After a while Captain Hemings gave up and left Virginia and his child.17

  Exactly where in Africa Elizabeth Hemings’s mother was supposed to have come from is unknown. That she was African fits extremely well with the demographic profile of Virginia at the time of her daughter’s birth. The 1730s marked the high tide for importation of Africans into the colony. More were brought into the Old Dominion during this period than in any other decade in which the slave trade was legal. Newly imported Africans made up 34 to 44 percent of the colony’s total slave population. The largest numbers were from Angola, followed by the Bight of Biafra (off the coast of Nigeria) and the region of Senegambia (Senegal and Gambia). The Williamsburg area had particularly high concentrations of people who had been born in Africa, making it a place full of Africans of diverse ethnic origins, native-born blacks, Anglo-American colonists, and English seamen—a multicultural, multilingual province, where an English ship captain would likely encounter a “full-blooded African” woman.18

  Under law Elizabeth Hemings’s father had no right to her, and if he wanted his child, unless her owner in the spirit of generosity wanted to give her away, he would have had to buy her. If the owner refused, there was no recourse. But just who owned Elizabeth when she was born? Although John Wayles did live near Williamsburg, in Charles City County, he apparently did not own Elizabeth Hemings at her birth. Rather, he came into ownership of her when she was about eleven years old upon his marriage to Martha Eppes in 1746. The couple’s marriage settlement (essentially a contract that, among other things, allowed the wife to retain control over property brought to the marriage, which in slaveholding areas very often meant slaves) included Elizabeth Hemings and, presumably, her mother because whoever owned the mother owned the child.19 This confusion over ownership, and the tangle that emerges in sorting it out, reveals with great clarity what happened when human beings were treated as “things.”

  Martha Eppes Wayles’s father, Francis Eppes IV, died in 1734. In a 1794 listing, Jefferson’s Farm Book recorded Elizabeth Hemings’s year of birth as “abt” 1735, but dropped the equivocation in other listings. So it cannot be said with certainty whether she was born just before Eppes died or just after. By his will drafted in 1733, Eppes set out with great specificity what property he wanted to leave to each of his children. When speaking of his daughter Martha, he wrote that he gave “unto my my daughter Martha Eppes Several negroes following, the negro woman Jenny, my negro girl Agge, my negro girl Judy, my negro girl Sarah, my negro girl Dinah….” At the end of the section devoted to Martha, Eppes also gave her a share with her sister Anne in two male slaves, Argulas and Will, and a female slave named Parthena, stating, “[M]y will and desire is that the increase if any from ye said Parthena may be equally divided between them when they, or either of them shall come of age or mary [sic].”20 Was one of these six the “full-blooded African” woman?

  Not one of those names is African, but we would not expect them to be, since most slave owners called their African captives by the names they wanted when they arrived in the New World, instead of what their names actually were. Two names in that group, however, are very closely associated with later generations of the Hemings family. “Sarah” was the name of Elizabeth’s youngest daughter, more famously known by her nickname, Sally. In turn Sally Hemings would have nieces and a granddaughter named Sarah, and the name would continue in the family. As we will see, however, Sally Hemings more likely got her name from her father’s family. “Parthena” was an alternate spelling of the name Parthenia, which stands out among the usual run of Marthas, Marys, Elizabeths, and Annes. Elizabeth Hemings would have a daughter and several granddaughters called Thenia in Jefferson’s records, a diminutive of Parthenia. In the marriage settlement between John Wayles and Martha Eppes, the five female slaves given to Martha by her father are mentioned in the same order in which they appeared in Francis Eppes’s will—Jenny, Aggie (now spelled with an ie), Sarah, and Dinah. The slave Judy, whose name appears between Aggie and Sarah, is rendered as Judah. Several other names were added in the next line of the will, “Kate, Parthenia [now spelled with an i], Betty and Ben, a boy.”21

  Just which of these women was Elizabeth’s mother? When preparing his will giving Elizabeth Hemings to his own daughter Martha, John Wayles makes clear that Elizabeth was the “Betty” referred to in the property settlement when he married Martha Eppes. Elizabeth must have been the daughter of one of the Eppes slaves given to Martha, as she had evidently not been born yet when the will was written. That the Eppes-Wayles marriage settlement lists these new names along with the five enslaved women given to Martha in her father’s will suggests that in the years between 1733, when Francis Eppes willed the slave women to his daughter, and 1746, when the settlement was drawn, these women had given birth. Some, if not all, of the added names may represent their children who by law would automatically have belonged to Martha as well.

  Given the uniqueness of the name, and the prevalence of its diminutive in Elizabeth Hemings’s family, it seems very likely that Parthenia, whose “increase” Francis Eppes said should be divided between his two daughters, was related to Elizabeth. She may, in fact, have been her mother. The provisions of his will indicate that Francis Eppes IV was a hard man. He clearly had no compunction about separating mothers from children to achieve some sort of parity between his own offspring, as sections of his will make clear. He wanted to be fair to each child (but with a tilt toward his sons), down to the number of “silver spoons” and “feather beds.”22 Indeed, that was apparently the reason for having Martha and Anne Eppes share Parthenia and two other male slaves. They appear at the end of the section of the will as if Eppes had been rounding up a sum of money. He knew that to give Parthenia to one daughter would be giving that daughter a bonus. Parthenia would have children who would always belong to her owner, while Will’s and Argulas’s children might not, if the males were to have children with a woman owned by another. Eppes’s resolution—sharing Parthenia and her increase—contained a built-in cruelty, for while Parthenia could not be in two places at one time, she could have children who could be divided between two sisters, thus separating mother from children and siblings from one another. This outcome was avoided by means of partition, with Parthenia going to Martha, and the other two slaves to her sister Anne. Whatever her mother’s name, any tussle over young Elizabeth Hemings occurred between Captain Hemings and some member of the Eppes family, not John Wayles. The Eppeses resided at Bermuda Hundred, in the immediate vicinity of Williamsburg. It was there that Elizabeth Hemings was most likely born.

  The Eppeses

  Elizabeth’s owners, the Eppeses, were among the earliest arrivals to Virginia from their native England. The founding settler, Francis, served on the Council of Virginia in the 1630s. The family took up residence along the James and Appomattox Rivers in Henrico County, which would later be divided in two, creating a new county calle
d Chesterfield. Like other arriving families of the day, the Eppeses achieved large landholdings through the headright system, a scheme designed to stimulate immigration to Virginia.23

  In the beginning years of the colony, when the experiment seemed in danger of failure—with immigrant indentured servants dying of disease at alarming rates, starving, or being killed by Native Americans who resented the encroachment on their land—the owners of the Virginia Company decided to take drastic measures to get bodies into the colony to do productive work. Throughout the seventeenth century and into the beginning of the eighteenth, anyone who paid his way or for passage of other immigrants to Virginia received fifty acres of land for each person, hence the term “headright.” For a time, people received headrights for bringing in African slaves.24

  Francis Eppes obtained seventeen hundred acres of land under this system, giving his family a valuable head start in the emerging colony.25 As the years passed, members of the clan followed the standard practice of elites the world over, marrying into other families of similar “rank,” or sometimes even their own cousins. These unions further concentrated landownership within the small planter elite, although by the middle of the eighteenth century the Eppeses were no longer at the forefront of Virginia power and society. With the greater amount of land came the greater need for hands to work the fields of tobacco that quickly emerged as the colony’s lifeblood. Until a population bust and improved economic prospects in England dried up immigration, white indentured servants provided the bulk of the work. The expansion of the slave trade provided a new labor source. In this way those who would later be called the first families of Virginia became enthusiastic promoters and beneficiaries of African slavery.

  Because there was no grant of land at the end of the indentured servant’s tenure, the Virginia system led to huge inequities between families like the Eppeses and the average Englishmen and Englishwomen who came to the colony. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Virginia elites had taken the best land for themselves, leaving the former indentured servants land poor and resentful. Inequalities of class proved the source of great tension in the colony, fostering instances of rebellion great and small. These tensions were buried when race entered the picture as the prime dividing line for status within the colony. There would be no alliance between blacks and lower-class whites, who each in their own way had legitimate grievances against their overlords. Instead, poor whites, encouraged by the policies of the elites, took refuge in their whiteness and the dream that one day they, too, could become slave owners, though only a relative handful could ever hope to amass the land, wealth, and social position of the most prominent members of the Virginia gentry, who gained their place early on and would keep it for decades to come.

  By the time Elizabeth’s owner, Francis Eppes IV, took his place at the family seat in Bermuda Hundred, this group had firmly established an identity and way of life. Determined to smooth out the rough edges of their origins, they aspired to gentility. They built fashionably large houses, spent their leisure time visiting other members of their social set, and attended hunting parties and horse races. Members of the Eppes family, in particular, were known for their fondness for horse racing. In sum, the Eppeses and their cohort sought to reproduce the accoutrements of upper-class life in England—to the extent that could be done in the still feral wilderness of Virgina.26

  But Virginia was not England. It was a frontier society, complete with an inhospitable terrain and an often hostile native population that the colonists felt had to be conquered or removed. Upper-class Englishmen could dominate ordinary people who at least looked like them, who spoke the same language, and who, for the most part, had religious traditions they could understand. Imagine the scene. Virginia’s soi-disant elite imported thousands of people who looked nothing like them, spoke foreign languages, and had cultures and religions that white Virginians could never have truly comprehended. The colonists knew exactly what it took to bring these people to their shores, into their fields, and into their homes. Theirs was a society built on and sustained by violence, actual and threatened. The Eppeses and their kind thus led a fragile existence among people they had to subdue, uncertain whether that job could ever really be done.

  This was the hostile world into which Elizabeth Hemings was born. Besides the story of a tug-of-war between her father and her owner, no other details of Elizabeth’s earliest years at Bermuda Hundred survive. That story and what we know of her subsequent history suggest that her life as a slave who worked primarily in the house began during childhood, establishing a pattern for her family that would extend well into the nineteenth century.

  The house where Elizabeth worked as a child no longer stands. The Eppes family seat became Eppington, a structure built by Francis Eppes VI in 1766. That residence would play a recurring role in the lives of Elizabeth and her children as they lived there off and on even after the family was moved permanently to Monticello. We do not have physical evidence of what young Elizabeth’s immediate surroundings were like, but given her owners’ wealth and prominence, in that very status-conscious environment, they would have built a home suitable to persons of their station.

  Before they were sent “into the ground” to cultivate tobacco or whatever crop their owners chose, or before they took their places as servants in the house, young slave girls were often used to serve as companions or playmates to the master’s children, to run errands, or to watch over other slave children while their mothers worked in the fields. Their experiences and duties varied according to the material circumstances and needs of their owners, their mothers and fathers having no capacity to override the owners’ control over their children’s lives. Elizabeth, after being taken into the “great house,” apparently never made the transition to fieldwork. Instead, she began a life that would require daily interactions with and the immediate service of whites. She would come to know, indeed have to know, white people in ways that slaves more isolated from them would not.

  We can only wonder what this might have meant to the development of Hemings’s attitudes about herself and her place in life, understanding that it must have meant something. There is some evidence from the actions of her children and grandchildren that the Hemingses saw themselves as a caste apart. Whether this was an idea born in their individual generations or whether the seeds were planted when Elizabeth, because of her mixed-race status, began to live a life different from that of other slaves cannot be known. We do know that at every stage of her existence Elizabeth Hemings ended up being singled out for special consideration.

  One obvious aspect of Elizabeth Hemings’s story often gets lost in dealing with the gravely serious issues of slavery and race, and that is the issue of how she looked. Superficial as it is, appearance matters; and it matters even more for women—it probably mattered as much in the eighteenth century as it does today. The only physical description we have of Elizabeth Hemings is that she was a “bright mulatto” woman. But descriptions of several of her daughters and granddaughter refer to them as having been extremely attractive women. White men said this as well as black men. Elizabeth herself was able to attract males of both colors well into her forties, when by the standards of that day she would have been considered relatively old. Saying that whites reacted to Elizabeth Hemings in a particular way because she was mixed race, and thus physically more familiar to them, may not do justice to all that was going on with her. Not all mixed-race women would have been considered attractive. If Hemings, as a child and later as an adult, was seen as pretty, that might also account for the way people reacted to her, and not only in a sexual sense. Being pretty, of course, would not have made her free, nor would it have made those who dominated her life see her as an equal human being. Those truths, however, are not the only criteria for considering the important influences in her life.

  While work shaped the daily routines of slaves, and a few like Elizabeth were “favored” in some sense by their masters, being considered property made
all slaves’ lives inherently unstable. Designating an item (of whatever form) as property gives the owner the right to use, sell, and prevent others from having access to that item. Whim, caprice, careless indifference, cruelty, grim determination, self-centered passionate attachment—every emotion or thought that owners can have about their property ranged over the lives of Elizabeth and other enslaved African Virginians. They, this inappropriate property, responded as best they could within the small spaces their circumstances allowed, but the regime of private property set the tone, pace, and progress of their lives. When a master died, when one of his children got married, when a creditor had to be paid, a slave’s life could be transformed in an instant. Husbands were separated from wives when they were given as wedding presents. Slave families, assets in the hands of executors, were often scattered to the four winds to pay off a decedent’s debts. All of these things would touch the lives of various members of the Hemings family for more than a century. But one, the marriage of John Wayles to Martha Eppes, would turn out to be the signal event in the young life of the African and English woman who was to become the family’s matriarch.

  2

  JOHN WAYLES: THE IMMIGRANT

  ELIZABETH HEMINGS LEFT her childhood home at Bermuda Hundred in 1746, when Martha Eppes married a prosperous English immigrant named John Wayles. As a woman of the eighteenth century, Eppes became a feme covert when she married Wayles—a wife under the cover of her husband, who gained the right to control her property, among other things, in return for his protection.1 Wealthy families very often had great concerns about losing property that could have been in the family for generations simply because one of its female members got married. Marriage settlements, essentially prenuptial agreements usually entered into before the couple wed, provided a way out of the bride’s and her family’s predicament. The couple, or typically their fathers, negotiated a contract that allowed the wife to maintain control over specified property that she held before she married. The prospective bride, in turn, often gave up the right to the dower interest that would have given her a life interest in one-third of her husband’s freehold estate upon his death.