That was the way Elizabeth Hemings came into John Wayles’s household, as part of the property that Martha Eppes wanted to keep in her family line even after she married. Some men found these premarital arrangements vaguely insulting—a hint that they as prospective husbands would not necessarily have their wife’s best interest at heart or were incapable of managing their affairs. One wonders whether Wayles’s lower-class origins played any role in the decision to have a premarital agreement keeping certain Eppes property in the Eppeses’ hands. Although he was already wealthy by the time of his marriage, and had strong connections to an extremely well-regarded patron, he had no family ties in the colony, a definite drawback in a society run on family linkages and influence. If ever there was a case for a rich and powerful family’s reticence about a future in-law, this might seem to be one. Given their relative positions in society, Wayles had more to gain through his alliance with an old Virginia family than he lost by giving up what would be, in the absence of a contract, his property rights as a husband.
As it turned out, Elizabeth’s move away from the Eppes family was not permanent. Over the next five decades, she, her children, and even some of her grandchildren returned to them periodically as items of property passing between and among the extended families of the Eppeses, Randolphs, and Jeffersons. Actually, Elizabeth did not have far to go. Her new home, “the Forest,” John Wayles’s plantation, was in Charles City County, across the James River from Bermuda Hundred.2 Wayles chose to build his home among the hardwood trees just inland from the banks of the James.
Most prominent planters in Wayles’s region built their homes as close to the river as they could, for very good reasons. The James, with its numerous tributaries, meanders before emptying into the Chesapeake Bay, which gives it a direct link to the Atlantic Ocean and the world beyond. The very first settlement in the colony, Jamestown, lay forty miles upriver. The people who lived in the area and knew the river before the white settlers arrived named it after Powhatan, the leader of the powerful Powhatan tribe and the father of Pocahontas, whose name has lived on in history and myth. As the years passed, and the Native Americans were displaced, other settlements and Tidewater plantations stretched out along the river to take advantage of its connection to the bay and Atlantic markets. A similar process unfolded along the Potomac, York, and Rappahannock, three of the other major waterways in Virginia. The waters of all these rivers carried indentured servants, African slaves, and consumer goods into the colony and transported its life-defining staple crop, tobacco, out to foreign markets. Wayles was intimately familiar with all aspects of life on the James. He lived and worked as a lawyer in the area, and it was from Bermuda Hundred that he sometimes carried out one of the most important parts of his life as a businessman—selling slaves.
Elizabeth’s move from one home to another in 1746 was symbolic. We would consider the nearly twelve-year-old a child. By the standards of Elizabeth’s day, twelve marked the beginning of the end of childhood for most females, but particularly for female slaves whose status as property made the designation “child” short-lived. At the Forest the life Elizabeth would lead as an adult started to take shape. There she continued to serve as a house slave, became a mother to children by a black man, and a mother to children by John Wayles, thus forming blood and family ties that ensured that her father’s name would echo across the years. We know nothing of the man, or men, who fathered her first four children. We do, however, know some things about the man who fathered her next six.
Jefferson noted in a family Bible that John Wayles was born in Lancaster, England, on January 31, 1715,3 but gave no additional information about Wayles’s parents or family. Little is known of his early life in England or Virginia. The loss of the official records of Charles City County, along with the loss of Wayles’s papers, which were taken to Eppington with his daughter Elizabeth, helps explain the dearth of personal details about him. History books define Wayles solely by what he accomplished in America, as if he had had no life before he arrived, no family, and no parents. If the boy is father to the man, nothing of the boy’s life has appeared in print to shed much light on what sort of man he really was. The people who would have known what Wayles’s early life in England was like—his daughters Martha, Elizabeth, Tabitha, and Anne—apparently did not write of their father’s early beginnings, or, if they did, those writings are not extant or have not been included in historians’ writings about the Wayles and Jefferson families. When the issue was addressed at all, the assumption was that Wayles had been trained as a lawyer before he arrived in America. That bit of information, which would tend to point toward an upper-or at least middle-class birth, appears not to have been correct.4
On August 14, 1715, “John, son of Edward Wales of Lancaster,” was christened in St. Mary’s parish. As no other child named John Wales (or John Wayles, as he became known) was baptized between 1712 and 1724 in Lancaster, this record of baptism almost certainly referred to John Wayles of Virginia and confirms Jefferson’s notation about his father-in-law’s date of birth. Following the pattern common in those days, the record listed only the father’s name. In the year before Wayles’s baptism, however, the parish records noted the November 11 marriage of “Edward Wales of Lancaster and Ellen Ashburner of Bulk,” a small town north of Lancaster. Ellen was about seven months pregnant with John when she married Edward, but in those days the betrothal began the union of the couple. The marriage sealed it. If Ellen was born in Lancaster, there is no record of her baptism. Ellen Wales would be memorialized in the names of two of her son John’s great-granddaughters through his white family line, and one great-granddaughter through his black family line. Edward and Ellen Wales apparently had only one other child in Lancaster, a daughter, Mary, whose baptism took place in November of 1718. No other records of children born to Edward are noted in the parish records.5
Whatever the town may be like today, one gets the sense that Lancaster was a place to be from rather than to run to during John Wayles’s early life. The noted author Daniel Defoe was there in 1726, when Wayles was eleven years old. He characterized it as a
country town…situated near the River Lone or Lune. The town is ancient; it lies, as it were, in its own ruins and has little to recommend it but a decayed castle, and a more decayed port (for no ships of any considerable burthen); the bridge is handsome and strong, but, as before, there is little or no trade and few people.6
A town with “little or no trade and few people” held no real prospects for a person as ambitious as John Wayles. This is especially so given that Liverpool, which Defoe also visited and accurately described as having “an opulent, flourishing, and increasing trade to Virginia and English colonies in America,” lay just to the south. Liverpool, a thriving entrepôt at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was booming because of the trade that would help Wayles make his fortune: the transport and sale of African slaves. Even farther south, London beckoned young people from all over the country. Slavery, and the staple crops tended by enslaved people, had created a truly global economy, tying together European, North American, and African villages in the traffic in human beings. Although Lancaster may not have been an economic powerhouse during John Wayles’s boyhood, it did have a long-standing connection to Virginia, through its tobacco trade with the colony, which started in the late seventeenth century. Tobacco did not bring prosperity to Lancaster. It was, instead, the trade in Africans that transformed the place from the somewhat sleepy village that Defoe described in 1726 into a smaller version of neighboring Liverpool, though Lancastrians came somewhat late to the game. It was not until 1736, when Wayles was twenty-one, that Lancaster began its involvement in the slave trade. The Prince Frederick sailed to the coast of Guinea, thus beginning a trade that lasted until the first decade of the nineteenth century, during which period Lancaster became the fourth-most-prosperous slave-trading port in England.7 Although Wayles was in Virginia by the time the Lancaster slave trade was at its peak, he probably knew
before he came to America about its ability to make rich merchants out of men who otherwise would likely have been small farmers or artisans. As one observer of Lancaster’s society, writing about the men who had participated in the trade, put it, “Here lived the wealthy merchants who flourished, so it is said on the slave trade, and grew rich on their importations of mahogany and rum.”8 Away from his native Lancaster, John Wayles grew rich himself off of Africans. He used them as items of trade, held them in bondage, and mixed his blood with theirs.
Nothing in the record suggests that the Wayleses were prosperous people. The name, spelled with or without a y, was not common, and it is very likely that people who shared that last name in tiny Lancaster were related in some fashion. The Wayleses who appear in the public records around the time of John Wayles’s early life were definitely what we would call working class, and in some instances they were struggling mightily. In 1719 an Elizabeth Wayles of Lancaster, described as a widow with several unnamed children, was sent to debtor’s prison for about two years. John Wayles’s father’s profession is unknown, but his probable grandfather, also named Edward Wayles, was a butcher who died in 1686. His wife, Elizabeth, handled the letter of administration concerning his property on behalf of their four children: John, Thomas, Edward, and Anne. Neither Edward nor Elizabeth could write, and both signed the testamentary documents with their marks as signatures. Edward Wayles clearly wanted more for his children. In a rare move for his area, he left a bond with instructions to his wife to make sure that his children received as much education as the money would provide.9
That John Wayles’s life was a version of a rags-to-riches story is further supported by a note appended to an 1839 copy of a Lee family memoir transcribed from a document that William Lee wrote in 1771. Lee, who died in 1795, chronicled the family history, discussing individual members’ lives, fortunes, and contributions to society. The note states that Wayles came to Virginia as a “Servant Boy” brought over by a Lee family ancestor, Philip Ludwell, a name renowned in early Virginia history.
More on the back of the paper lent me by Mrs. Lee was written—on what authority I know not—“The Daughter of a Servant Boy brought back from England by Philip Ludwell, grandfather of Portia Hodgson, now living in Alexandria who finding him so Promising that he educated him, gave him a handsome set out in Life, and finally left him executor to his will, was the Wife of Mr. Jefferson[”]
Jefferson married 1772 Martha Skelton, a young beautiful childless widow, daughter & heiress of John Wayles a leading lawyer of VA-wealthy Veno. Anc.10
There were three Philip Ludwells of note in Virginia’s colonial period: father, son, and grandson. The Philip Ludwell referred to in the Lee papers was Philip Ludwell III, who was born in 1716 and died in England in 1767. Like his father and grandfather before him, Ludwell III ranked high in Virginia’s political and social hierarchy. The family’s connection to William and Mary was close because his father had been the rector of the college. Ludwell III, who attended the college and was also on the board of visitors, was in the perfect position to have furthered Wayles’s education. In later years, one of Jefferson’s slaves, Isaac Jefferson, mentioned Wayles in connection with Archibald Cary, a graduate of William and Mary, in a way that suggested that the two men had gone to school together—“he went to school to old Mr. Wayles.” This is a somewhat cryptic comment, but there was evidently talk within Isaac Jefferson’s earshot of a William and Mary connection for Wayles.11
Each generation of Ludwells held a seat on the Council of Virginia. The first Philip Ludwell had married Governor Berkeley’s widow, Frances Culpepper, thus bringing the well-known plantation Green Spring, about five miles from Williamsburg, into the family line. It was, evidently, to Green Spring that Philip Ludwell III brought John Wayles, probably in the late 1730s after one of Ludwell’s trips to England. The Virginia Gazette noted that he had traveled there in 1738, and Wayles once referred to one of his earliest memories in the colony as having taken place in 1740. Ludwell was the last of the male line of his family. In the convoluted and circular world of early Virginia’s family life, the Ludwell connection continued into the next generation when Ludwell’s daughter Lucy and her husband, John Paradise, became friends with Thomas Jefferson (Lucy perhaps too friendly for Jefferson’s tastes) while he was in Paris, France, with Wayles’s children James and Sally Hemings.12
The notations to the Lee family memoir are in two separate hands, the last paragraph added at a later date by someone who evidently wanted to give further details about just who the “Wife of Mr. Jefferson” was. The “authority” providing this information was most likely William Lee or one of his children, who were in good positions to know of Wayles’s origins. Lee, the father of Portia Hodgson mentioned in the note, married his first cousin Hannah, the daughter of Philip Ludwell III. William Lee’s mother, also named Hannah, and Philip Ludwell III were siblings. William Lee lived with his uncle Philip in London during the early 1760s. He was so devoted to him that he urged his own son, William Ludwell Lee, to drop the Lee name to preserve Ludwell for future generations. After Ludwell died, William married Ludwell’s daughter, and took charge of handling his father-in-law/uncle’s business affairs from London. He knew all the executors of Ludwell’s will—Wayles, Robert Carter Nicholas, Richard Corbin (related to the Lees by marriage), and Benjamin Waller. Indeed, Lee corresponded with Nicholas about various aspects of Ludwell’s business affairs in the years immediately following his death. It was, most likely, William Lee who arranged to have Ludwell’s will probated in England in 1767. After years in London, he returned to America in 1783 and became the master of Green Spring, living there with his son and daughters until his death. It would have been entirely natural for him to have mentioned to his children the link between Jefferson, by then a national figure, and their family.13
The references to Wayles appear in papers that were in the possession of the Lee family, with whom Jefferson had both bad and good relations. But they were really not about him. The information was included in the story of the Lees in order to memorialize one of their ancestor’s very decent and worthy contributions to an important aspect of “Mr. Jefferson’s” life in a way that put both Ludwell and Wayles in a good light. Though just a “servant boy,” Wayles deserved to be elevated: he had shown great promise and was extremely intelligent. Moreover, the Lee ancestor was astute and good-hearted enough to discern and want to cultivate that promise. The clear message is that, had it not been for Philip Ludwell III, there perhaps would not have been a John Wayles in America who was able to develop his talent and become prosperous enough to overcome his origins and produce a daughter for “Mr. Jefferson” to marry.
There was, quite simply, no more influential a man whom Wayles could have had as a benefactor than Philip Ludwell. Who but one from the highest ranks of society could have lifted him from the position of servant to a place where he could be the executor of Ludwell’s will, sharing that role with men who held extremely important positions in their society: Corbin, “his Majesty’s Receiver General,” Nicholas, “Treasurer of Virginia,” and Waller, who had represented James City County in the House of Burgesses and became the clerk of the General Court. Wayles must have been impressive, indeed, to have been given the chance to join men like that, although it has to be noted that, unlike those other men, he never held a position of public trust in his community. Instead, he worked with them to take care of Ludwell’s interests in Virginia after Ludwell decided to return to England permanently following his wife’s death, at the end of the 1750s. He and the other executors were to be the guardians of the Ludwell girls if they decided to return to America before they came of age.14
Several letters between Ludwell and Richard Corbin describe his partnership with “Mr. Wayles” on Ludwell’s behalf, usually overseeing the sale of tobacco. Corbin told Ludwell when he would be meeting “Mr. Wayles at Green Spring” to discuss business matters, and at one point he felt obliged to apologize after he “and Mr.
Wayles” had made an “unlucky mistake” when handling a shipment of tobacco that had caused Ludwell to lose money. He assured Ludwell on behalf of both men that “an error of this kind [would] not happen again.” After Ludwell’s death, seven years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, Corbin wrote to one of his daughters to tell her, “Mr. Nicholas, Mr. Wayles & myself proved your father’s will,” noting that “Mr. Waller” had not participated. There had been some disagreement about timing and process, and Waller wanted to take more time.15
When Wayles ceased to be connected to Ludwell’s household and started his career is unknown, but he made reference in a letter to traveling to other homes in the Williamsburg area in 1740.16 By this time Williamsburg had been the seat of colonial government for forty-two years. About five miles from Jamestown, situated between the James and York Rivers, Williamsburg was originally called Middle Plantation. In the earliest days it served mainly as an outpost that the settlers retreated to whenever they were attacked by the Native Americans upon whose land they were encroaching. As early as 1677, the year after participants in Bacon’s Rebellion had laid waste to “the state house and all other buildings at Jamestown,” Middle Plantation was proposed as an alternative to Jamestown as the seat of government. Another twenty-one years passed before that happened. In the intervening years work began on the establishment of the “free school and college” that became the College of William and Mary.17
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 6