Operating under the constraints of his personality, Jefferson opted for a different course: one that allowed him to continue to espouse the progressive belief in emancipation, thus holding on to his very deep need to be seen as an intelligent man of the future, while maintaining the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. Though he understood viscerally that slavery was wrong, he resigned himself to the institution and rationalized that the project of emancipation was best left to future generations, his revolutionary generation having done its part by creating the United States of America. The debate about the best course of action regarding slavery would remain for him largely a political abstraction, carried on in the republic of letters. But what was to be done about the problem on a day-to-day basis? With the help of architecture and landscaping, Jefferson arranged his personal life to minimize the reminders of his entanglement with African slavery. He took to the mountain with his wife, surrounded himself with enslaved people—some of whom, his wife’s blood relatives, he could treat as something other than slaves—and set about creating his own world with them.
For most people the word Monticello invokes an image of the second house that Jefferson built atop his 867-foot “little mountain.” It is, perhaps, the most well-known private residence in the United States—the only one to appear on a piece of U.S. currency. Less often thought about is what it took to build the place and to provide an adequate lifestyle there. Other planters built homes with fine views that required a great amount of work to construct and maintain. Situating a house at Monticello presented not only unique problems but also familiar ones on a far greater order of magnitude than was typical.
First, building the house required shaving the top off the mountain, a huge earth-moving enterprise in an era that had neither earth movers nor bulldozers, at least not mechanical ones. Human beings, slaves Jefferson hired from a nearby planter, engaged in this massive effort, digging with shovels in Virginia’s hard red clay to level the ground and then digging a foundation and cellars for the house. This was backbreaking work carried out over twelve-hour days. On one occasion Jefferson observed as “a team of four men, a boy, and two sixteen-year-old girls” worked. It was winter. There was snow on the ground, it was extremely cold, and the laborers periodically stopped their digging to warm their hands over a fire before they returned to their arduous task.5
There was no ready water supply on top of the mountain. A well had to be dug, an especially difficult undertaking, because the workers were required to dig deeper to find water than they would have had to if they been digging on level ground. It took them forty-six days to excavate sixty-five feet of mountain rock before they hit water, almost twice the depth of a normal well in Virginia. Even with that, at times when not enough rain fell to provide a constant and ready supply, water had to be hauled up the mountain.6 Jefferson did not consider these issues a serious problem. From his perspective, as from that of any man of his class, his tasks were to imagine the design for his life on the mountain, engineer ways to execute the design, and then find people—slaves and hired workmen—to complete his projects. As long as labor was available, the job would be done.
The first Hemingses who came to Monticello with Martha Wayles Jefferson in 1772 saw a dwelling that was still in a very rudimentary state. Martha and Thomas Jefferson began their married life in the South Pavilion at Monticello, the one-room building—the first at the site—that Jefferson built while still a bachelor. They ate and slept in the room that housed his books, the furniture, and their clothing.7 Fifteen-year-old Betty Brown, who served as Martha’s maid, was apparently the very first Hemings to arrive; as fate would have it, she would be the last one to leave the mountain.8 Indeed, she likely accompanied the couple on their much written-about winter journey to the mountain, though no mention is ever made of her. Members of Jefferson’s class did not generally travel by themselves, and certainly a bride going to her new home would not have left her personal maid behind, for there was much to do to create a new household. We have no indication where young Betty or the other later-arriving Hemingses stayed. Nor do we know where the rest of the family members lived when they were all brought together in 1775. It would not have been a difficult task to build cabins to house them, although one wonders how a couple living in such small quarters could have made use of a butler, two maids, and two other personal attendants. The only plausible explanation is that the Jeffersons set out right from the start of their life together to live as if they were in normal circumstances—entertaining family and friends in their small quarters—since it was a given that it would be some time before their family home was finished.
This marked a dramatic change for the Hemingses. Elizabeth Hemings had grown up serving in two well-established households, the Eppes home at Bermuda Hundred and the Forest. Her children’s experiences had been the same. They probably did not know it, but they were now beginning a way of life that would feature constant physical upheaval and change—living and working in what was to become a perpetual construction site. While this may have been exciting to Jefferson, who as the owner and conceiver of the projects would have had a strong incentive to put up with any of the adverse consequences of his choices, those who had to live and work amid the chaos may have felt differently.
Elizabeth Hemings was no stranger to Jefferson’s personality and quirks, and one yearns to know what she thought of this bookish and eccentric young man with the gadgets in his pockets and a tendency to sing as he went about his business. Even before Wayles died and Jefferson came into formal ownership of her family, there were signs that her children’s destinies would be shaped by his demands and desires. We can trace the beginnings of this process in Jefferson’s memorandum books in the early 1770s. In those years Hemings’s eldest son, Martin, then a teenager, appears several times receiving gratuities and payments for catching and selling to Jefferson his beloved mockingbirds.9 From those early days Hemings’s sons began to learn to do things Jefferson wanted to have done. Once he took ownership of them, the process of shaping all the Hemingses to suit his aims only intensified.
Almost as soon as he became their owner, Jefferson singled out the older generation of Hemings males—Martin, Robert, and, as he matured, James—for special treatment. Each man had some degree of freedom within his enslaved status. All were allowed to travel around by themselves, to learn trades, to hire themselves out to employers of their own choice, and to keep all their wages. Despite their status on the law books, Jefferson treated them, to a degree, as if they were lower-class white males. That Robert and James Hemings were his new wife’s half brothers was reason enough to make him see them as different from other slaves. They would have been his in-laws, had slaves been “in law.”
Not all slave owners who shared family ties with enslaved people responded this way, but it should not come as a surprise that some of them might have felt sentimental about blood relationships. Blood mattered a great deal in Virginia society. Race and caste complicated this further, but there are enough instances of fathers who emancipated their children to show that race and status did not always obliterate attentions to family connections. Although Martin Hemings, Elizabeth’s eldest son, had no blood tie to Martha Jefferson, Jefferson’s response to him evidently derived from the fact that he shared a mother with the Hemings-Wayles children. As things turned out, Jefferson freed two of these men—Robert and James—the only slaves he legally emancipated during his lifetime. They, along with Jefferson’s children Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings, were set free as young people when they had their lives ahead of them. The other slaves Jefferson emancipated, all Hemingses—John Hemings, Joseph Fossett, and Burwell Colbert—were, by the standards of the time, old men who had given their lives to Jefferson; they were the “trusted,” “worthy” slaves, freed on the basis of “merit.” Put another way, Robert, James, Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings gained freedom because of who they were—Wayles’s sons, Martha’s brothers, and Jefferson’s childre
n, respectively—while the other men were freed because of what they had done.
In keeping with gender roles of the day, Elizabeth Hemings’s sons had more opportunities than their sisters to broaden their lives by going outside of the home. Enslaved males were generally employed at a much greater variety of jobs than female slaves. If they were not agricultural workers, they were carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, or barbers, engaged in the types of jobs deemed unsuitable for women. Sex segregation became even more pronounced when Virginia’s economy diversified after the Revolutionary War. The shift from tobacco to wheat as a cash crop opened up a host of subsidiary jobs for slaves to fill. More and more enslaved men were taken out of the fields to perform tasks associated with the processing of this new crop, working in mills and granaries, turning wheat into flour. As men were shifted into these and other types of jobs—working in mines, iron works, and other industries—fieldwork became even more the province of women and children.10 The Hemings men were not agricultural workers. They spent their time in the house or traveling with and attending to Jefferson, and were transformed by the kind of work they did and experiences they had, whether it was being trained to become a barber or chef, traveling alone to places near and far from their home, or living by themselves in various Virginia towns.
The Hemings women were not eligible for the transformative experiences that shaped the lives of their male relatives, but they were not treated like other enslaved women at Monticello. Although they, like the male Hemingses, were attached by blood and affinity to Jefferson’s wife, he viewed them differently because they were females. His response to Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters over the years was a gender-appropriate—that is, by eighteenth-century standards—mirror image of his response to the male Hemingses. He constructed the Hemings women along more traditional European feminine lines. The women were exempted from work in the fields, even when everyone else had to go there at harvest time; they instead performed chores not unlike those that many white women were doing—sewing, mending clothes, looking after children, and baking cakes.11
Jefferson took the Hemings women out of the pattern that had been well established in his home territory. From the very beginning, Virginia’s slave society situated black women outside the scope of European notions of femininity. If Virginians wanted to make the most of slavery as an economic and racial institution, they could have no qualms about the treatment of African women. A notion grew up very early that black women were an “exception to the gender division of labor” and could be sent into the fields to work, while wealthy white women were seen as too delicate for that. White Virginians codified this idea in 1643 when free black women were made “tithables.” This meant that a tax could be placed on their labor, just like that of free white men and enslaved men and women. White women were not tithables, because they worked in the home. In other words, black women who were out of slavery were treated like white men instead of like white women. As the years passed, the connection between black women and hard physical labor became so firmly entrenched in the minds of white masters that the women “were as one with their farming tools and called, simply, ‘hoes.’”12
In truth, lower-status white women worked in the fields during the period of indentured servitude and alongside their farmer husbands thereafter. People knew that. The nature of life on an ordinary farm is such that, at some point, everyone has to pitch in and help. But the ethos of a society is often most tellingly expressed in its mythology, emphasizing what people want to believe about themselves, and what they want to tell others about who they are, rather than what one can observe about their nature by simply opening one’s eyes. Ignoring reality is a part of the game. Very often in these mythologies, people of higher rank become the standard of measurement for people in the community. The everyday reality of the lives of lower-class white women in Virginia disappeared under the weight of the need to defeminize black women. Women (some might say “ladies”) became defined by the actions, demeanor, and attitudes of high-status females.
True to his time, Jefferson saw fieldwork as unfeminine, and he criticized Native American men for sending their women into the fields and assumed that the intensity of the experience accounted for the low birthrate among the group. While discussing their example, Jefferson posited that, whenever the men in a given society are “at ease,” the first thing they do is take women out of hard labor and put them in the home. He had been brought to this observation as he noted with disdain the presence of peasant women in the fields during his time in Europe. While traveling through Holland in the spring of 1788, Jefferson made clear what he thought of women engaging in agricultural pursuits.
The women here, as in Germany do all sorts of work. While one considers them as useful and rational companions, one cannot forget that they are also objects of our pleasures. Nor can they ever forget it. While employed in the dirt and drudgery some tag of ribbon, some ring or bit of bracelet, earbob or necklace, or something of that kind will shew that the desire of pleasing is never suspended in them. How valuable is that state of society which allots to them internal emploiments only, and external to the men. They are formed by nature for attentions and not for hard labour. A woman never forgets one of the numerous train of little offices which belong to her; a man forgets often.13
He could well have been describing a scene in the fields at Monticello or another of his farms. Enslaved women attended to their “little offices” just as diligently as the laboring women of Holland. They wore bracelets, ribbons, and earrings, too, and that behavior had the same object as that of their European counterparts. Having lived among them, Jefferson knew that enslaved women wanted to make themselves attractive to their male companions. Yet, when talking of this matter of women and fitness for hard labor, he resorted to the Native American example, ignoring the more logical comparison—the laboring women in his own fields. Jefferson, however, really did know that fieldwork was inappropriate for black women. He daydreamed while in France about planting fig, mulberry, and olive trees in “countries where there are slaves.” In those places, he noted, “women and children are often employed in labours disproportioned to their sex and age. By presenting to the master objects of culture, easier and equally beneficial, all temptation to misemploy them would be removed, and the lot of this tender part our species be much softened.”14
Jefferson’s characterization of enslaved women as “this tender part of our species” engaged in labor “disproportioned to their sex” demonstrates that he knew the obvious: black women did not have physical strength equal to that of black men. In addition, black women, not black men, were the ones having babies and breast-feeding them, thus interfering with their capacity to work efficiently. Everything he wrote about women suggests that for Jefferson biology was destiny. Their defined roles vis-à-vis males and children were the reasons that the home was the most suitable place for them. Where did that leave the enslaved women at Monticello who were not members of the Hemings family?
The issue, as in so many other areas of Jefferson’s views on race, was that certain truths had to be overridden (or rationalized) when they bumped up against an extreme self-interest that did not rest comfortably with the implications of those truths. Jefferson could place black women among the “tender part” of the human species, along with the peasant women in the fields of Europe and the Native American women in his own country, see them as ill equipped relative to men for fieldwork, and still send them there because it suited his needs and the needs of his society. White supremacy does not demand deep conviction. Ruthless self-interest, not sincere belief, is the signature feature of the doctrine. It finds its greatest expression, and most devastating effect, in the determination to state, live by, and act on the basis of ideas one knows are untrue when doing so will yield important benefits and privileges that one does not care to relinquish.
Jefferson’s special treatment of the Hemings women allowed him to think of himself as a “good” and “kind” master. By exempting
them from labor in the fields, he set them apart from the other black women who tended and harvested his tobacco and wheat, putting them in a social and, no doubt, psychological limbo—for the women themselves and the white males around them. The great irony is that, in doing this, he also cut the women off from the traditions of their African foremothers. Wherever she was from, the chances were great that Elizabeth Hemings’s mother would have grown up to work in the fields, as would her daughters and their daughters. In the vast majority of the West African communities from which most slaves in North America were brought, agricultural work was women’s work to a substantial degree. To the African mind, there was nothing unfeminine about this.15
Not having an African mind, Jefferson defined the Hemings women, just one generation separated from Africa, along European lines. He saw them as the kind of women who were formed for the “attentions” of men, not for “hard labor.” Accordingly, he dressed them differently from other enslaved women on the plantation. When he was away from Monticello during his political life, he bought the Hemings sisters Irish linen, muslin, and calico, making sure they were not all in the same pattern to avoid monotony in their dress. He purchased fitted cotton stockings for them, taking note of the sizes. Other enslaved women at Monticello “received a uniform allotment of osnaburg, the coarse brownish linen issued to slaves all over the south…and baggy stockings of woven cloth.”16 At one point, when she was ill, Elizabeth Hemings’s daughter Critta was sent to “the Springs” to take the cure, her room and board paid for by Jefferson.17 The Hemings women were not free white women, but they were not hard-laboring black women either. They were something else. Just what that “else” was is difficult for us with our well-developed sense of racial identities and meanings to gauge precisely. That the Hemings women’s existence in this “middle category” did not lead to their immediate freedom did not make their life in that state meaningless to them. Even though enslaved, these women had inner lives that were shaped by what did and did not happen to them on a daily basis—and by what they saw happening to others.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 13