Jefferson’s attitude toward the male Hemingses has long been commented upon and, generally, portrayed in a positive light, as an example of his innate humanity breaking through a slave owner’s persona that many find troubling today. In this view, Jefferson’s seeing male Hemingses through a different lens allowed him to connect with them almost as if a form of male bonding occurred between these men that transcended the day-to-day reality of slavery. As we will see in the coming chapters, Jefferson acknowledged their masculinity (particularly that of Robert and James Hemings) and refused to take all of it—letting them do some of the things that men of the day would be expected to do, allowing them to have a measure of control over the course of their lives. All this raises an obvious question avoided for many years: If Jefferson responded to the masculinity of certain Hemings males, how did he respond to the femininity of their sisters?
By all accounts of them, in contemporary writings and the family histories of Jeffersons and Hemingses, the Hemings women were seen as beautiful and desirable. Thomas Jefferson Randolph commented on this himself. The white males on the mountain, Jefferson family members and his employees, responded to them in that way. The duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, upon visiting Monticello, noted the prevalence of interracial relationships between the white men who worked there and “mulatto” slave women, reinforcing the idea that lower-status white males alone were responsible for the white-looking slave children. But there were other indications that the practice was not strictly divided along class lines. Practically every adult Jefferson male associated with Monticello was said, either by his own family members, the families of those enslaved, or nonfamily members (white and black), to have had sexual relations with Hemings women: Jefferson, Peter Carr, Samuel Carr, and John Wayles Eppes. In a way that seems at once astounding and unsurprising, Monticello seems to have resembled a mini version of the stereotypical view of New Orleans—a place where white males pursued and attached themselves to light-skinned black women.18
Throughout their time at Monticello, none of the Hemings women married men from “down the mountain” who worked in the fields. They were either in long-term liaisons with high-status white males or white workers at the plantation, or they married household servants from other plantations who were also mixed race or, in the case of Critta Hemings, a free black man.19 One could say that these women had no choice regarding the white men, even the men who did not own them. It is also possible, of course, that given a choice they would have preferred white mates. That might be a disturbing thought from a modern perspective, with our knowledge of slavery and views about the value of solidarity in the face of oppression. This possibility, however, must not be discounted outright, especially in light of the behavior of some of the Hemings children and grandchildren.
Tempting and romantic as it may be to construct a monolithic population of slaves who acted cohesively across color and genetic lines because of their common enslaved status, it is more realistic to accept that different individuals and families had different understandings about where they stood in relation to other slaves, within the slave system and, indeed, within America’s racial hierarchy. People’s individual experiences shaped their way of seeing the world. The Hemingses did not, any more than other human beings, always live with reference to the “big picture” of their society. They lived, instead, in the day-to-day interactions with the people around them, the values they formed in the context of their surrounding society, and their sense of the best way to make the most of their lives before they died.
We cannot simply assume that the Hemingses, living in a world that valued whiteness—whites’ culture, hair, skin color, and facial features—regarded their status as slaves as vastly more meaningful than the reality that they were also part white. To be a slave was hard, but being black was not easy either. Even emancipated blacks lived under the harsh regime of white supremacy, denied the right to full citizenship, the quality of their lives determined by the whims of the dominant white community. This world expressed open contempt for the tightly curled hair, broad noses, and full lips of African people. White society could change the Hemingses’ legal status with the stroke of a pen, or the Hemingses could change it themselves, as some of them did, by walking away from Monticello and blending in with the rest of free white society—leaving the stigmas of slavery and blackness behind. The only way to destroy their proximity to whiteness would be for the Hemingses to marry and have children with a person who was not as “bright” skinned or light bronzed as they were. That, for generations, many of the Hemingses refused to do. When one considers the harshness of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for people of African origin, it is not surprising that some black people who could leave life under slavery and white supremacy behind might have wished to do that.
For the women in the Hemings family, being treated as a caste apart and having their femininity reinforced rather than forcefully denied—circumstances that may seem trivial to present-day observers viewing the enormity of slavery—may have had deep meaning. Elizabeth Hemings, her daughters, and granddaughters knew that their enslavement limited their horizons. But their everyday existence encouraged them to think of themselves as different from others who shared the same legal status. They could, as women of all races and classes have often done, use their femininity to seek better lives through their association with men who had some degree of status—white males, mixed-race house servants, or free black men. Jefferson would not take any Hemings woman completely out of slavery until 1822, when he freed his daughter Harriet to go live as a white woman and escape partus sequitur ventrem. Instead, the Hemings women served as seamstresses, maids, and, in Sally Hemings’s case, Jefferson’s “substitute for a wife.” But these events, which will be discussed more fully in later chapters, unfolded over decades. It took years to build the Hemingses’ story at Monticello.
MARTIN HEMINGS WAS between seventeen and eighteen years old when he became the butler at Monticello. In any of the cultures that contributed to his identity—African, English, and, finally, American—he would, as the eldest son, have had special status within his family. This may have shaped his personality. Of all of Elizabeth Hemings’s children, he had the reputation for being the most difficult (from the perspective of a slave owner) and aggressive. Jefferson family tradition cast him as the prototypical surly manservant, whose saving grace (in the eyes of whites) was his extreme loyalty to Jefferson. Hemings presented himself as one who did not want others to perform tasks for the master of Monticello—he wanted to do them himself. On the other hand, he complied with others’ orders and requests only grudgingly, indeed “with scarcely concealed anger.”20 Whether this attitude grew out of his genuine attachment to Jefferson, or whether it was a strategy designed to achieve some other goal, cannot be known definitely. It is understandable that the Jeffersons would have looked at Hemings’s behavior and seen and, perhaps hoped, that it grew out of some foundational loyalty to the master. Given that Jefferson and Hemings often quarreled and actually ended on bad terms, it may be that Hemings fashioned himself in this way for a different purpose. The young man seems to have found a way to carve a space out in life while he accommodated himself to his circumstances.
Consider the practical results of Hemings’s posture. If he was Jefferson’s “man,” the only one who could attend to his needs, then he had to be free from others’ demands in order to fulfill this important role. This appears to have been about more than just shirking work. The descriptions of Martin Hemings betray no hint of that as the reason for his behavior. It was a matter of pride, in the Jefferson family’s view—pride at being able to serve Jefferson so well and to please his master. From Hemings’s viewpoint it could well have been about achieving pride for himself. Insofar as he could, Martin Hemings attempted to minimize his exposure to the vagaries of the life of a slave, answering willingly only to one person, while signaling to others that he was off-limits. Note that there are two separate parts of his perso
na: the man who wanted to be Jefferson’s only servant and the man who did not want to serve anyone else. The two do not necessarily go together. By combining these two attributes, Hemings constructed himself along the lines of a contract employee of one person, rather than an enslaved black man who, like all other slaves, had to answer to any white person who addressed him. This was almost certainly more about Hemings’s self-image than any undying love for the man who legally owned him. As later events made clear, he did not build his world around Jefferson.
If he performed the typical role of a butler, Hemings was in charge of making sure that the Jefferson household ran smoothly. He supervised the work of the household staff as well as of the cooks, although his position was somewhat distinctive because the staff he managed consisted mainly of his mother, sisters, and brothers. Early on in his tenure Jefferson devised a very petty (though probably not unheard of) way of testing Hemings’s loyalty. He kept a tally on some bottles of liquor to which the young man had access to see if Hemings’s “fidelity” would remain intact.21 Martin Hemings passed the test.
One outsider to the group was under Martin Hemings’s supervision. Jefferson had purchased a woman named Ursula in 1772. He paid 210 pounds for her and her two sons, George and Bagwell. Soon thereafter, he bought Ursula’s husband, George Granger, and their experiences on the mountain all but destroy the long-held conventional wisdom that Jefferson favored only light-skinned slaves.22 The Grangers’ time at Monticello also reveals the great problem with taking Jefferson’s writings on race in Notes on the State of Virginia as a blueprint for how he actually lived at Monticello. In his famous Query 14, he stated that blacks had no ability to reason above telling a simple narrative and insisted that white blood improved blacks.23 Yet members of this family, who by the appearance of their son Isaac Jefferson, in his near iconic photograph, had no trace of European ancestry, were at least as trusted and “privileged” as many members of the mixed-race Hemings family. George Granger Sr. was a paid overseer at Monticello, the only black person ever to hold that position on any of Jefferson’s farms. Indeed, Jefferson may have freed him informally before he died. His son George Jr. was the foreman at the nail factory, an operation that Jefferson viewed as critical to his family’s finances in the late 1790s and early 1800s.24 Neither man would have been in his important position had Jefferson truly believed that no blacks could reason above telling a simple story, or that they had to have an infusion of white blood to be basically intelligent. Ursula Granger became a cook, “house woman,” and laundress for the family, and she and her husband were given the nicknames “Queen” and “King.” When Jefferson was away in Paris, he explicitly exempted them, along with Elizabeth Hemings, from being hired out, while the man administering Jefferson’s estates in his absence hired out both Thenia and Critta Hemings.25
If Martin Hemings enjoyed any special status as the eldest of Elizabeth Hemings’s sons, Robert Hemings also had status as John Wayles’s firstborn son; and that became apparent very early during his time at Monticello. From his days at William and Mary, and even before, Jefferson had been attended by his boyhood enslaved companion, Jupiter Evans. The two men went everywhere together. After his marriage, however, Jefferson transferred Evans’s duties to Robert Hemings, despite Robert’s youth. Evans took charge of Jefferson’s stables and was sometimes his coachman.26 A twelve-year-old assumed the duties of a thirty-one-year-old. When he replaced the same-age companion of his childhood with his wife’s half brother, Jefferson not only made a statement about the merger of two families—one side enslaved, the other side legally free—he also signaled that he had come of age as an adult family man. His wife’s brother would now be the closest to him physically, the keeper of secrets and the possessor of intimate knowledge of him, just by virtue of their being in daily proximity to one another. Robert’s siblings and his mother would keep Jefferson’s household running, building a cocoon for him spun out of family relations on the mountain in which some of his most elemental needs, physical and emotional, would be satisfied by members of this one family bound to him by the laws of slavery and blood.
Though Jefferson never stated why he put Robert in Evans’s place, Thomas Jefferson Randolph explained that his grandfather favored the Hemingses because of their talent and intelligence.27 We do not know about Jupiter Evans, but Robert Hemings was literate. Though it is not known how he learned to read and write, there is no reason to suppose that he did not learn early on. Indeed, his literacy may have been part of the reason why Jefferson made the switch. It would have compensated for whatever he lacked in experience and maturity, making him more useful to Jefferson. Robert’s abilities aside, family doubtless played a role in this scenario. A valet is privy to the most intimate details of his employer’s or, in this case, his master’s life. The position requires extreme trust and discretion. Jefferson, who preferred manipulation (he would say incentive) to outright coercion, would easily have known how to build the trust of his wife’s young brother, particularly since the foundation, a shared father, had already been laid. In the context of their slave society, who would be better suited to fulfill this role? Throughout the early days at Monticello, Robert Hemings traveled extensively with Jefferson in Virginia, and in 1776 the fourteen-year-old lived with Jefferson in Philadelphia when he was a member of the Continental Congress and wrote the Declaration of Independence.28
We know something of Elizabeth Hemings’s daughters’ occupations at Monticello, but her precise role there is perhaps lost to history. There is some indication that later in life, long after the days of Martha and Thomas’s marriage, she spent her time looking after her ever-growing number of grandchildren. But in the years immediately after moving to Monticello, she was probably responsible for looking after Martha’s children. At the same time, she still had her own small children to care for, including her final two offspring, John and Lucy, born in 1776 and 1777, respectively. They were the only ones of her children to be born at Monticello. Her grandson Madison Hemings named a white man, Jefferson’s chief carpenter Joseph Neilson (Nelson, by another spelling), as John Hemings’s father. He did not discuss Lucy, most probably because she died in 1786, nineteen years before he was born. But her proximity in age to her brother John—they were just one year apart—suggests that Neilson was likely her father as well.29
Neilson’s apprentice, William Fossett, most probably fathered Elizabeth’s daughter Mary Hemings’s son Joseph, who also became a talented artisan on the mountain.30 Neilson and Fossett participated in a phenomenon described by one of Jefferson’s white grandchildren over half a century later. They were white Monticello workingmen who lived openly with or had more casual encounters with enslaved women on the plantation. Where these two men fit on that continuum is not known. Both Fossett’s and Neilson’s employment at Monticello ended in 1779. Joseph Fossett was born the following year. Either Mary Hemings was pregnant when he left, or they kept their association after he stopped working on the mountain. John Hemings was three years old when Joseph Neilson stopped working at Monticello. Sometime near the end of the Revolutionary War, Neilson married a local woman named Mary Murphy. By 1784 they were living in downtown Charlottesville.31
Although they were not the legal owners of Elizabeth and Mary Hemings, and were certainly of lower status than Jefferson, Neilson’s and Fossett’s whiteness put them in a position of power over mother and daughter. If either man’s attentions had been unwanted, both women would have had to resort to violence or hope these men might take no for an answer—out of either vanity or a sense of personal restraint. No one knows for certain what, if anything, Jefferson would have done if Elizabeth Hemings had complained about Joseph Neilson or if Mary Hemings had complained about William Fossett. The question is whether Jefferson’s view of the Hemings women as different from other female slaves on his plantation provided them with any measure of protection against sexual abuse. If Hemings women did not have to go into the fields, or answer to the overseer, did they have to g
o to bed with Jefferson’s white employees?
Rape was an ever-present threat to slave women, so it is understandable to think of it immediately when faced with any example of interracial sexual relations during slavery. Striking a rare insensitive note, Fawn Brodie referred to Elizabeth Hemings’s “cheerful giving of her body” when talking about her many years of childbearing.32 We do not know whether Hemings was cheerful about it or not. She may have welcomed some of her partners and not others, while loving unequivocally the children those unions produced. Lacking either Hemings’s or her daughter Mary’s voices on this matter—or any direct statements from her family hinting at how these women felt about Neilson or Fossett—we cannot know what they thought about these two white men (or for that matter, the black men) who fathered their children. While their relations with white men draw more scrutiny because of the natures of slavery and white supremacy, one finds, upon examining their children’s behavior, subtle indications that not all sex between blacks and whites was the same, and that enslaved black families recognized that and had different responses to it.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 14