The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Hemings arrived in London on June 26, 1787, after five weeks at sea, her journey with Polly having begun with something of a cruel trick. The Eppeses devised a way to get the still reluctant Polly to stay on board the Robert. They brought their children and Hemings onto the vessel to stay “a day or two.” At one point when Polly fell asleep, the Eppeses left, the Robert pulled anchor and went out to sea, bound for London.10 By the time Polly awoke, everyone she knew was gone except Hemings. Sadly, there is no record of the voyage. The letter that Polly wrote describing what happened on the trip is not extant, so we may never know the details of the girls’ lives aboard the ship.11 Abigail Adams, in London with her husband, John, America’s first ambassador to the Court of St. James, met the girls. She wrote to Jefferson the day they arrived, assuring him that his daughter was safe and telling him how attached she had become to Andrew Ramsey, the captain of the ship. Adams then brought up Sally Hemings, though not by name:

  The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her [Polly], was was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her, the Sister of the Servant you have with you.12

  Adams sent another letter the next day with more information about Polly, along with other comments about Sally Hemings:

  The Girl who is with her is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of opinion will be of so little Service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good naturd.13

  July 6 brought yet another letter from Adams to Jefferson about his daughter, this time especially extolling her virtues, with more disparaging comments about Hemings, and a reference to buying clothes for both girls.

  The Girl she has with her, wants more care than the child, and is wholy incapable of looking properly after her, without some superiour to direct her.

  As both Miss Jefferson and the maid had cloaths only proper for the sea, I have purchased and made up for them, such things as I should have done had they been my own….14

  Adams was wrong about Hemings’s age. We do not know the month of her birth, but she was probably fourteen when she met Abigail Adams.15 Although a difference of two years may not seem to matter generally, in the lives of teenage girls the period in question—between fourteen and sixteen—can work a real change in appearance. They can go from having the bodies of prepubescent girls to being as physically developed as they will be as women. That Adams thought Hemings was as old as sixteen, may say something about Hemings’s appearance and, more important, also account for Adams’s repeated comments about her immaturity.

  That young Hemings was not qualified to be Polly’s sole nurse may well have been true. But it is a long way from that to the charge that a putative sixteen-year-old was less mature than a nine-year-old, particularly in light of Adams’s later very revealing comments about Polly’s extremely childlike behavior in London. Francis and Elizabeth Eppes had observed Sally Hemings in their home for over two years. One of Jefferson’s children had died while in their care. They would not have sent his other child on an ocean voyage with a person who was less mature than she, a person who could have hurt her more than helped her. Adams, confronted with the reality of Hemings’s youth compared with what she had been expecting, was simply confounded by the surprising young girl in her midst. Under the circumstances, there was probably little Hemings could have done to change Adams’s opinion of her.

  Over the course of the next decades, several generations of the Adams family would comment directly and indirectly on Hemings. Thinking seriously about Abigail Adams’s reaction to her in London in the summer of 1787 requires keeping in mind that this was an encounter between a free adult white woman and an African American slave girl. Class, wealth, status, and race divided these two people. Without a doubt, the first three differences affected the way the two saw each other, but contemplating how the racial divide shaped their interactions is perhaps the most crucial to consider. The Adams family is well known for some of its members’ strong and, even heroic, stances against slavery, particularly that of Abigail’s son John Quincy. Yet it has long been apparent that being antislavery is not the same as being nonracist, and the example of the Adams family reinforces that observation.

  We get a very telling glimpse of Abigail Adams’s own views about one aspect of race relations in a letter she wrote upon seeing the play Othello in 1786, just one year before she met Sally Hemings. By her own admission, Adams was simply undone by the play’s depiction of the marriage between a Moor, portrayed by a white man done up in black face, and a white woman. Adams wrote of her “horror and disgust” every time the “sooty” actor touched the “gentle” actress who played Desdemona, even though she knew they were just actors on a stage.16 She was not sure why she felt that way and seemed discomfited by her response, but her reaction against racial intermixture was visceral and extremely powerful. Her son John Quincy, who would later write a number of satirical poems about Sally Hemings, saw Othello thirty years after his mother. He offered more detailed responses to the play in two essays in which he was able to put into words, in a way that his mother could not in 1786, exactly what was troubling about the play. Adams wrote,

  Who can sympathize with the love of Desdemona? The great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that the black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws…. The character takes from us so much of the sympathetic interest in her sufferings, that when Othello smothers her in bed, the terror and the pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her just deserts.17

  The only reasonable reading of this passage is that Adams was saying that Desdemona deserved death for race mixing with Othello. As it happens, he made exactly that point very graphically to the renowned actress Fanny Kemble at a dinner party in Boston in 1839. Kemble described Adams’s face as displaying “the most serious expression of disgust” as he told her that Desdemona should have died for marrying, in Adams’s words, “a nigger.” Kemble was offended by Adams’s use of what she called “that opprobrious title.”18 Her journal entry on the conversation reads as a biting esprit d’escalier moment, with Kemble noting sarcastically that some might think Adams’s characterization superior to Shakespeare’s. At the right moment on stage, she wrote, Iago could adopt Adams’s language and say in a soliloquy, “I hate the nigger” instead of “I hate the Moor.”19 If in the play Desdemona had escaped the wrath of her jealous husband, and lived long enough to have had a daughter, that child should have been portrayed by someone who looked much like the young girl who was in the Adams’s home in London, the obvious product of the race mixing she and her son so abhorred.

  Even though the references to Hemings in Adams’s letters are brief, they reveal other important truths about the world in which she lived. First, Hemings was a “girl,” in terms not just of her gender or age but of the amount of respect that whites, upper class and not, could be expected to give her. Her personhood was ignored. In the Adams correspondence she literally had no name. After almost two weeks in the Adams household, and three letters from Abigail Adams to Jefferson specifically referring to her, Hemings was still “The Girl,” even though it is inconceivable that Adams did not know her name was Sally.

  Adams was not doing anything unusual. That was the way most whites dealt with black slaves and, if they had them, white servants; that manner of dealing communicated to them their subordinate status in the world. Think, however, of a life lived daily under the power of that kind of profound social dismissal. Even if Hemings did not know what Adams had written to Jefferson about her, it is unlikely that an attitude revealed so freely on paper was not discernible in face-to-face interactions, especially since it probably never occurred to Adams that she was expressing any attitude that had to be hidden.

  Hemings surely knew the social realities of her time—that there were people who felt she was unworthy of being called by her name
—yet could still feel the sting of being dismissed or discounted as a person. She, and other slaves and black people, knew from their intimate family relations what it felt like to be a person who mattered—to be someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, sister, or friend. Those experiences as valued members of a family or a community provided a critical counterpoint to the world they lived in with the whites with whom they were forced to interact. It is a safe assumption that a person who has a name would prefer to be called by it. Enslaved people could not force whites to give them the dignity of using their names, and they often had to appear as if all the slights and dismissals did not matter when, often, they mattered very much. It was a rare enslaved person who got to record her observations of the whites who controlled her life, so we do not know what Sally Hemings thought of Abigail Adams’s character.

  An even more telling detail is Adams’s recounting of Captain Ramsey’s “opinion” that Hemings would be of “so little Service that he had better carry her back with him.” Although willing to offer Jefferson a wealth of advice about other things, Adams had no preferences about this issue that she was willing to express openly. Her nonchalance about Hemings’s welfare is striking and highlights the distance between the enslaved girl and her charge. Jefferson was unwilling, because he would have thought it neither wise nor proper, to send his daughter on a five-week voyage with a ship full of men with no woman attached to her. He understood, as people have throughout the ages, that young females need to be protected from the sexual attention of males and, when they are of a certain age, from the effects of their own emergent sexuality. These concerns are expressed through the concept of the “appropriate” and the “inappropriate” in male-female relations. Without requiring openness about the delicate topic of sexuality, this shorthand saves members of the community from having to cast aspersions on the character of a man who may never do the thing feared—flirt inappropriately with a young girl, make a sexual advance or comment. Designating a male-female situation inappropriate also acknowledges that some young females do in fact want male attention, even when it is not what is best for them. The age of consent in eighteenth-century Virginia was ten.20 There prevailed then an understanding about girls and sex very different from that of our day. Rather than let people drift into a circumstance where the character of an individual male had to be tested, or where the preferences of a young female were left unchecked, steps were taken to ensure that the people were never in questionable circumstances.

  There is no evidence that any of these considerations entered into Abigail Adams’s or Captain Ramsey’s mind about Sally Hemings. It apparently did not occur to them that, whether she would actually have been harmed or not, it would have been simply inappropriate for her to go, without female support, on a multiweek ocean voyage with Ramsey and his crew. Had Hemings been a free white girl, Ramsey would have consulted her father before making so momentous a determination about her life, and turned to her mother in her father’s absence. Even if he had considered it in passing, he probably would have kept it to himself, not wanting to appear unmannerly before the genteel Adams, who would have seen that he was overstepping a boundary. She would have wondered about him if he had offered to take a sixteen-year-old unchaperoned white girl off in that way.

  Hemings had no parents to consult, or to be a force that Ramsey and Adams had to reckon with even if they were not present. John Wayles was dead; had he been living, the circumstances of Hemings’s birth would likely have precluded an outsider from approaching him as a father on her behalf. Elizabeth Hemings was certainly in no position to demand anything for her daughter. She may not have wanted her to make the trip at all. Without a “legal father” and with a mother who was not in law, the most logical person to have consulted was the man who owned Hemings: Jefferson.

  Captain Ramsey had communicated with the Eppeses before the trip.21 Perhaps they relayed Jefferson’s instructions about the slave woman going back after delivering Polly to France, and this may have prompted his suggestion. That is not the import of Adams’s letter, which highlighted Ramsey’s belief that Hemings was too immature to be of service—presumably to Polly—and that was why she should go back to Virginia with him. Whatever Jefferson had written two years before, the circumstances had changed dramatically. The Eppeses knew they had not sent the mature woman Jefferson requested. As an enslaved woman, the almost thirty-year-old Isabel Hern might well have been vulnerable on the voyage, too—but not so vulnerable as fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings.

  Recall Jefferson’s correspondence with Paul Bentalou, who sought his help in trying to get the French ministry to allow him to keep his nine-year-old slave in France. Bentalou expressed his great fear that his family would have to send the boy home alone. He said his wife’s “feelings would be very much hurt,” at the thought that on the trip he might be “Ill used by a Captain” or “spoiled…by the bad example of sailors” because of his tender age.22 The Bentalous were thinking enough about the realities of life to know that the young slave boy traveling for weeks by himself would be at the mercy of whoever was on the ship. His devalued status made him fair game for insults or anything else so long as he suffered no serious physical damage.

  A teenage enslaved girl voyaging across the Atlantic alone would have been in at least as much peril as the nine-year-old boy whom Bentalou was talking about; and her London hosts should have known this. Captain Ramsey might well have appointed himself responsible, but for all Hemings or Adams knew, once Polly Jefferson was not attached to the teenage enslaved girl, he could have become the “ill-us[ing]” captain of the Bentalous’ very perceptive formulation, with no inclination to rein in or closely monitor his crew. Abigail Adams had not known Ramsey long enough to make a real judgment about this.

  The unwillingness to see Hemings as a person of value and the complete inattention to her vulnerability as an adolescent—and her even greater vulnerability as a female slave—were the kinds of things that have gotten enslaved and servant girls into trouble throughout history. It is impossible to write the story of the lives of these girls without always being aware of the ways in which sexual exploitation—either the potential for it or the actual experience of it—was a constant threat in their lives. Because they were left uncloaked by the support and protections given to higher-status females, the dynamics of their interactions with higher-status males were very different from those of the interactions between males and females of equal rank, and they must be analyzed differently.

  Hemings’s predicament as an “uncloaked” female, then, requires a hard look at the attitude of Captain Ramsey, whose reported comments about her are the earliest male responses to Hemings that exist in the historical record. Although he may actually have had absolutely nothing untoward on his mind, Ramsey’s very quick, and extremely presumptuous, suggestion, on the very day he arrived in port, even before he had any word from Jefferson about what he wanted to have done—that he “better carry her [Hemings] back with him”—is worth pausing over. Ramsey appears just a bit too eager. What was it to him that Hemings would be of “little service” to Polly, especially now that she would be safely under her father’s care? This seems a strange call for him to have made about another man’s servant—indeed, a higher-status man’s servant—especially since he and Adams believed at the time that Jefferson would be coming to London straightaway and be able to see Hemings for himself.

  Just days after he left Hemings and Polly with Abigail Adams in London, Ramsey wrote to Jefferson. After praising Polly’s virtues and noting their mutual attachment to one another, he offered to bring her to Paris himself, if no arrangement had been made for her trip. He did not mention to Jefferson the idea of carrying Sally Hemings back to Virginia with him.23 By that time, he evidently thought better of it or more seriously about how the suggestion might sound to Jefferson, for it really was quite a thing for him to act as if the configuration of Jefferson’s household was his concern.

  Adams’s statement that Jefferso
n “should be the judge” of whether Hemings stayed in Europe or went home shows that she immediately apprehended the problem with Ramsey’s suggestion. Unlike the captain, however, Adams thought this was an important enough issue that she could not let the matter drop. In three of the four letters she wrote to Jefferson during a two-week period, she felt compelled, in tones from veiled to very frank, to disparage Hemings’s capacity to take care of Polly on her own. That she should take this tack is especially intriguing because she knew all along that Hemings would not be Polly’s main caregiver in Paris anyway and that Jefferson could never have been counting on her, or anyone else, to play that role. Polly, as Adams specifically noted somewhat ruefully to Jefferson in one of the letters that referred to Hemings, would soon join Patsy at the “convent” and would be under the everyday care of nuns. She dreaded the prospect, but she could not reasonably have thought that Jefferson would have sent his older daughter to school and not his younger one.24 Adams knew that, even if the “old nurse” had made the trip with Polly, she would have been similarly eclipsed as the sole caretaker of Jefferson’s daughter. The issue was not the relative skill of Polly’s companion from Virginia; it was that Polly’s circumstances in Paris would make any full-time nurse superfluous. Adams’s warnings about Sally Hemings’s specific unsuitability were really meaningless in this context.

  Oddly enough, this passive effort to convince Jefferson of Hemings’s uselessness was really insensitive to Polly’s needs, though both Ramsey and Adams professed to care so much about them. The Eppeses sent Hemings when Hern could not make the trip precisely because she had been with Polly all her life. There were other enslaved women from Monticello who could have gone, but they did not turn to them. Hemings’s mother, Elizabeth, had no very small children to care for at that point. Her older children could have looked after their younger siblings during the several months or so that it would have taken to travel to England and return immediately to Virginia as Jefferson had originally planned.