The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Had Hemings never been in Paris, her choice of mates at Monticello would have been perhaps even more limited than that of other enslaved women on the plantation. Her racial background contributed to her identity and undoubtedly affected her views about who would be attractive as a companion and as father of her children. Race and American slavery were so intertwined that it may be hard to imagine that any slave could have separated the two and developed a sense of self and a set of priorities that confounded the rules about the way those defined as “white,” and those defined as “black” or “mulatto,” were supposed to feel and think. In slavery and outside of it, members of Hemings’s family—female and male—developed a practice of having children with, and marrying when that was available, people who looked something like themselves, which is what most people in the world tend to do.17 Jefferson probably resembled Hemings more than the average male slave on the plantation did, in terms of hair texture, skin color, and eye color. This is not to say that she would never under any circumstances have welcomed a partner with skin darker than her own or tightly curled hair, as allowances must always be made for the vagaries of attraction. It is human beings we are dealing with, after all, and no one has devised a precise formula or foolproof predictor of personal taste, and black couples and families come in all shades.

  Although Hemings was probably not thinking in strictly legal terms about the racial makeup of the child she was carrying in Paris when she was deciding whether to come home with Jefferson, Virginia statutory law on racial categorizations, as Jefferson noted many years later, would make all of her children by him legally white. We know Hemings wanted to free her children from slavery, and Jefferson’s actions show he wanted that as well. No one has ever said that Hemings thought it important to free them from blackness, too. However, that is exactly the route that three of her four children took when they left both slavery and the black community to live as white people. The one child of hers who did remain in the black community, Madison Hemings, married a woman who was fair-skinned enough that some of their children were able to pass into the white world. We do not know whether the Hemings-Jefferson offspring were raised to do that, but it would not be surprising, particularly given their father’s stated values, if that was a part of a plan or at least a very strong hope.

  While it is perfectly acceptable not to want one’s children to be slaves, the notion of escaping from blackness may raise some hackles today, a reaction, it must be noted, that comes from the relative safety of the twenty-first century. It also comes after more than a century of the one-drop rule adopted in the wake of the South’s defeat in the Civil War. In the decades following the end of slavery, southern whites became far more strident about racial classifications than they had been in Hemings’s and Jefferson’s time. The legal rule was supposed to send a message about the “contaminating” nature of blackness. Instead, blacks absorbed the concept and used it to forge political, if not always social, cohesion among themselves. This way of operating eventually turned blacks in the United States into a force to be reckoned with in ways unknown in other parts of the black diaspora (Brazil, for example) where the putatively “enlightened” sliding-scale approaches to race have effectively choked off political and social assaults on the doctrine of white supremacy. Frederick Douglass was clear about what the American linkage of race and slavery taught people of African origin like Sally Hemings years before the legalized one-drop rule, and this recognition explains how blacks of all shades were able to come together so forcefully in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to work for racial justice for people of color. Douglass wrote,

  The father might be a freeman and the child a slave. The father might be a white man, glorying in the purity of his Anglo-Saxon blood, and his child ranked with the blackest slaves. Father he might be, and not be a husband, and could still sell his own child without incurring reproach if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.18

  Sally Hemings knew this and certainly would not have thought of herself as a white person, because she was not. But the political uses of black solidarity across the various shades, hair types, and facial features of all people with differing degrees of African ancestry, a very modern consciousness, would not necessarily have been available to her either.

  Blacks in the eighteenth century who were in the position to do so-religious figures and community leaders in urban areas of the North, for example—did make appeals to people of African origin on the basis of their heritage. Free people joined organizations and secret societies that promoted black solidarity, and slaves felt loyalty to one another because of their shared oppression. Even with that, eighteenth-century people of African origin, like Hemings, did not have the same sense of African American identity as blacks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.19 They could see themselves as black (“Negro” or “colored” the more common usage) and yet have a completely different understanding of what that actually meant in terms of how they should go about their personal lives. There was not then, as is there is not now, one way to be black.

  Eighteenth-century African Americans were themselves from Africa or were, like Hemings, the recent descendants of people who had come to America as members of different ethnic groups with no idea that they were supposed to be part of a single entity called the black “race.” That was an invention of whites. The process of melding together African people of diverse origins took place over time, driven, in part, by white society’s need to destroy African identities so that blacks would fit more easily into the slave society they were creating on the American continent. The historian Michael A. Gomez emphasizes that slaves’ “embrace of race…was not imposed upon the community but was a concept suggested by the logic and reality of the servile condition and adopted and fashioned by those of African descent to suit their own purpose.”20 That is certainly true. It is also true that, had it been left up to them, most Africans probably would have preferred to maintain even more of their distinctive ethnic identities than they were able to under the tremendous pressure from whites to give them up.

  The Hemingses were in a more complicated position, with even fewer reasons than people who were “all black” or “all white” to believe in a world of fixed, bipolar racial categories. While they understood and accepted that they were part African, identity seems to have been a plastic rather than a static thing for them. Unmoored from any one racial destiny, their line could extend through blacks or through whites. Madison Hemings spoke openly of his “full-blooded” African great-grandmother without a trace of discomfort, and even with a touch of pride, when he did not have to mention her at all, much less emphasize her African heritage and that she may have come directly from the continent. She appeared right along with his English and Welsh forebears as a defining part of his heritage. At the same time he pointed to, and mildly disparaged, his sister Harriet’s decision to marry a white man and live totally in the white world, which in American society required leaving blackness and, painfully for him, her family behind.21

  Attitudes about race clearly played a role in this as well. The young Sally Hemings had been in a society where blackness, slavery, and a degraded legal and social status were inextricably linked. To be black, even to be free and black, was to live in a world with extremely limited horizons. Yet her sister had been married to Jefferson. She among all enslaved people would have felt the arbitrariness of the link between a notion of race and a severely restricted status. Life in France enlarged Hemings’s sense of entitlement and belief that she should have some hand in shaping her future and that of her offspring.

  We have the advantage today of knowing that the American story of blackness, slavery, and second-class status was going to end—or at least that slavery would end. We also have the example of a black community that has, by and large, bound itself together as a culture despite differences in skin color. It really has been left to specific individuals and families to decide how seriously they will adhere to color consciousness despite it
s patently obvious links to white supremacy.

  As far as young Sally Hemings knew, the link between any trace of blackness and an assured diminished life might continue into the indefinite future. There was nothing on the horizon visible to her in France to suggest that matters would change in her lifetime or that of her children. She could not likely have foreseen that there would come a day when the words “black” and “power” or “black” and “beautiful” would flow naturally together and have a positive meaning and purpose that could direct the course of African American life. Under the circumstances of Hemings’s life, given her society and her family history, what type of man would be most able to end slavery for her children along with all the problems associated with being a person with black skin in America? If not Thomas Jefferson, who? She may have thought him as good a white man as any other, perhaps even better in some ways. That was a judgment to ponder.

  Calculating the Odds

  Contingencies drive the making of history on scales large and small. To speak of the inevitability of any historical event or outcome is to ignore this salient fact. The same can be said of individual lives. Through a series of events, planned and unplanned, Sally Hemings was not in America when she had to think about what Jefferson offered. Unlike the vast majority of her enslaved cohort back in Virginia, freedom was within her grasp, and she ended up using the unique opportunity she possessed, not as an end in itself, but as a starting point for a discussion with the man who wanted to take her home with him. That Jefferson desired that at all, a further contingent element in Hemings’s life, gave her leverage under their particular circumstances. Another man might not have cared enough to try to persuade her or would have dared her (and her brother) to do their worst: take their claim to the Admiralty Court. Hemings’s discussion with Jefferson would have been meaningless if the pair had been in, for example, South Carolina and she had attempted to take her freedom and refuse to return to Virginia unless Jefferson assured her that he was going to provide what she thought would be a good life.

  Any psychological influence Jefferson exercised over Hemings and her family was not total. Whatever he was to her back in Virginia, she had the will to challenge him in France—a very bold thing for a sixteen-year-old to try. Her gambit might not have worked on a man with a different personality—another contingency that shaped her life. It mattered greatly that Hemings was talking to Jefferson, a man who abhorred conflict, especially face-to-face. She probably knew this by the time they talked about returning to Virginia. She had had to pay close attention to him all her life, just as other enslaved people had to pay attention to the people who owned them. Living daily under the power of individual men and women, enslaved people could ill afford to see and deal with their owners as if they formed one, undifferentiated monolithic class. Timid men held slaves just as surely as overly aggressive men held them. Some slave owners were extremely intelligent, while others were as dumb as posts. Some preferred to fashion themselves as benevolent, while others were sadistic and reveled in their sadism. The quality of slaves’ lives—if not their very lives—depended upon developing a sophisticated and pragmatic view of slave owners, and of white people in general. They knew how far they could go in exploiting, resisting, or relying upon the variable personal tendencies of both.

  Hemings had not only her own observations of Jefferson to draw upon; a wealth of family history supplemented her knowledge. Whether she had had time in her young life to learn this fact about him or not, the truth is that few things could have disturbed the very thin-skinned, possessive, and controlling Jefferson more deeply than having persons in his inner circle take the initiative and express their willingness to remove themselves from it. To have this come from a young female, the kind of person he thought was supposed to be under the control of males, whether they were enslaved or not, was likely doubly upsetting. While Hemings was an item of property with a dollar value that he would have lost had she remained in France, Jefferson spent more money remodeling the various residences he rented in Paris, and later in New York and Philadelphia—investments he knew he was going to walk away from and leave to the landlord—than Hemings was worth to him in strictly monetary terms. This challenge was a far greater threat to his self-esteem and emotions than to his wallet. He had great confidence in his ability to charm and in his capacity to bring people to his side and keep them there. As we will see, he took her brother Robert’s successful bid for freedom personally as if the man’s willed separation from him were a failed connection of some sort, instead of a completely understandable desire for personal autonomy.

  Her behavior suggests something of Hemings’s own confidence—or vanity—that she believed she could hold Jefferson to his promises over what would be a very long period. Twenty-one years from 1789 was an eternity for a sixteen-year-old. Other children would extend the years. Then again, Hemings was a young person without the benefit of personal experience to provide a chastening dose of reality about how devastating to her and her children it would be if she turned out to have made the wrong calculation about Jefferson’s character. She had to trust that he understood and valued what she was giving up by coming back to Virginia, and she staked both her and her children’s futures on that critical belief about him.

  According to her family story, with nine-year-old Hemings in the room, Jefferson promised his wife, Martha, that he would never marry again. Seven years had passed, and he still had no new wife, a long time by the standards of that day. As Hemings well knew, a Jefferson promise not to remarry was hardly a promise never again to have female companionship in his life. If Hemings thought Jefferson would continue to abide by his pledge, his desire that she return with him and talk of making a life with her made sense. She would be secure in her place at Monticello. No woman not already known to her would have any influence over the course of her life.

  As the product of an interracial union, as a resident of a plantation where such unions were common, and as a Virginian, Sally Hemings knew how society at large would view her life at Monticello once she returned from France with Jefferson. Whites would, of course, be disdainful. One can imagine what other enslaved people at Monticello might have thought if they learned of the terms upon which she had given up her chance for freedom; as Michael A. Gomez has shown, the enslaved community tended to respond to their fellow slaves on the basis of how they conducted themselves. If upon her return Hemings presented herself as enemy to fellow blacks, she would be viewed as such. If she was friendly and acknowledged a common link to them, she could be accepted.22

  Whatever the outside world felt, Hemings was apparently determined to make the outcome of her life with Jefferson different from the outcome of her mother’s life with John Wayles, who had died and left Hemings and her five siblings to the mercy of his legal white daughter and her husband. Despite Jefferson’s attempts to ameliorate their condition, what seems to have motivated Hemings as she talked with him in 1789 was that she and her siblings were legally enslaved. Freedom was clearly the preferable state, and she wanted substantially more for her offspring than favored treatment under slavery. The historians Dianne Swann Wright and Beverly Gray have said that Hemings wanted to bring her children “out of Egypt,” which in the end is exactly what she did.23

  Hemings had other concerns in addition to her children’s future. Jefferson’s promise to treat her well also figured in her decision to return with him. He knew what he had to say to her, and offered her a life as the companion to a wealthy and powerful man whom she knew well and could trust (he said) that he would do what he promised to do: take care of her in a place where she felt comfortable—at Monticello with her family—and provide something she very much desired for her children. He saw himself as offering what he thought most other young women at the time almost certainly wanted, a stable relationship with an acceptable man. What Hemings could have envisioned as a good life, and what Jefferson knew of that, must be measured by the kind of life that was actually possible for her to have.
She knew that in Virginia marriage would be a legal impossibility for her, whether she was paired with Thomas Jefferson or anyone else.

  The historian Brenda Stevenson has noted the methods that nineteenth-century planters used to promote matrifocal families within slave plantation communities, “routinely identifying the child’s parentage solely with the mother, often denying any acknowledgement of the father’s role—biological, emotional, social, or material”24—effectively erasing fathers from the lives of their children and diminishing their status as husbands. The extremely patriarchal Jefferson took a different route. He definitely saw enslaved men as the heads of their households, an attitude likely to be well known within the enslaved community. His Farm Book listings of slave households begin with a male’s name, followed by a female’s, and then their children’s. When they do not, as other sources indicate, it was because the father of the children was a white man, and could not be listed as living within the woman’s household, or the women had “abroad” marriages with men who did not live on Jefferson’s farms. Perhaps even more telling about his attitude is that in the separate listing of births during any given year, after he wrote the child’s name, he put the parents’ names next. When the man’s name was included (that is, when he was black and lived on one of Jefferson’s plantations), it was customarily placed first. Writing of intact enslaved families in other documents, he referred to the man first and then “his wife” and children. When Jefferson contemplated blacks’ future outside of slavery, he spoke of black men—not black women—as the prime movers of their society.25 To him men of all races were natural leaders; women of all races, natural followers.