IN THOSE FIRST days after James and Sally Hemings returned, there was much news for their family to share regarding all that had taken place over the preceding five years. One of the first things to talk about was that there were now more of them. Mary Hemings, Betty Brown, and Thenia and Critta Hemings had all given birth while their brother and sister were away. Their oldest sister, Mary, was living with Thomas Bell, a relative newcomer to the area, having arrived in Charlottesville in 1784. Mary Hemings had been leased to him in 1787. Although the birthdates of their children are unknown, their youngest, Sarah (Sally) Bell, married in 1802.17 This suggests that Hemings and Bell met sometime before she was leased to him; indeed that may have been the impetus for the transaction. While the Hemingses and Jefferson were still at Eppington, Jefferson wrote to William Short reporting the recent news about Charlottesville, mentioning new people who had come to the area and noting that “A Colo. Bell is there also, who is said to be a very good man.” He did not say who had told him about Bell, nor did he mention the context in which his new neighbor’s name came up. But Bell had leased Jefferson’s property—Mary Hemings. His name probably surfaced in a general discussion of Jefferson’s business affairs or a general recitation of where members of the Hemings family were all living at the time. Bell was also among the notable citizens of Albemarle County who gave a public welcome to Jefferson when he returned to Charlottesville.18
Bell and Jefferson had met before that official event. Whether or not he had heard about Bell and Mary Hemings before their first meeting, he certainly knew of their relationship afterward. On Christmas Day 1789, two days after he came home, Jefferson went into town to buy “snuffers” from Bell’s store.19 It is not known whether James and Sally Hemings were along to see their eldest sister when Jefferson first visited Bell’s store, although the holiday would have been the perfect occasion for a reunion with her after their years away from home. If they did not travel into Charlottesville with Jefferson, he would, as a simple matter of courtesy, have passed on to Mary news of her little brother and sister. Slavery, of course, mixed business with the personal in a very particular way. By the time of Jefferson’s first visit, Mary Hemings had borne two children with Bell, Robert and the above-mentioned Sally. Her offspring, naturally, were of interest to her younger siblings. They were of interest to Jefferson because he knew Mary Hemings both as a person and as his property. Her children were additions to his capital.
Bell’s store was attached to his home. So Jefferson undoubtedly saw Mary Hemings that day. Whether they spoke of it explicitly or not, it did not take much deduction on his part to figure out that she and Bell were lovers. There were new babies who had not yet been born when he left for France. One might say in our time that none of this was anyone’s business but the couple’s. In their time, it was exactly Jefferson’s business. He had a right to know what was going on in Mary Hemings’s life—from her as an item of his property, and from the man who had leased her, who had legal duties and obligations to him that arose from the leasehold agreement.
Jefferson’s discovery of what was going on between Hemings and Bell made no difference to him. In fact, it may have been part of the basis of their instant affinity. He and Bell, involved with two enslaved African American sisters, took an immediate liking to one another and formed a deep friendship that was at once social, political, and business oriented. Given their respective situations, they had much in common and little ability (or need) to make judgments about the other’s personal life. Bell has been a much neglected figure in Jefferson biographies. He truly was one of Jefferson’s closest friends. He dined at Monticello, and Jefferson visited his home. Within two years of their first meeting, Bell was clearly like family, and Jefferson enlisted him in his very controversial effort to build support for the National Gazette, the newspaper he hoped fervently would provide effective opposition to Hamilton’s economic and political program. Bell was a perfect Jeffersonian Republican. Neither a member of the gentry nor a yeoman farmer, he was what would be called a “middling” sort—a prosperous, intelligent, educated, and civic-minded man who had enough of a stake in society to make him want to be active in his community. He cared about what was going on, in his local government and in the new federal one, following both scenes and voicing his opinions. When he wrote or spoke to Jefferson about the political issues of the day, he offered the voice of the ordinary citizen, and Jefferson respected his opinions and came to trust him greatly. He enlisted him as his agent on business transactions and to sell the nails that enslaved boys made at Monticello. They socialized together, talked of quotidian things, including, no doubt, the ways—good and bad—of the sisters with whom each was living. Their connections to Mary and Sally Hemings gave their association deeper resonance, though not in a way that could ever be shared on paper.20
R. T. W. Duke, a white resident of Charlottesville, who knew several of Mary Hemings and Thomas Bell’s grandchildren, described what he called the “‘easy’ morality” of Bell’s and Hemings’s day, not just in terms of what people actually did but in the way others reacted to them. He said that “no one paid attention to a man’s method of living.”21 Their neighbors, Duke explained, would not have thought to raise a public fuss about the pair. His observation fits in with other known information about that era. Eighteenth-century people like Bell, Hemings, Jefferson, and their neighbors fit the popular conception neither of the Puritans nor of the later Victorians, though there is often a tendency to read the perceived values of one society forward and the other backward to cover the people who lived in the interim. There were standards of behavior, as there are in every period, but the era of Bell, Jefferson, and Hemings was practical—more libertarian—about the ways of human beings and sex.
There was premarital sex, among all classes, but with the expectation that the couple would marry and avoid the stigma of illegitimacy. Fornication and interracial marriages were officially against the law, but neighbors were not going to bother people about their relations unless what they were doing somehow directly affected them or represented an aggressive threat to social mores. The couple usually had to act in a fashion that was annoying or troubling in some exceptional way before any persons in the community actively concerned themselves with their behavior.22 Vigilante, and quasi-vigilante, activities are more likely to occur in communities living in fear of losing control in some fashion. There was no question who was in control of society in Albemarle County in the 1790s.
The stricter present-day “morality” of Duke’s age—the one he contrasted with that of Hemings’s and Bell’s day—was the morality of a white South that had declared war on the blacks in their midst after the Confederate’s defeat in the Civil War. Having had one form of control over blacks wrested from them, they desperately sought to reestablish other forms. Virginia fell into the total grip of Jim Crow. Interracial couples had a greater chance of being censured in Duke’s era than in Hemings’s and Bell’s time, and laws regarding racial classifications became even tighter. It was not until the 1920s, however, that Virginia became the first state to adopt as a matter of law the so-called one-drop rule for deciding blackness.23
Twentieth-century Virginia legislators were more stringent in their beliefs about racial categories than Jefferson, who pronounced octoroons (individuals with one-eighth black ancestry) white, even though they, like his youngest son, Eston, could be visibly of African descent.24 Duke’s Charlottesville could not have countenanced a Thomas Bell living openly in town with a black woman and having children with her. He would never have become a justice of the peace or been appointed to a committee to study a proposal to bring public education to the town, as he was back in the 1790s while living with Mary Hemings.25
The Bell-Hemings union reveals something else about the nature of Charlottesville society, the workings of small towns, and family business in their time. We have no official record of Bell’s ever having formally freed Mary Hemings or the children he had with her. Formal freedom requi
red drafting a deed of manumission and filing it in the county courthouse, as Jefferson would do with deeds of manumission for Robert and James Hemings during the time Hemings and Bell were together. Alternatively, slaves could be freed by a will that would then be filed. One might understand how the recordation of one Bell deed might be lost, but that all three would have been lost seems unlikely. There is no gap in the records of Albemarle County deeds for that period. The most probable answer is that Bell freed his enslaved family only informally, and gambled that his will, which treats them as if they were already free, would be respected by his immediate white family and members of the community.
Bell’s failure to act would be completely familiar to property and contract professors, as well as to legions of lawyers. The former have dozens of cases to analyze with their students and the latter are kept employed because of a simple fact: people often fail, in the most critical situations, to follow simple legal formalities even when the failure to do so could work catastrophic results for people they love. People often do things that make no sense. They postpone making wills and die before they get the chance, leaving it to the state to distribute their property and find guardians for their minor children. They purport to transfer land without a written document, a legal impossibility in countries following the English system of jurisprudence since the 1600s.
Bell apparently trusted that his legal relatives, and the surrounding community, who knew very well who Mary Hemings was to him, would not challenge his wishes as expressed in his will. Sure enough, as far as we know, no one rose to stand against his preferences, which is yet another example of how law works “on the ground,” so to speak. When everyone, for whatever reason, agrees to look the other way, individuals can easily circumvent legal rules. Several decades later, Mary’s sister Sally, who was also freed informally, appeared in the 1830 census as a free white person when she was neither legally free nor white. A few years after that, she appeared as a mulatto woman freed in 1826. Even though no formal papers had been filed, the community treated her as a free person. Still, Bell’s was a risky strategy, and one wonders whether he might have been concerned about testing the limits of his community’s tolerance. It was one thing for him to live with Hemings and have children with her when she was his property, but he might have gone too far if he had tried to live openly with her when she was a free woman. Had she been freed, of course, they still would not have been able to marry. Slavery provided a “polite” cover for what would otherwise be illegal fornication.
The coming years brought much travel between Monticello and Bell’s house and store in Charlottesville. Mary Hemings’s home was a meeting place—and no doubt a place of retreat—for multiple generations of Hemingses. According to family tradition, even after Bell died, Jefferson liked to come by the house to listen to Sally Bell’s husband, Jesse Scott, play the violin. Scott was a member of a well-known and much celebrated mixed-race family of musicians. In that very convoluted and insular world, his family’s connection to Jefferson was long-standing by the time of his marriage to Hemings and Bell’s daughter. Jefferson had hired the “Scott Family” to play at his own daughter Martha’s wedding, an event that took place two months after he first met Scott’s future father-in-law that Christmas Day in 1789.26 These multiple overlapping connections—business, personal, and family—ensured that there would be deep connections between the mountain and Main Street. Those bonds began to be forged in earnest during the period when the Hemingses started to reassemble at Monticello.
THOUGH ALL THE Hemingses had stories to tell in the last days of 1789 and the beginning of 1790, James and Sally certainly had more exotic and startling things to reveal to their family about their adventures abroad. One wonders about their states of mind in those early days. Theirs had not been a short vacation to a foreign land, dabbling in the local culture just long enough to get a taste of it before returning home and, at most, having their internal clocks disrupted by living briefly in a different time zone. They were out of their country long enough to have become part of a new one and to be changed in ways subtle and profound.
That certainly happened to Jefferson, who relished his time in the country and brought elements of it home in the form of his dress, furniture, appreciation for haute cuisine, wine, and, some said, even his mannerisms. Playing at being French meant one thing for Jefferson and another for the two Hemingses, James in particular. He had been in France as long as Jefferson and had every reason to remain attached to things French because it was his job to be a French chef. And while Jefferson merely added French culture to an already celebrated and secure persona, Hemings was a much younger man, with fewer social resources at his disposal. Having received a completely new identity in France, he now had a profession and experiences that set him apart from others.
Along with whatever cultural affectations and, perhaps, sense of superiority, attached to brother and sister because of their European adventure, France lived in their memory as their time out of Virginian slavery and the place where they could have lived free. They had to adjust to something very different now, picking up where they had left off as slaves in a slave society. If Jefferson and his daughters were at all discomfited by being thrown back into “the Forest of Albermarle,”27 they had not experienced so vast a change in their statuses. Where they had once been powerful slave-owning white Virginians, they were now powerful slave-owning white Virginians who spoke better French and had firsthand knowledge of French culture.
The physical surroundings at Monticello told a symbolic story of the social distance the siblings had traveled from a place of potential freedom back to a slave society. They had returned from living at a grand and luxurious residence with indoor plumbing to an unkempt and run-down “great” house that must have seemed a near wreck to them after the Hôtel de Langeac. A few months after arriving home, Jefferson warned his in-laws, the Eppeses, whom he had invited for a visit, that were they to come, they would be “roughing it,” indicating the poor condition of even his own living quarters.28 There was no neighborhood full of well-appointed homes, no street scenes to provide daily theater, no more balls for Sally Hemings to attend as lady-in-waiting, no more sumptuous architecture. Instead, the scene the siblings took in upon their arrival included the neglected “great house” looming over tiny slave cabins dotting the landscape, providing a stark reminder of what they had decided to return to.
Those poor dwellings housed the brother’s and sister’s relatives and other enslaved people. It was, most likely, in one of those cabins that Elizabeth Hemings learned that her daughter was now in the same position that she had been in with the master of the household. Sally Hemings could tell her mother why she believed her life and that of her children would be different from the lives her mother and siblings had lived. Did Elizabeth Hemings wish her daughter had made a different choice, to have opted for freedom even if it meant she might be lost to the Virginia Hemingses forever?
Elizabeth and Sally Hemings surely discussed how the laws of slavery in France differed from the laws of Virginia. But that Hobson’s choice for families in slave societies was an especially tough one for females, and Sally Hemings’s predicament and her mother’s more likely reaction to it, is explained very well by the historian Stephanie M. H. Camp’s observations about enslaved women’s attitudes toward flight from slavery. Camp explained, “Paramount among women’s reasons for not running away as fugitives more frequently were their family responsibilities and gender ideals among the enslaved. Women were enmeshed in networks of extended family and friends, and they played central roles in the black family.” Enslaved women defined themselves as women “through their activities on behalf of their families.” The “dense social relations” that informed their lives made it especially hard for them to leave their families behind. Many enslaved women did run away, but the special pressures they faced—the things they had to think about before they made their decisions—were ever present and insistent.29
One can ea
sily see how women whose femininity was devalued by the society at large would want to latch onto a definition of self tied to something positive—being a source of support for loved ones—even if that meant putting self aside, and forgoing a chance for individual freedom. Self-sacrifice was a route to self-affirmation and respectability. Stephanie Camp quotes Molly Hornblow, who criticized her granddaughter for considering running away. “Nobody,” Hornblow said, “respects a mother who forsakes her children.”30 In a culture where daughters were also expected to care for elderly members of their families, it was very likely that the sentiment ran in both directions to at least some degree. A daughter could also not be seen forsaking her mother. Jefferson, with his very traditional views about the role of women in family, probably reminded the sixteen-year-old girl coming into womanhood of her duties to her family as he sought to persuade her to come home with him. We do not know how Elizabeth Hemings felt about the way her daughter dealt with Jefferson and freedom or, for that matter, about how Jefferson had dealt with her daughter. Nor do we know whether she would have better understood it if her son had stayed than if her daughter had, but we do know that she had valuable information about what life was like as a slave woman attached to the master of a plantation. She could have told her daughter what to expect from Jefferson, other white people, and other members of the enslaved community. She had many more years to provide counsel because she lived longer than most people of her day, black or white, enslaved or free.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 50