The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  20

  EQUILIBRIUM

  BY THE BEGINNING of February 1790, if not before, James Hemings knew with certainty that he would never go back to Paris with Jefferson. After weeks of mulling it over and discussing it with friends and family, Jefferson accepted the appointment as secretary of state. That ended his term as minister to France, and he never saw Paris again. New York, the capital of the new nation, was his next destination. Hemings had not been anticipating an exact return to the life he had known in Paris. Without his sister and Jefferson’s daughters, things simply could not be the same. He would not even return to the same house. Jefferson had decided, before they left the city, that he could not afford so grand a residence as the Hôtel de Langeac, and needed to find a less expensive alternative. Although Hemings would not be going back to the same surroundings there, Paris, a free society, versus New York, a slave society, was probably preferable to him. He had to say goodbye yet again to his family at Monticello and to whatever thoughts or plans he had about what he would do once he got back to France.1

  It was also clear that the configuration of slaves and masters who had lived together overseas would never be reconstituted in the same way at any place on American soil. At some point after the party’s arrival in Norfolk on November 23, their trek through Virginia stopping at the homes of various relatives, and their return to Monticello one month later, Patsy Jefferson encountered her cousin Thomas Mann Randolph. The two became engaged, evidently sometime in January; one says “evidently” because it is not known exactly how their courtship began or progressed. Jefferson’s memorandum books and letters trace his visits to others’ homes during this period, but make no reference to Randolph or Tuckahoe. Jefferson learned of the couple’s plan sometime in January and on February 4 received a letter from Randolph’s father about the impending union. He quickly replied favorably to the match.2

  Patsy, now called Martha, and Thomas had surely met as children, but cannot have known each other very well. She had been away from Monticello from the time she was eleven. Couples then and now do meet and fall in love at first sight, and that could have happened to this young pair, though that would not have been the only consideration in their time. As important as whatever love existed between them were the long-standing ties between the two families, ties that went back to the prospective fathers-in-law’s own fathers and to Jefferson’s family on his mother’s side—he was a Randolph himself through her line.3

  It helped that Jefferson knew Tom Randolph, though in a very limited fashion. While he was still in Paris, Tom had written to him from Edinburgh, where he was studying, and Jefferson spoke well of his daughter’s future suitor.4 Although this was not a case of a young girl’s seeking to join her life’s fortunes to a totally unknown quantity, it was nearly so. Martha’s engagement to a man whom she could have known only as an adult for as little as three and, at most, seven weeks—four of which had been spent traveling from plantation to plantation when he would not have been with her all the time—is worth pausing over. Others who have chronicled Jefferson’s life have done so, sometimes providing their own explanations for what really was an extraordinary turn of events.

  Henry Randall insisted that the couple had met and courted in Paris. That could be the only reason for so swift an engagement in Virginia. He knew how intensely devoted Jefferson’s eldest daughter was to him, a devotion he wrote movingly about in his biography. The idea that Martha could so hastily agree to leave her father’s home—before she had even begun to reacclimate herself to that home—seems to have unnerved the historian so much that he promoted the idea of a European romance between the young lovers that all evidence indicates did not occur.5

  The couple’s granddaughter Sarah Randolph endorsed the idea of a meeting in the summer of 1788 as a possible start to her forebears’ romance. She apparently based this on a letter from Thomas Mann Randolph Sr. to Jefferson dated November 19, 1787, in which he said he told his son to go to Paris, as if a letter alone urging someone to go to a place, with no confirming after-the-fact circumstances, proved that the person actually went there.6 Thomas Jr. did not always do what his father said. That seems actually to have been the source of the great tension between them. At the end of December 1788, Jefferson said he had not heard from Tom Randolph for over a year and supposed that he had returned to America, which, in fact, he had. The young man wrote to his mother the preceding May, saying he was coming home, having decided not to go to Paris.7

  Other, more modern considerations of this subject linked the quick engagement and marriage to Jefferson’s appointment as secretary of state. Things had to move quickly because he had to assume his post and did not want to miss the wedding.8 There was also the marriage settlement to think of. It had to be signed before the marriage took place, or it would have no legal effect. That answers the question about the timing of the wedding ceremony, not about how Martha came to accept so quickly a marriage proposal from a near-stranger on the very heels of her return from over five years in another country. She gave herself no time to get settled and think, and barely enough time to unpack. Love does that to some people, but it is almost impossible to view this lightning-quick courtship and marriage without taking note of its disappointing aftermath.

  Unlike her sister Maria, Martha would not have a happy marriage. That she and Tom had twelve children over a long stretch of time was most likely due to the near-permanence of the marriage bond in those days and the lack of a culture of and access to birth control. Martha could not have refused Tom, even had she wanted to, though it was clear at some point that she wanted no more children. After the birth of her ninth child, Benjamin Franklin, she expressed the hope, in a day when abstinence was the only sure route to preventing conception, that he would be her last. She had three more after him. In the final period of her life, her family broken by debt, she viewed her eldest son’s growing family with great trepidation. Children were more burden than pleasure.9

  Jefferson has been seriously criticized for the failure of his eldest daughter’s marriage, as if he were chiefly responsible for that. In the conventional narrative, for purely selfish reasons, he encouraged Martha’s loyalty to him over her husband, thus taking what was destined to be a happy marriage and wrecking it. On the other hand, Maria and John Wayles Eppes were able to be happy because they resisted Jefferson’s call to move to Pantops, a farm near Monticello, and generally lived outside of his influence. Both couples were free adults who bear primary responsibility for the way their lives turned out, both credit and blame—if any blame is to be laid. Maria and John Eppes’s marital happiness was not merely a function of Jefferson’s absence. There is every reason to believe that these two would have been happy wherever they were, because they loved each other and were truly compatible. They, in contrast to Tom and Martha Randolph, had known each other for many years before they married, and knew they suited one another. A hard look at Martha and Tom’s situation suggests that Jefferson was never the major problem with their union. The details of the Randolph marriage and family circumstances are worth considering closely at this point because the fallout from their domestic woes shaped life at Monticello—particularly the lives of Sally Hemings and her children from 1790 on.

  All families have problems, of varying degrees of severity, but there has been a marked tendency in the presentation of the life of Jefferson and his white family to overlook some extremely serious issues the family had to confront. There are clear indications from Thomas and Martha’s eldest son, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and from other observers, that his father was an unstable and physically abusive man. Jeff Randolph described him as capable of being “more ferocious than the woulf and more fell than the hyena.”10 No child says that about a father who is merely annoying or just somewhat overbearing. Tom Randolph must have done things to members of his family, hurt them in ways beyond being merely impecunious and neglectful. Wolves and hyenas are associated with violence and aggression. Indeed, Edmund Bacon remembers seei
ng Tom cane his eldest son when he was a grown man, a wholly inappropriate act designed to humiliate as much as to “correct.”11 By the time Bacon witnessed this, such things had probably been going on for a long while and may have been worse before the Randolphs moved to Monticello permanently in 1809.

  Jeff Randolph denied Bacon’s account of post-adult whippings from his father in a broadside he published to refute some of Bacon’s more embarrassing stories about life at Monticello. The man more ferocious than a wolf and more “fell” than a hyena was transformed into a Virginian Saint Francis of Assisi. Tom Randolph may well have been all these things—the sinner/saint dichotomy always suppresses the complex nature of any human being’s life. Jeff Randolph was an old man by this time and could well have been seeing his father through the nostalgic haze that often covers memories of earlier life. Moreover, his father had reportedly begged his forgiveness on his deathbed. It is also clear that Jeff Randolph thought of himself as the guardian of his family’s reputation, and was willing to go to great lengths in that role even if it meant saying things that were not true.12

  Thomas Mann Randolph is often written of as if his mental instability appeared only late in life—his poor financial circumstances and, again, Jefferson having driven him crazy. Evidence of Randolph’s problematic temperament already appeared in the young man, soon after his marriage. In the months immediately following the wedding, Jefferson set up and tried to shepherd through negotiations with Tom’s father to acquire one of his farms, Edgehill, as a family home for the newlyweds. Tom lost his temper during the negotiations and insulted his father so gravely that it caused a permanent rupture in their relations. They reconciled on the surface, but the elder man never really forgave or trusted his son again.13 Two years later, when his sister was thrown into a scandal involving their brother-in-law Richard Randolph, Tom wrote to the embattled young man facing a criminal prosecution and trying to find a way to defend himself. He threatened his kinsman, saying that he would personally “wash out with your blood the stain on my family.”14

  Deviating from the well-documented typical pattern of youthful male aggressiveness in the late teens and early twenties that mellows, Randolph kept his rough edges well into his adulthood. He got into brawls. On one occasion, he struck his son-in-law Charles Bankhead in the head with an iron poker after Bankhead mistook him for a servant and cursed at him.15 He could easily have killed him. His temper and lack of self-control affected not just the immediate objects of his wrath but also his relations with all who knew him. Imagine Jefferson sending a man a graphic letter threatening to kill him, getting into fistfights above the age of boyhood, or hitting someone in the head with a poker. It is not known whether Tom Randolph ever directed his physical aggression toward Martha. He, like other aggressive men, may have drawn the line at hitting women—or he may not have. Even if he never physically abused Martha, it cannot have been easy for a woman used to the placid environment of life with a father who modeled a version of manhood that emphasized control over one’s emotions to be suddenly placed under the power of a man who had violent mood swings and felt no compunction about striking those who displeased him.

  The family aggression replicated itself when Tom and Martha’s eldest daughter, Anne, married the above-mentioned Charles Bankhead, who repeatedly beat her even while they lived at Monticello. At least one time, he beat her in front of her mother. When Martha Randolph told Jefferson about the incident, he appealed to Bankhead’s father for support. They both tried to keep what had happened secret from Tom Randolph, fearing his reaction—although if there was ever a time to take a poker to a man, that was it.16 Bacon’s memory of Anne’s travails at the hand of her husband gave rise to another Jeff Randolph cover-up. In the same broadside in which he disputed Bacon’s claim that his father had caned him when he was an adult, Randolph flatly pronounced Bacon’s story of “Mr. Bankhead’s violence toward his wife” as “untrue,” hiding his sister’s suffering out of a sense of family shame, when he could have told the truth (Anne had done nothing shameworthy) or simply remained silent.17 Instead, he saw himself as preserving the family honor by lying, for he well knew that his brother-in-law beat his sister. Moreover, Randolph had his own personal experience with Bankhead’s violent tendencies. Decades before he denied that Bankhead beat his sister, Bankhead had almost killed Randolph, stabbing him when the two got into an altercation in a Charlottesville tavern. Bankhead’s beastliness was so taken as a given that as Jefferson contemplated this horrible family situation, he was concerned not only about his grandson’s life but about his granddaughter Anne’s. Bankhead, he feared, would take things out on her physically after his fight with her brother.18

  Bankhead also physically attacked a member of the Hemings family, Burwell Colbert, no doubt drawing the enmity of the clan. Ellen Coolidge wrote of the elderly Jefferson’s indescribable anguish when he found out what had happened.19 Their grandfather’s home was undoubtedly a happy place for the Jefferson grandchildren; young people’s resilience allows them to absorb an enormous amount of distress without despair while focusing on the good things that happened to them. But the presence of one, and then two, unpredictable and violent males at the heart of the Jefferson-Randolph household cannot be treated as a minor detail; aggression is never without consequence. Although both men were periodically exiled from the family, their difficult personalities and actions inevitably affected the lives of all family members and others who came into close contact with them.

  It is completely understandable that Jefferson, upon viewing his daughter married to an unstable man with a ferocious temper, might well have wished to provide a haven for her without being open about why the haven was required. When he learned of the horror his granddaughter Anne was living with her husband, he begged her—to no avail—to come live at Monticello. When she refused, he confided with deep sadness to a friend that he always expected her “to die at [Bankhead’s] hands.”20 We understand today much more about spousal abuse and that women like Anne stay in abusive relationships because they genuinely fear that their husbands will kill them if they leave. Often they are right. Bankhead was the sort who really might have killed Jefferson’s granddaughter.

  Great stigma attached to both serious marital discord and emotional illness. These were not the kinds of things a man so private as Jefferson cared to speak of in his letters, and his reference to Anne’s problem shows that he was at a loss to do anything about her situation beside offering her a place of refuge. People were to carry on, entertaining friends and relatives, as if there were no problems at all. In the mid-1790s, Tom and Martha traveled from doctor to doctor looking for a cure to his unspecified or, perhaps, unknown illness.21 Jefferson wrote as if the illness caused Randolph’s depression, but it is also possible, given later descriptions of his emotional history, that depression was the actual root of the problem, and the difficulties with his “physical” health a mere byproduct.

  While no one could have foreseen all of this at the couple’s beginnings in 1790, more time and more opportunities to observe Tom Randolph—and hear what a wider range of people knew of him—might have given Martha at least the small consolation of being able to say, as the years passed, that she knew what she was getting into when she married him. If Jefferson can be faulted for anything relating to his eldest daughter’s marriage, it is for not exercising greater vigilance about her entrance into what was, in his time, a permanent arrangement. In those first weeks after their return to America, his much vaunted possessiveness of Martha was nowhere in sight. She was vulnerable. Anyone would be disoriented after having spent almost six years away from home, five of them in a foreign country. She had gone from girl to woman in a different world. Yet her father quickly agreed to put her under the control of a man neither of them knew, understanding very well what marriage would mean for her. Not long after the wedding, he wrote to Martha saying that the happiness of her life now depended upon “continuing to please a single person.”22 This was not, as it
is sometimes portrayed, merely a statement revealing Jefferson’s personal misogyny. Jefferson was speaking the plain truth. A married woman ceased to be her own person and was placed under the total dominion of her husband—by law. One who lives under the legal dominion of another, even if styled as a benevolent dominion or one grounded in “love,” is not in control of his or her happiness. If Martha was too in love to think straight about this, it was her only surviving parent’s job to think for her and suggest, at least, that they take their time. What was the rush, given all that was at stake?

  At seventeen, Martha was younger than the average Virginia bride, and Tom was only twenty-one. When Tom’s sister Judith was set to marry Richard Randolph, under the same circumstances, her mother, Anne Cary Randolph, objected strenuously. Cynthia Kierner has noted that Randolph “hoped to delay Judith’s marriage and to keep all of her daughters single until, in her words, ‘they were old enough to form a proper judgment of Mankind, well knowing that a woman’s happiness depends entirely on the Husband she is united to.’”23 Randolph’s words, almost exactly tracking Jefferson’s, were written several years before Tom and Martha’s union. Having been a teenage bride herself, she knew very well what it meant to tie one’s life to a man under the facts of social life as it existed for women in her time, having baby after baby (she gave birth to thirteen) with no satisfactory way out even if one were deeply unhappy in one’s circumstances. Had she lived long enough to become Martha’s mother-in-law, Anne Randolph would have understood perfectly the risk this young girl was about to take and would not have been at all surprised at how her married life turned out. She knew that there were many reasons why a seventeen-year-old girl, married much too soon to a twenty-one-year-old man, might become unhappy and wish fervently to return to girlhood in her father’s home. Martha’s circumstances were even more striking and poignant; within a nine-month period she went from living a carefree, almost giddy life in a grand residence in Paris, attending balls with her friends, to living in a virtual swamp in a barely adequate house in the middle of nowhere with a man she did not know.24 Nothing about this signaled happily ever after.