One would not expect Jefferson to have had the same perspective on matters as Anne Cary Randolph. While her daughter’s impending marriage caused her to reflect upon her own ambivalence about the way her life as a woman had turned out, he would have looked at Randolph’s life and seen nothing at all amiss. What were women to do but get married, live under the direction of a man, and have his babies? Still, finding the right man was important, and it should have occurred to Jefferson that it might take Martha more than two or three weeks to do that.
It is very likely that Jefferson’s habitual optimism and early life experiences overrode any reluctance to support his daughter’s plan to get married so quickly when she did not have to. He had been brought as a little boy to live in Thomas Mann Randolph Sr.’s impressive residence, Tuckahoe. Although he was well used to gracious living from the time of his boyhood, Tuckahoe took that to another level. Well-appointed as it was, Shadwell did not rival his cousin’s home. The boys grew up together for a time in that house, Randolph the young master of it, Jefferson a kinsman, but nevertheless a guest in those more opulent surroundings. When the son of the boyhood master of Tuckahoe asked for his daughter’s hand, with the expectation that she would become the mistress of the place herself, Jefferson was not inclined to hesitate, even if he should have. The imprinted association of Tuckahoe with wealth and stability gave him the confidence to support the whirlwind engagement and marriage, even though he knew that Randolph Sr. carried a staggering amount of debt, inherited from his father-in-law, Archibald Cary. The trappings of Tuckahoe aside, Thomas Mann Randolph’s family was neither wealthy nor stable.25
Most important of all, Martha’s inexplicably quick courtship and marriage took place in a critical context. The very weeks that she met and married her future husband coincided with the period that Sally Hemings’s condition became more obvious. If Martha’s swift marriage was in any way her reaction to that, Jefferson was not in a good position to dissuade her from starting her own new life and household. He may indeed have been quite relieved. She was willing to go right away, and he was willing to let her go as fast as she wanted to. Family crises of this nature were not typically spoken of in the papers of white slave-owning families. It is unreasonable, therefore, to expect to be able to survey the family’s written record of itself and hope to find an answer openly displayed, or to attribute any significance to the absence of a forthright treatment of such matters. If an answer is to be found in written records, it will be hidden away or referred to indirectly, which is exactly what happened with Sally Hemings and her pregnancy in 1790.
Following the trajectory of Hemings’s life, and taking her seriously as a person, requires one both to notice when the trajectory veers and to look for an explanation for the change of course. It was a staple of life among upper-class slave-owning families that when the daughter of the household married, she was given a lady’s maid to attend her in her new role as wife, usually a female whom she already knew and who had attended her before.26 Through all the transformations that took place within the institution from the colonial period to the antebellum years, this phenomenon remained a constant to the point of cliché. Martha’s grandmother Martha Eppes brought Elizabeth Hemings to her marriage. Her mother took Betty Brown as her lady’s maid from the Forest with her when she married Jefferson. Sally Hemings, given her life up until 1790, could reasonably have expected, as she grew up, to follow in the footsteps of her mother and aunt and serve in the home of either Martha or Maria upon their marriages. Yet it was never to be.
Before Martha Jefferson wed Thomas Mann Randolph in February of 1790, her father drew up a marriage settlement earlier that month in which he gave her twenty-seven slaves.27 Tellingly, he did not give her Sally Hemings, the young woman who had been her lady’s maid for two years in France. That this very quickly created something of an issue for Martha was revealed in letters that passed between her, her aunt, and her father during the first half of that year. On July 2, 1790, while Jefferson was in New York serving as secretary of state, the newly married Martha wrote to him from Eppington, where she was living with her sister, “on the subject of a maid,” saying that she needed one. Jefferson referred to this letter in one he wrote on July 25 to her aunt Elizabeth Eppes. Martha, along with Polly, now called Maria, had been staying with her at Eppington during the late spring and early summer of 1790 while Martha’s husband got their home at Varina ready for them to live in later that season.28 While there, she discussed with her aunt the fact that she needed a maid. Eppes had written to Jefferson on June 4 about the same issue, but her letter arrived after Martha’s. Jefferson wrote, “Patsy has written me on the subject of a maid also, but adds that it will be time enough when we meet at Monticello. She will certainly never want any thing I can add to her convenience. I am in hopes, while in Virginia, to bring about arrangements which may fix her in Albemarle.”29
Like other correspondence that holds a promise of a substantive discussion of Sally Hemings, both letters from these two women written almost exactly a month apart, on the same topic, are missing from the collection of Jefferson’s letters. Although it is unlikely that either woman was totally candid or explicit about why Hemings would not be available to act as Martha’s maid, there may have been some general reference to her unavailability and a discussion of who among the enslaved women at Monticello already known to Martha might be a suitable replacement.
The slaves Jefferson gave his daughter were from one of his outlying plantations, and she could not have known any of the women well enough to trust them so much as the women house servants she had grown up with at Monticello. The point, however, is that both women wrote to tell Jefferson that Martha needed and wanted a maid. Jefferson, for obvious reasons, did not suggest to Eppes or his daughter that Hemings could continue in her role as a “convenience” that he was willing to provide, though when he returned to Monticello that fall, he did act upon his daughter’s request. He deeded Martha eight additional slaves, including the oldest daughter of Mary Hemings, Molly, who was about fourteen years old.30 Mary Hemings had been an important house servant of long standing, and Martha knew her and her children. It made perfect sense in the context of slavery at Monticello to give the teenager to Martha to serve as the maid she said she needed. Molly evidently continued with Martha for many years.31
Hemings was Maria’s maid, too, but her newly married sister was in far greater need of help in setting up what would be her new household with her husband than the thirteen-year-old who was back in her element with her beloved aunt, her cousins, and their slaves. The timing of Jefferson’s exchange of letters with Betsy Eppes and his daughter about providing a maid for Martha is critical, especially in light of his November conveyance of additional slaves to his older daughter. He knew, at least as early as July of 1790, that Maria’s circumstances were about to change drastically anyway. He had plans for her that would obviate the need for Sally Hemings to serve as her personal maid.
Earlier in the same month that Jefferson wrote to Eppes, as a partial result of some of his own very famous dealings with Alexander Hamilton, Congress had voted to move the capital from New York to Philadelphia on an interim basis before settling into its permanent home on the Potomac River. Even before the bill formally passed, Jefferson was so confident in its passage that he wrote to William Short on July 1, telling him to send his “baggage” from Paris to Philadelphia rather than to New York.32 The thought that his younger daughter might join him there came quickly to his mind, for in that same July letter to his sister-in-law, replying to her missive about getting Martha another maid, he informed her that he wanted “to consult” with her about Maria and thought that could be “best done at Monticello.” He invited her and her husband to visit him there during the coming fall. The Eppeses were apparently unable to join him for the face-to-face consultation, but sent Maria along. In October, Jefferson wrote to Elizabeth Eppes and announced that he was going ahead with the plan that he had obliquely referred to earl
ier in July. He had decided that Maria would remain at Monticello for the winter, but would join him in Philadelphia in the spring and be placed in a boarding school.33
When Maria went to live with her father in Philadelphia, Sally Hemings did not go with her. Instead, after a time, Jefferson hired a local woman to attend his daughter. Just as he eschewed giving Hemings to Martha upon her marriage, when Maria married seven years later, and Hemings was still a very young woman, Jefferson did not give her to his younger daughter either, despite their lifelong intimacy with one another.34 There was no enslaved female with whom Maria was more familiar, and no role that Hemings played until that time was of longer standing than being helper to Jefferson’s daughters. But they were going to get married and, presumably, live away from their father. After Hemings’s return from France, someone very important had an interest in having her stay at Monticello: Jefferson. Instead of giving Sally Hemings to Maria on her wedding, he gave her another of Mary Hemings’s children, Sally’s fifteen-year-old niece, Betsy.35
It is not clear where Sally Hemings was in the spring of 1790. The most reasonable estimate of the absolute latest month in which she could have given birth was May, and it is not known how long her child lived. Martha and Maria were supposed to go to Eppington right after Martha’s wedding at the end of February, and Jefferson left for New York at the beginning of March, thinking his daughters and son-in-law would start right out for the Eppeses. It seems unlikely, though not impossible, that Hemings would have been expected to go with them if she was in the last stages of her pregnancy or had already given birth, and had a newborn (the Jefferson daughter’s half sibling) to look after.
As things turned out, Martha and Maria did not get to Eppington for another two and a half months—until the middle of May. At the end of April they were at Tuckahoe, stranded there because they did not have their own horses, and Tom did not want to borrow his father’s to make the trip.36 They explained this to a somewhat baffled Betsy Eppes, who told Jefferson that she and her husband could easily have supplied them with horses had they just written to say there was a problem.37 Why the logistics of their trip had not been discussed and set before Jefferson even left is unclear. This seems another curious lapse in fatherly attention, though he may have felt it appropriate to step aside and let the new husband take matters into his own hands. If that was the case, Tom’s performance was a portent of things to come.
Hemings was apparently at Eppington by summer’s end, however. Tom and Martha sent for her there sometime in August, for Maria Jefferson referred to this in an undated letter to her brother-in-law written, most likely, before the last week in September 1790. Maria’s language suggests that about six weeks had gone by since the last communication with her sister. Then she went on to mention Hemings. “We were at Cumberland when you sent for Sally but she was not well enough to have gone.” Elizabeth Eppes’s sister and Hemings’s half sister, Ann Wayles Skipwith, lived in Cumberland County, and Eppes visited her sister regularly.38 The nature of Hemings’s illness is unknown.
There is no extant written explanation for why the Randolphs sent for Hemings. By midsummer the couple had concluded that Varina was ruining their health. Determined to move away as quickly as possible, they already had their eyes on Edgehill in Albemarle County. Monticello would be their way station until they gained ownership of it.39 There was no urgency, at that late date, to take Hemings there to help put in order a house they expected to abandon shortly. If she was called to Varina to help, it was to help an overwhelmed Martha pack up to get ready to leave. The timing of the Randolphs’ request, however, suggests that bringing Hemings to them was more likely about Monticello than about Varina.
At the beginning of August, Jefferson wrote to Martha, directing her to send word to Hemings’s brothers Martin and Robert to make sure that they were at Monticello by September 1 to “have things prepared” by the time he got there.40 Martha and Tom Randolph were likely planning to send Sally Hemings to Monticello, perhaps with one or both of her brothers, to help everyone get ready for Jefferson’s arrival. He had told the young couple even before his August letter to expect him (and meet him) there near the beginning of September.41 There was, then, at the end of the summer of 1790, a gathering of all the Hemingses who formed the basic foundation of the personal staff at Monticello. Everyone who was supposed to be there would be there when Jefferson arrived.
Gabriella Harvie and “Sarah Jefferson”
By the time Jefferson returned to Monticello that September, it was clear that his idea of finding a home for Martha and her husband in Albemarle might not work out, for reasons that strangely mirrored his own personal circumstances. He planned to talk with Thomas Mann Randolph Sr. about selling Edgehill to the newlyweds.42 A complication arose in the form of Gabriella Harvie, Randolph Sr.’s seventeen-year-old soon to be new wife, whose turn through the Randolph household calls to mind the phrase “white tornado.” Jefferson, forty-seven, and Randolph, fifty, boyhood friends and cousins, had both taken up with teenage girls of almost the exact same age—Jefferson, with a young girl from his household, Randolph, with a girl who lived on the plantation right next door. Like Jefferson, Randolph had probably known the young object of his attention all her life. It is also very likely that his children—some of whom were around Harvie’s age, some older, some younger—had known her, too, for in the close-knit world of the Virginia gentry, the Randolphs and Harvies undoubtedly socialized. The Jeffersons knew Harvie as well. Her grandfather John Harvie had been one of Jefferson’s guardians after his father died.43
This was a difficult circumstance for the Randolph children, especially the daughters. Whatever qualms she had had about marrying him (discussed in chapter 15), once married, Harvie almost immediately proceeded to wrap her much older husband around her finger (it did not take very long) and moved to ensure that any children they had would be favored over his previous large set. By the time she was finished, Randolph Sr. had seen fit to name his first son with her Thomas Mann Randolph, symbolically erasing his first son from his prior marriage. Though Virginia did not follow primogeniture, the symbolism of the first son as the head of his group of siblings remained. It was as if Randolph Sr. felt he was starting his life all over again. In a sense he was. His new bride was the same age as the woman he had married decades before. Between the time of his second marriage, at the end of 1790, and his death, in 1793, the couple had two children, a daughter who died in infancy and the son mentioned above.44 Had Randolph lived as long as Jefferson, he could have had as many children with Gabriella as he had with his first wife, Anne.
All this was a devastating blow to young Tom Randolph, whose struggles with depression and feelings of inadequacy could likely be treated today with medication and/or therapy. The saga of Randolph Sr. and Harvie also greatly alarmed Martha, who worried openly, and evidently without shame, about what this would mean for the distribution of property within her husband’s family. She had married the presumptive scion of Tuckahoe, of which she would be the mistress, and now the current master of the plantation had decided he wanted a brand-new family. Martha wrote to her father about this matter in the very same July 2 letter in which she addressed the issue of requiring a maid.
Jefferson never responded to Martha in writing about the need to have a new maid, but he answered the part of her letter voicing concerns about Harvie in one of the most eloquent, wise, and deeply revealing pieces of prose that he ever wrote. Unlike other of his admonitions to young people that seem old-fashioned and stale, even for his own time, the universality and timelessness of parts of this letter to his daughter about how to respond to Harvie take him far beyond meaningless cliché and describe the human condition with a clarity that echoes across the centuries. He was able to achieve this, of course, because of his remarkable facility with language, but it was also because he was not affecting a pose or mouthing empty words or the kind of rote platitudes fashioned to suit any occasion that an older person might say to a younger
one. He was speaking to his adored daughter from his heart, and he wanted her to really hear that, addressing her as one human being to another. Like all good writing, it was intended to, and does, operate on more than one level, for Jefferson was not just speaking about the problem with Harvie; he was speaking about himself, his daughter, and all who must live in society with others and who want to maintain some sense of peace and happiness—an equilibrium—while doing that.
Every human being, my dear, must thus be viewed according to what it is good for, for none of us, no not one, is perfect; and were we to love none who had imperfections this world would be a desert for our love. All we can do is to make the best of our friends: love and cherish what is good in them, and keep out of the way of what is bad: but no more think of rejecting them for it than of throwing away a piece of music for a flat passage or two.45
While Martha may have reconciled herself to Harvie (she had no choice, for she could not make Harvie disappear), she never ceased thinking about the importance of property and inheritance to family life. Jefferson’s white family tradition has noted, with a faint hint of criticism, her keen interest in her own children’s ability to acquire property through their marriages as if she thought this, rather than love, was the most important consideration for their matches.46 That mild note of censure seems a bit unfair, given that acquiring and maintaining property was an ever-present obsession throughout Anglo-Virginian culture. Getting property had allowed a man like her grandfather John Wayles, who was a “nobody” in English society, to become a “somebody” in America. That process had replicated itself thousands of times and would continue to do so in the future. Property was the engine that drove the society, for good and for ill.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 52