Randolph was a product of her time and place. In her day, even more than in her children’s day, when love began its ascendance as the primary purpose for unions between males and females, marriage was very much about property and the eventual disposition of it. In that property-obsessed and male-dominated society in which both Jefferson daughters were raised, women were especially vulnerable, as their futures depended upon the choices made by the men in their lives—fathers, then husbands or whoever was the designated patriarch in the family. Living under that regime and being women of the upper class, Martha and Maria Jefferson did not have the same expectations about life as many modern women who can leave home, take up a profession, support themselves, and chart a new course if disappointed about a domestic situation. Their grandfather John Wayles came to America with nothing but his talent, ambition, and skin color. Because he was a man and white, he could enter a profession and be befriended by other men who put him in the position to become a wealthy landowner. If one job or venture did not work out, he could pull up stakes and begin anew elsewhere. His was not a woman’s story. Protected daughterhood and well-made marriages that solidified and protected family property were women’s routes to personal happiness.
If property and family were their chief sources of support, stability, and self-esteem, white women had to work (and hope) to maintain both. An awkward private arrangement at home was to be dealt with by adjusting one’s attitude, something that women throughout the ages have been trained and expected to do when dealing with the men in their lives—their fathers, husbands, and lovers. That came with the territory of being a woman. As her father told her later on in a less inspiring passage in the letter described above, the more skillfully she handled difficult and personal family situations, the more respect observers of the scene would have for her. Here was a message that one would expect Jefferson and other men of his era, white or black, as a matter of fact, to deliver, one that promoted a very traditional notion of virtuous womanhood. Women achieved respect by bearing the improprieties or transgressions of others in silence or without too obvious rancor. Jefferson and other men saw this as part of the balance of life: men had their trials to endure in the outside world, and women had their trials on the domestic front.
Some trials are more difficult than others, and realizing that things could always be much worse often shapes one’s response to an unhappy situation. The true nightmare scenario for an upper-class daughter in the world in which Martha Randolph lived was not a widower father in thrall to a slave woman who bore his children; it was the potential loss of property—the source of family wealth, social stability, prestige, and patrimony, along with the personal identity all those things provided—when her father remarried and had another set of legitimate white heirs. Having to manage an embarrassing circumstance that was a well-known hazard of the way of life that they had chosen and was, otherwise, tremendously beneficial to them was one thing; facing the concrete effects of a deed, an inter vivos gift, a transfer of title, or a disappointing will or marriage settlement—all giving property to someone else’s children—was quite another. Tom Randolph, and Martha, would have had nothing to fear if his father had chosen to take up with a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl instead of marrying a seventeen-year-old free white one.
Property united the past, present, and future, through the great events of life—birth, marriage, and death. This did not simply address itself to the passions and needs of one man and one woman in a particular generation; it affected generations to come. In their Anglo-Virginian world, both Jefferson daughters could fully expect that whatever was the meaning of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings would die a mercifully restrained death with them. No marriage license, no white family acknowledgment, the only one that counted in their world, no grant of land, no intestate succession would bind them to their black half siblings. Once Hemings and Jefferson were “over,” they would all go their separate ways forever—Jefferson’s legitimate heirs, with the honor of a recognized connection to him and his property (they thought); the Hemings children, with their freedom and whatever he had given them over the course of the years under the heavy mantle of his discretion.
Unsettling as her father’s relationship with Hemings may have been to Martha Randolph, the dispute with her father-in-law about Edgehill in 1790 through 1791 (and the eventual disposition of the famous family home, Tuckahoe, which went to Gabriella’s Thomas Mann Randolph)47 provided a stark lesson that he had actually done her and her sister a tremendous favor by becoming involved with a woman who was in no position to pull a Gabriella Harvie in her nuclear family. She cannot have looked at the marriage of her father’s boyhood friend to a young woman who was exactly her age, a girl whom she knew personally, and not have wondered if a similar thing could happen in her life and what the fallout from it might be. There but for the grace of God—and Sally Hemings—she and her sister might have gone. No matter what her father had promised or thought at the time, neither she nor he (nor Sally Hemings, for that matter) knew for certain in 1790 that he was never going to meet another white woman he wanted to marry.
Martha Randolph observed firsthand over the years the poignant struggles, emotional and financial, of Thomas Mann Randolph Sr.’s daughters, brought on, in part, by the aftershocks from his remarriage. One of the most searing aspects of their father’s union with Harvie—aside from its quickness, for their mother had died only the year before—was that Harvie immediately began to exercise the prerogatives of the wife of the household. Just months after her wedding, she redecorated the house, “painting the black walnut wall in the first floor parlor white.”48 Nancy Randolph, who had served as the mistress of the house after her mother’s death, was summarily supplanted. One by one, the sisters sought refuge in others’ home: Nancy, very fatefully at her brother-in-law’s home; Bizarre, Harriet, Jane, and Virginia, spending time with their brother and Martha at Edgehill and at Monticello, no doubt telling stories about their predicament. Harriet became a favorite of Jefferson’s and was the probable source of the name for his and Hemings’s daughters, one who died as an infant and one who lived.49
It is perhaps too facile to cast Harvie as the “evil teenage stepmother” for choosing to do what the Anglo-American property system gave her the perfect “right” to do. She was entitled to act as, because she was, the mistress of Tuckahoe, and could not reasonably have been expected to carry herself as if the first Mrs. Randolph were still alive and in the house. Even with that, Randolph Sr. bore some responsibility for the less than artful way matters proceeded. Thomas Jefferson was not Thomas Mann Randolph. If he had chosen a new bride, she might not have been at all like Harvie and even if she had been, she might not have been able to run Jefferson the way Randolph evidently let Harvie run him. Nonetheless, the risk of such a turn of events was always there. Jefferson, like any wealthy (or perceived to be wealthy) man, was “marriage material” for somebody until the day he died. As long as her father remained attached to Sally Hemings, Martha, her sister, and their children would be safe in the way that most mattered to them and others of their class during the eighteenth century.
Property was central, but there was an emotional component to the matter as well. Imagine Thomas Jefferson remarried in 1790 to a free and white Sarah Hemings by whom he had three white sons, William Beverley, James Madison, and Thomas Eston, with a “very beautiful”50 daughter Harriet thrown in for good measure. Even if she had been the total opposite of Harvie, Jefferson’s very ideal of a domestic “angel,” the dynamics of his relationship with his older daughters and their children could not have remained the same with a Sarah Jefferson living and sleeping with him while presiding over his household.
Sarah Jefferson’s primary duty would have been to secure her own and her sons’ and daughter’s places in her husband’s heart, with the opportunity to do that every moment of the day. Under any circumstances, Jefferson’s grandchildren would have been his absolute delight. But if they had been forced to compete w
ith his legitimate white children who were in the same generation—the birth of an eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, followed six years later by the birth of an eldest son, William Beverley Jefferson—things would have been much different. Only if Beverley Jefferson had turned out to be an absolute disappointment could one have expected his father to favor his first grandson over his first son. Martha and her family would always have been welcomed to her father’s home for visits long and short, but it is doubtful that she would have been able to move her husband and all her children there and act as the mistress of Monticello if her father had had another legal family. That could not have been accomplished without diminishing the position of his wife, unless Martha’s subordination to the new Mrs. Jefferson in the running of the household had been made absolutely clear to everyone. Under those circumstances (unlikely to be satisfactory to either woman), Martha would have had to, or wanted to, stay in her own home with her own husband, thus losing some of the intimacy and familiarity that shaped the contours of her and her children’s attachment to her father over the years. Without even being able to see all the way down the road, anyone who knew and valued the rules of family, property, and slavery in Virginia understood the differing levels of threat posed by a Sally Hemings versus a Gabriella Harvie.
Martha and Tom eventually settled at Edgehill, but years after they wanted to. Varina was somewhat worse than merely uncomfortable to them, so it was decided that fall that they would live on the mountain for a time. Accordingly, Jefferson wrote a memorandum to Nicholas Lewis, who was still overseeing his farms and slaves, listing Sally Hemings, along with her relatives, as one who would be available to attend to the needs of his daughter and son-in-law, most likely using her skills as a seamstress. Hemings was, by this time, just as he described her: one member (the third on the list) of Monticello house slaves who could, if needed, do things for his daughters.51 He could not very well have told Lewis that she was really in a position different from that of the rest of her kin and outlined any different course of treatment of her.
We have come to better understand, as our society’s values have changed and black people’s position in the United States has improved, that Jefferson and members of his white family are not to be taken as the only, or even the best, sources of information about life at Monticello. What they wrote, and did not choose to write, about their relations with their human property does not define the total reality of either their lives or the lives of those whom they enslaved. Members of the Hemings family, other enslaved people on the mountain, and members of Jefferson’s nearby community provided an answer to the question of why and how the trajectory of Sally Hemings’s life changed in 1790, just after she had returned to the United States. Their answers provide a valuable framework in which to read Jefferson’s white family’s letters and other documents that bear on the lives of the Hemingses.
The explanatory power of an answer, or a story, if you will, is the truest and best measure of its credibility, how it illuminates without effort the meaning of the seemingly unrelated details, circumstances, and actions that exist in the world around it. It is most reliable when the providers of the answer or story had no ability to affect, or were even totally unaware of, all those details, circumstances, and actions. Madison Hemings, who described an event that took place in his mother’s life in 1790—she had a baby who “lived but a short time”52—was not alive when Jefferson, his daughter, and sister-in-law wrote the letters that support his recounting of the important event that changed his mother’s life that year. He certainly did not have access to Jefferson’s family letters, which remained in his white family’s hands long after he had left Virginia in the 1830s.
When Martha Randolph and Elizabeth Eppes wrote letters in the first half of 1790 saying that Martha needed a maid, and Jefferson responded by providing her with someone other than Sally Hemings and fixed Maria’s life so that she would not need Hemings either, they did not know that eighty-three years later Madison Hemings would flesh out the meaning of what they were talking about and doing during that spring and summer. When, in 1802, Jefferson’s neighbors, who assumed that all the children Hemings bore in the 1790s lived, said that she had five children and that her oldest child was about twelve, they had no knowledge of what Jefferson and his family wrote in 1790.53 Had they been able to read those letters and had known of his actions that year, they would have immediately understood why Hemings eased out of her role as the personal maid to Martha and Maria Jefferson in 1790.
Even Ellen Coolidge could not escape the powerful gravity of an accurate answer. Just as her comments about maids in Jefferson’s rooms unwittingly dovetailed with Madison Hemings’s descriptions of his mother’s role in life, she also unwittingly shed light on Hemings’s situation in 1790. Coolidge asked plaintively, almost as if she, as a sixty-two-year-old woman, was still trying to sort this out herself, how it could be that her grandfather would have “selected the female attendant of his own pure children to become his paramour”?54 Of course, men have conducted affairs with the housekeepers, nannies, and governesses to their children from time immemorial, and one would be hard pressed to characterize the unmarried ones among their number as presumptively evil.
The historian Nell Irvin Painter, in her study of the journals of Ella Gertrude Clancy Thomas, a long-suffering nineteenth-century southern planter’s wife, has written eloquently about the phenomenon of what psychologists call “deception clues” and “leakages.”55 Both refer to the situation, familiar to police interrogators, where a person seeking to hide damaging or very painful truths accidentally reveals those hidden truths, or leaves clues to them, in the stories he or she tells for public consumption. Coolidge reflexively associated the start of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship with the days in Paris when Hemings was, in fact, an “attendant” to Jefferson’s “pure children,” inviting readers to conjure up images of Patsy’s and Polly’s wounded girlhoods, while skipping over the many later years that Jefferson could have “selected” Hemings.
Ellen had no personal memory of either her mother or Aunt Maria as pure children attended to by Sally Hemings. By the time she was old enough to pay any attention to Hemings, Jefferson’s oldest “pure children” were grown and married women, one of them, obviously, Ellen’s mother. Maria, married and moved away from Monticello in 1797, when Ellen was one, and dead in 1804, when she was eight, was not much in Ellen’s memory at all. In a very poignant letter to her mother written in 1820, twenty-four-year-old Ellen confessed that she had “almost entirely forgotten” her aunt.56 The Sally Hemings whom Ellen knew and remembered from her days at Monticello was the mother of Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston—all born well after her days in France. Who had said, at the time of Coolidge’s letter, that Jefferson had chosen Hemings as his paramour while she was an attendant to his children? It was, of course, Madison Hemings who said that his father had “selected” his mother “during that time,” and that was how she came to have a baby in 1790. He did not say that in print, however, until fifteen years after Coolidge’s letter. Coolidge (inadvertently) and Hemings (deliberately), each unaware of the other’s comments, put France at the heart of both of their statements about the origins of Sally Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson.
In the end, right answers and true stories have a positive cascading effect because they illuminate. They enable one to notice and make sense of things that one might have ignored or thought incomprehensible without them, thus allowing for a clearer picture of the world one is surveying. Wrong answers and false stories obscure matters and have little or no explanatory power. They shed no light on the facts, circumstances, or actions in the world they purport to describe, because they are not really of that world, and thus cannot help explain it. Instead, they tend to make matters more confusing, by creating their own negative cascading effect, as other bad answers, weak, illogical, and/or simply false stories must be offered to shore up the original wrong answer’s deficiencies.
The
explanatory power of Monticello slaves’ answer to the question of who Sally Hemings came to be to Thomas Jefferson, at the end of the 1780s, lies in how precisely it tracks and explains the otherwise inexplicable situation in 1790 described above. It accounts for all the other extraordinary things that happened to her over the years. Hemings had a very serious role in life—and a personal identity that grew out of it—and she suddenly ceased to have that role and identity and took on new ones. She was Jefferson’s mistress, she had a baby, and she lost it. After that, she could do things for his older daughters, but she would never again be primarily attached to them.
That reality did not change. Years later, after Maria visited Monticello and needed to take an enslaved woman home with her to help with her infant for a time, she wrote to her father, then President Jefferson, that she had taken Hemings’s sister Critta with her, understanding that the companion of her childhood was not eligible for that kind of service.57 While Martha did end up living in Jefferson’s home permanently during his retirement years, at the outset of both his daughters’ married lives in the 1790s, he expected them to set up house with their husbands—not too far away from Monticello, he hoped—but away from it. Hemings, however, was supposed to remain tied to the mountain and to him. She was not going anywhere.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 53