The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  21

  THE BROTHERS

  ROBERT AND JAMES HEMINGS had last seen New York when they were in the city just before James went to Paris. So they knew in general what to expect when they left Monticello with Jefferson on March 1, 1790. The three men started out with differing immediate destinations. Robert Hemings, with money from Jefferson, was to head for Alexandria to pick up horses and Jefferson’s phaeton, newly arrived from France. James Hemings, on the other hand, went to Richmond with Jefferson, who had financial affairs to attend to in the town. After several days, the pair boarded a stagecoach for New York by way of Fredericksburg, stopping in Alexandria to meet Robert Hemings. They planned to continue north in Jefferson’s carriage with the Hemings brothers alternating driving, and Jefferson perhaps taking the reins himself occasionally, because he liked to drive when he was bored or in a hurry.1

  Their plan never materialized. A late winter storm blanketed Alexandria with a foot and a half of snow. After concluding that it was too dangerous to proceed on their own, Jefferson decided to ship the carriage by water, and the three men took a stagecoach with their horses being “led on” to New York. The trip sounds to have been beyond tedious: “The roads thro the whole were so bad that we could never go more than three miles an hour, sometimes not more than two, and in the night but one.”2 To relieve the boredom, Jefferson sometimes got out of the coach to ride one of the horses. The Hemings brothers probably did so as well, to find their own respite from the tedium. As they headed north, Robert Hemings was the advance man sent ahead—after Baltimore on to Philadelphia and then New York—to make arrangements for Jefferson’s arrival in each city.3

  On the Philadelphia leg of the journey, Jefferson called on Benjamin Franklin. The great Philadelphian was gravely ill, and would die on April 17, a month after Jefferson’s visit. The last letter he ever wrote, in fact, was to Jefferson, answering his query about maps that had come up during their final time together.4 Robert Hemings almost certainly had at least seen Franklin many years before. He was with Jefferson in Philadelphia when he served with Franklin as a representative to the Continental Congress and wrote the Declaration of Independence. Though he knew of Franklin—practically everyone on at least two continents seemed to—it is less likely that James Hemings had ever encountered him. They were in Paris at the same time, but in deference to Franklin’s advanced age and status—and perhaps because he did not yet have a suitable residence for entertaining before Franklin left the country—Jefferson usually went to the elder man’s residence at Passy.5 There was no obvious reason for Hemings to have accompanied him on those journeys. After a short stay in Philadelphia, it was on to New York, where Robert Hemings was waiting for them.

  Except for the surprise snowstorm, this was an altogether familiar situation. The Hemings brothers, one called home from his employment elsewhere, were once again compelled to travel with and serve Jefferson, as if time had stood still over the past five and a half years. One wonders how long it took the men to realize that things had changed; given all that had happened to them in the interim, they simply could not go on as they had before.

  On the surface, James Hemings’s situation had changed the most. He was a long time away from the mental and emotional requirements of the slave society he had just returned to. Although he had certainly lived a larger life in that society than most enslaved males even before he left the country, his experiences in France made it even less likely that he could fit back into his old self in quite the same way. It did not help that the move to New York was so sudden. This was a dizzying turnabout for Hemings. He had been in America just a little over three months, and he had assumed, for some part of that time, that he was on his way back to France.

  Robert Hemings had never left America, but the preceding five and a half years had brought him to a different point in life as well. He had spent those years living on his own, working for wages, and, unlike his brother James, creating a life apart from Jefferson. This was the longest period that he had ever been separated from him since they had known each other. He had become Jefferson’s traveling companion and valet when he was really a boy—only twelve. It is hardly speculative to say that he did as much growing up, and Jefferson did as much raising and training him during those early years, as he did being a real attendant to the much older man. He had known Jefferson primarily as a child or an adolescent would know an adult. Now, as they were back together in New York, he was a twenty-eight-year-old man with an adult perspective aided by the distance that Jefferson’s absence had provided. He had more than learned the lesson that he could do without the man who legally owned him. Indeed, he could do without any owner at all.

  Nothing in Virginia’s slave society supported the way Robert Hemings had lived his life up until this moment, and much sentiment was against it. The pass system, which required slaves to have written permission to go out on defined missions or errands, was designed to maintain a nearly seamless connection between enslaved people and their legal owners. They were out for a specific purpose to go to a specific place, their very movements and use of time measured by the master’s instructions. Owners looked askance at neighbors who gave slaves open-ended passes that allowed them discretion and some measure of control over their time and physical space. That interfered with the goal of subordinating slaves to the will of the master, as much as was humanly possible.6

  It was, in fact, impossible to achieve complete and uniform subordination of slaves on a societywide basis. They resisted that in myriad ways, and slave owners themselves were sometimes weak links in the chain. Men like Jefferson, because of their own personalities, quirks, and senses of entitlement, wanted to be able, within reason, to construct their personal lives as they saw fit. Jefferson’s way of life at Monticello called for a slightly different take on the master-slave relationship when it came to the older generation of Hemingses, particularly Robert and James. That he was also at a particular moment in his life—less rigid overall and caught up with his sense of himself as a leading man of progress living in a revolutionary era—no doubt shaped his views about how to deal with them. He did not have to be, or want to be, conventional in all aspects of his life. At the same time he clung to many of the comforts and verities of the patriarchal slave society that had formed him and shaped the contours of his own peculiar brand of unconventionality. Keeping the Hemings brothers in nominal slavery exactly fit his needs and self-image at the time. At various points in their lives, the two brothers were thus very much out in the world on Jefferson’s general pass, so long as they heeded his call to come home.7

  Despite that figurative tether, those times away from Jefferson allowed—actually required—the brothers to develop identities that had nothing at all to do with him. They did things and went to places he knew nothing about—had friends, enemies, and lovers who were unknown to him. They used their general passes in the treacherous environment of Virginia to create dual roles for themselves as enslaved men and employees. The practice of hiring the slaves of other men and women became more prevalent as the institution grew and matured; it allowed less wealthy people who could not afford to buy slaves to rent them, giving them an economic and personal stake in slavery that they would not have had otherwise. Not everyone was happy about this. Prospective buyers were often reluctant to purchase enslaved people who had ever been hired out, thinking that the experience of working for wages—even when they did not keep them—made them questionable as slave property. The split in authority between the “true” master and the hirer weakened enslaved people’s links to both the idea and the fact of the primary master-slave relationship. It also highlighted their connection to free laborers. The two groups would inevitably compare themselves and see some points of commonality.8

  Perhaps most ominously of all, hiring slaves out put a dollar value on their services, bringing home very forcefully to enslaved people (as if they did not already know this) that their labor had a specific economic value that could be determined. A hired
enslaved carpenter knew that the hirer was paying his legal master for his labor. When the hire was over, he returned to his own home to do the same work. The value of his work, expressed by the hirer’s payments to the master, did not disappear; it was merely being captured by his legal owner, just as surely as his body had been captured and held by men with superior numbers and force. Frederick Douglass wrote passionately about the extreme indignity of having to give his legal owner the money he had worked so hard for during the times he was hired out.9

  The Hemings brothers had even greater reason to question their position in the world and what Jefferson meant in their lives. Unlike Douglass and most other slaves who worked for men who were not their legal masters, they chose their own employers and kept their wages. They knew exactly what their labor was worth and were used to personally benefiting from it. They were the embodiment of all that the law sought to prevent: enslaved African American men who had some control over their time and labor. Living like this in the middle of a generally closed slave society could only have made them special people in their own eyes and in the eyes of other members of their extended family—especially the female members. The Hemings brothers modeled aspects of traditional masculinity beyond the physical. They worked and made money, like other men—money they could give to their mother and sisters, or the other women in their lives, if they asked for it, or if they simply wanted to give it to them. The men were both resourceful and resources. Given his early close association with Jefferson, Robert Hemings, in particular, could not erase the thoughts his long separation from him almost inevitably raised. Why should he continue to be bound to Jefferson when he knew he could function on his own as a wage earner?

  Jefferson let the Hemings brothers go and come back to him over the years because he felt confident that he could count on their loyalty no matter what. He was wrong about that—or he and the Hemings men just had differing conceptions of what one could reasonably demand as a show of loyalty. Robert and James Hemings and the rest of their family were products of Virginia’s eighteenth-century slave society, before most slave owners adopted the strategically sentimentalized and self-serving notions of the master-slave relationship in the nineteenth century. Jefferson was somewhat ahead of his time in sentimentalizing his relationship with the Hemingses, for very obvious reasons. When he and other planters of his cohort called their slaves members of their “family,” they were speaking the implacable and unsentimental language of the patriarch describing all the people over whom they exercised power, as well as displaying their notion of responsibility. Slaves had not yet taken their place in the “family,” as they would during the antebellum period, as the adult “children” for whom some masters claimed they had feelings of love and impulses toward care. Southern members of the Revolutionary generation were firmly on the road to sentimentalizing their relations with slaves by the early nineteenth century; but during Jefferson’s most intense time with the Hemings brothers—1774 through 1794—that process was only newly under way.10

  That word “family” did not have the same application for everyone on Jefferson’s plantations, because not every one of his slaves had true family connections to him. The young men traveling with him to New York to serve him there were actual, not metaphorical, family members—brothers to his dead wife and new mistress, and uncles to his children with Martha, as they were uncles to the child their sister already had or, more likely, was just about to bear. Jefferson had a degree of sentimentality toward them that grew out of all these ties that he did not have for other enslaved people on his plantations, and he evidently expected some reciprocity from these men and their other siblings in the form of love, gratitude, and attachment.11

  Though the Hemingses and the Jeffersons were not the only enslaved and free families entangled by blood, it is probably true that few masters constructed their relations with their enslaved relatives as Jefferson did. From his place atop the pyramid, he could afford to indulge his sentimentality—styling himself as their “friend,” keeping their sisters out of the fields and in the domestic realm, borrowing money from the brothers and paying it back as if they were just friendly acquaintances—without diminishing himself in any discernible fashion. The way Jefferson treated the Hemings brothers, no doubt, made him feel good about himself. He did not have to do any of this, as he well knew. Having the Hemings men live this way served some affective need on his part, for this was not solely an intellectual choice. He was aware that the young men who traveled ahead to Rouen, Philadelphia, and New York to put his life in order for him, and who found work on their own and supported themselves as workers, did not really need to live under his wing. His inclination to give them freedom, coupled with a hesitancy to give them the full measure of it, was a function of the possessive nature he displayed in so many other contexts. They were to be slaves, but slaves to him alone, as if he thought that made their enslavement less of a problem for them.

  All this proceeded, apparently, without regard to the turmoil that a life configured in this way would naturally create in any person who had to live under those rules. If Robert and James Hemings did not accept the rightness of their enslavement, and they clearly did not, any gratitude they felt about being given part of what should have been theirs by right—to come and go as they pleased, to make a living, and to have a family like all other human beings—would quickly dissipate as they grew used to being self-sufficient men. Again, we may let Frederick Douglass express the complicated emotions at play when enslaved people were treated “benevolently.” Of his owner he wrote,

  He would, however, when I made him six dollars sometimes give me six cents, to encourage me. It had the opposite effect. I regarded it as an admission of my right to the whole. The fact that he gave me any part of my wages was proof, to my mind, that he believed me entitled to the whole of them. I always felt worse for having received anything; for I feared that giving me a few cents would ease his conscience and make him feel himself to be a pretty honorable sort of robber. My discontent grew upon me.12

  The lives of Robert and James Hemings were even more complicated than Douglass’s on this score, for there were many more ways in which Jefferson raised their expectations about what they had a right to have in life. It would have been a far simpler matter for Jefferson, and forestalled the conflicts that later arose, if he had given Robert and James Hemings fewer or no opportunities to develop identities apart from him. Their heritage almost surely affected the way they viewed their circumstances. The Hemings brothers knew that the man who controlled their lives had inherited a fortune that would have been theirs if they, the sons of John Wayles, had been born free white men. Robert was an eldest son in a world where that position meant something. There was nothing the brothers could do about it, but that did not prevent them—as Douglass would do years later—from considering the obvious.

  For whatever this meant to Jefferson, the Hemings men could never have afforded to be sentimental about him in the way he wanted without giving up a great deal of themselves. They had to remain in slavery for this to work in the manner that best suited his emotional needs—living as the objects of his benevolence, protection, and grants of autonomy under the overlay of his will to control. Neither wanted to do that. They wanted their freedom. One wonders whether it ever crossed Jefferson’s mind that they would want to be free, that these young men’s experiences had created expectations that could never be fulfilled so long as they remained enslaved to him. After years of existing in this hybrid state, they would express the desire to leave him, or at least cut the legally created cord he used to bring them back at his discretion.

  It happened many years later, but the example of James Hubbard, who was not a member of the Hemings family, is useful for considering how matters between the Hemings brothers and Jefferson unfolded in the early 1790s. Hubbard was a chronic runaway from Monticello, who in the first decade of the 1800s managed to string together fairly long periods when he was absent from the plantation. Jefferson d
ealt with runaways by selling them—a response perfectly in keeping with his preference for making conflict, or potential sources of it, disappear. He sold Hubbard while he was off on one of his escape attempts. The contract gave Jefferson extra money if he recovered him, so he had Hubbard recaptured, brought back to Monticello, “severely flogged” to set an example, and put in jail. He then suggested to Reuben Perry, the man who had bought Hubbard, that he immediately sell him because “the course he has been in, and all the circumstances convince me he will never serve any man as a slave.”13

  What slaves did, the things that happened to them, Jefferson was saying, affected the way they looked at life and their circumstances. This ran counter to the popular view, which Jefferson expressed later in his life, that slaves were perpetual children—people who never learned and grew. When in the midst of quotidian business, instead of when making pronouncements for public consumption, Jefferson revealed his true feelings and beliefs: experiences mattered to slaves. White society had to take active measures to keep them from engaging life in ways that would make them unfit for their condition. So there would be no school, no marriage, no unfettered ability to testify against white people, nothing coming from the white community that would make enslaved people see the world differently and be changed in the process. Enslaved people were left to build their own inner identities in opposition to the dominant society’s assaults upon their humanity.

  Hubbard had grown used to thinking he had a right to be free. He did not just think it; he acted upon the thought with some success. Even if he never ran away again, his mind-set had been forever altered because he had lived, very effectively for a time, in direct challenge to his enslavement. The Hemings brothers were not runaways in the same sense as Hubbard, but their time in the world away from Jefferson, and successes at independent living and decision making, also posed deep challenge to their enslavement. They met and embraced the challenge. Not long after their time in New York, both men took successful steps to disentangle themselves from Jefferson so that they could come back to him only when, and if, they wanted to. That was all to come; they still had to get through their time with him in New York.