New York
James Hemings and Jefferson arrived in New York on March 21, 1790. His older brother had secured lodging for the party at the City Tavern, where they remained for a brief period until moving to Mrs. Dunscomb’s boardinghouse at 22 King Street, in lower Manhattan. There they would stay until they moved at the beginning of June to a house on Maiden Lane. The men immediately went about setting up their lives in this place, which was so different from Albemarle County and the Paris that James Hemings and Jefferson had left only recently. One of the first orders of business was settling accounts. Robert Hemings gave Jefferson the residue of the amount he had been given as expenses for his trip to the city. Jefferson repaid Hemings money he had borrowed at some earlier point on the journey.14
New York had already taken its place as the largest city in the United States; its multitudes crowded, for the most part, into the bottom of Manhattan Island.15 The brothers had to adjust to this teeming environment while attending to a man who was decidedly—and probably very vocally to the Hemings brothers—out of his element. Jefferson did not care much for the place. It featured everything he hated about cities—cramped living conditions, noise, and citizens seemingly in perpetual contention with one another. It was not a place for the conflict averse. “I view great cities,” he wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1800, “as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” Though he conceded that they “nourish some of the elegant arts,” the most “useful” among the arts could exist in other places with fewer downsides. Then there was the weather. There were only two seasons, he claimed. During the months he and the Hemingses were in New York, March until September, the weather went from cold to hot with no temperate springtime.16
New York was almost certainly disappointing to James Hemings after Paris. It offered little in the way of architecture, no beautiful parks to walk in, no stunning churches or cathedrals to admire and take refuge in. Most important of all for him and his brother, New York was a full-fledged slave society. The 1790 census counted 3,092 black people there—1,036 of them free, the other 2,056 enslaved. As it is for all poor and relatively powerless people, life was still a very difficult proposition for freed blacks because they were relegated to doing “most of the inferior labor of the town.” There was indeed a great deal of all types of work to be done, for New York had already begun its ascent to its position as the financial capital of the United States. It was clear even by then that money, and those who made it, would rule the metropolis.17 New York’s economy was growing rapidly, and though the critique of slavery was growing louder, the number of slaves continued to grow during the years of economic expansion. Slave ownership became more diversified as the newly rich and upper middle class bought slaves as status symbols and to enhance their lifestyles, relieving housewives of drudgery and husbands of physically arduous tasks. Though slavery was an important part of the fabric of social life in New York, the numbers suggest that the Hemings brothers would have encountered many free black people as well. Although largely consigned to doing the dirtiest and most demanding jobs in the city, some became “shopkeepers, fruiterers, bakers, boardinghouse keepers or hawkers selling buttermilk or hot corn in the city’s streets and markets.” They mixed and jostled with newly arriving immigrants, fueling the political and social tensions that became a permanent feature of life in the urban North.18
Robert and James Hemings experienced the great diversity of black life in the city. African Americans were especially visible in the downtown area where they lived. From the time of the Revolution, when many of the city’s blacks very rationally cast their fortunes with the English in the hope of achieving freedom, most free blacks lived in “Negro Barracks” on downtown streets like Church and Broadway. Both were very close to the Hemingses’ first home on King Street and their second one on Maiden Lane. Just immediately north, the vast Negro (African) Burial Ground served as the final resting place for thousands of blacks (some estimates say almost twenty thousand) enslaved and free.19
Although the end of the twentieth century is often cast as a defining period of globalization, ideas, people, and goods moved across the Atlantic with great frequency (and with great impact) in the Hemingses’ time as well. The shock waves from the French Revolution followed James Hemings from Paris to New York as blacks and their supporters in the city linked the struggle to end slavery in America to what was going on in the streets of Paris. Just a few months before he and his brother arrived in the city, “a crowd at the John Street Theater gave a thunderous ovation to an epilogue that linked the liberation of ‘Afric’s sable Sons’ to the cause of international republicanism.”20 For myriad reasons, at the end of 1789 and the beginning of 1790, a number of New Yorkers made the abolition of slavery a major goal. Many were moved by their moral outrage against slavery’s inhumanity, while others, especially European immigrants, simply did not want to have to compete with slave labor. New arrivals in the country often displayed their concern about this by adopting an actively hostile attitude toward the blacks who lived among them.21 Whatever the motives for it, once again, James Hemings was in a city where the nature of liberty and freedom was the topic of ardent and very public discourse. This time, however, the discussion was specifically about the future of members of his race.
The brothers surely talked about the time James had spent in France, what he had done, and whether he expected to return to that country. One longs to know what they thought about Jefferson, for there could not have been any two people in the world at that point who knew him better. Their sister’s relationship with him was a new and very important piece of knowledge, a circumstance to be considered from very different perspectives. James had, of course, been at the Hôtel de Langeac. He had either known about his sister and Jefferson all along, or it was something he found out near the end of their stay when the issue of remaining in France arose. Did he feel a useless pang of guilt for not having been able to intervene, and did Robert feel a useless negative judgment of James for the same reason? It is most likely that both men, the sons of a white man, simply viewed their sister’s connection to Jefferson as a predicatable event in life as they knew it. While the word was that Jefferson would never marry again, and both men may have believed that word, there was no reason for them to think that he was going to forgo female companionship for the rest of his life. They knew that southern slavery gave white slave owners who lost their wives several alternatives: never have sex again as long as they lived, take a new wife, take up with an enslaved woman on their plantation as a substitute wife in a steady relationship, frequent prostitutes in bawdyhouses, or spend the rest of their days rampaging through the slave quarters with multiple women—or some combination of all but the first choice. As for their little sister, the probabilities were always very high that she would end up with some white man. Jefferson may have appeared to the Hemings brothers to be at least as good as any other—with the added advantage of being the metaphorical devil they knew. And if they had any degree of trust in his word—that he was going to stick by his bargain with their sister—she was already better off than their mother, who had not obtained freedom for any of her children.
History had repeated itself, but only the future would tell if the replication was going to be exact. There was now a chance that a coming generation of Hemingses might escape living their entire lives enslaved to their close white relatives, because their sister had insisted upon that. Whether this made them feel more positive or negative toward Jefferson because he went along with this plan is unknown, but they surely had some opinions about it. If they expressed them to one another, what, if anything, did they say to Jefferson about their thoughts?
As with so many other aspects of slavery, it is difficult to fathom what conversations between these three men were like. One’s first inclination is to think they never acknowledged to one another the complex nature of their relationships. That too comfortably—and strategically—limits the range of things one has to consider when im
agining, as historians must, the lives of the Hemingses and Jeffersons. This may explain why, in a related vein, some have posited, even insisted, that Jefferson’s wife did not know that Robert and James were her brothers, though Jefferson and people in their community knew. A Martha Jefferson ignorant of her father’s relations is a less complicated personality—easier to fit into a perhaps preferred image of the innocent upper-class white woman who remained naïve about the ways of the world. That construction relieves us of the responsibility to see her knowing about her enslaved siblings, and then contemplate the persona that encompassed that knowledge. One sidesteps a deeply troubling aspect of the infinitely strange, but still in some ways familiar, world of slavery.
IT IS NOT clear exactly what Robert Hemings was supposed to be doing in New York, and whether he was really expected to have a long-standing formal role in Jefferson’s household there. His brother was set to continue his job of several years, being Jefferson’s chef. The most natural thing for Robert Hemings to have done was to reassume his place as Jefferson’s valet, and that was probably his job at first. Curiously enough, that job did not entail shaving Jefferson, even though Hemings had been trained years before as a barber and Jefferson expected his manservant to shave him. Instead, Jefferson paid another man for shaving him during that first month in the city. Hemings may have been out of practice.22 There is some irony in this, for Jefferson had arranged to have Hemings trained as a barber while waiting to go to France.
The brothers’ formal roles were not their primary focus in May, their second full month in the city. Jefferson fell ill with one of his periodic migraine headaches at the very beginning of the month, and they directed their energy toward taking care of him. Although he described the attack as moderate, Jefferson’s letters indicate that he was actually quite debilitated. Illness kept him pretty much housebound during the entire month and prevented him from writing any long letters—both serious matters for this normally energetic and communicative man. At the end of one shortened missive to his son-in-law, he described his “eyes” as being “too weak to” continue the letter. For most of this period, the brothers were Jefferson’s main companions on a daily basis, nursing him to the extent that was needed, taking his orders, and running errands for him throughout the city.23
There were many things in Jefferson’s life that might have brought on one of his stress-induced migraines, not the least of which is that he had just taken a serious position in a new government. He was still getting reaccustomed to being “home,” that is, in the United States, but not the home that mattered to him most. He was reacquainting himself with America in an American city he despised. There was, too, the situation at Monticello with Sally Hemings, and the fact that he had recently and abruptly given a daughter away in marriage. Neither of his daughters had written to him since he left Monticello at the beginning of March—an almost two-month interval that must have seemed endless to him. Everything about his circumstances made him vulnerable to a physical breakdown. Robert Hemings went out to get his medicine and to pay the doctor he consulted. Peruvian bark (quinine), the usual remedy for his migraines, did not work this time. The headache, and the Hemings brothers’ care of him, persisted.24
Robert and James Hemings were not alone in making Jefferson’s life run as smoothly as possible. Through the fog of sickness, he managed to hire two additional people to work with them: Jacob Cooke to be a “house servant” and François Seche to be a coachman. This was in preparation for his move to the house at 57 Maiden Lane, which he had arranged to rent early on. These two men arrived in May, when the Hemingses and Jefferson had been in the city only a month and a half. It may have been clear by that time that Robert Hemings would not be staying, since Cooke and Seche seemed to combine the roles that he normally played. Did Jefferson really need a chef, a coachman, a house servant, and a separate manservant? He was long used to having help, but his recent experiences at the Hôtel de Langeac had accustomed him to a very high level of personal maintenance. Even with that, the house on Maiden Lane was the very opposite of the Hôtel de Langeac—“small” and “indifferent,” as Jefferson described it to his son-in-law and daughter, respectively. It was not the kind of place that really needed a large staff of servants to care for one person. There were, nevertheless, four by the time the Hemingses and Jefferson moved in at the beginning of June.25
That number diminished by one just several days after the move to Maiden Lane. Robert Hemings left New York for Fredericksburg to try to find employment there. Getting a paying job was not the only reason he wanted to go. While living in Fredericksburg on his own, he had met and married a woman named Dolly, and he wanted to be near her. Like so many enslaved women who married men who lived on other plantations or in nearby towns, Dolly Hemings was left alone to wait for Robert to visit whenever he could arrange it. The couple may have already had both of their children, Martin and Elizabeth, named for Robert’s older brother and mother, respectively. Up until this time, Dolly was in a somewhat better position than other enslaved women because, for most of the time she knew him, her husband was at liberty to come and go on his own, and had disposable income to support their family. They now faced an unprecedented situation: her husband, off playing some ambiguous role in Jefferson’s life, was well out of range for anything approaching a normal schedule of visits. No wonder Robert Hemings wanted to leave. Jefferson agreed to let him go, gave him money for his expenses back to Virginia, but held him to the same terms that always applied: Hemings was to tell whoever hired him that he would be available only until the time that Jefferson returned to Monticello and called him home. Sometime around June 7, Hemings set off. He had his reunion with Dolly in Fredericksburg, but whatever prospects he thought he had there did not materialize. So he went to Williamsburg and took a job working for a man named George Carter, going about his business while waiting for Jefferson to send for him.26
Hemings’s desires to be with his wife and to find paid work are completely understandable. Why he had to leave New York to be able to do either one is less clear. Jefferson had no apparent problem paying the Hemingses wages. He paid James and Sally Hemings in France, and he paid James Hemings a salary in New York. It should have been possible to come to terms with Robert. Hemings’s actions over the next few years provide a clue: he seems to have preferred working for people other than Jefferson. This may have influenced his choices about Dolly. As far as we know, he never made a move to have her join him at Monticello or in New York, for that matter. This is quite interesting, given that Jefferson bought the spouses of slaves whom he barely knew in order to reunite them with their families. It is hard to imagine that he would have refused a request from Robert Hemings to do the same thing. Dolly could have done housekeeping for Jefferson in New York or at Monticello. It is possible that the reticence about Dolly’s joining him stemmed not from Hemings but from Jefferson. Perhaps Jefferson, French in so many ways in these years, had the same attitude toward the Hemings brothers as some members of the French upper classes who did not allow their household servants to marry. A servant with a spouse necessarily had divided loyalties: family concerns competed with the master’s. Dolly Hemings’s presence would have changed the dynamic between Jefferson and Robert Hemings, particularly since she was an outsider to life on the mountain and had not grown up knowing Jefferson and understanding the system he had established there.
Jefferson apparently did not think he was in great need of Robert’s services in the household. By early April, just two weeks after they arrived in New York, he wrote to William Short, who was still living at the Hôtel de Langeac, asking him to implore Adrien Petit to come to New York to take over the running of his household.27 If Petit agreed, which he eventually did, that would bring the total number of servants to five. Petit was used to running a much grander household, and with James Hemings, Cooke, and Seche on hand, and with all the washing for the household being sent out, matters could be very much under control without Robert Hemings.
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br /> After his brother left, James Hemings was solely responsible for handling the household expenses and making sure the domestic affairs were in order. As he could easily have expected, he soon had to do that in a house that was under construction. Jefferson, as always, immediately began a plan of remodeling the small house he had moved into; he put in a gallery and had cabinets and bookcases made. The bookcases alone cost more than a whole year’s rent. His books were not even there yet, which distressed him greatly, but he was determined to be ready for them when they arrived.28
The two men settled into a period of intense involvement in a relationship whose characteristics differed markedly from those of any of its earlier incarnations. Jefferson’s memorandum books for the rest of his time in New York tell a fascinating story of the daily exchanges between the two; they contain at least one reference to Hemings, giving him money for himself or some other purpose, almost every day.29 With the household staff small compared with the one at the Hôtel de Langeac, and Jefferson’s life less complicated—in Paris he had a wider array of cultural and social activities to spend money on—Hemings suddenly looms as a larger figure in the written record. He had always been close to Jefferson, but before going to Paris and while in the city, he was either surrounded by his brothers and sisters or was just one of a number of other French servants. This was yet a different turn in his connection to Jefferson, the first time he served as a paid employee to him in their native land.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 55