The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Jefferson responded quickly and politely to Banneker, indicating that he was impressed with his work and that he hoped the conditions of blacks could be raised. He also promised to send the almanac to his friend Condorcet, the “Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris,” which he did on the very same day he replied to Banneker. He had already heard about Banneker before the letter arrived, having been approached by Andrew Ellicot, the cousin of George and Elias Ellicot, the mathematician’s chief benefactors, about allowing Banneker to become an assistant in surveying the land for the Federal District. Jefferson approved of the assignment, and Banneker began work during the first part of 1791.60

  Eighteen years later, however, Jefferson sounded a different note about Banneker in letters to Joel Barlow and Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, the “Abbé Gregoire,” questioning whether Banneker had had help in preparing the almanac he had sent to him.61 Much had happened in the country, and to Jefferson, during those nearly two decades. Whether he had believed all along that Banneker’s mentors had helped him is unknown. The astronomer was mixed race and could easily have fit Jefferson’s profile of the African American “improved” by white blood. What is known is that the charge that Banneker may have received help in preparing his almanac did not originate with Jefferson. It appeared in print years before he hinted at it in his letters to Barlow and Gregoire, and it was conceived as a weapon to attack him. Thomas Green Fessenden, a prominent Federalist from New Hampshire, chided Jefferson mercilessly in a newspaper column as gullible, saying that he had been taken in by Banneker and abandoned his suppositions about blacks’ inferiority after having encountered the “wonderful phenomenon of a Negro Almanac, (probably enough made by a white man).” William Cobbett, a rabidly racist expatriate Englishman who wrote under the pseudonym “Peter Porcupine,” was even more sarcastic in his description of Jefferson’s support of Banneker.62

  Jefferson closely followed the writings of his enemies in the Federalist press, and it is not possible that he did not know the tack they were taking on his dealings with Banneker. Being seen as one who supported black aspirations was not the kind of thing any American politician of Jefferson’s day, or long thereafter, for that matter, wanted. There was no future in it. Voicing a generalized antislavery sentiment was one thing—it fit with the still resonant natural rights formulations that helped set aloft the Spirit of ’76—but championing blacks as individuals was another matter. It did not help that for most of the first decade of the nineteenth century—from 1802 until his retirement in 1809—he and Sally Hemings had been the subject of newspaper articles, cartoons, and ballads from one end of the country to the next, even reaching across the Atlantic.

  It may be difficult from this remove, when current-day fashion often casts Jefferson as the extreme racist and political conservative of his age, to accept that this was not his general reputation during most of his political career. Without getting too far ahead of the story of how his political ambitions and hopes for the future of the United States affected the Hemingses and his other slaves, one can say at this point that the fallout from his dealings with Banneker was an early and clear signal to one of the shrewdest and most self-protective politicians of his era about how he could and should express himself on the issue of slavery and race in public and in private.

  At the time, Banneker and his supporters were thrilled to receive a letter from Jefferson that from a modern-day perspective seems unremarkable—even meaningless. Still, the letter was like tonic to blacks and whites who opposed slavery. They very quickly arranged to have both letters printed together in pamphlet form and distributed to advance the nascent cause of abolitionism. There is no evidence that they approached Jefferson about using his letter. However, one of Banneker’s staunchest allies, Andrew Ellicot, the commissioner in charge of building the Federal City, regularly communicated with Jefferson. With his permission or not, after the pamphlets circulated, Jefferson became a target for those who put this exchange together with his well-known support for the French Revolution and his antislavery sentiments written in the Notes on the State of Virginia and cast him as a dangerous political extremist.63

  Much as it cheered Banneker and his supporters, Jefferson’s reply to the black man enraged some prominent southerners. One, and apparently others, took his letter as a tocsin that he wanted to do away with slavery immediately, which was never the case. Every plan he ever conceived of along those lines contemplated a period of delay, as had been suggested by Condorcet and adopted by several northern states in the wake of the Revolution. One critic focused in on his signing off his letter, “I am with great esteem, Sir Your most obedt. humble servant,” the entirely formulaic closing common in letter writing of that time. Indeed, that was how Banneker had closed his letter to Jefferson. The problem, of course, was that their mutually respectful letters and mirrored closings suggested equality between the two. Jefferson had let down the side by engaging Banneker in this fashion.64

  In the realm of personal interactions, Jefferson had no problem with extending common courtesies to black people. He once rebuked his grandson for not bowing to a black man who had bowed to them while they were walking together on the street. Jefferson had returned the gesture and wondered aloud to his grandson why he let a black man be more of a gentleman than he. Throughout all the years Henrietta Gardiner was employed as his washerwoman, he invariably referred to her in his own records as “Mrs. Gardiner,” never as Henrietta.65

  Part of Jefferson’s great skill as a politician lay in his ability to intuit and respond to how others would react to certain words or actions, not a trait that was easy for him to turn on and off, and it showed itself in many vastly different contexts. He would not have expected the black man to have assailed him for failing to bow or Mrs. Gardiner to have shown offense had he called her Henrietta, but it was easier to follow the policy of being nice and respectful if it really cost him little to do so. He apparently did not think these niceties in his one-on-one encounters with blacks cost him very much, for, in truth, they did not. Whether he styled himself as Banneker’s “obedient servant,” returned the bow of a black man, or called a black woman Mrs. Gardiner, he was still a white man who was the master of black people on his plantation and viewed as the social superior of all other blacks and the vast majority of whites.

  George Washington, who was much more formal than Jefferson in every sense, did think such things mattered. He evidently did not easily recognize last names for black people. When he wrote of his manservant William Lee, with whom he seems to have spent more time than anyone else, he could not resist styling him “William (calling himself William Lee).”66 In 1775 when he replied to the young poet Phyllis Wheatley, who dedicated one of her poems to him, he addressed her as “Miss Phillis,” even though it was well known that she was married. Washington, as did Jefferson in his letter to Banneker, had kind words for her work. He could hardly be too critical of a poem containing the following couplet:

  A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,

  With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! be thine.67

  Both Washington and Jefferson believed in white supremacy, because that was as much the currency of their time and place as was male dominance over females, but those who hold to that doctrine do not always express it in the same way. Washington was willing to go on record praising Wheatley’s poetry, but would not address her with an honorific attached to her name. Jefferson went on record disparaging her poetry, but would not have hesitated to call her Miss or Mrs.

  Given the nature of their association, it is hard to imagine that Jefferson did not mention to James Hemings his contact with Banneker as the matter unfolded, if only in a “You’re a black person, see what this other credit to your race has done” fashion and to let James know that he had helped get Banneker a job surveying the Federal City. Whether Jefferson told him about it or not, Hemings almost certainly came to hear about the correspondence very soon—and perhaps read a copy of it—because it was widely circulated
the following year in Philadelphia and other places where abolitionists had a presence. It was exactly the kind of thing any person of color would have been interested in at the time. Hemings was living in the home of a white man whom some blacks and their supporters looked to in their desperation for any glimmer of hope, no matter how small. Banneker told Jefferson that he was writing to him because he had the reputation of being a “friend” to black people. Jefferson’s friendship with Benjamin Rush, who was well known in the black community, probably helped shape black Philadelphians’ view of him.68 They may also have heard that he had given money to help Richard Allen build the AME Church. One cannot discount the possibility that the black people who dealt with Jefferson, like Henrietta Gardiner, and even James Hemings, circulated stories about him that suggested that he was, at least, approachable. Banneker had written from Maryland, but news traveled quickly and far in black circles. That is how fugitive slaves knew to run to Philadelphia and seek help from likely friends in the city.

  Jefferson’s very human contradictions have long bedeviled observers, but James Hemings and his family had to live with them. It formed the basis of their lives. Hemings would have immediately recognized Jefferson’s instinct to be polite to Banneker, because he had witnessed such displays directed toward him and other blacks. He would also not likely have been surprised to see Jefferson’s later waffling on Banneker’s accomplishments after suffering public ridicule for having praised the astronomer. Nor would it have shocked Hemings to know that Jefferson suggested that Banneker’s “white” blood and that of others offered to him as examples of black achievement might account for their talent. He and other members of the Hemings family were burdened by and benefited from Jefferson’s construction of race and his ambivalent attitude about slavery and emancipation. That was one of the reasons he was in Philadelphia as a slave when Jefferson communicated with Banneker, yet poised on the threshold of making a radical transformation of his life.

  23

  EXODUS

  ELIZABETH HEMINGS AND her children lived through the Age of Revolution. The end of the 1780s and the beginning of the 1790s saw the denouement of one, in America, and the beginnings of two others, in France and in one of its colonies, Saint Domingue. From the British invasion of Richmond to the malaria and smallpox-infested encampment at Yorktown and to the storming of the Bastille, several of Elizabeth Hemings’s children had an ironic presence at galvanizing struggles for social transformation. Ironic, because these upheavals were not designed to bring about a revolution in their own particular circumstances; and if any people needed a transformation of their lives, it was the Hemingses and other American slaves.1

  Although the American Revolution failed to end slavery in the South, or immediately to destroy it in the North, it did change, for a time, the nature of the conversation about the institution. In the wake of revolution, and talk of the natural right to freedom, Virginia liberalized its emancipation law in 1782, allowing individuals to free their slaves without the permission of the state. The rhetoric of political revolution was not the only influence. Religion played an important role as well. Denominations that had first appealed to nonelite white Virginians, Baptists and Methodists, the latter guided by the abolitionist and, for his day, antiracist sentiments of John Wesley, sent ministers throughout Virginia in the 1790s preaching the gospel. Methodists, in particular, urged any of their members who owned slaves to free them. A number of them did. In ways that might astonish modern observers, black and white Virginians in the early Republic worshipped together in Methodist services, sometimes with black men, often still enslaved, acting as lay preachers. This, not surprisingly, drew the enmity of those who feared alliances between ordinary whites and black people of any status. When large numbers of upper-class white Virginians began to join the church during the first years of the nineteenth century, they insisted on marginalizing blacks, persuading any lower-and middle-class whites who might think otherwise that racial affinity was vastly more important than religious affinity. Soon churches that had urged their members to free slaves began to own slaves themselves.2

  The revolution in Saint Domingue brought a flood of refugees into the United States, many to Virginia towns like Richmond and Norfolk, telling stories of the bloody and successful slave revolt. The specter of blacks killing whites for their freedom struck terror in the hearts of Virginians. By the end of the 1790s, the small spirit of liberalization the American Revolution had brought to race relations in Virginia began to dissipate in the wake of white Virginians’ fears that enslaved people would follow the course they had taken with Great Britain: engage in armed conflict against their oppressors.

  At the beginning of the decade, however, the Hemingses lived in a Virginia where more subversive ideas were being offered in the marketplace, with a small, but growing, population of freed blacks whose presence served as both provocation and inspiration. As to provocation, most whites simply did not want these blacks without masters around. Their very existence severed the link between blackness and slavery and reminded the enslaved that freedom was a real possibility. Stifling the imaginations of blacks—and of whites inclined to be sympathetic to them—became the order of the day, discouraging thoughts that there could be any real change in the way black and white Virginians went through the world together. With most blacks laboring under the disabilities of slavery, life was made hard for those who became free.3

  As to inspiration, free blacks provided enslaved members of their race with a hopeful example of what could be if they somehow managed to break free. They saw them acting on their own as artisans and farmers, some failing under the weight of white hostility, others making decent lives for themselves. A cogent equation was projected: black did not have to equal slave.

  Thenia and Mary Hemings

  If any enslaved people were in a position to hope that they might benefit from the slight, but important, change in atmosphere in Virginia, it was Robert and James Hemings. They had existed on the cusp of freedom for many years, the younger brother literally a carriage ride away from it in France. They were not alone in being restless. Something happened at Monticello between 1790 and 1794 that never happened again. In that five-year period, five of the Hemings siblings, four who had played major roles at Monticello, decided they wanted to be somewhere else—one way or another.

  The least well-known among this group was Thenia Hemings, John Wayles’s oldest daughter with Elizabeth Hemings. In 1794, when she was twenty-seven years old, she was sold to James Monroe, along with her five daughters, Mary, Lucy, Betsy, Susan, and Sally.4 Jefferson never wrote why he sold the family, but it was almost certainly at Thenia Hemings’s request. She was, after all, a Wayles daughter, and Jefferson’s attitude toward this group of siblings virtually rules out his having decided on his own to sell her away from her family on the mountain. Neither the sale nor the purchase of five little girls (age ten down to infants) would have given either Jefferson or Monroe much immediate value. The father of Hemings’s children must have lived on Monroe’s plantation or nearby, and the sale was carried out to unite her family. Most, if not all, of these children had been born while Jefferson was in Paris, and a number of the enslaved people at Monticello were hired out to neighboring farms.

  Thenia Hemings had a direct connection to James Monroe dating from that period. Her brother Martin had hired himself out to Monroe as a butler or manservant even before other Jefferson slaves were rented out by Nicholas Lewis. Thenia had gone to work in a home in Staunton, Virginia, in 1786, but there is no indication of how long she was there.5 The circumstances suggest that she might have worked at or near Monroe’s after she returned from Staunton and formed a relationship with a man while there. Jefferson’s memorandum to Nicholas Lewis written in November of 1790 and listing “Ursula, Critta, Sally, Bet, Wormeley and Joe,” along with “Betty Hemings,” as the “house-servants” at Monticello strongly suggests that Thenia Hemings was not at the plantation, or she would have been on that list with he
r mother and sisters. Everything that had happened in her family in the early 1790s told Thenia Hemings that, if she wanted to live with her husband and family, she had a good chance of having that happen. What time she had with them turned out to be far too brief; she died the year after her formal sale to Monroe.6

  There was probably more than one reason for the exodus of Hemings siblings from Monticello in the first half of the 1790s. The world seemed to be falling apart there, or, one should say, it had never really been put back together again after Martha Jefferson’s death. Jefferson had been gone from Monticello, effectively, for almost eight years. The appointment as secretary of state took him away from the mountain the overwhelming majority of the time he was in office. Except for his sojourn in France, he would never again be away from home for such a concentrated period as between 1790 and 1794, not even when he was the president. Given his absence, he could not exercise the same influence over the imaginative lives of those who lived on the mountain. The unsettled circumstances there brought opportunities for some family members and allowed them to think more expansively about what could happen in their lives. The situation at home, along with the subtle transformations taking place in Virginia’s slave society, may well have emboldened members of the family to approach Jefferson about making the changes they wanted in their lives. And then, of course, there was Sally Hemings. Her siblings knew that she had successfully negotiated with him and that he was a man who might be reasoned with. Whatever they felt about the situation on the merits, Hemings’s brothers and sisters cannot have looked at Jefferson in the same way as they did before he went to France. When they asked him for things now, it was in the context of a new connection between them.