The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Not all the members of the family had realistic prospects for the kind of changes that Robert and James Hemings were able to engineer. Gender and degrees of family affiliation mattered greatly. The most exact counterparts to Robert and James—Thenia, Critta, and Sally Hemings—could never have expected to persuade Jefferson to free them outright. If no free black man or white man sought to buy her, the most that Thenia or Critta Hemings could hope for from Jefferson is what Thenia accomplished, a sale to be united with an enslaved husband who lived elsewhere. As we have seen, Jefferson believed that women, all women, were supposed to be under the control of a man, preferably a white man. In fact, the first member of the family to formally break away at her own initiative was Mary Hemings. In April of 1792 Jefferson wrote to Nicholas Lewis about her: “I am not certain whether I gave you power to dispose of Mary according to her desire to Colo. Bell, with such of her younger children as she chose. If I did not, I now do it, and will thank you to settle the price as you think best.”7

  Mary Hemings found one way to leave the mountain: exchanging masters—attaching herself to a man who never formally freed her or their children, but who ultimately acted more as her husband than as her owner. Yet this was not a clean break. Jefferson did not let all of her family go. In uniting one biological family unit—the Bells and their children—he broke apart another. “With such of her younger children as she chose” meant that her two older children, Joseph and Betsy (probably “Elizabeth,” after her grandmother), had to stay at Monticello. In fact, Joseph Fossett was only twelve and his younger sister, Betsy, only nine when they were separated from their mother. The youngsters continued on, most likely looked after by their grandmother and aunts. Although they were geographically close, and there was always much contact between Monticello and Mary Hemings Bell’s house, there were, no doubt, many painful nights for Joseph, Betsy, and their mother.

  By the time Hemings was separated from Joseph and Betsy, as was noted earlier, her oldest children, Daniel and Molly, had already been given away. So having her offspring taken from her was nothing new. But nothing in the human makeup would allow a parent to view this as inconsequential. There could be no greater impetus to escape, however one could, a system that allowed such a thing to happen. It is almost inconceivable that Mary Hemings would not have chosen, if given the opportunity, to have all her children together with her. Although Bell may have wanted to buy only his son and daughter, Jefferson’s instructions suggest that Joseph and Betsy were not for sale. Joseph Fossett became one of his most important artisans, and it is possible that Jefferson may have seen his potential and had plans for him early on. Like her brother, Betsy Hemings was kept on the mountain because Jefferson and his family were already looking to the future. The nine-year-old would be groomed for the role she eventually took on: Sally Hemings’s replacement as the personal maid for Jefferson’s daughters.

  The most salient aspects of the Bell-Jefferson transaction were not written about. The deal was presented in a way designed to evade any understanding of its true meaning, guaranteeing that anyone who chose to rely primarily on the family letters of slave owners to tell the story of their lives with their slaves would never figure out what actually happened. In other business deals—who the parties really were to one another, what they were trying to accomplish and why, and where their real interests lay—were often presented in revealing detail, or in letters referring to the transaction. To see Jefferson and Lewis in operation in this circumstance (for it is unlikely that Lewis, who had leased Hemings to Bell and lived in the area, did not know their true relationship) is to view the shadow world of slavery at work. Here Jefferson was instructing his agent to sell a white man the enslaved black woman he was living with along with the two children she had borne him, writing in a manner that made clear that her two older children, who did not belong to the man, were not for sale.

  One would never know that from any of Jefferson’s letters to Lewis. A more curious reader, however, might wonder why Mary wanted to be sold to Thomas in the first place, and why being owned by Thomas Bell was preferable to being owned by Thomas Jefferson and living with all her children. One might also wonder why only her “younger” children were allowed to go, especially since one of the older children was not really that old. Even in the shortened childhood of slavery in general, and at Monticello specifically, a nine-year-old was still a child. Why separate Betsy from her mother without even an attempt to make her available for sale? That these “younger children” were born during Hemings’s time in Bell’s home might also raise an eyebrow.

  Naturally, the Hemings family knew the story of Mary and Thomas Bell. In their world, however, their explanation for the underlying meaning of this cryptically rendered transaction would not likely have been accepted as valid for purposes of history. The Hemingses, and other American slaves, have a dubious distinction in Western civilization. They are the only victims of a historically recognized system of oppression who are made to carry the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that things endemic to their oppression actually happened to them, as if enslaved people were a powerful government making accusations against relatively powerless, and presumptively innocent, people—slaveholders. This standard, borrowed from law, and others discussed more fully in chapter 3 hold sway in mainstream historical determinations of paternity in the southern slave system. Just as they did during slavery, these strategically restrictive standards protect masters against the claims of their black female slaves in order to preserve the racial integrity of white family lines—an interest often assumed to be of far greater importance than the family identity of African Americans. In the morality of this setting of the balance of interests, only Thomas Bell (and perhaps any of his contemporary white relatives who might claim the African American Hemingses as their relatives) had the power to make the story of Mary Hemings’s life under slavery real within the pages of mainstream American history. By eventually acknowledging his children, he gave permission for everyone to see, and say, what Jefferson was really talking about in his letter to Lewis.

  Martin Hemings

  Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest son, Martin, who had no Wayles connection and was less likely to have had children with a white person who could buy his freedom, evidently did not fare as well as his sister or his half brothers Robert and James during this period. On the surface the three oldest Hemings brothers’ circumstances were alike. Jefferson reposed a great amount of trust in all three men and gave them privileges that others did not have. Their ultimate destinies suggest that all along there was, in fact, a profound difference in their situations: only Robert and James were destined to be emancipated by Jefferson. And when he did let them go and decided to have another personal servant, he did not replicate the relationship he had had with either Robert or James.

  Martin Hemings had a very tense and fateful moment with Jefferson during one of his infrequent trips back to the mountain during the early 1790s. The first hint that he would not continue to live at Monticello came in a letter Jefferson wrote to Daniel Hylton in November 1792. Unlike that of his sister Mary, who had managed her departure in as smooth a way as possible, Hemings’s eventual separation from the life he had known for almost two decades began in turmoil and ended in mystery.

  Martin and myself disagreed when I was last in Virginia insomuch that he desired me to sell him, and I determined to do it, and most irrevocably that he shall serve me no longer. If you could find a master agreeable to him, I should be glad if you would settle that point at any price you please: for as to price I will subscribe to any one with the master whom he shall chuse. Any credit may be given which shall be desired in reason. Perhaps Martin may undertake to find a purchaser. But I exclude all idea of his own responsibility: and I would wish that the transaction should be finished without delay, being desirous of avoiding all parley with him myself on the subject.8

  The last visit referred to in this letter had taken place earlier that year. After an eight-and-a-ha
lf-month absence—from the end of October 1791 until the end of July 1792—Jefferson returned to Monticello from Philadelphia.9 He stayed there for a little over two months and then went back to the capital, not to come home again until the following year. One can imagine the difficulty these types of drop-in visits caused, especially for slaves who were expected to snap to attention and deal with the extremely self-absorbed and exacting Jefferson. He was, as we have seen, a man who could not stand to live in a rented house without remodeling its rooms to fit his specifications—even for the short time that he might be living there. Rearranging the lives of the people who served in the house—so long as he was, in his view, nice about it—would have been of no great moment.

  Neither the cause nor the substance of his quarrel with Martin Hemings was ever disclosed. It must have been extremely serious for Hemings to have demanded to be sold and for Jefferson to have agreed to it with such alacrity. Hemings had been the butler at Monticello for twenty years, since he was nineteen years old. He was hardly a young man, and here he was opting for a life away from the most obvious sources of emotional support—not to gain freedom itself but just to be free of Jefferson. His departure would represent a momentous break in his own life and a real change in the structure of life at Monticello.

  While Jefferson made clear that he wanted Hemings to find a master of his own choice, and that he was willing to take any price in order to help matters along, suggesting solicitousness toward the man, his anger is palpable. There was here no viewing “every human being” for what it was “good for” or “keeping out of the way of the bad” aspects of the person. He was clearly furious at Hemings, and he fulfilled the truth of one of his grandchildren’s observations that he never talked about anything that he did not want to talk about. He and Martin Hemings had gone past the point of return, Hemings having said or done something so serious as to make Jefferson want to sever contact as completely as possible.

  Jefferson could have forced Hemings to continue at Monticello and, if required, had him beaten into submission. Certainly, any attempt to bring Hemings around by using the whip would have set off a chain reaction in a household staff made up entirely of Hemings’s relatives. Whether they would have protested aloud or not, even a slight negative change in the atmosphere would have damaged the willed harmony that Jefferson sought to maintain everywhere he went. Then there was the matter of Hemings’s younger half sister Sally. What would brutal treatment of her brother make her think of him? There was no need for a naked display of his power over Martin Hemings if the matter could be handled in a different way and keep some semblance of peace, and perhaps even make himself look good. The way Jefferson handled this, casting himself as the accommodating master, minimized the scope of the complaints that Martin Hemings’s relatives could raise about what was happening. The substance of the dispute would never be detailed in print, but Jefferson’s procedural “fairness” would be duly noted.

  Unlike Robert and James Hemings, Martin did not, as far as we know, suggest that Jefferson free him or come up with a plan to buy his freedom as did his younger brother Robert within two years after this conflict with Jefferson. On the other hand, we should guard against assuming that because Jefferson never wrote down that something happened that means it did not happen. What the Jeffersons wrote about life at Monticello was only a tiny fraction of what actually occurred there over the years.

  As it turned out, Hemings was not sold immediately. When Jefferson began to keep his Farm Book again in 1794 after twelve years away from permanent residence at Monticello, Hemings was listed as living there, but that was the last time he appeared in any of Jefferson’s records regarding his slaves.10 The only written trace of him after this time was a cryptic reference in one of Jefferson’s letters to his daughter Martha in January of 1795. He spoke to her about some business that her husband was attending to for him in language that says all that needs to be said about what slavery was and meant to the people who lived under it:

  There remains on his hands Martin and the Chariot. If the latter cannot be disposed of without better wheels I would be obliged to him to take the greater and larger diameters of the axle, and the length of the Nut of the wheel, as also the height of the fore and hind wheels, that I may have a set of good wheels made here, and sent down.11

  Martin Hemings and a “chariot”: both to be “disposed of” by sale. It appears that Hemings was not able to find his own buyer among the people for whom he had worked during Jefferson’s absences, if indeed he had wanted to work for them. There is no record that he was ever sold. He may have died during this period, or it is possible that he was simply let go at some point without a formal emancipation, to live as he had before, hiring himself to employers. The entirety of his life suggests that Hemings would never have been satisfied with any master. His aggressive attitude disqualified him from the status of the kind of faithful and loyal servant that Jefferson would reward by legally emancipating him. He was neither a woman going away to be taken care of by a white man nor a son of John Wayles. Lucia Stanton wrote of him as “the fierce son of Betty Hemings,” and that description seems most appropriate.12

  James Hemings

  After Mary and Martin came James. About a year after Martin Hemings asked to be sold, Jefferson wrote a fascinating document that reveals how determined some members of the second generation of Hemingses were to press whatever advantages they had. It had most likely been a topic of conversation since before they left France, but it was at the end of their tenure in Philadelphia that the deal, reconciling Hemings’s desire for freedom and Jefferson’s wish to realize a return on his investment in having paid to have Hemings train as a chef, was put in writing. As fate would have it, Petit, Hemings’s friend and co-worker from France, was involved in this and will be forever memorialized for it. Petit was the witness to the document that formalized Hemings’s agreement with Jefferson to free him.

  Having been at great expence in having James Hemings taught the art of cookery, desiring to befriend him, and to require from him as little in return as possible, I do hereby promise and declare, that if the said James shall go with me to Monticello in the course of the ensuing winter, when I go to reside there myself, and shall there continue until he shall have taught such person as I shall place under him for that purpose to be a good cook, this previous condition being performed, he shall be thereupon made free, and I will thereupon execute all proper instruments to make him free. Given under my hand and seal in the county of Philadelphia and state of Pennsylvania this 15th day of September one thousand seven hundred and ninety three.13

  This document, signed and sent to Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, a promise by a master to his slave, had no legal force. Although enslaved people filed suit to uphold these types of documents, courts generally held them unenforceable either at law or in equity.14 Hemings, literate and conversant in two languages and by that time a worldly man, knew the rules of slavery and almost certainly understood that what Jefferson had done was strictly personal. While this was not a legal document, one should not underestimate what it meant to Hemings to know that it had been prepared in response to his discussions with Jefferson.

  Promises do not have to have legal force to be important to the people who make them. This was a piece of paper with Jefferson’s signature on it that put him on his honor, which was why it made sense to send a copy of it to his son-in-law, who handled his business on many occasions. It marked the seriousness of the venture and assured that if Jefferson broke the promise, someone whose esteem he valued (and that Hemings knew he valued) would have knowledge and proof that he had done so. Also, if something were to happen to Jefferson as the process unfolded, the paper would be evidence in the hands of his family of his intent on the matter. That Jefferson kept a copy of it in his records shows that he wanted posterity to know that he had done this as well. He could just as easily have written up a piece of paper, given it to Hemings, and left it at that. There was no need for a
witness to this extralegal document, either. That Petit was chosen, instead of others in the household, seems especially fitting since this deal was apparently put in motion when the three men were still in Paris.

  Jefferson did not likely draw up this agreement out of his own desire. From his perspective, his word alone should have been enough, especially since he knew the document had no legal validity. This was more likely something he did to please Hemings. It has been suggested that he must have been acting in response to a threat by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) to file a freedom suit on Hemings’s behalf.15 There is no indication that Jefferson ever felt threatened by the PAS or that credit for bringing him to this point belongs to benevolent, unknown whites and not to Hemings and his courage and personal initiative. The PAS did have a record of helping enslaved people bargain with masters about freedom, especially in the nineteenth century after Hemings’s time in the city. But bargaining with masters about freedom was not a singular event in the world of slavery. Other enslaved people, in Pennsylvania, in Hemings’s Virginia, and elsewhere, entered into bargains with their masters for their future emancipations, even when no white people were around to tell them what to do.

  Given his residence in Philadelphia, Hemings did have the option of seeking the aid of the PAS or other abolitionists, black and white. If enslaved people from the South seeking liberation could make it to Bishop Allen’s church, he could have, too. One of the society’s most prominent members, Benjamin Rush, a frequent guest at Jefferson’s home and consumer of Hemings’s fare, gave him direct access to the organization. He did not choose a legal confrontation. His situation in Philadelphia actually paralleled that of his and his sister’s circumstances in France and raises the same questions: Why would a young woman come back to slavery at Jefferson’s request, and why would a young man go along with Jefferson’s proposal if it meant another two years as a slave instead of immediately filing suit against him to obtain his freedom as soon as possible? One should resist the temptation to say that when a person does not make the choice one would have made, that person must have been forced or tricked into it or deny that he had any choice at all.