His sister’s possible motivations have been discussed at length in previous chapters. While it might seem clear enough from our perspective that almost two and a half more years as a slave would be a worse resolution than a possibly successful freedom suit, James Hemings’s calculations evidently brought him to a different conclusion. It is not at all certain that a lawsuit could have been wrapped up more quickly than the time he ultimately spent at Monticello, or that he would have won. And while we do not have Hemings’s words, we know enough about his life with Jefferson to that date—and enough experience with the meaning and fallout from litigation—to know that he would have had to weigh this matter very carefully.
Embarrassing Jefferson in Philadelphia, the site of his greatest achievement in life until that point, was to burn a serious bridge irrevocably, for he did not easily forgive those who wounded him personally. Hemings knew Jefferson extremely well—his strengths, vulnerabilities, and vanities. Taking the route he took allowed him to extricate himself from slavery with minimal rancor from a hugely influential man who, in a hostile world, could continue to be helpful to him in the future—but from a distance that Hemings could choose.
The language of the document is telling. Jefferson presents himself as “desiring to befriend” Hemings and announces his intent to “require from him as little in return as possible” as Hemings trained the new Monticello chef. The language of friendship lays the groundwork for a future association, which Jefferson definitely wanted and sought in the years after Hemings’s emancipation. Referencing his “great expense” to have Hemings trained was also a justification for having him come back to Monticello as an unpaid trainer of a new cook to help Jefferson recoup his expenses. Finally, it was a not very subtle attempt to appeal to (or awaken) a sense of gratitude or guilt in Hemings. Whether this was a benevolent document (and whether that even matters, given the important end result that was achieved) is subject to debate.
The overall context in which the document appeared should also be considered. Jefferson, emotionally scarred from his battles with Alexander Hamilton, which he was losing at the time, had made a firm decision by the end of 1792 that he would retire when Washington finished his first term. He arranged to take a house about three miles outside of the city near the banks of the Schuylkill River, sending his furniture and, most important, his books back to Monticello, a clear sign of his seriousness because he cannot have expected to stay in Pennsylvania for very long without his books.16 Before he moved to the country in April of 1793, it was clear to Hemings, and all members of the household, that their days in the state were coming to a close. After Jefferson left office, Hemings would return to Monticello with Jefferson, Petit would go back to France, and Jefferson’s other employees would go on to new situations. By July, Jefferson had set on September as the end point for his term, and he told President Washington of his plans. It did not work out that way, for he was unable to resist Washington’s request that he stay on until January.17
Though Jefferson’s description of his house on the river makes the place sound charming, it may not have been for James Hemings, and one wonders how Petit felt about the change in scenery. This was clearly a place of needed respite for Jefferson. Here he escaped the scene of the bruising conflicts that had become integral to his position as secretary of state, while Hemings cooked and served him meals that he preferred to take outside under the trees surrounding his house whenever the weather allowed. “I never go into the house but at the hour of bed,” he wrote. Under his “high plane trees with good grass below,” he would “breakfast, dine, write and receive…company.”18 His enthusiasm about this bucolic life and the almost childlike delight he took in being able to stay outside as long as he wanted are understandable. His generally pleasant letters home to his daughter and son-in-law hint at, but do not come close to telling, the story of the really titanic political machinations (some put in motion by him, others by Hamilton) that were going on before and during his idyll on the banks of the Schuylkill.
All this may have meant something quite different to James Hemings. Though he was only several miles outside of the center of the city, he apparently did not crave the semirural isolation that Jefferson found so appealing. He had come of age in cities, and when he was emancipated he went back to them to live—first Philadelphia and finally Baltimore. One does not get the sense of a man who ever longed for the quiet life on his own little farm. He had never been an agricultural worker, and nothing suggests that he had any particular competence in that arena, or wanted to obtain it. What he knew how to do best could more easily be done in an urban setting.
Jefferson’s decision to move to the country might have been a life-saving one for both him and Hemings. By the beginning of August, five months after their departure from the house on Market Street, it was clear that something was going seriously wrong in Philadelphia. People began to come down with a mysterious illness that caused severe headaches and backaches, along with a high fever. After a few days, the skin of the victims turned yellow, and they began to vomit blood so dark that it looked black. This was the start of the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, which would end up taking five thousand lives in the city. From August to November “10 to 15 percent of the estimated 45,000 Philadelphians perished, while another 20,000, including most government officials, simply fled.”19
No one knew where it came from or had any inkling that the “dense mass of” mosquitoes “that hung over the city like a cloud” were the vectors.20 Many blamed the refugees who had only recently arrived in the city fleeing the revolution in Saint Domingue, and others, like Jefferson, believed that the city’s cramped and sometimes dirty conditions were the culprits. Arguments over the fever’s origins and the best treatment for it broke down along political lines—the Federalist faction blamed the émigrés, and the Republican faction faulted the noisome environment.21 Jefferson’s flight from political turmoil, and the distasteful prospect of having to run into his enemies on the streets of Philadelphia, succeeded in getting Hemings out of the city in the spring, long before the evenings of the summer and early fall of 1793, when the disease wreaked its worst damage.
The epidemic, a catastrophe for all, hit the black community hard in a number of ways. As the cases and death toll rose, and inhabitants left the city, some blacks stayed to help out in the crisis. Not all remained voluntarily. Many were conscripted and prevented from leaving so that they could dig graves and attend the sick. Of those blacks who stayed by choice, a good number saw this as a chance to perform a heroic deed that might change the way the white community viewed blacks overall. Committed “race” men like Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, who had founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church with Allen, helped organize their efforts. Benjamin Rush had worked with these men before and urged blacks to stay, in part, because he thought they were naturally immune to the disease.22 Jefferson alluded to this supposed immunity when he observed to his son-in-law, “The pure blacks have been found insusceptible of the infection, the mixed blood has taken it.” What he thought more amazing was that “not a single instance of it occurred of anybody’s catching it out of Philadelphia” (emphasis in the original).23
Blacks were not totally “insusceptible” to yellow fever, and a number of black Philadelphians who stayed behind to help caught the disease and died. Those who escaped death were repaid for their efforts when the crisis abated with charges that they had taken advantage of their sick patients, either robbing them or overcharging them for services. Bishop Allen and Absalom Jones, ever vigilant to matters that affected their community, wrote a pamphlet refuting the charges and detailing the contributions of blacks to the relief effort. They also listed examples of the fees and payments for services that black nurses, drivers, and gravediggers rendered as they tried to help out during the crisis. There might have been people who acted inappropriately, they said, but the deeds of the minority should not have defined the character of the majority of blacks who risked their lives to help.2
4
When Washington talked Jefferson into staying in his position until the end of the year instead of leaving in September, he agreed to Jefferson’s plan to go to Monticello for a visit that month instead.25 James Hemings and Jefferson ended up leaving a week earlier than planned because Jefferson’s staff had dwindled down to one clerk, everyone else having fled to avoid the plague. In this harrowing time, the two men set out for Virginia knowing that they would not return to the house near the Schuylkill. Even though they did not know what caused yellow fever, all had noticed that the disease was seasonal—being particularly bad in the summer and disappearing in the cool weather. Hemings and Jefferson had reason to hope that by the time they returned, the epidemic would have abated or at least be in decline.
THEIR BRIEF SOJOURN at Monticello over, Hemings and Jefferson set off from Monticello on October 25, 1793.26 They were not going back to Philadelphia. Germantown, just outside the city, had been designated the temporary seat of the government as officials tried to escape the ravages of yellow fever, whose depredations spared no one. Alexander Hamilton came down with the disease but recovered with some lingering effects, as well as Dolley Todd’s young husband, who lost his life. A year later, the young and vivacious widow remarried and became Dolley Madison, a woman who would come to have her own place in Hemings family history.27
On their return Robert Hemings rode with them as far as Fredericksburg and then went back to Monticello with the horses. Jefferson gave him money there for his expenses and bought tickets for himself and James Hemings for the stagecoach to Baltimore. When they got there, they met President Washington, who was on his way to the capital himself. There is no mention of him in Jefferson’s records, but Washington’s ever-present body servant, William Lee, was probably along, and he and Hemings may have encountered one another before.28
Since no public stages went “further North,” Jefferson had to hire a private driver—and was “fleeced,” he said—to take him and Hemings on to Germantown, on a journey in which the weather ran the gamut from hot to cold to dusty to rainy. The pair arrived to find a town overflowing with escapees from Philadelphia and yellow fever. There was no place to stay. Jefferson reported that he, the secretary of state, “as a great favor” had gotten “a bed in the corner of a public room of a tavern” and had to stay there until “some of the Philadelphians” left the city.29 Hemings was there with him, because no other place was to be had in the city, every available accommodation being full. They remained in those circumstances for several days until they found more permanent lodging and Hemings was able to settle back into his responsibility for taking care of the household. Jefferson paid him his month’s wages and gave him money to purchase items for their daily needs.
Hemings’s Germantown stay proved short. By December 1 he and Jefferson were back in a Philadelphia that was “entirely clear of all infection” with everyone ready to take up where they had left off. But Jefferson had no house, so he rented rooms in the home of Joseph Mussi on “the corner of Seventh and Market.”30 There was not enough space for Petit, who boarded at a nearby tavern. The men lived this strange existence—a chef with no kitchen to cook in, a master of the house with no house—for five weeks. Hemings may actually have enjoyed this, as it relieved him of some pressure, for Mussi’s Italian chef prepared Jefferson’s meals for the entirety of his stay. It also gave Hemings the chance to observe the differences and similarities in the preparation and, no doubt, taste of another of the world’s great cuisines. The displaced chef, however, still had responsibilities, managing all of Jefferson’s household expenses. Petit seems to have been primarily biding his time waiting to leave the country. As he had in France, Jefferson periodically borrowed money from his maître d’hôtel while he was in his service in Philadelphia. The men settled all their accounts in January of 1794, and Petit returned to his native land.31
From their very different positions in the world, both Hemings and Jefferson believed they were coming to a breaking point in their lives. Jefferson, frustrated and demoralized by the political setbacks during his time in Washington’s administration, saw this as the end of his long public career and looked longingly toward Monticello as if he were going there to take a cure. Hemings had his own reasons to be eager. The sooner he began to train a new chef, the sooner he could return to Philadelphia, or wherever he wanted to go, as a free man.
Robert Hemings
Even though his younger brother seemed likely to gain his freedom first, it was the eldest son of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles who in the end received a formal deed of emancipation from Thomas Jefferson before any of the other Hemingses. Robert Hemings and his relatives surely knew of Jefferson’s agreement with his younger brother, and this could only have raised his own expectations. Though he had not traveled as widely as James, Robert had taken his own serious steps toward freedom and needed a life away from Monticello. He was a husband and father whose family lived elsewhere. After the brief turn in New York, he returned to Monticello whenever Jefferson called for him, being his manservant, carrying messages back and forth between Jefferson, his daughter, and son-in-law, just as he had since boyhood. He even spent time in Jefferson’s Philadelphia home.32
By 1794 his wife, Dolly Hemings, had moved from Fredericksburg to Richmond. At some point during that year, Robert Hemings and Dolly’s owner, Dr. George Frederick Stras, worked out a deal. Stras would buy Hemings’s freedom from Jefferson, and then Hemings would repay Stras. Robert’s gambit seems to have taken Jefferson by surprise, and he was not happy about it at all. In fact, he was extremely angry at Hemings. He decided to go along with the proposal and wrote up a deed of manumission stating that he had “manumitted and made free Robert Hemings, son of Betty Hemings: so that in future he shall be free and of free condition…and shall be discharged of all obligation of bondage or servitude whatsoever….”33
We get a glimpse of how Jefferson really felt about this in a letter he wrote to his son-in-law the day after Christmas.
You will find by the inclosed that Bob’s business has been hastened into such a situation as to make it difficult for me to reject it. I had certainly thought it just that the person whom I suppose to have debauched him from me, as well as the special inconvenience of my letting him go for 2. or 3. years to come, and a total abandonment of his services for 11. or 12 years past should have been known and operated in estimating his value as a mulct on Mr. S. However all that has been kept out of view, and I have too much respect for the gentlemen who have valued him to have the subject revised. It remains therefore only to receive the money and deliver the deed, which you will find inclosed in the letter to Stras. I have made it to Bob himself, because Mr. Stras mentions it is for his freedom he is to advance the money, and his holding the deed will sufficiently secure the fulfilment of Bob’s engagements to him.34
In some ways this document is more intriguing than Jefferson’s earlier writing in which he promised to free James Hemings. The man who had the ultimate control in this situation placed himself in the position of one forced to do something that he clearly did not have to do; “Bob’s business” “hastened” to the point that it would be “difficult” for him “to reject it,” as if he were a victim of Hemings and Stras. Neither man could have forced Jefferson’s hand on this matter. And then there was the characterization of Hemings’s wish to be with his wife. The notion that the young man had been “debauched” from him by the woman’s owner makes Hemings’s very natural desire to be with his spouse and children sound an unsavory choice when compared with being Jefferson’s manservant.
The most interesting language of all is the bitter lament about Hemings’s valuation. Jefferson could not seriously have thought that it should have occurred to whoever valued Hemings to include as an item of value the fact that he had chosen to let Hemings work for other people over the previous “11. or 12 years.” “Pay me for all the ways I chose not to use my property in years past,” with no showing of how his “non-use” contribute
d to the property’s value, was an extremely peculiar expectation on his part. He was counting all the way back to 1782, when he embarked on his odyssey away from Monticello after his wife’s death, and he had allowed Hemings to hire himself out to others.
Jefferson did not mention what it had cost him to have Hemings apprenticed to a barber. This may well already have been included in the price. He cannot have been anticipating the loss of Hemings’s services in that regard, for their time in New York shows he had not been using them; he paid someone else to shave him and dress his hair all the while Hemings was in the city. As to what he specifically referred to, unless he could show how Hemings’s acting as a valet for other men over that time made him more valuable than he would have been had he acted as Jefferson’s valet, the twelve years he decided to forgo personal use of Hemings’s services were merely his lost opportunity. As for the wages Hemings made, and Jefferson did not collect, he had chosen to order things that way over the years, no doubt congratulating himself on giving the equivalent of a “gift” to the young man. He thought he was building emotional capital that would strengthen Hemings’s loyalty to, and affection for, him. Allowing Hemings to have his own time away from Monticello and keep his money was Jefferson’s own show of affection, and Hemings was supposed to see it that way and act accordingly: be content to remain in lifelong service to him on those “generous” terms. When Hemings failed to follow this plan, the now angry Jefferson wanted to monetize the emotional benefit he had gotten over the years so that he could take back the “gift” he had given Hemings, suggesting that Stras should have to pay for a thing he had never shown the slightest interest in having before: Robert Hemings’s money.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 61