Jefferson was, in truth, in a precarious position to begin with in terms of Robert Hemings’s value. An enslaved person’s history of having been hired out was often a liability upon an attempted sale. Two years after this episode, St. George Tucker, of the famed Virginia emancipation plan of 1796, sought to sell four highly skilled slaves who had been hired out to the city. He was stunned to find no takers. The man handling the sale, experienced in these matters, explained to Tucker that, having “so long hired their own time, and lived without controul,” they were unattractive to potential buyers. Tucker eventually sold the slaves at a much lower price than he thought fair.35
Had Hemings been on an open market, Jefferson might have ended up with a price not far from the one he accepted from Stras had the extent of Hemings’s freedom over the past decade been revealed to prospective buyers. Why would owners want to deal with a literate black man who had for twelve years been choosing his own employers, traveling at will, working where he wanted, and keeping his wages? Moreover, it was not true that what Hemings had been doing over the years amounted to a “total abandonment of his services.” Hemings could not have abandoned anything without Jefferson’s assent. He could have brought Hemings to France with him to be his manservant while his brother learned to cook, or he could have sent him to the fields if he had wanted to.
While on the surface Jefferson appears to be reasoning, his complaint makes sense only as an emotional outburst, rather than a well thought-out analytic dissection of the economic fairness of this transaction. He was not talking about the monetary value he had lost, nor was he really addressing the arbitrators who had valued Hemings. This was a complaint that grew out of his sentiment-driven pique that Hemings did not seem to value all the years he had let him essentially do whatever he wanted to do. Property often has a sentimental value, but the owner seeking to sell the property usually must say that outright or set a minimum price to reflect any non-economic, personal feelings that transcend more obvious economic considerations. The arbitrators did not know what it meant to Jefferson to have taken up his wife’s twelve-year-old enslaved half brother, traveled and lived with him as part of a pair, and treated him, by the standards of the day, with great leniency. They also did not know that Jefferson had assumed there was some reciprocity of feeling from Hemings and that he experienced the purported mutuality of sentiment between them as a “value.” Who but Jefferson had “kept” what all this meant to him “out of view”?
The arbitrators did not know any of this, but Jefferson surely expected Robert Hemings to know it, and he was deeply hurt that the younger man’s knowledge seemed to make no difference to him. Despite everything, he wanted to go somewhere else. Money, which Jefferson could sometimes spend like the proverbial drunken sailor, was not the real issue. He simply did not want Hemings to want to go. Compare his attitude in this situation, carping about the price, with his attitude about the sale of Martin Hemings, an event unfolding at the same time. Martin and Robert Hemings had both occupied positions of trust in Jefferson’s household, and both men had been allowed to work and keep their money. Jefferson pronounced himself willing to accept any price—to perhaps take a loss—in order to facilitate the sale to whomever Martin Hemings picked. There was no suggestion of trying to recoup the money that Hemings had made while out of his service for the same length of time as his younger brother.
Robert Hemings knew that Jefferson was angry and that his anger was not just about his dissatisfaction with the price. This transaction, proposed after Jefferson made the agreement to free James Hemings, raises an interesting question. Did Robert Hemings ever approach Jefferson on a one-on-one basis about working out a deal for his freedom? If he had let Hemings work for wages and keep them for himself, he could have let him work for wages to pay him with no middleman involved. Perhaps Hemings did raise the possibility with Jefferson, was rebuffed, and went to Stras as an alternative. Whether the possibility was previously raised or not, Hemings sought to effectuate his emancipation working with a third party’s involvement that automatically put the third party, Stras, on a par with Jefferson. He had been talking with someone besides Jefferson about his future. Glimpses of the tension this created are offered in the correspondence between Jefferson and his daughter Martha. Several weeks after Jefferson drew up the manumission deed, Martha wrote to him about Hemings:
I saw Bob frequently while in Richmond he expressed great uneasiness at having quitted you in the manner he did and repeatedly declared that he would never have left you to live with any person but his wife. He appeared to be so much affected at having deserved your anger that I could not refuse my intercession so warmly solicited towards obtaining your forgiveness. The poor creature seems so deeply impressed with a sense of his ingratitude as to be rendered quite unhappy by it but he could not prevail upon himself to give up his wife and child. (emphases in the original)36
This report of Hemings’s feelings comes from an interested third party, and it is a great loss to history that all the letters Hemings wrote to Jefferson are no longer extant, for they might have allowed us to see exactly how he approached his former owner in the aftermath of their difficult disengagement. Hemings understood that Jefferson perceived his dealings with Stras to be a form of disloyalty, and he correctly divined what his former owner wanted to hear: an expression of devotion so wide that only his love of his wife and child could get around it. Whether he actually felt that or not, we will never know. Wearing “the mask” was often a necessary part of life for relatively powerless people in those days. Whatever his feelings for Jefferson, Hemings was interested in freedom for himself and his family. He did not want to live in slavery with Dolly and their child (either Elizabeth or Martin at the time) at Monticello, which very likely could have been arranged. It is almost inconceivable that Jefferson, who bought and sold men and women who were not Hemingses to unite their families, would have balked at buying Hemings’s small family. He would have kept his manservant at Monticello and provided yet one more reason, in his eyes, for the young man to have been grateful to him.
Jefferson’s fertile and creative mind wandered everywhere and saw the world not just as it was but how it could be, but for the conventions and rules of society—some of which he approved, others of which he did not. He knew that Robert and James Hemings were the sons of the man who had given him his fortune, though we will never know if he ever for the briefest moment allowed himself to ponder the ramifications of this. In a world with any degree of morality, or even in another type of slave society, these young men would never have been his slaves and might have had a share of that fortune. Jefferson had spent at least five years in a society where the mixed-raced children of slave owners sometimes shared the property of their fathers, and he knew there was such a thing under the sun. If he never talked to any of them, he almost certainly saw such people. They often came to Paris to conduct business and were visible evidence that not every person of color occupied the same status. The laws of slavery, and the Anglo-American culture in which he and the Hemings-Wayles brothers lived, allowed—mandated—that John Wayles’s wealth be transferred to his free white daughters and ultimately to his white son-in-laws, and not to his enslaved mixed-race sons and daughters. No “gift” or “privilege” Jefferson ever gave the Hemingses was in any way commensurate to what the law and cultural mores had taken away from them and transferred to him and his white family.
The brothers’ course of dealing with Jefferson after their emancipations suggests that they had genuine affection for him at some level, but that was beside the point. They did not want to give their very lives to him any more than he would have wanted to give his life to them. Both men, very reasonably, were unwilling to make a show of love and devotion to Jefferson if it meant they had to remain slaves. Jefferson was like a planet whose gravitational pull holds some bodies in its orbit and constantly threatens to haul in other smaller bodies that happen to be passing by. His tendency toward possessiveness and controlling behavio
r undoubtedly had its own impact on the lives of Robert and James Hemings in ways we cannot recover, though his handling of their departure from Monticello gives important clues. Who knows how many lessons, admonishments, offers of advice, and stubborn opinions were offered to these two young men on their long journeys with Jefferson or during the many hours and times when they were completely alone with him? They were young boys when this began, and now they were men in a relationship that was to a great degree emasculating. Resistance, in the best way available to them, was the natural course.
When Robert and James Hemings broke away from Jefferson, they changed not just a lifestyle but their very statuses in life. No evidence of Mary Hemings’s formal manumission, or that of her children with Bell, has been found. The official records of deeds in Albemarle County in the 1790s, which do record Robert’s and James’s emancipations, are intact. So there was no formal change in Mary Hemings’s status when she went to live with Bell, who trusted his legal white relatives not to challenge his wishes regarding how she and his children with her were to be treated. No one knows Martin Hemings’s ultimate fate, but he, too, wanted to break away. As for their sister Sally, none of the means her siblings used to leave the mountain were available to her if she ever thought of trying. She could never have said to Jefferson, “Sell me to another white man” or “Let me go out on my own and find a job.” She could have said those things, but he would not have done what she asked. Her decision not to take freedom in France and to return to Virginia with Jefferson permanently fixed her in his orbit until he or she died.
How Robert and James Hemings engineered their freedom certainly became known to others on the mountain. Yet, over the years, no one else, not even other Hemingses, were able to replicate what these two brothers did in the 1790s. Not until just before his death did Jefferson prepare documents to free other slaves. When he freed five slaves in his will, two were his sons. His two older children—who chose to live as white people and would not have wanted formal and recorded documents proving that they were part black and had been born slaves—quietly left Monticello as soon as they became adults. Their uncles Robert and James Hemings were the only other enslaved people at Monticello who did not have to give their entire adult lives to Jefferson in order to obtain their freedom.
24
THE SECOND MONTICELLO
TWENTY YEARS HAD passed. Girls had grown into women, boys into men; and a new generation of Hemingses was coming of age to participate in what would become a revised story of life on the mountain. The man who had controlled their lives for all those years had plans to alter the look of the place as he prepared to settle there for good. The new story began with an ostensibly normal routine. In the middle of January 1794, Robert Hemings met his brother James and Jefferson in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with fresh horses for the last leg of the trip home from Philadelphia.1 The brothers had performed this type of operation many times, and the rituals of deep acquaintance played out over the trio’s three-day journey to Monticello. And yet, this time things were different. Both of the young men riding on horseback those winter days were on their way out of slavery at Monticello. It is not known precisely when Robert Hemings first thought of the idea of having his wife’s owner, Dr. Frederick Stras, lend him money to purchase his freedom, but it was probably a plan that unfolded over time. On the coming Christmas Eve, Jefferson would sign a “deed of manumission” for Robert, who would then go to join his family in Richmond to work off his debt to Stras.
James Hemings carried the promise of freedom, knowing that he had one final task to perform to make sure that promise was fulfilled. The agreement with Jefferson, now four months old, was undoubtedly known to all the Hemingses, communicated the preceding September when James had last been home, giving the family ample time to ponder his future. The agreement was important for another reason: James was going to train his younger brother Peter Hemings to take his place, ensuring that the legacy of his time in France would pass to another family member. While the terms of the pact expressly left it to Jefferson to choose James’s successor, James himself may well have lobbied for his brother, for no one was better suited. At eighteen, John, the family’s youngest, was the right age, but Jefferson had already marked the young man out for the profession that would make his name: that of carpenter, like his father before him. There had probably been little or no consideration of turning any of the Hemings females into cooks. Even though James had been away during the years Peter had grown to manhood, a natural affinity between the brothers might well have made the whole process go more smoothly. Whether they grew close because of this association or whether the affection was there all along, Peter Hemings named one of his sons after James.
No time was wasted. Just eleven days after James arrived at Monticello, Peter Hemings came home to begin his apprenticeship, having been away from the plantation, working for a local man named William Chapman.2 Peter’s arrival brought all five Hemings brothers together; it was the first time since 1782 that they could expect to be in one another’s presence when Jefferson was not poised to take one of them off somewhere. Martin, at age thirty-nine, and John formed generational and genetic bookends to the three brothers in the middle—Robert, thirty-two, James, twenty-nine, and Peter, twenty-four. They were half siblings to one another and to the three Hemings-Wayles sons. Martin was nearing the end of his time on the mountain, and John would live there for another thirty-two years. While they could have been fond of one another, the twenty-one-year age difference between them and Martin’s absence from Monticello between 1782 and 1790 would not have allowed for steady camaraderie between the two. But Martin knew his youngest brother, for he almost certainly returned to visit his mother and siblings, bringing money or other goods bought with his wages.
Jefferson had come home to Monticello in defeat, bested in the struggles over policy in Washington’s cabinet. When his rivals Hamilton and Adams questioned the finality of his retirement, they did so at a distance, measuring what his presence on or absence from the scene might mean to their own political fortunes. The Hemingses knew Jefferson better than either Hamilton or Adams knew him, and had their own senses of whether he was really ready to leave the arena forever. The political battles in Philadelphia played out in newspapers that at least Robert and James Hemings, if not all the siblings, were able to read. The family had a personal stake in them because the courses of their lives depended upon where Jefferson wanted to be at any given moment. In fact, they were not at Monticello long—just nine months—before he was presented with a chance to return to public life. President Washington asked whether he would be willing to go to Spain as a special envoy, a significant overture, given that their final parting had been less than amicable. Though he was likely gratified by Washington’s show of confidence, Jefferson, in the midst of a prolonged illness, declined the offer, citing what he thought was his totally broken health along with the “inflexibility” of his decision to leave public life.3 Had he accepted, James Hemings would have accompanied him to serve as the chef in his Spanish household. It was perhaps this fleeting opportunity that prompted Hemings’s determination to travel to Spain just a few years later.
Whatever the Hemingses’ views on the question, Jefferson had styled himself in retirement, and for the moment everyone had to act as if he truly were. As he prepared for his new role, Peter Hemings could have had no expectation that it might take him to the kinds of places it had taken his older brother. On the other hand, who knew where this might lead? Peter could not help noticing that his two brothers who had been trained in a trade, and were the sons of John Wayles, were the two whom Jefferson decided to free. Perhaps this new job was a stepping stone. Although the thought would have been reasonable, timing in life is everything, and the timing was against Peter Hemings.
The youngest son of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles was simply born too late—in 1770—to take full advantage of his family status and gender. Robert and James Hemings came of age at just the right
time to have the kind of close relationship with Jefferson that put them on the path to freedom in the 1790s. All the enslaved people in Jefferson’s inner world were people he had helped mold, either by early and long association with them or by virtue of their youth—Jupiter Evans, Robert and James Hemings, Sally Hemings, and Burwell Colbert. These people would have viewed him differently (and he them) if they had had the chance to form personalities independent of him, before he brought them into his most intimate circle. Separated from his older brothers by eight and five years, respectively, and by two sisters, Thenia and Critta, Peter was a small child during the early period of the family’s time at Monticello and did not have the occasion to be too closely connected to Jefferson. He was five years old when he came to the mountain, six in 1776 when his brother Robert traveled to Philadelphia with Jefferson, and thirteen when Jefferson left Monticello for seven years. When he returned, there was neither time nor reason for young Peter to develop an association with him, and by the time of Jefferson’s first retirement, he was a grown man.
Hemings did share his family’s easy association with his half sister Martha’s husband and appears intermittently in Jefferson’s documents, mainly in notations detailing various economic transactions. The first appeared in 1780, when he was only ten years old and Jefferson wrote that he had “Repd. Peter for shoe thread £9.”—indicating that money, most probably from his older brothers, circulated among the Hemings siblings. Despite his relatively few references to him over the years, Jefferson thought highly of Hemings, proclaimed him extremely intelligent, and extolled his capabilities to others.4 None of this would be enough, however, to make Jefferson free him.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 62