With James Hemings acting as teacher, what had been the almost daily notations about him in Jefferson’s records disappear. There is then no way to trace his day-to-day life after the beginning of 1794—either at Monticello or when he left Virginia as a free man. It is not even known where he lived on the mountain. Did he return from the Hôtel de Langeac and the house on Market Street to live in a slave cabin, or did he have a room in the house? Architectural evidence indicates that some enslaved people did live in the Monticello mansion. Thomas Jefferson Randolph said that during Jefferson’s presidency his “confidential servant Burwell Colbert” lived there, and the source for the Frederick Town Herald, who knew enough to pinpoint Sally Hemings’s role as a seamstress at Monticello, said she had a “room to her own” within the house.5
The Monticello of the 1790s was nothing like the place known to the throngs of modern-day visitors who come and see a house and grounds brought to a level of perfection that Jefferson himself never saw. James Hemings did not even live to see Monticello with a completed dome. The first house, never finished, was in bad condition after Jefferson returned from France, and his long absences during his days as secretary of state had left him no opportunity to begin to put things in order. Living standards for those in and around the house were severely compromised throughout the 1790s. Near the end of his first year home from Philadelphia, he told his friend and mentor George Wythe that he and his family were “living in a brick kiln,” as he had started the process of tearing down the old to make way for the new.6 It was not a safe environment, with bricks flying into the middle of a domestic routine that kept going no matter what. As work continued over the years, the house would be without even a roof for a time.
Although the kitchen where the Hemings brothers worked cannot have resembled what James had grown used to, he did have all his old cooking utensils, which had been sent over from France. They were far more advanced, varied, and costly than those typically found in Virginia. Jefferson had made the rounds of specialty shops in Paris, almost certainly with Hemings, seeking out and buying large amounts of French copper cook-ware. Much lighter and a better conductor of heat than ironware, it was designed for the French fare that was Hemings’s specialty.7 So the enslaved brothers set to work in a serviceable kitchen with state-of-the-art European equipment as the walls of Monticello began to come down around them.
Their first year together was difficult for every one on the mountain, being rainy most of the time and extremely cold in the winter. A smallpox epidemic in nearby Richmond, the state’s commercial nerve center, brought travel in the area almost to a standstill, even interrupting the delivery of mail.8 Jefferson’s own prolonged illness confined him to bed at points. His poor health cannot have comforted members of the enslaved community, who well understood what might happen if he died. His daughters or, really, his sons-in-law, and whatever creditors swooped down for their share of property, would take his place and separate the enslaved people according to their respective needs. They already understood how changes in his fortunes and family structure could affect the lives of people enslaved on his plantations. Between 1784 and 1794, he had either sold or given away as part of marriage settlements to his daughters and sister over one hundred people.9 While some of the sales were to unite family members, and Martha’s settlement changed legal title but left most of the people in place, these transactions required many individuals to leave their homes. His death would have been even more disruptive. But he recovered near the end of the year; and life, work, and “pulling down” and “putting up” continued on the mountain.
The demolition and construction activities on the house were not the only distractions with which James and Peter had to contend, for Jefferson started several major projects at once. He transformed the landscape of the mountain by having enslaved people plant hundreds of peach trees to fence in his fields. Following the trend in Virginia, Jefferson was also making the switch from tobacco as a cash crop to growing grains like wheat, and he needed another source of income while he took his land out of production to replenish the soil and to prepare for this new type of agriculture. He wanted to find a new venture that would combine what he perceived to be his “interest and duty,” which involved, he said, “watch[ing] for the happiness of those who labored for [his] own.”10 He settled on the nail-making business as the way to do this.
The historian Lucia Stanton has noted that, while in Philadelphia, Jefferson took an interest in the work of Caleb Lownes, a Quaker who argued for the reform of the city’s penal system. Lownes criticized the operators of traditional prisons for failing to take into account that prisoners were human beings with “feelings and passions.” They were, he said, too geared to “perpetually” tormenting the incarcerated. He had a different idea. Prisons should attempt to reform inmates by instituting a strict regime to train them to useful services. Corporal punishment would be eliminated, and replaced with character building through the incentive of paid work and other rewards. Lownes’s prisons were to be a combination “school and manufactory.”11
Lownes’s theories were part of a larger movement of penal reform that Jefferson was well aware of, and he decided to work “out new humanitarian ideas about exercising power on his mountaintop.” Stanton persuasively shows that Jefferson’s nailery “was not just an adventure of industrial entrepreneurship. It was also an experimental laboratory for the management of enslaved labor in harmony with current ideas of humanitarian reform.” Staffed, in Jefferson’s words, by “a dozen little boys 10. to 16. years of age,” the operations drew enough profit to allow him to get along until his farms made more money.12
Several of Elizabeth Hemings’s grandchildren worked in the nailery, though they split duties between there and the house—Joseph Fossett, the brothers Wormley Hughes, Burwell and Brown Colbert, and James (Jamey) Hemings, son of Critta Hemings. When they were not working in the house—doing what besides occasionally breaking china is not clear—these first cousins joined other boys churning out thousands of nails a day. One thinks of Dickens and the children he wrote of trapped in the nineteenth-century workhouses that sprang up to power the Industrial Revolution. There was no sense, in settings rural and urban on either side of the Atlantic, that the children of the laboring classes should be spared work. In fact, they had long been a part of the nail-making trade. In England boys and girls started at age seven in nail factories, bringing home whatever they could to support their families. Indeed, some of the children working in Jefferson’s nailery looked very much like their English counterparts. Joseph, Wormley, Burwell, and Brown, and their other cousins, were almost certainly among the children whose appearances stunned noted Europeans who visited Jefferson in the 1790s. One, the comte de Volney, observed upon seeing them that they were “as white as [he was].”13
Nail making was boring and repetitive work at Monticello, performed cooped up for as long as twelve hours a day under strict supervision. George Granger’s son, George Jr., was the foreman, but Jefferson involved himself directly in the daily work of the factory, counting the nails (which he probably enjoyed very much) and noting how many nails each boy produced and how much nail rod he wasted.14 In keeping with his plan of increasing productivity through incentives, boys who performed well were given extra rations and more expensive clothing. Jefferson was thinking about the present and the future. Measuring these boys’ performances, and giving them rewards for good ones, led to more nails immediately. It also told him what kind of men they might become, and how they would later fit into his plans for operation at Monticello. Isaac Jefferson, brother of the foreman, remembered that he and the other boys were allotted “a pound of meat a week, a dozen herrings, a quart of molasses, and a peck of meal”—twice the weekly ration for field hands.15 George Granger, the only enslaved adult associated with the nailery, received one-sixth of the yearly profits of the operation.
This third generation of Hemingses represented a departure for the family. But for those members who were l
eased out during Jefferson’s time in France—an anomalous situation—these youngsters were the first Hemingses employed in a form of labor specifically designed to bring income and profit to Monticello. Their aunts and uncles had all been personal servants to the Jeffersons, making their lives run more smoothly, but neither planting crops nor producing items for sale. Family-based connections would continue to matter, but this new generation of Hemingses, particularly Joseph and Wormley—and we may say John Hemings—were valued on the mountain not just because of who they were but because of what they produced.
Elizabeth Hemings
One important person was not at Monticello when James Hemings returned in 1794: his mother. At some point after 1791, Elizabeth Hemings went to live at Tufton, one of the quarter farms at the southern base of Monticello. No reason for the move has been found, but it suggests that by this time Hemings—approaching sixty—no longer had regular duties in the mansion. Enslaved women who grew too old to be productive in whatever tasks they performed when young often looked after the children of mothers at work in the fields. One of the enduring mysteries about Hemings’s life is just what her actual duties had been, apart from motherhood and her connection to John Wayles and Martha Jefferson. Her eldest son had been the butler, the person traditionally in charge of supervising the household staff. Was Hemings, in deference to her age and status, a sort of über housekeeper, looming over all her children and ultimately responsible for the efficient running of the household? Or was she called into action to help her daughters only when required?
While the written record of Elizabeth Hemings’s life at Monticello is frustratingly unrevealing, the archaeological record is rich and informative. At least since the 1970s, historians have recognized the critical role that archaeology can play in the study of American slavery. As the historian Patricia Samford put it, “[a]rchaelogical study of the detritus of daily life can provide a perspective on African-American life generally absent in the documents—the perspective of the enslaved themselves, visible through the structural footings of their homes, the broken ceramic bowls from which they ate their food, and the objects they used to give spiritual meaning to their lives.”16 The head of the archaeology department at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Fraser Neiman, and others have done extensive work at the site where Hemings lived after she came back to the mountain in 1795 and, perhaps, before. That work, combined with the documentary record, tells us a great deal about the way the matriarch of the Hemings family lived.
Hemings’s residence must be considered in the context of the natural and planned landscape that surrounded her. Monticello was segmented by four roads, which Jefferson called “roundabouts,” circling the mountain “at roughly constant elevation.” The roundabouts were, in turn, linked to roads of varying slopes. This “internal transportation system” was both practical and aesthetic.17 Jefferson viewed the roundabouts, along with the replacing of wooden fences with peach trees and a sunken fence (the ha-ha!) to cordon off fields and gardens, as part of his overall effort to create an ornamental farm. Beauty, rather than utility, was the main consideration.
The first roundabout enclosed the Monticello mansion and Mulberry Row, the area where Hemings’s children and grandchildren lived. The second “encircled the kitchen garden and orchards planted on slopes just below the mansion.” The third and fourth roundabouts “marked a transition zone between the ornamental and agricultural precincts of the Monticello Mountain landscape.” It was in this zone, about “thirty feet south” of the third roundabout, that Elizabeth Hemings lived, situated somewhat apart from her children, and even farther from most of the currently known residences of other enslaved laborers.18 A dense forest has reclaimed the spot today, but in her time the area was largely a cleared grass field interspersed with large trees. Her known neighbors were Robert Bailey, a Scot who served as the head gardener at Monticello during the 1790s, and “William Stewart, a white blacksmith from Philadelphia,” who came later.19 The composition of Hemings’s “neighborhood” shows the problem with seeing slavery through the eyes of twentieth-century residential Jim Crow and displays the eclectic nature of Monticello’s residents. A part English, part African enslaved woman lived next door to a Scot, and a white family who hailed from the North. A native of Italy, Antonio Giannini, a gardener at Monticello before Bailey, had relayed to Jefferson in Paris Elizabeth Hemings’s message that her daughter had died.
There is little written record of what social relations were like in this multiethnic world. Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen focused on sex, painting a picture of easy sexual relations between the enslaved women at Monticello and Jefferson’s “Irish workingmen.”20 Sex was not the only, or even the main, thing that linked them. Work was the focus, performed by blacks and whites while they shared the rituals of life in what was essentially a small town of around two hundred people. Jefferson’s white workingmen taught enslaved people crafts and skills—some to Elizabeth Hemings’s grandchildren. Wormley Hughes learned gardening from Bailey, and Joseph Fossett learned blacksmithing from Stewart, whom Jefferson pronounced “the best workman in America, but the most eccentric one.”21 He drank, not exactly unusual in those days, but Jefferson put up with the drinking because he was so gifted.
There is little doubt that, had she wanted to, Hemings could have lived in the midst of her children and grandchildren. By this time, however, she had been mother and grandmother to many. Peace and quiet, in a place of her own away from the demands of family, may have been her preference. She was not so far away that she had no easy access to her family, but she was at enough of a distance that some effort had to be made to visit. There was at least one other advantage to her location. Her living area was “at least ten times that of the people living along Mulberry Row.”22
Hemings’s dwelling fit the pattern of late eighteenth-century housing for enslaved people. Just as agriculture in Virginia was undergoing transformation, slave housing was changing as well. For most of the century, enslaved people lived in “‘barracks-style’ housing,” with others who may or may not have been related to them. The floors of these houses featured numerous subfloor pits. These pits served as storage spaces for people who had no closets or trunks in which to keep their possessions. Being open, the pits left the contents visible to everyone—which was apparently the point. Each resident knew the other’s pit and what was in it. That social knowledge, and the morality that grew up around it, worked as a check on theft among coresidents. The changing demographics of slavery—ratios of males to females became more equal, and slaves began to form families—caused a shift in housing patterns. Individual family dwellings replaced barracks, and subfloor pits disappeared. In keeping with this trend, Hemings, living alone, perhaps with containers for her possessions—had no subfloor pit.23
By modern standards, Hemings’s house was almost unimaginably small—roughly 170 square feet. There is no evidence of a wooden floor, though she did have at least one glass window. The house was actually at the smaller end of the range of the typical square footage of slave quarters in Virginia—“from 144 to 672” square feet.24 The size of slave housing depended, at least in some instances, on the number of people in the residence and the preferences of slave owners. Expectations about space and privacy were very different from our own, as were understandings about the usages of living space. For enslaved people there was, evidently, little sense of the interior of the home as a place where one spent much time, work being the center of their lives. For most of her adulthood, Hemings’s daily life took place in John Wayles’s house and, later, in Jefferson’s. Her own home was primarily a place to sleep. Parlors, dining and sitting rooms, and multiple bedrooms were found in the homes of the elite, although even there people, including adults, were often expected to share bedrooms and beds. Because their houses were so small, Hemings and other enslaved people typically socialized, cooked, and took meals outside. One imagines that her large yard area, somewhat removed from the eyes of Jefferson and his family
, was often a gathering place for the Hemingses.
Hemings and other enslaved people were not the only ones who lived in extremely tight quarters. A 1785 survey of one Virginia county showed that “more than 75 percent of the [white] settlers surveyed were living in one-room homes of less than 320 square feet.”25 Though whiteness and free status gave them a tremendous social advantage over blacks, the material lives of nonelite white Virginians were much closer to those of blacks than to those of people like the Jeffersons. Not only were their houses small; the homes of poor whites and even “many middling planters of English descent” had dirt floors and no glass windows.26 One can well understand the deep resentment, even turmoil, this bred in them, for although they enjoyed the benefits of their society’s enforcement of white supremacy, they were unable to rise, and Virginia’s political system was designed to keep it that way. The extremely conservative state constitution, which Jefferson abhorred, left a full two-thirds of the white male population without the vote because of its stringent property qualifications.27 Virginia’s poor and middling whites, the sort who would be working for Jefferson and living among the Hemingses, were in a worse position politically than their counterparts in other states. For example, Tennessee’s constitution, which Jefferson lauded as the most perfect in the new union, provided for universal male suffrage in 1796. Even free black males could vote in the state until a constitutional convention in 1834 took the right away.28 Thus, for roughly fifty years, free blacks in Tennessee (admittedly few in number) had the right to vote when large numbers of free white men in Virginia did not.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 63