Archaeological work also allows a comparison between Hemings and her closest neighbor, William Stewart, that sheds additional light on her life. Both she and Stewart lived in log cabins “seated on a dry-laid stone foundation.” Stewart’s place was much larger than Hemings’s, with almost “four times the floor space.” Neiman suggests the difference cannot be attributed to the fact that there were seven people in the Stewart household, while Hemings lived alone. The residents of Mulberry Row had families, too, and their houses were smaller than Stewart’s. The reason for the difference, of course, is that Stewart was a free white man, and the market created an incentive for Jefferson and other employers to give him and other white workers, particularly skilled ones, the best housing they could provide. If they did not, the workers could take their services elsewhere.29
Both Hemings and Stewart participated in the market and consumer revolution that took place in the latter half of the eighteenth century when Americans developed an unquenchable thirst for the imported British goods that filled country stores and vendue markets, which the historian T. H. Breen describes as a “combination of modern flea market and wholesale auction.” Peddlers, “mysterious and ubiquitous,” traveled the countryside introducing people in isolated rural communities to “the pleasures of owning an ivory comb or colorful piece of ribbon.”30 Hemings, for example, accumulated a good quantity of consumer goods. She had creamware, pearl ware, and Chinese porcelain. This was not uncommon in the Chesapeake. Visitors to Washington’s Mount Vernon remarked upon the incongruity of seeing china in the mean cabins of the enslaved. Slaves acquired these goods through different means, and the dating and usage gives clues as to how they obtained them. Evidence of heavy usage and old-style patterns suggest that much of the china in slave cabins consisted of castoffs from their white owners.31
Hemings’s dinnerware, however, did not come from the Jefferson family, for the items do not match the records of the types of china the Jeffersons purchased. This is not surprising, given that her sons often worked for themselves and could give her money or buy her things on their own. Her dinnerware was not outdated. She continued to obtain items into the 1790s, favoring popular patterns of the day. For example, some of her porcelain plates were “painted with Nanking II–style motifs” that dated “from 1785–1800.” She seemed to favor blue—even one of the chamber pots recovered was “painted in blue with a floral or Chinese motif”—and she had distinct preferences about the types of ware she used for different purposes. Plates and platters were mainly the more expensive pearl ware and Chinese porcelain, and her tea settings consisted mainly of less expensive creamware. Her pattern of consumption was the reverse of that of William Stewart, whose family spent more money on its tea settings and less on its dinnerware.32
Neiman suggests that the difference reveals Hemings’s and the Stewarts’ individual strategies for “social advertising.” The striving Stewarts used their expensive tea set as a form of display to impress visitors, as the tea party was becoming a mark of a particular form of gentility. Hemings, on the other hand, preferred to impress at meal times, “while tea drinking was more an informal affair.” But it is also likely that the Stewarts’ five children influenced how much money their parents were willing to invest in the plates they used for their daily meals. Fancy tea ware could be safeguarded from rambunctious kids and brought out only on special occasions. As one might expect, given her son’s and daughter’s time in France, wine was also a part of Hemings’s life. Wineglasses and wine bottles, English and French, were recovered from her home. But other than items related to meal consumption, not much else was found at the Hemings site besides “a half dozen upholstery tacks, two buttons, a woman’s brass shoe buckle, and a slate pencil.”33
Hemings had a garden and kept chickens, some of which she sold, along with produce and eggs, to Jefferson and his family, as did every other adult on the plantation, save for her daughter Sally. Given the nature of her relationship with Jefferson, it would have been odd indeed for her to have turned to him and asked, “Would you like to buy some string beans, or eggs, or chickens?” Tending the garden, raising animals, and looking after children may have been the main ways Elizabeth Hemings occupied herself in her declining years.
It is not known precisely what month Hemings returned to the mountain, but an important thing happened that year that made her return understandable. Sally Hemings gave birth to a daughter, Harriet, at the beginning of October.34 Unlike her daughter Betty, who had a two-year-old, Edwin, Sally had no older children to help her during her pregnancy or after her baby was born. She had also lost her first child and may have had some difficulty with her pregnancy and the aftermath—she had, in fact, been sick in the months after she gave birth. That could only have increased anxiety about her and her child. Who better than her mother, a woman who had lost only one of twelve known children, that one well past infancy at age nine, to watch over her daughter as she began again her life as a young mother.
Jefferson’s absences from Monticello between 1790 and 1794 defined Sally Hemings’s earliest experience with motherhood. She had given birth in 1790 at age seventeen, and if he had been with her for any substantial amount of time, one might expect that she, a young woman at the very height of her potential fertility, would have had at least one other child within that period. But he was not at Monticello for any significant length of time. In 1791, he was away eleven months out of the year. He was gone for ten and one half months in 1792 and another eleven months in 1793.35 His return in 1794 marked the real start of their time together in America, and, as we noted earlier, he was seriously ill for long stretches of time, the battles with Hamilton apparently taking their toll physically.
Harriet Hemings’s birth also marked the beginning of another pattern that would adhere throughout Sally Hemings’s life as a mother: her children would bear the names of people who were important to Jefferson. Harriet Randolph, the younger sister of Thomas Mann Randolph, was described as Jefferson’s particular favorite among the females in his son-in-law’s family. She spent time at Monticello in the mid-1790s, in the wake of the Randolph siblings’ estrangement from Tuckahoe after their father’s marriage to Gabriella Harvie. She continued to visit the mountain over the years and came there to give birth to one of her children. In the end, she would have a son named William Beverley, as Jefferson and Hemings did before her, a name that had a very poignant and particular meaning for Thomas Jefferson.36
There is no way to know whether naming this child Harriet was Jefferson’s doing or Hemings’s. But Harriet was neither a Hemings family nor a Wayles family name. Hemings knew and could have liked Harriet Randolph enough to name her child after her—but certainly not more than she liked her own mother, many sisters, and nieces, for whom this little girl could have been named. The Hemingses had a positive mania for naming their children after one another. It was their way of reinforcing family connections in a world that gave no legal recognition to enslaved families. The family continued in this steady pattern over the generations, well into the twentieth century. We do not know the names of all of her brothers’ children, but Robert and Peter each named children after their siblings. Of her five female siblings, Sally Hemings was the only one who did not choose to, or did not get to, name any of her children after people in her family. It was not until her children began to have their own offspring that the name Wayles—first John Wayles Hemings and then Ellen Wayles Hemings—came back into her family line. In fact, two of her four sisters who had daughters named one of their own daughters after her. Her brother Peter and her nephew Burwell Colbert named one of their daughters Sarah. Hemings was apparently unable to return the honor to any of her relatives.37
Of course, naming children was important to white people, too. All of Jefferson’s children with his wife had family names. Because his wife shared the name Martha with his sister, it is impossible to say whom the couple’s first daughter was really named for: this was a happy and useful coincidence. The co
uple’s two youngest children, both of whom died, were in succession named Lucy Elizabeth, a name that combined that of two Jefferson sisters, and Elizabeth, which was also the name of one of Martha’s sisters. The two other daughters, Jane and Mary, were definitely the names of Jefferson’s mother and sister. In the end, the balance clearly favored Thomas over Martha, as all of their children ended up with names that were held by people in his immediate nuclear family.38 As with Sally Hemings and her children, this one-sided way of naming a group of siblings was the work either of a woman trying very hard to please a man or of a man who felt his children should bear his mark.
While Elizabeth Hemings’s presence on the mountain allowed her to play the role of helpful grandmother, she was not the only resource available to her daughter. At some point in 1796, eight-year-old Edy Hern moved into Sally Hemings’s household to help look after Harriet. Edy was the daughter of David Hern and his wife, Isabel, the woman who was originally slated to go to Paris with Maria Jefferson. Edy was replaced in 1797 by her younger sister Aggy when she turned eight years old.39 According to Jefferson’s specifications in the 1790s, enslaved children below the age of ten served as nurses for infants and very small children, apparently under the general direction of elderly enslaved women, but this did not require having the child move in with the enslaved mother. Hemings’s duties as Jefferson’s chambermaid and seamstress during this period did not likely require personal nurses for her daughter, particularly not ones who stayed overnight. This arrangement did provide someone to be with Hemings’s child when she was with Jefferson.
JUST AS MONTICELLO as a physical entity in the 1790s differed markedly from its later incarnations, the social life of the place during those years was also different. The endless stream (horde) of visitors that marked Jefferson’s retirement years, his passel of grandchildren, did not exist in the mid-1790s. There were many visitors, of course; the hospitality of the age required entertaining guests and putting up travelers who needed a place to stay while on the road. But it was nothing like what was to come. By the end of the 1790s, there were only three Jefferson grandchildren, and Martha and Thomas Mann Randolph were not yet permanent residents of Monticello. The Hemings sisters undoubtedly had things to do, but by far the busiest people on the mountain during those years were Jefferson’s workmen and nail boys, who were putting in motion his dreams for his house and for finding a path toward economic security in his new vision of a more “humanitarian” form of slavery. In those same years, an event in the lives of the Hemings family reinforced the basic impossibility of that vision.
Nancy Hemings and Her Children, Billy and Critta
While some of Elizabeth Hemings’s children were about to or had left slavery and Monticello, another, Nancy Hemings, came back to the mountain in 1795, after a ten-year absence. When Jefferson was in Paris, his youngest sister, Anna, married Hastings Marks. Nancy Hemings and her two children, Billy and Critta, were part of the marriage settlement that Jefferson provided to the couple. Marks decided, sometime in 1795, that he wanted to sell Hemings, and may have been thinking of separating her family. Jefferson’s sister told him of this because she knew that Hemings was an expert weaver and that Jefferson wanted to resume the “business of domestic manufacture.” He noted that Hemings was “34. years of age” and, he believed, had “ceased to breed.”40 He wanted her to come back to the mountain and teach others how to weave, and begin his textile shop. Desperate to avoid sale to an unknown person, Hemings asked Jefferson to purchase her and her family. He flatly refused to buy Billy, who was fifteen, but said he was willing to buy Critta, age twelve, if Hemings insisted—as if there had ever been a chance she would not. In the end, Jefferson bought Nancy, and she returned to Monticello, and his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph purchased Critta. Unlike her brother, whose fate is unknown, Critta was at least within easy visiting distance of her mother at nearby Edgehill plantation, where she became a nurse to Martha Randolph’s children.41
No matter how “close” the Hemingses were to Jefferson, no matter that he viewed some of them in a different light and did not subject them to certain hardships, their family remained a commodity that could be sold or exchanged at his will. As the years went by, the newest members of the family would become even further removed from the original connection that had made the Hemingses special in the first place, and would receive little benefit from their genetic heritage. In truth, Nancy Hemings, who was not a Wayles daughter, was never fully part of that connection to begin with. If she had been, Jefferson would not have given her to his sister. Robert, James, and Sally Hemings, living in whatever metaphorical greenhouse Jefferson had placed them in, could not save all their relatives from the most painful realities of slavery if doing that conflicted with Jefferson’s, or his white family’s, interests. After all, this whole problem arose because he chose to use Nancy and her children as wedding presents for the benefit of his sister. While it is true that he really did not have the money to buy Nancy and her children, and actually bought Nancy on credit, it would not have bankrupted Jefferson to have bought her son, too, or persuaded his son-in-law to purchase the youngster. That the sales of Nancy and Critta happened simultaneously indicates that Jefferson asked Tom Randolph to buy Critta so that she could be near her mother. But, in his view, Billy was essentially an adult, and his ties to his mother and sister did not warrant extra expenditures by him or Randolph.
In September of this same year, Jefferson recorded the deed of manumission he had drawn up for Nancy’s half brother Robert.42 It had taken Robert just nine months to pay his debt to Dr. Stras, and he became the first member of the Hemings family to obtain formal freedom. So, while this event, along with James’s coming emancipation and the birth of Harriet Hemings, helped make a new story of the Hemingses’ lives at Monticello, Nancy Hemings’s separation from her son, Billy, shows starkly how the deeply tragic reality of slavery always remained the same.
25
INTO THE FUTURE, ECHOES FROM THE PAST
ON FEBRUARY 26, 1796, James Hemings received thirty dollars from Thomas Jefferson “to bear” his expenses to Philadelphia.1 This time Hemings was not going ahead to prepare for a Jefferson arrival. In fact, his departure had nothing to do with Jefferson at all. Two years and one month after he had returned to Monticello to train his brother Peter to be a chef, James Hemings was leaving slavery for good. Approaching the fourth decade of his life, he became the second member of the Hemings family to achieve formal freedom.
Although Jefferson had signed the deed of manumission three weeks earlier, Hemings had remained in place, perhaps preparing for his journey and saying a long goodbye to his family. There was undoubtedly much for him to do, leaving a life behind as he was. He would have had to find a place to live, a place to send his possessions, of which there were probably a good number. For about eight of the preceding ten years, he had been a paid employee in Paris, New York, and Philadelphia—places that gave him ample opportunity to acquire things. Certainly all of his belongings that Jefferson had shipped from the Hôtel de Langeac would go along with him now. These were, of course, strictly his own affairs, and Jefferson’s records give no account of Hemings’s preparations for his new life. Indeed, the only thing he left by way of a valediction that we have access to came from his old one: the list he prepared of all his kitchen utensils from Paris that would now be left in Peter’s hands.2
James Hemings’s choice of destination shows how different he was from his brother Robert, either by temperament or by experience. The elder brother was a family man of long standing, having developed a settled place for himself in Richmond, where his wife, son, and daughter lived. His settlement may not have been strictly a matter of choice, for we do not know when the rest of his family became free—whether it was before or after his own emancipation. By all appearances, however, Frederick Stras wanted to help Hemings. He seems like the sort who would have imposed lenient terms for the emancipation of Dolly and their children, for he was trying to unit
e their family. We do know that in 1802, Robert and Dolly’s daughter, Elizabeth, became a legally married woman, which she could not have done had she still been enslaved.
Even long after all his family was emancipated, Robert Hemings chose to remain in Richmond, instead of seeking a new life in the North. Though nowhere near as populous as Philadelphia, the town did have its attractions. The 1800 census recorded 5,737 residents, which was large by Virginia standards. It was well situated on the James River, with a port that had a long history of shipping farmers’ goods to other American cities and across the Atlantic to England. After it became Virginia’s capital, in 1780, it grew quickly with lawyers and other functionaries of government arriving to take their place in society. Tobacco, wheat, coal, and the production of iron, in state-run industries, fueled its economy.3
Richmond’s large black community, a little over two thousand enslaved and about six hundred free, had created a vibrant culture in the midst of oppression. Some free blacks managed to carve out stable existences, owning shops of various types. Others, like Robert Hemings, had their own fruit stands and hauling businesses.4 Although Hemings was by no means prosperous, he so wanted to be his own man after a life spent acting at Jefferson’s beck and call. We can see that in the image of Hemings—the former “privileged” manservant, now in his midthirties hawking fruit to passersby, braving all sorts of weather, exchanging money and pleasantries, and, on occasion, no doubt, encountering more hostile reactions from members of the public. Martha Randolph remembered seeing him often in Richmond, probably at his fruit stand.
Because of his former position, Hemings could have been, had he wanted to, something of a minor celebrity in Richmond, particularly when Jefferson occupied the highest offices in the country. There is no reason to believe that he would have wanted to divulge secrets about Jefferson, but he wouldn’t have had to go that far to cash in on the public’s desire to be connected to a famous and highly regarded person. I just bought fruit from a man who used to be the confidential servant of Thomas Jefferson! Hemings did, in fact, become the object of attention in the town after Jefferson’s life with his sister was exposed by Richmond-based newspapers. It was from that scrutiny of him in 1802 that we learn that he had “some infirmity” in one of his arms, which explains why he did not ply his trade as a barber. By that time he had become a property owner, having half a lot on Grace and Seventh Street in Richmond. Isaac Jefferson recollected that Hemings had his hand blown off in a gun accident. He did not say when this happened, but it seems likely that it was by 1802, which accounts for the reference to his infirmity.5 Jefferson perhaps exaggerated. A missing hand would not likely be termed “some infirmity.”
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 64