Hemings was not alone in choosing to work on his own rather than going back into service. A number of freed blacks, often to the great annoyance of white observers who wanted them to work as domestics, preferred precarious lives as vendors, chimney sweeps, and laundresses to going back into the homes of white families on a daily basis. Hemings could have stayed on working for Stras or, with a letter of introduction from Jefferson and Stras, found a decent position in the home of another gentleman. He evidently wanted no more part of the kind of entangling alliances that had so defined his family—even to the point of blood.
Not that Hemings ever completely disentangled himself from Jefferson. Because his own family remained there, he visited Monticello on occasion. In 1799 Jefferson mentioned to his cousin and business agent in Richmond, George Jefferson, that Hemings had promised to obtain for him “a preparation of the lemon juice called in the W. Indies center but which he [Hemings] called by some other name.”6 There is no correspondence about this, so Hemings and Jefferson likely talked about the matter when Hemings was at Monticello. Later, when he wanted Hemings to buy him twelve bottles of the drink, he directed George Jefferson to relay the message to Hemings and then pay him for the beverage. After Hemings’s report that he could not find the drink, Jefferson decided to settle on regular lemon juice and asked that some be sent to him, with either George Jefferson or Hemings to buy it and be repaid. A few days later Hemings found the sought-after center, and George Jefferson sent it Monticello. Unbeknownst to George, Hemings had already sent along the lemon juice. He evidently told George this when he brought the news that he found the center, and he also told him that he didn’t expect payment. The lemon juice was, Jefferson’s cousin reported, “a present from Mr. Hemmings” (emphasis in the original).7
There are hints, however, that Hemings’s sense of connection to Jefferson went only so far. In that same year, when Jack, an enslaved man whom Jefferson had hired, ran away from Monticello to visit his wife in Richmond, Jefferson wrote to his cousin George on May 18 to make inquiries about Jack. George wrote back to Jefferson on June 3, reporting that he had asked Robert Hemings whether he knew anything of the man and that Hemings said he did not. George then asked Hemings to speak with one of Jack’s former employers to try to find out where he might be, but as of the date of his letter Hemings had not done so.8 Whether or not this was Hemings’s deliberate attempt to be noncooperative on Jack’s behalf, his actions were dilatory and bought Jack that much more time away from slavery. By this record Hemings had no pressing interest in helping the Jeffersons apprehend a slave who had escaped from Monticello.
While free blacks like Hemings enjoyed some breathing room in Richmond, the many enslaved blacks living there also had an unusual amount of autonomy. Historians have long noted the difficulty of controlling enslaved people outside the context of rural plantation life, and Richmond with its large number of hired slaves was no different. The Hemings brothers had not been unique in traveling there to find work in the 1780s. Nor was Jack, the escapee from Monticello, unusual. Virginia’s shift during the post-Revolutionary period, from growing tobacco to growing wheat, altered normal work patterns on plantations. The new crop required less labor overall than tobacco cultivation, creating longer periods when there was no work to be done in the fields. It was in the direct interest of slave owners to have their slaves gainfully employed instead of waiting idly for work on the farm. So they sent them to Richmond to find work there or be hired by other farmers, as Jefferson had done with Jack. These men, and sometimes women, usually turned all or most of their wages over to their owners. A few others, like the Hemings brothers, kept the money. Whatever their circumstances, the people who remained in town gained valuable information about how to maneuver in the world beyond the plantation.9
Their more independent existence emboldened Richmond’s black residents in ways that often discomfited whites. In the same letter in which he groused about Robert Hemings’s plan for emancipation, Jefferson, asking his son-in-law to hire some male slaves for him in the Richmond market for the coming January, stipulated that they be from “the country” and not from Richmond. He did not “chuse,” he wrote, to have men from the city mix “with [his] own negroes.”10 Those Richmond “negroes” would come to Monticello with their city dwellers’ heightened expectations and diverse experiences and wreak havoc in the limited and settled world of rural plantation life. He had had quite enough of that. In the sentences immediately following, Jefferson gave the bitter (to him) proof of the deleterious effects that cities had upon slaves: Robert Hemings, with confidence and contacts developed in Richmond, had wanted to leave him.
The town was, in Rhys Isaac’s description, “a fickle, polymorphous segregated, non-segregated…fast-growing” place, where laborers, black and white, shared space with a much smaller number of privileged whites.11 These poor and middling types were making their own rules in ways sometimes troubling to the town’s more prosperous citizens, who preferred it if each social and racial group stayed in its designated place. At the same time, some better-off whites took advantage of the freewheeling attitude, particularly the great frequency of interracial socializing. Blacks and whites who worked together during the day continued their contact in bars and other gatherings at work’s end.
James Callender, who in six years would become the scourge of Robert Hemings’s sister Sally, spent time in Richmond at the end of the 1790s and early 1800s and was among the most vocal and expressive critics of its milieu. From his position as a columnist for the Richmond Examiner, the town’s major newspaper, he railed against the “black dances” and barbecues often attended by white men of all strata of society. The rabidly racist Scottish émigré was outraged to see white men sitting in boxes at the local theater with their black girlfriends. As it turned out, his boss, Meriwether Jones, the editor of the Examiner, had a black mistress. When he and Callender fell out over Callender’s exposé of Jefferson’s life with Sally Hemings, Callender dubbed Lewis’s paramour “Mistress Examiner.” Of course, this sort of mixing went on in rural venues as well, but the openness in Richmond violated norms of secrecy-based decorum. It was one thing to carry on these liaisons with black women in the privacy of the home, quite another to appear with them in public.12
While the needs of the domestic economy and cultural mores shaped the social and racial climate in Richmond, news from the outside had an impact as well. Two world-defining revolutions—in France and Saint Domingue (Haiti)—put the issues of liberty and slavery into the public discourse in the most profound way—an especially important and difficult conversation in a fledgling country conceived in both liberty and chattel slavery. The two events had different implications for white and black Americans. Fresh from their own break with a monarchical system, most white Americans initially supported the French Revolution. As noted earlier, while James and Robert Hemings were in New York in 1790, those calling for the abolition of slavery, black and white, linked their struggle to the spirit of ’89 in France. After the execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793 and the excesses of Robespierre, the mood changed. French émigrés escaping the Terror brought news of France’s spiral out of control, furthering skepticism about the new day dawning in the country of America’s first ally. France and its revolution galvanized politics at the national level for all of the 1790s.
Saint Domingue, which came quickly on the heels of the French uprising, was a different story from the start, at least for many whites. The 1791 uprising there, and subsequent battle for control of what had been France’s richest colony, raised the specter of slave revolts in the South. Although the United States had been born because Americans had fought—killed and been killed—to secure their liberty, many white Americans were alarmed about Saint Domingue. The black rebels apparently did not understand. Whites could fight and kill other whites for their freedom, and they could certainly fight and kill nonwhites for it. Blacks, however, were never to fight and kill whites for their freedom—thei
r liberty not being worth that particular cost. Speaking of the evils of slavery in the abstract, instantly abolishing the institution in places with minuscule numbers of blacks, and enacting gradual emancipation plans along timetables suiting the needs of whites, kept the notion of white supremacy firmly in place. What was happening in Saint Domingue was altogether different, and the image of empowered blacks taking freedom on their own terms was a nightmare scenario for Jefferson and most other whites.
If whites were uneasy, blacks in Richmond and other places immediately identified with the rebels in Saint Domingue. By the end of the 1790s, the talk of the rebels’ success on the island inspired an enslaved blacksmith, Gabriel, to recruit black men—and lower-class whites, he hoped—to seize the armory at Richmond, take Governor James Monroe hostage, and force the end of slavery in Virginia. The evidently widespread plot, in place by 1799, was foiled, but the fear it struck in white Virginians changed the climate in the state. If the American Revolution prompted emancipation in the North, and brought liberalized emancipation to Virginia, Gabriel and Saint Domingue led to retrenchment. The charismatic blacksmith and many of his followers were hanged, along with some number of others who may not have been involved. “We were too lax,” white Virginians explained, and local communities began to pass laws prohibiting, among other things, the congregation of enslaved blacks and free blacks, a pairing seen as the root of the “evil” of the uprising.13
One wonders what Robert Hemings knew of these matters. Dr. Stras, his erstwhile benefactor, was a French émigré. Robert and Dolly were connected to his household when the turmoil on the island began, and he certainly had thoughts about the matter. It is possible, indeed probable, that Robert Hemings, whose business brought him into daily contact with members of the public, actually knew Gabriel, or at least knew of him. The blacksmith apparently cut an impressive figure in the town, and the population of blacks was not so large that there could have been many degrees of separation between people of color. Information affecting their community could not have been kept from them. The slave/African American network being what it was, it is very likely that Hemings had heard something of Gabriel’s plan to fight for freedom for all enslaved Virginians. Hemings already had his freedom. He just had to make the most of it in a community that was growing ever more wary of and hostile toward people like him and his family.
RICHMOND EVIDENTLY HELD no attraction for James Hemings. His brother had an established life there and was already in the town. It was not uncommon—indeed, it was even expected—that family members would pool their resources. In the years to come, when they had the chance, members of the Hemings family did exactly that, living together to cut down on expenses, taking in relatives, helping to secure loans for one another, and buying one another’s freedom. The brothers may, in fact, have supported each other in ways that cannot be learned from the extant record. We cannot know the conversations the two had about what they planned to do in life after they were freed. Did one brother ever try to persuade the other of the benefits of life in the places where they chose to settle? On the other hand, one cannot assume that, because they were brothers, they necessarily got along well enough to live with, or close to, each other when they did not have to.
Given his life to date, Philadelphia made sense for James Hemings in a way that Richmond did not. More cosmopolitan than Robert, and with no known wife or children, he had a greater desire, and capacity, to test the outer limits of freedom. He was picking up where he had left off in 1794 in a place that he knew well from having lived there for three years. With any luck, any of his Philadelphia contacts would still be in the city and could be sources of aid and support—just what many others in his position were seeking. There was also Benjamin Rush, Jefferson’s friend, who had enjoyed many of Hemings’s meals and had a well-established record of aiding blacks independent of their association with any of his white friends. Hemings probably had a better basis for approaching Rush than any of the other free blacks who sought the doctor’s help. The city was still considered a “refuge” for newly emancipated blacks and for fugitive slaves alike, with its small but growing middling class who through churches and civic organizations did what they could to help other members of their race. There was another group of likely interest to Hemings whose numbers had grown since he had left the city: French-speaking blacks—a few free, and the much larger number of enslaved people who were brought along with white refugees from Saint Domingue. Hemings would have known people like them when he was in Paris, and he, unlike other American blacks, would at least have had the chance to communicate with them in their native language, which many of them sought to preserve as long as they could.14
Whether the presence of this Francophone group, forced travelers as most of them were, provided the spark, or whether it was just his own wanderlust, Hemings did not stay in Philadelphia long; instead, he embarked upon a period of travel apparently within the United States and overseas. Again, we know this because of Jefferson. As it turned out, of course, Jefferson did not stay retired. He became vice-president of the United States to President John Adams in 1796. The office carried him back to Philadelphia, where he took up residence (as infrequently as decency would allow) after his election. In May of 1797 he wrote to his daughter Maria, “James is returned to this place, and is not given up to drink as I had before been informed. He tells me his next trip will be to Spain. I am afraid his journeys will end in the moon. I have endeavored to persuade him to stay where he is and lay up money.”15 Along with the completely delicious irony of seeing Jefferson tell another person to save money, this passage presents a fascinating look into James Hemings’s state of mind in the aftermath of his emancipation. In the immediate post–Civil War period, whites, sometimes with disdain, commented upon the former slaves’ seeming love of travel. People who had been forcibly detained on plantations, in servant quarters in urban areas, wanted to go. Freedom meant movement. Now many of these people, as whites probably did not think about or choose to acknowledge, were seeking to reconstitute families shattered during slavery. They were traveling to search for loved ones who had been sold away from them, often to distant parts of the country.
James Hemings knew where his relatives were, and they were not in Paris, his probable first destination after Philadelphia, nor were they in Spain. He was looking for something else—perhaps no more than any other person who wants to see the world and has the chance, though Jefferson’s report indicates that he was particularly restless. Jefferson’s endeavor to keep him in one place grew out of his own deep attachments—to familiar place, things, and people. Perhaps he and the younger man simply had different personalities. Hemings, with no wife and family to keep him in one place, seems to have preferred adventure and variety over stability and comforting familiarity.
Then there is the question of Hemings’s drinking. Chefs in the eighteenth century were notorious drinkers. There is, however, no way to know whether Hemings was really an alcoholic at this point, for not all who drink, or even all who drink to excess at times, fit that category. The drastic report of his having giving himself up to drink apparently came from someone who knew Jefferson well enough to know that he would be interested in a report on Hemings’s condition—Henrietta Gardiner, perhaps, or Benjamin Rush, who long had an interest in the causes and effects of alcoholism. Whether his characterization of the report on Hemings was one of his customary exaggerations, or whether it was the person who had relayed the information who was exaggerating, the meeting with Hemings reassured Jefferson. He was apparently not there when Jefferson first arrived in Philadelphia, or else Jefferson would not have had to rely upon others to give him information about his former servant. Like his brother Robert, James Hemings still felt some vestigial connection to Jefferson. It is telling that when he returned to Philadelphia from his travels, evidently just long enough to start out again, he spent time with the man who had owned him, and still owned the rest of his family, save for Robert Hemings. That was a real
ity that he could not travel far enough to escape.
The First Son
When Jefferson returned to Philadelphia in 1797 to take office as vice-president, he was intent upon spending as little time in the city as he could. And the lightness of his duties in that office enabled him to follow his plan. So unlike his sojourn in the city when he was secretary of state, this stay saw him make no substantial investment in his living quarters. There was no beautiful house with a French chef and maître d’hôtel, only rooms in John Francis’s hotel. Henrietta Gardner once again served as his laundress, and he made do during his entire tenure in office with only one manservant at a time. Not long after he left Monticello in February of 1797 to take the oath of office, he received word from his daughter Martha that “poor little Harriot,” his child with Sally Hemings, had died at the age of two.16 Hemings, now twenty-four years old, was once again childless.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 65