Jefferson never gave a good account of why none of Fossett’s relatives by marriage were chosen for her assignment, or to work alongside her in other capacities. When he was governor of Virginia, he took almost his entire household staff to Williamsburg and Richmond. Although he did not repeat this when he went to Philadelphia as secretary of state, he had a good reason. His daughters were still living on the mountain. Martha and her husband had yet to settle into a habitable place, and Maria would not join him in Philadelphia for several months. Both Jefferson daughters were married by the time he became president, and the Hemings women were in “idleness” at Monticello when he was away.
Jefferson did give an explanation of sorts for his choice when he expressed his preference for having white servants in the President’s House. It was easier, he said, to sever ties with them were they to “misbehave”—an odd statement, given the facts of life in his Washington household. He actually had a number of black servants there, enslaved and free, and it is unfathomable that he really believed that Peter, Sally, and Critta Hemings, and Betty Brown, or any of the younger generation of Hemingses, for that matter, would have behaved so atrociously in Washington that he might have wanted to “exchange them.” As for Peter Hemings, we have no reason at all to think that his evidently agreeable personality made Jefferson leave him at home. There was likely something else. While he enjoyed Peter’s cooking and thought highly of him overall, he apparently did not believe James’s younger brother his equal in talent and, thus, up to the task of being chef in the President’s House. There is no hint that Critta Hemings ever gave anyone a problem, and the few reports of Sally Hemings give the impression of a sweet and reasonable person. Betty Brown may have been another matter. A Jefferson granddaughter at one point described her as being “a greater virago than ever,”2 suggesting that she had been one for a long time, but Brown was not so much trouble that Jefferson made any move to get rid of her. She did have small children, but Edith Fossett and Frances (Fanny) Gillette Hern, Fossett’s sister-in-law who joined her in Julien’s kitchen in 1806, would have small children, too. Between the two of them, five youngsters were born in the President’s House, including James Fossett, evidently named for Joseph Fossett’s tragically lost uncle.
Why Jefferson did not bring Sally Hemings to Washington on a full-time basis is obvious. Living with her anyplace other than Monticello would have caused all sorts of complications, not the least of them cute babies running around who looked just like him. And having a woman in the President’s House whom he favored, but who lacked the recognized power of a wife, could have created all sorts of jealousy and tension among the domestic staff—the kind of thing Jefferson sought to avoid at all cost. This was particularly so since at least five white women—the wife of Jefferson’s chef, the wives of two other servants, and two laundresses—lived at the President’s House. Each of the wives, at various times, worked for Jefferson, too.3 This was the largest group of white women at any of Jefferson’s residences when he was in public life. There had been one female cook at the Hôtel de Langeac before James Hemings took over as chef and before Sally Hemings arrived. There was, of course, the ill-fated Mrs. Seche, the wife of his coachman in Philadelphia who had tangled with Adrien Petit, whom Jefferson had brought all the way from France to be his housekeeper. The presence of five white women, and the children of one of the women, changed the usually male dynamic of Jefferson’s away-from-Monticello households, and one suspects that the situation would have been potentially volatile had Sally Hemings and her sisters lived in the President’s House.
Jefferson’s white daughters had grown up with the Hemings women and were used to their special status. Their family history allowed them to put these women in context. Very importantly, they had the luxury of viewing them from their positions as the unquestioned mistresses of Monticello whenever they were in residence. The middling and lower-class white women in Jefferson’s presidential household could have had no ingrained understanding of how these women fit into Jefferson’s world, and no firm basis for security about their status in his eyes. There would almost inevitably have come a moment when Jefferson would have had to arbitrate some dispute between these free white women and the enslaved African American women whom he had encouraged all their lives to see themselves as having a special relationship to him. Mrs. Seche’s dispute with Petit, and the trouble it caused Jefferson, comes most immediately to mind as an example. There Jefferson was forced to choose between one servant to whom he had long-standing ties and another who was only recently of his world. Petit was nowhere near as close to Jefferson as the Hemings women. If they had been mixed in with his Washington “family,” and he made the wrong choice about one of them, an “anti-Hemings” choice, he would not only have upset his household in Washington; the hard feelings would have traveled all the way back to Monticello. There were always benefits and burdens to having his household staff on the mountain composed of one family. Whatever he did for, or to, one member would be known and judged by the others. Under the circumstances it was far better to have a staff made up of people who were on relatively equal footing in terms of their associations with him.
A complement of reasons, of varying strengths lay behind Jefferson’s choice to leave the Hemingses at home when he went to Washington. His evolving sense of himself and his position in the world also influenced his relationship to the family. Jefferson had been remaking his image from the time he was elected vice-president in 1796. With his ascent to that office, the age of the plain, austere Jefferson had arrived, and he carried it through his presidency and beyond. Much has been made of his shift from the somewhat Frenchified southern aristocrat, to the plainly attired, unassuming embodiment of republican simplicity and virtue, his straight hair undressed and unpowdered. Was it all an act, an example of Jeffersonian duplicity and hypocrisy? If it was an act, it was a useful one. Politics is theater, and the successful politician is the one who can skillfully bring just the right symbolism to the cultural and political moment at hand. Jefferson understood that political power was shifting to the so-called common man, and that it was therefore critical to do away with the most obvious trappings of Old World elitism.
Even as his Federalist opponents ridiculed this new homespun version of Jefferson, the voters took to it. They were not dumb. They knew he was a wealthy man compared with them, but they apparently appreciated that he at least made the effort to appear as one of their own—thus acknowledging that they were the country’s political future. This cost Jefferson little, as his new persona easily took him into what today would be known as shabby chic—like the modern-day trust funder so confident in his social position that he uses duct tape to wrap up his worn docksiders when he could easily buy a thousand new pairs. Certainly the Federalists ultimately did themselves no favor by making sport of Jefferson’s attempts to appear in solidarity with the common people. The fun all ended for them, of course, with the election of 1800.
This new incarnation of Jefferson not only affected his public conduct but also altered the way he deployed his personal servants. Members of the Hemings family, and others enslaved at Monticello, had been the most obvious evidence of his high position in society. What could have been more elitist than having Robert and then James Hemings following him about as his manservant? In later years his grandson-in-law Nicholas Trist, in keeping with that generation of the family’s habit of saying things about Jefferson’s life that were patently untrue in order to control his image, claimed that Jefferson “usually” did without a “body servant.” According to Trist, his famous in-law followed the motto that one was “never to allow another to do for you what you can do for yourself.” It was, therefore, Trist explained, “incompatible with the sentiment of Manhood, as it existed in him, that one human being should be followed about by another as his shadow.”4 Leaving aside the fact that Jefferson could probably have handled a plow as well as—and probably better than—many of the men and women he had tilling his fields, Trist’s sta
tement erases significant portions of the life and efforts of Jupiter Evans, Robert and James Hemings, and Burwell Colbert. All of these men were, at one time or another, Jefferson’s body servants. Evans and the Hemings brothers were before Trist’s time at Monticello, but he knew that Colbert was, in Jefferson’s later years, virtually his “shadow.” The notion that Jefferson had no use for such things was born in the 1790s, and with it came a change in the trajectory of his life with the Hemingses. There were still other factors.
As many historians have also noted, Jefferson’s overall attitude regarding slavery underwent a subtle shift after his return from France. The young man who had been very vocal, for one of his station and place, on the subject of emancipation, fell pretty much silent from his middle age on. In earlier times he had spoken of legislated gradual emancipation when the idea was anathema to the overwhelming majority of his class cohort, and while in France he contemplated importing German workers to live and labor at Monticello along with slaves who would be freed and transformed into something akin to European tenant farmers. In a letter of 1789, he wrote,
I will settle them and my slaves, on farms of 50. acres each, intermingled, and place all on the footing of the Metayers…of Europe. Their children shall be brought up, as others are, in habits of property and foresight, and I have no doubt but that they will be good citizens.5
Jefferson ceased such talk in the 1790s. He was a national figure with his base in Virginia, where there was no strong clamor for abolitionist politics at any level of white society. Actually, no clamor existed at the national level either. Despite his protests to the contrary, once Jefferson saw in the early 1790s that his vision for America after the Revolution might actually be thwarted by Hamilton and his followers and what would become the “Federal party,” there was really little chance that he was going to walk away from politics altogether. Although he wrote to others about his seeming contentment during his first retirement, he later confessed to his daughter Maria that he had been deeply unhappy for long stretches of time during that period.6 He loved Monticello, but he simply did not find enough there to occupy his time, particularly when there were really pressing things he wanted to have happen on the national political scene. Jefferson was not ready for retirement until he had been in the position to try to accomplish what he thought should be accomplished for the United States. His election in 1800 allowed him to do that. Building the nation was Jefferson’s true obsession, not the end of slavery and definitely not the racial question.
As he retreated from the antislavery rhetoric of his youth, and grew comfortable in his role as the champion of the common man (the common white man), Jefferson, like others of his type, began to accommodate himself to the institution of slavery. As was discussed earlier, Lucia Stanton has detailed his plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory. He also brought in overseers who eschewed violence in favor of incentives as a way of motivating enslaved workers; for unexplained reasons, however, the men did not remain in his service. Jefferson was again, in all of this, ahead of his time—on the leading edge of adopting the sort of paternalism that would in the coming decades turn his white grandchildren’s generation into full-throated apologists for the peculiar institution.
One of the signs of the change in Jefferson is that he never again put an enslaved man from Monticello in the position that Martin, Robert, and James Hemings occupied. Their relative freedom in the 1770s and 1780s made sense in the heady days of the American Revolution and the pre–Saint Domingue early American Republic. Jefferson was not inclined to free these men totally—he never really wanted to let go of anyone who had ever been close to him—but they were able to move about as if they were free. This cannot have been a matter of his greater affection for these three men than for the ones he encountered later. There is no reason to believe that he felt closer to Martin Hemings than to Burwell Colbert. He probably liked him less, but he gave the elder Hemings a much wider range of operation than he did Colbert, who was thoroughly of the home.
Colbert was thirteen when Jefferson became vice-president, seventeen when he became president, and Jefferson had already singled him out as a special favorite. Although he worked in the nailery, he was not indispensable there, and certainly could have attended Jefferson in Philadelphia and Washington. In the 1770s his uncle Robert at age twelve was following Jefferson around on horseback and acting as his manservant. In the 1780s it was sometimes the teenage James Hemings. John Freeman, the man Jefferson hired to fill a role that Colbert could have played at the President’s House—that of footman, waiter, and traveling attendant to Jefferson—was only three years older than Colbert and did not have the advantage of long acquaintance with Jefferson. Ironically enough, Freeman became a member of the Hemings family through his marriage to Colbert’s sister Melinda.7
Bringing Colbert to Washington would not have been a case of taking a person who had no knowledge of service and putting him out of his league. Colbert, his brother, and cousins also worked in the house at Monticello and knew what it meant to serve there. By the mid-1800s Colbert had experience as a painter and glazer, but there is no indication that he was allowed to leave Monticello and ply his trade for others during the months that Jefferson was away. Instead, Jefferson told his overseer to give him spending money whenever he asked. This was the difference between treating a person as an adult versus treating him as a child, which, after all, is what paternalism is about.
It appears that Jefferson did not want his particular “favored” slaves to see and get used to the outside world. Just as he did not want “city negroes” at Monticello, at a certain point he no longer wanted his favorite Monticello “negroes” to go to the city. This was particularly true of Colbert, whose presence in Washington would have made the most sense. After all, what had been Jefferson’s experiences with the young man’s uncles? The end result of their autonomy and forays in the world at large was that each of them grew restless in his service and anxious to end his formal association with him. When they wanted to leave, he was not emotionally prepared to thwart them, though he easily could have. So he avoided this possible “bad” scenario by leaving the person who most reasonably could have played a role in Washington at home and making him stay there.
The only other enslaved people Jefferson brought from the mountain to live and work in the President’s House were teenage girls, all of them to be trained as cooks. The first, Ursula, who joined the Hemings family when she became the wife of Wormley Hughes, was a member of another important family at Monticello with ties all the way back to Jefferson’s wife. She was the granddaughter of George and Ursula Granger, the “King” and “Queen” of Monticello and the niece of Isaac of the famed memoir and photograph. George Granger was the only black man to serve as an overseer at Monticello, and his wife, Ursula, had been the head cook before the Hemings brothers took over the position in the days after Jefferson returned from Paris. Ursula, it will be remembered, served as a wet nurse for Jefferson’s eldest daughter when her mother was unable to produce enough milk for her and the Jeffersons feared the infant might die. Ursula’s “good breast of milk,” as Jefferson put it, saved her life.
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the Granger family faced its own catastrophe. George and Ursula, and their eldest son, George Jr., all died in less than a twelve-month period in 1799 and 1800. After falling ill, each consulted a black doctor in a nearby county who gave them medicine that the Jefferson family believed poisoned them. Jupiter Evans, who also died in 1800, had consulted the same doctor, who, in Martha Randolph’s words, “absconded” after learning of Evans’s death.8 Given her family history, and the still fresh tragedy that must have devastated her, the remaining members of the Granger family, and the other members of the enslaved community at Monticello, Jefferson’s idea to have the fourteen-year-old Ursula Granger come to Washington and train to be Monticello’s new cook, like her grandmother and namesake before her, appear
s a sentimental choice.
Jefferson’s plan did not work. Ursula lasted less than a year. She was actually a few months pregnant when she came to the President’s House, a fact no doubt unknown to Jefferson when he decided to bring her to Washington. Indeed, Ursula’s child, not Martha Jefferson Randolph’s son James, was the first child born in the President’s House.9 Being pregnant, and a first-time mother with an infant, was not the best way to begin an apprenticeship to a French chef. She apparently did not fare well as a cook trainee and went home to resume life as an agricultural worker, and to have nine more children with her husband, Wormely Hughes. Her efforts in Washington were not totally lost, because she often helped out in the kitchen when she was not in the fields. Edith Fossett and Frances Hern were her replacements, and these “two good girls” as Jefferson’s maître d’hôtel at the President’s House, Etienne Lemaire, called them, succeeded where Ursula apparently failed. In fact, Fossett became the head of the kitchen at Monticello when Jefferson retired from politics in 1809, Peter Hemings having moved on to other trades, including that of a brewer. It was Fossett’s cooking that visitors to Monticello like Margaret Thornton and Daniel Webster would extol in the years to come.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 70