The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  With his very traditional views about the natures of men and women, Jefferson probably saw these teenage girls as less likely to cause problems than teenage males, at least not the kind that would make them grow restless and want to go out into the world. All of them had ties to men at Monticello that they might not have wanted to break. It is true that Sally Hemings, a teenager, had rebelled temporarily in France, but her situation in Paris was quite different from that of Ursula’s, Edith’s, and Frances’s in Washington. The nation’s capital had no law that provided an easy avenue to freedom, no revolution was brewing just outside the walls of the President’s House, and the three teenagers in Washington had no older brother there helping them think they could build a life away from Jefferson.

  The presence of Hughes, Fossett, and Hern may have fueled the rumor that Jefferson kept a “stable of mulatto slave girls”10 at the President’s House, and had an African harem, for his sexual pleasure. We do not know about Ursula Granger’s mother, but, as noted earlier, the Grangers were not mixed race, and we have no reason to believe that Ursula would have been thought of as a “mulatto.” Precision, however, was not the point of these exercises, or perhaps Ursula represented the “African” part of the contingent. Some of Edith Fossett’s children passed for white, so she was likely fair-skinned, as was her husband, Joseph. The members of Frances Hern’s family, the Gillettes, were also described as mixed race.

  Whatever these young ladies’ skin color, President Jefferson lived under a cloud of suspicion about his relations with African American women. Because many whites saw engaging in interracial sex as something akin to a malady or an indelible character flaw, having sex with black women would be a recurring event for him, a terrible and mighty thing beyond his control. After the Hemings revelations, Jefferson, they said, was the kind of person who would do something like that. This racist formulation cast any African American woman in his vicinity as his likely mistress, with no consideration of how that might have distorted the lives of the women involved. If these women had children, they belonged to him. The great irony, of course, is that just as Jefferson moved to make the Hemingses strictly a part of his private world, his return to the public domain forced his private life with one family member out into the open.

  “His Mechanics”

  As the locus of Jefferson’s relations with the Hemingses shifted strictly to Monticello, John Hemings and Joseph Fossett—son and grandson, respectively, to Elizabeth Hemings—became the family’s new face at Monticello at the turn of the nineteenth century. Unlike their older relatives, these two young men, particularly Hemings, grew close to Jefferson, not as personal attendants but as craftsmen whose skills he respected. They began to come into their own in their separate fields during Jefferson’s presidency—Hemings, the carpenter and joiner, and Fossett, the blacksmith and metal-worker. These two young men, from very different pathways, became the most important enslaved artisans on the mountain.

  In many respects, the less well-known Joseph Fossett’s progress through life is the more poignant, for the theme of separation from family permeated the line of his mother, Mary Hemings, throughout their time at Monticello and afterward. Their experiences show starkly how tenuous the Hemingses’ “privileges” really were. Fossett’s elder brother and sister, Daniel and Molly, had been given as wedding presents in 1787 and 1790 when young Joseph, born in November 1780, was seven and then ten.11 We most typically think of the pain of the mother and child separated, but enslaved children suffered, too, when their brothers and sisters were taken from them. While children of all races and classes lived with the loss of siblings through death, young Joseph and his enslaved cohort knew they could lose their family members through the normal operations of the systems of slavery and property.

  When Daniel and Molly were taken, Joseph was old enough to know, and presumably miss, his older brother and sister. If fears of death brought nightmares to all young children who buried siblings, Joseph Fossett, at seven and ten, could lie in bed at night and fear that his time to be given away might come. Although Molly had served as Martha Randolph’s maid from around 1790, and probably came to Monticello when Martha visited, Daniel, whose last name was Farley, was farther away in Louisa County with Jefferson’s sister Anna Scott Marks. The removal of Daniel and Molly from Joseph Fossett’s daily life provided a harsh first lesson regarding his family’s true position in the world. Jefferson often spoke of the transfers of enslaved people between and among his white relatives as keeping slaves “in the family,” as if that mitigated the harshness of family breakups. Whatever he felt he had to tell himself in these situations, one seriously doubts that Mary Hemings and her children really considered Anna and Hastings Marks, or Martha and Tom Randolph, as members of their family.

  Around the same time his brother was given away, Joseph, along with his sisters Molly and Betsy, went to live in the home of Thomas Bell, who had leased their mother while Jefferson was in Paris. Two years after Molly was given to Martha Randolph, Joseph faced another loss when Bell bought his mother and the two children she had borne him during the time of the lease. Mary Hemings was forced to choose between the possibility of freedom for herself and her two youngest children and living in bondage with all four of the children left to her. She decided, of course, to remain with Bell, perhaps calculating that this offered the best chance to rescue her other children in the future. Joseph and Betsy’s aunts and uncles almost certainly stepped in to help raise the twelve-and nine-year-olds. That was a tradition born of necessity in enslaved families, for they always lived with the reality of separation and had to have ways of taking care of their own. It appears that these early and recurrent reminders of the fragility of family bonds in slavery, rather than breaking his sense of family, made Joseph Fossett more determined to keep his family together. As things turned out, he would need every ounce of that determination in the years to come.

  Fossett was twenty when Jefferson became president. One of the original nail boys in the Monticello plantation factory, he distinguished himself for his efficiency in churning out product for Jefferson. Like some of his other Hemings cousins in the nailery, he worked part-time in the house, a scene that united him with his sister Betsy, who had become Sally Hemings’s replacement as Maria Jefferson’s maid. The siblings lived together, for they were listed in the Farm Book in 1794, two years after they were separated from their mother, as making up their own household.12 When Betsy Hemings left the mountain in 1797, when Maria got married, Joseph, then approaching seventeen, became the last of Mary Hemings’s children to remain at Monticello.

  Fossett’s skill in the nailery suggested to Jefferson that the young man had a particular talent for metalworking. He therefore put the sixteen-year-old under the training of George Granger Jr. to become a blacksmith. Within a year of Granger’s death, in 1799, Fossett became the next foreman of the nail factory. He also came under the tutelage of the extremely talented, but equally erratic, William Stewart, the blacksmith from Philadelphia who lived next door to Fossett’s grandmother Elizabeth Hemings. Jefferson hired him in 1801, and from the beginning Stewart established a reputation for weirdness. When he was on his way to Monticello to begin work, he stopped in on Jefferson’s cousin George to ask for part of his salary in advance. George wrote to Jefferson in alarm, saying that his new workman “was either very much intoxicated or, is actually a madman.” He knew nothing of what Stewart was supposed to do at Monticello, and when he tried to get the information from him, the workman was so “incoherent” that George could not figure out what he was saying.13 Stewart nevertheless had a genius for metalworking and did masterly work at Monticello and passed on his skills to Joseph Fossett, among others.

  While Fossett continued at his trade, his wife, Edith, continued at the President’s House. The couple saw each other infrequently, for Jefferson typically left his trainee cooks behind when he went home to Monticello on vacations. The difficulties posed by having a long-distance marriage got to be too mu
ch for Fossett. Not long after Jefferson came home for his summer vacation in 1806 without Edith, Fossett left the mountain to go and see her. Lucia Stanton suggests that John Freeman and John (Jack) Shorter, two of Jefferson’s African American servants who had come to Monticello with him, had told Joseph something about his wife or their young son, James, that caused him to set out immediately for the capital.14

  When he found out that his blacksmith was gone, Jefferson wrote to Joseph Dougherty, his coachman at the President’s House, alerting him to the possibility that Fossett might be on the way there and telling him that he had “sent Mr. Perry in pursuit of a young mulattoe man named Joe, 27. years of age, who ran away from here the night of the 29th inst[ant] without the least word of difference with anybody, and indeed never in his life recieved a blow from anyone.” He went on to say that Fossett might “possibly trump up some story to be taken care of at the President’s house till he can make up his mind which way to go” and noted that Fossett might “make himself known to Edy only, as he was formerly connected with her.”15 The pair’s connection was “former” only to the extent that Jefferson had pulled them apart by bringing Edith to Washington.

  This episode is intriguing on a number of levels. First, there is Jefferson’s incredulity that Fossett would run away when in his view his blacksmith had had a good life at Monticello to date. There was some dim awareness that Fossett might be going to see his wife, but that did not appear to register as a reason important enough to make him leave. Jefferson was a very cagey correspondent, and there was almost certainly more to this episode than appears in his letter. Did Fossett simply leave after asking Jefferson for permission to visit his wife and being refused? If Jefferson did refuse the request, why? Abroad marriages were common at Monticello and on other plantations, and enslaved people were given permission to visit spouses who lived apart from them. Washington was farther away than a neighboring plantation, but enslaved people at Monticello traveled back and forth from the capital with no supervision.

  Jefferson knew that no matter how loyal enslaved persons appeared, no matter what “benefits” they received under slavery, there was always the underlying reality that they were not really happy to be enslaved. We see this in Jefferson’s instant and serious response—quickly employing a slave catcher to apprehend Fossett, instead of saying, “Oh, he’s just going to see his wife. He’ll be back.” He clearly thought Fossett was gone for good, the stop at the President’s House to see his wife just a way station on his flight to freedom, perhaps taking her with him.

  Fossett got to spend little time with Edith, for he was apprehended while leaving the grounds of the President’s House not long after he arrived. He spent the night in jail, and then Perry brought him back to Monticello. Etienne Lemaire was sympathetic to the “poor unhappy mulatto,” saying that he deserved “a pardon” for running away or, rather, running to see his wife, but we do not know how Jefferson received Fossett upon his return to the mountain.16 Madison Hemings described Jefferson as one who did not allow himself to be made unhappy for any great length of time. If anger and disquiet created a quotient of unhappiness in him, he apparently forgave those rather quickly who made him angry. The surest evidence that Jefferson bore no long-term rancor against Fossett is that less than a year later—when he could take his brilliant, but drunken, blacksmith William Stewart no longer, and fired him—he made Joseph Fossett the head of Monticello’s blacksmith shop.17

  From 1807 on, Fossett was at the very center of activity on the plantation, and he was a pivotal figure for many. He made things that were indispensable to life on a farm in the early nineteenth century—shoes for horses, tools for tilling the earth. When these items had to be repaired or needed sharpening, people returned to him, and not just members of his immediate community. Fossett’s shop on Mulberry Row served farmers and other residents in the area, bringing the Monticello community, enslaved and free, into contact with the world outside the plantation, countering the isolation that might otherwise have attended life on top of the mountain.

  When Jefferson was in residence, he spent a good deal of his time holed up in his bedroom/office writing, engaging the world through the republic of letters. Fossett’s blacksmith shop, strategically located on Mulberry Row and directly adjacent to Jefferson’s wing at Monticello and the homes of his relatives who worked in the house, was the exact counterpart to Jefferson’s more cloistered world. This was the republic of face-to-face communication, with all the glories and hazards of unguarded talk and revealing facial expressions and gestures. People of different statuses and races met to solve the problem at hand—a too dull plow, a broken horseshoe—even as all the mores and tensions of that slave society shaped their interactions. Here was a venue in which to discuss the latest serious news of the area and to gossip. Whether Fossett would have volunteered information about his aunt Sally is unclear. That depended upon how he felt about her and Jefferson. It is inconceivable, however, that during his years as the head of the blacksmith shop dealing directly with Jefferson’s white neighbors the subject never arose. Until he left public life in 1809, Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings was fodder for the political fights of the day. Even after he returned home, his neighbors continued to talk, and it is very likely that many who made the trip up the mountain hoped to catch a glimpse of the woman who was, at the time, the most well-known enslaved person in America.

  The Monticello blacksmith shop was more than just a social center: it was a business that turned a modest profit for Jefferson. It made money for Fossett, too. Following the practice begun with his nail factory, Jefferson wanted to create incentives for his artisans to work harder and better. So Fossett received one-sixth of the profits of the shop, in the same way that the Grangers had before. He was also allowed to do work on what was considered his own time and keep whatever money he made. He gave good value. Jefferson’s overseer Edmund Bacon, who began work at Monticello in 1805, said that Fossett “could do anything it was necessary to do with steel or iron,”18 combining his own natural talent with the teachings of William Stewart. One sees in Fossett and his uncle John Hemings, the carpenter and joiner, the way slavery exploited one of the noblest aspects of the human character: the desire and capacity to be creative. Talented artisans like Fossett and Hemings took pride in their capabilities and their work, and each had the artist’s will to perfection. They went beyond what they had to do, having fallen in love with their creations. Yet their creativity, which necessarily required some inner freedom from the restraint of convention, flowered in an atmosphere of coercion. This was the nature of the society they lived in, and Fossett and Hemings were better rewarded for their talent than many others, but the cruel reality at the heart of their lives remained.

  Woodworking was in John Hemings’s blood, his father, Joseph Neilson, having plied the trade at Monticello during the 1770s. He learned to be a professional joiner, however, from two white workmen whom Jefferson brought to the mountain, David (Davy) Watson and James Dinsmore. Watson had deserted the British army to remain in Virginia, and he was in the mold of William Stewart. Isaac Jefferson remembered him as a heroic drinker, who would “get drunk & sing,” sometimes wasting a week at a time when he was on a bender, leaving Hemings to pick up the slack.19 His first stint at Monticello came in the early 1780s and lasted for two years, before Jefferson embarked on the journeys that took him to Paris. Watson returned to Monticello in 1793 and stayed another four years. It was during this time that Jefferson gave the first inkling of his plans for the then seventeen-year-old Johnny Hemings, as he was wont to call him. In the midst of a set of elaborate instructions sent to his son-in-law Tom Randolph from Philadelphia, the secretary of state wrote, “As to the house joiner, I mean Johnny (Betty Heming’s son) to work with him.” Then, later in the year, “Johnny is to work with him [Watson] for the purpose of learning to make wheels and all sorts of work.”20 His free white laborers might stay or go, depending upon their whim and opportunities. As a result, Jeffers
on had to tolerate a good deal more bad behavior from them. Having skilled—and captive—enslaved artisans saved money and held out the promise of greater stability.

  After Watson came James Dinsmore, a native of Ireland, who gave Hemings another close association with a person from a foreign culture. Dinsmore was William Stewart minus the alcoholism, a man of exceptional talent in whom Jefferson reposed a great deal of confidence. Another Irish-born joiner, John Neilson (whose relationship to Joseph Neilson is unknown), joined Dinsmore and Hemings in 1805, and he also came without any raging personal problems. James Oldham rounded out the trio of Jefferson’s white master joiners for several years at the beginning of the 1800s. Jefferson respected him, too, but was particularly pleased with the collaboration between Dinsmore and Neilson and wrote with characteristic hyperbole, but nevertheless genuine enthusiasm: “They have done the whole of that work in my house, to which I can affirm there is nothing superior in the U.S.”21 John Hemings honed his skills in the company of these men, making furniture in the plantation joinery that had every kind of tool and device a carpenter or joiner could ever need, for no one was more serious about building than Jefferson. Because Jefferson always had projects in mind, Hemings had almost endless opportunities to learn on the job.

  In this place where work and personal lives fused, Oldham played a critical role in the lives of John Hemings and his family that had nothing to do with woodworking. In 1804 Critta Hemings’s son James (Jamey) was a seventeen-year-old worker in Jefferson’s nail factory, having started there at the age of ten when operations at the nailery first began. After George Granger Sr. died and George Jr. came down with the lingering illness that would kill him, Gabriel Lilly was hired as the overseer at Monticello and took charge of the nail factory for a time. Lilly was as brutal as he was uneducated. He, too, drank excessively, making liberal use of Monticello’s well-stocked wine cellar when Jefferson was away in Washington. He could neither read nor write, and violated all of Jefferson’s precepts about using incentives, rather than violence, in the nail factory. James fell ill one day and could not work, enraging Lilly, who resorted to the whip to try to beat work out of the youth. Oldham wrote to Jefferson about what happened: “The barbarity that he maid use of with Little Jimmy Was the moost cruel, to my noledge Jimmy was sick for thre nights and the moast part of the time I raly thot he would not of Livd he at this time slepd in the room with me.”22 In addition to the information about James Hemings, this missive reveals much about Oldham’s level of education and the physical closeness of whites and blacks during slavery. James was sleeping in the same space with Oldham. Through this intimacy Oldham was well aware of James’s condition, and he attempted to intervene on James’s behalf, explaining that the young man was too ill to work, and “Begd. [Lilly] not to punish him.” Lilly did not listen and took his anger out on James and “whipd. him three times in one day, and the boy was rely not able to raise his hand to his Head.”23