A year after these events Broadnax, suffering the lingering effects of her brush with death, wrote to Jefferson, alerting him to her “distressed situation” and, with great embarrassment, asking whether he would be willing to provide her with some financial assistance. She appealed to him on the basis of their “old and intimate acquaintance” and her knowledge of Jefferson’s benevolence. Jefferson had been in Washington when the letter arrived, but he attended to her entreaty as soon as he returned home. He wrote to his agent George Jefferson, in Richmond, where Broadnax lived also, directing him to give her fifty dollars, a good sum in those days, along with other instructions about handling his affairs. Interestingly enough, when he noted his directions to George in his memorandum books, he listed the other transactions but made no mention of having told George to give Lydia Broadnax money.14
The exact nature of Michael Brown’s connection to Wythe and Broadnax is unknown. It has often been assumed that he was Wythe’s son and that Broadnax was his mother. No evidence exists to support either conclusion, however, though Wythe’s treatment of the pair was extraordinary. Whether Brown, who was described as “yellow” skinned, was his biological son or not, Wythe treated him as if he were, taking pains with his education. Certainly asking his own favorite and most famous pupil, the current president of the United States, to become Michael’s guardian shows the depth of his affection for the boy.
Once again, a member of Jefferson’s close circle had died an unnatural death, leaving him stunned. He wanted a memento of his old teacher and asked William Duval, who had informed him of Wythe’s death, if he might be sent a profile of Wythe that Broadnax owned to make a copy. Broadnax sent Jefferson the original. He expressed his sorrow that Wythe, who lingered for several days before dying, lived his final hours knowing that the young man who Jefferson knew he regarded as a son had already died. He also said how much he regretted that Michael’s tragic death “deprived [him] of an object for the attentions which would have gratified [him] unceasingly with the constant recollection & execution of the wishes of [his] friend.”15
How would Jefferson have carried out Wythe’s final request about his involvement with Michael Brown? Would he really have brought the African American boy to Monticello or to the President’s House to continue his studies, or would he have used the money from Wythe’s estate to hire tutors for him? Brown at Monticello would indeed have been an interesting and problematic sight. Had Brown lived, and Jefferson accepted his dear mentor’s charge, he would have been attending to the education of George Wythe’s African American surrogate son, even as he had mixed-race sons and a daughter of his own flesh.
By 1806 Beverley was eight years old, Harriet five, and Madison nearly two. Two years after the Wythe tragedy and the near-miss of a Jefferson/Brown pairing, the last of the Hemings children arrived, Eston, born a month after Jefferson’s sixty-fifth birthday. This was truly an occasion, for it marked the first time that Jefferson had been home for the birth of one of his four children with Hemings who survived. Eston was also the first child that Hemings bore without her mother’s presence, another likely milestone in the life of the now thirty-five-year-old woman. And, yet again, Hemings did not—or was not able to—name her child after a member of her family. This youngest son was instead named for Thomas Eston Randolph, a favorite Jefferson cousin, the son of his maternal uncle William Randolph. Born and raised in England, he had come to the United States in the 1790s, apparently holding fast to the culture of that isle. One of Jefferson’s granddaughters, long after Randolph had left the country of his birth, referred to him as that “most English of Englishmen.”16
Though Randolph was younger than Jefferson, the two men struck up a friendship that involved all the generations of the Jefferson family. In fact, Jefferson described Thomas Eston Randolph’s family and his as being “almost as one,” and that was no Jeffersonian exaggeration. Randolph married Thomas Mann Randolph’s younger sister, Jane, who was also very close to Maria Jefferson. The couple had their own son named Eston and a daughter Harriet, born the year after Jefferson and Hemings’s daughter Harriet. That Harriet would grow up to marry Maria Jefferson Eppes’s son, Francis. Randolph and Jefferson went through some rocky periods in later years, as often happens when friendship and family get mixed with business, but their tie was never really broken. Indeed, in Jefferson’s final days, Thomas Eston Randolph, with great emotion and sensitivity, volunteered to sit up at night with his dying cousin and friend.17
The names of the Hemings children brought them into these convoluted Jefferson/Randolph/Eppes family connections, but not on the basis of equality. They certainly knew they carried the names of people important to their father and had some thoughts on what this meant. But like most enslaved children in their position, the times and their circumstances gave them ample reason to be realistic about all that this did not mean. Their father, an Anglo-American man of the eighteenth century, with a legitimate white child and grandchildren, was going to go with them only so far down the road.
The Hemings children’s older cousins Robert and Sally Bell had been in a completely different position. They had no competition, because their father, Thomas Bell, was apparently without any known white children, legitimate or otherwise. We will never know, but one wonders whether a Thomas Bell with white children would have taken property from them (which is what sharing entails) and given it to his mixed-raced enslaved children and his mistress. He certainly would not have been able to do that without formally freeing Mary Hemings, Robert, and Sally and making them eligible to receive his property. He was able to get away with informally freeing them and relying on his relatives, the law’s deference to his expressed will, and his community’s acquiescence to see things through. If he had had legitimate white children, that would have been next to impossible.
Madison Hemings remembered that his father, elderly even by today’s standards, was kind to him, his brothers, and his sister, as he was to everyone. He was “not in the habit,” however, of showing his younger children “partiality or fatherly affection.” He also mentioned that Jefferson’s grandchildren taught him to read and write, implying that Jefferson took no interest in his formal education.18 Hemings’s statement is often transformed into saying that Jefferson never showed any partiality or fatherly affection to him and his siblings. That cannot have been what Hemings meant, at least not regarding partiality, for he also detailed many of the ways that he and his siblings’ lives were different from others’ on the plantation, differences that were direct products of Jefferson’s decisions. Hemings may have wanted more from his father, but these decisions clearly showed that Jefferson favored his children with Hemings over other enslaved children on the plantation.
Hemings revealed what he meant by “fatherly affection” when he offered, by way of comparison, Jefferson’s treatment of his grandchildren toward whom he was “affectionate.” Jefferson was well known for his attentiveness to his grandchildren, playing games with them and, like many grandparents, being more indulgent with them than he had been with his daughters when they were young. We get a sense from Madison Hemings that Jefferson rarely played with or cuddled his youngest children, things that the young boy Madison noticed and perhaps longed for. Very tellingly, his point of reference for Jefferson’s shows of fatherly affection was not his half sister Martha. Instead, Hemings compared himself to Jefferson’s grandchildren, who were around his same age.19 Imagine a six-year-old with a father who is always kind to him, but who seems to ration his affectionate gestures, viewing that same father freely expressing his affection for his grandchildren who were around the six-year-old’s age. This scene, almost unfathomable to the modern American mind, has been played out countless times in feudal and slave societies the world over—biological children living within the eye-shot and touch of fathers from whom they were separated by class, race, or legal status. All three of these factors distanced the Hemings children from Jefferson. These four individuals had to forge, very early on,
singular identities as they lived in what could only be characterized as a form of limbo.
Madison Hemings suggested what that identity was when he said that he and his siblings were “measurably happy” during their childhoods because they grew up free from the “dread” of being enslaved all their lives.20 Their knowledge of their parents’ intended future for them, and their father’s capacity to bring that future about, gave them a distinct way to see themselves. They were not truly like the others enslaved at Monticello, though their father listed them in his Farm Book and wrote of them as if they were. Here was that not infrequent case where seemingly neutral documents badly mislead. Both the Farm Book and Jefferson’s nearly rote and veiled references in his letters calling Beverley and Madison, and then Madison and Eston, John Hemings’s “two assistants” or “two apprentices”—always unnamed—hid a vital truth of their lives, and of his as well.21 The phrases “his assistants” and his “two apprentices” suggest obscurity and hint at their unimportance relative to their uncle John, when the young men buried beneath these titles were the very opposite of unimportant. They were Jefferson’s sons who were going to receive what no other enslaved people at Monticello ever received: emancipation with his blessing upon reaching adulthood so that they could live the prime of their lives as free men. Their father, for whom everything and everyone had a place, put them in the nearest compartment that fit their circumstances, knowing all along that even that would be temporary. And when the two oldest Hemings children left Monticello, he used the language of slavery in his Farm Book to describe their departure. Both Beverley and Harriet, whom Jefferson arranged to be put on a stagecoach with the equivalent of about nine hundred dollars in today’s terms, “ran away.”22 This event had been expected and planned for since the day they were born, so they had not run away in the conventional sense. This was the beginning of the fulfillment of the plan set in motion thirty-two years before in France.
So the Hemings siblings had childhood identities as a special band of people who were destined to go, to leave behind two states that were coterminous for them: childhood and slavery. Even though their father was the master of it, Monticello would never be theirs, any more than he could ever really be “theirs.” They grew up in anticipation, with a present connection to their father, but moving toward a future where their connection to him would live only in their memories and whatever they wanted to tell their families about him. The situation would be even more stark for those of the children who planned to go into the white world. If Beverley and Harriet had thought all along that they would live as white people when they became adults, they knew early on that their father could live only in their memories for, depending upon whom they married, it might be unwise to tell their spouses or children who Jefferson was to them.
One wonders whether Jefferson ever told Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston that by Virginia law they were white, a law that he explicated, in needlessly complicated algebraic form, in an 1813 letter to a man named Francis Gray, who had asked him about racial designations in Virginia.23 He might not have had to tell them. Their mother probably knew. Enslaved people were often familiar with some of the basics of law, especially the laws of slavery and property that related to them. Isaac Jefferson, for example, was quite precise about the source of Jefferson’s fortune, saying that Jefferson was personally wealthy primarily in knowledge; his wealth in land and slaves had come to him through his legal marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton. One did not have to be a legal scholar to know that enslaved status was determined by the status of one’s mother, or even that people who were less than one-quarter black were considered white. This was the kind of information that mixed-race slaves, and even the whites around them, would have been interested in knowing and talking about. If these children grew up thinking of themselves as legally white, their connection to racially based slavery would seem even that much more tenuous to them. Their future was not just out of slavery but out of one putative race into another.
The Hemings children did not venture into this future unguided, for Jefferson had a direct hand in shaping their progress through life and the way they viewed themselves. In fact, so many things are known about the Hemings siblings that bear the mark of Jefferson’s actions that Madison Hemings’s picture of his life with his father seems more a description of Jeffersonian ambivalence than of rejection. There is a predictable sameness to their lives that has the unmistakable shadings of a plan, from their names, their hobbies (the violin), and the trade they would be trained to follow.
Other than running errands when they were small, all the Hemings children remained out of the realm of service and never had the occasion to develop an identity as servants. In another time, and in a different household, Harriet Hemings might have been considered a perfect personal maid for one of Jefferson’s numerous granddaughters. Instead, Harriet “learned to spin and weave” in Jefferson’s small textile operation, though his overseer remembered that she never worked very hard.24 Her father gave her something to do that did not automatically signal a subservient status—to him, the outside world, and to her and her siblings. After all, his mother and sisters had been spinners. Susan Kern has pointed out, in writing of the Jefferson females, that they used spinning primarily as a “polite hobby.” Jefferson bought his mother a spinning wheel and sent her wool and cotton for spinning.25 Certainly the republican revolution that brought forth the cult of republican wife and motherhood idealized women who produced homespun, lessening their family’s dependence upon foreign manufactures. Like all daughters, Harriet probably spent a good deal of her time under her mother’s direction learning to sew and to do other domestic tasks. Harriet Hemings was prepared at Monticello to be a successful wife and a mother, which is exactly what she turned out to be.
Jefferson followed a similar, gender-appropriate pattern with his sons. The boys were trained to become the types of workers he admired the most—carpenters and joiners, instead of blacksmiths, gardeners, or hostlers. Jefferson placed all three under the direction of his most trusted artisan, John Hemings, who became a surrogate father to each one. Madison Hemings remembered becoming apprenticed to his uncle at age fourteen, but Jefferson’s records indicate that the Hemings brothers began to assist John Hemings sometime after the age of ten. A Jefferson Farm Book entry in 1810 lists twelve-year-old Beverley as a workman along with his uncle. Six years later, in September of 1816, when Madison was four months shy of his twelfth birthday, Jefferson wrote to his overseer Joel Yancey at Poplar Forest, telling him when he would be arriving at the plantation. “John Hemings & his two aids will set out so as to be at Poplar Forest the evening before us.”26 The “us” included Jefferson and his daughter Martha and his sons’ uncle Burwell Colbert. The “two aids” were the eighteen-year-old Beverley the nearly twelve-year-old Madison. Neither Beverley nor Madison at ages eleven or twelve would have been expected (or allowed) to do dangerous carpentry work, but carrying their uncle’s tools, watching him work, and getting used to the world of carpentry before they actually tried their hand at it made perfect sense. The extremely talented and literate “Johnny” would teach them everything they needed to know.
Still, a Jefferson with working-class sons seems incongruous. Why not train them to be at his level in society? As Rhys Isaac has observed, class, along with race and status, governed the way Jefferson viewed his children.27 He had less to be concerned about with Harriet, who as female was not really his counterpart. Great beauty and a genteel (gentle) manner would be enough for her to attract a decent mate—at almost all levels of society. She could be successful at womanhood with just the rudiments of an education. As for his sons, Jefferson knew they would not grow up to be thought of as gentlemen in the same way that he was thought of as a gentleman. Unlike their grandfather John Wayles, whose whiteness allowed him to escape the lower class, Beverley, Madison, and Eston were of African origin. Had it been widely known that they were his sons, that part of their heritage would have to be known, too. T
his man, at the very pinnacle of the social pyramid, had children who had been born at the lowest status in society. The basic imperative was not to bind them to himself, or to try to make them junior versions of the public Thomas Jefferson, but to get them out of that status and, one suspects, he hoped, into a different race.
In the letter to Francis Gray in which he explained how much white blood it took to turn a black person white, Jefferson declared that freeing a person who was one-eighth black, like his children, would make that person a free white citizen of the United States.28 There was, of course, no reference to the Hemings children in this letter. It seems highly unlikely, however, that they were far from his mind when he issued the unnecessary (Gray was not interested in questions of U.S. citizenship) and emphatic pronouncement about the effect of emancipation upon people like his offspring.29 He knew that, when they became adults, he was going to make them the best thing he could think of, free white American citizens.
The historian Peter Onuf has noted how much Jefferson’s plan for the emancipation, and then the colonization, of American slaves resembled his situation with his children, in that it required the separation of parent from child. Jefferson acknowledged the difficulty that posed, but suggested that the great prize to be won—freedom for the generations to come—should not be thwarted out of sentimentality about the relationship between one parent and one child.30 This may have been a rationalization on his part, a way to explain why he had children who could never belong to him in the way children were supposed to belong to their parents—and why in the end that was still a good thing. One was to think of what freedom would mean to future generations. As things turned out, Jefferson’s calculations were right; his grandchildren who lived as white people used the privilege of whiteness and prospered greatly. We will never know what, if any, emotional toll this deferral of familial connection took on him, Sally Hemings, and their children. There is no way around the fact that their predicament at Monticello—and there is no better way to characterize the situation with Hemings and Jefferson, their children, and Martha and her children—carried no prospect of a harmonious resolution that could be equally satisfactory to all.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 74