Jefferson did not separate himself from the Hemings children. Choosing to make his sons carpenters and joiners guaranteed that he would at least be able to oversee their work and development. With no other artisan at Monticello did he spend more time than with John Hemings. During the years of Jefferson’s retirement, where John Hemings was, Beverley, Madison, and Eston—when he was old enough—were, too. When Madison Hemings astutely observed that Jefferson had “but little taste for agricultural pursuits” and preferred instead to be among “his mechanics,”31 he was talking, in part, about himself and his brothers.
Although Madison Hemings, an obviously very reserved and private man, gave a rich account of his life at Monticello, we really cannot gauge from his recollections alone what life was like for all of his siblings, especially not Beverley and Harriet. The world of siblings is not static. Each one enters the unit at different stages in the lives of the parents and the life of the family itself. That is even more so when there are large gaps in ages between siblings, years in which the family’s circumstances can change drastically. Beverley Hemings was seven years old when his little brother, Madison, was born. He was a full decade older than Eston. By the time Madison grew old enough to really pay specific attention to how Beverley and Jefferson interacted—say, when he was nine or ten, and that estimate may be generous—Beverley was well into his teens, certainly past the point of playing games on the lawn with anyone. Although Harriet was only four years older than Madison, that was still enough to create a gap in his knowledge about how Jefferson dealt with her when she was small.
Where one ends up in life is very often determined by where one starts, and it is, perhaps, significant that Beverley and Harriet Hemings entered their family and Monticello at a very different time in the life of the family and of the place than their younger brothers. They took paths in life quite different from those of their younger siblings. Both left Monticello to enter the white world immediately, with no apparent consideration of spending any time in the black community. They took white spouses and left blackness completely behind. Although their youngest brother, Eston, eventually followed them into that world, it was only after it became apparent that his children’s lives would be severely circumscribed if they continued to live as people of color.
Beverley Hemings had almost five years at Monticello with Jefferson before Callender exposed his parents’ life together. He was a first son, not the type of person whom a man who knew he would never have white sons could easily or totally have resisted. It would have been one thing for Jefferson to have had a “forbidden” first son living on another of his plantations, quite another to watch this small replica of himself running through the foyer at Monticello. This was the boy who, according to one recollection, would grow up to ascend balloons, one of his father’s great interests from the time he had heard of them until the day he died.32 Beverley bore so many marks of his father that it is not at all likely that Jefferson was ever completely indifferent to him. One of the few specific comments about him hints at an independent streak. In July of 1820 Edmund Bacon wrote a note to Jefferson asking him whether he knew that Beverley had not been coming to the carpenter’s shop for about a week. The now twenty-two-year-old, a year past the time of his promised freedom, apparently decided to take the week off. Jefferson did not respond to his overseer in writing. There is thus no indication whether he knew from John Hemings or Beverley that he had been absent from the shop, or whether he knew anything about it at all.
The person who was most like a full legal white son to Jefferson, of course, was his much adored first grandson and namesake, Thomas Jefferson Randolph. But Jeff Randolph bore neither a physical (other than height), intellectual, nor temperamental resemblance to his grandfather. His somewhat exacting mother worried when he was a boy that he was not very smart. He himself complained that he had been sent to inferior schools in his youth and was never sent to college. Jefferson, who helped direct his education, resigned himself early on to the reality that his grandson was not cut out to be a scholar.33 If Randolph was not an intellectual like his grandfather, he turned out to have been different from Jefferson in another way: he was a sound business manager, who worked tirelessly and successfully to keep his family afloat in the fallout from his grandfather’s disastrous financial affairs.
Jeff also had more of his father’s mercurial and aggressive personality. Although Jefferson preferred incentives to whipping people, he never totally banned whippings on his plantations. He did not, however, administer them himself and spoke ill of overseers because he suspected they actually enjoyed inflicting cruelty. Jeff Randolph, on the other hand, had no compunction about personally wielding the whip. He even whipped an enslaved man in front of his young nephew visiting from Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson Coolidge. Coolidge recounted the incident in his memoirs and seems to have been horrified by the whole southern way of plantation life. But Jeff Randolph had another trait that must have greatly disappointed his grandfather. According to his sister, Jeff had an “aversion to music,” about which his grandfather was passionate.34
The great irony, or tragedy, is that at least one, if not all, of the Hemings brothers—separated from Jefferson by the gulfs of race, class, and status—may have been more like him substantively than Jeff Randolph was. One wonders whether there was not some attempt to take these boys and turn them into some version of himself. He loved to build. They would build. He loved music and the violin. They would love music and play the violin. As far as the record shows, the youngest, Eston, seemed to have identified with him the most, and with good reason. He was said to be a near copy of Jefferson facially and physically in terms of his height and build. We do not know Beverley’s profession, but music was also the passion of Eston’s soul, so much so that he learned to play the violin and the piano and made his living as a musician. Although he never spoke publicly about Jefferson, he kept alive his connection to him by changing his name from Eston Hemings to E. H. (Eston Hemings) Jefferson when he went into the white world. He also carried a bit of Jefferson with him in his professional life, a private remembrance that had to remain unknown to his audience. Jefferson did not care much for popular music, but there were several songs he liked enough to copy down in his notes, one a tune called “Money Musk.” Decades later, Eston would make “Money Musk” one of his signature tunes as he played at society events throughout southern Ohio.35
Even more important than the fallout from Callender’s exposé was the move of Jefferson’s daughter and grandchildren to the mountain in 1809. Beverley and Harriet Hemings were eleven and eight years old, respectively, when this happened. Unlike Madison and Eston, who were four and a little over one in 1809, they knew a time when the Randolphs were not continuously at Monticello. Martha and her children had always visited during Jefferson’s vacations, but having them move into the household full-time was an important psychological step for all involved. There can be great comfort in knowing that visitors are eventually going to go home. Having the Randolphs as permanent fixtures at Monticello and Martha as the mistress of the plantation necessarily changed the dynamic of life there. Matters were even more delicate because the move was made under unhappy circumstances.
The Randolphs’ final settlement at Monticello has been portrayed either as the natural coming together of a happy family under the benevolent authority of the patriarch or as a sinister outcome engineered by a manipulative Jefferson. It was neither. This was, instead, the end result of a slow-motion, across two decades, catastrophic failure. Martha and her children would never have been back at Monticello if Thomas Mann Randolph had been successful and stable and if her marriage had been happy. It is doubtful that Martha and her children would have spent months out of the year there even before this final move, if the family had been in happy circumstances. As discussed in chapter 20, there was, from the very beginning, good reason to think the union between Martha and Tom might not succeed, and the ensuing years simply bore that out.
A Thomas Mann Randolph, in a strong financial position, could more easily have resisted this public display of the failure of his marriage and his inadequacies as a provider. Even if Martha had been unhappy in marriage, and had wanted to escape it by choosing to be the housekeeper to her father, instead of wife to her husband, she would not have been able to involve her children in this unless Tom had consented. On that point the law was clear: children belonged to their fathers. If Tom had been a wealthy patriarch, there would have been no reason for the Randolph offspring to be anywhere other than under his roof.
As things stood Jefferson had become the sole financial support for his daughter’s family, a precarious situation that seems to have humiliated his son-in-law and left him few avenues to make demands regarding his family. This, however, was not Jefferson’s fault. He did not make Tom Randolph unsuccessful. Nor did he cause the younger man’s apparent mental instability and tendency toward aggression, circumstances that had to have shaped the family’s view of him. It is often noted that Jefferson adamantly opposed his son-in-law’s plan to start over by moving his family farther south. He doubtless wanted to keep his daughter and grandchildren close to him, a not unusual desire. But if he, like others, harbored doubts about Randolph’s overall mental health, it is easy to understand why he would have been anxious about having his daughter go too far out of his sight, or the potential range of his help.
What this meant to Sally Hemings and her children is clear. With Jefferson in retirement and in the daily company of Martha (the most important person in the world to him) and her offspring, there was little chance that he could treat his children with Hemings fully as his own. Martha’s status as the mistress of Monticello surely made things more awkward for Hemings and Jefferson at times, but it posed no fundamental challenge to their identity as lovers. Martha had no basis for competing with Sally Hemings in that realm.
The Hemings children and Jefferson’s grandchildren, however, bore a different relationship to one another. This was, in modern parlance, a zero-sum game. Whatever Jefferson did for Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston would come out of whatever he was supposed to be doing for his legal white grandchildren. To raise the Hemings children up was to lower the Randolph grandchildren, and Maria’s son, Francis Eppes, as well. What would these children think if they saw their grandfather tousle Madison Hemings’s hair or put his arm affectionately around his daughter Harriet? She, in particular, posed a problem. Jefferson already had a daughter and numerous granddaughters. Although they had the satisfaction of being of a superior social class and, in their biased view, a superior racial stock, Harriet Hemings had a basic advantage in the one area where women the world over are encouraged to compete: she was, in the words of one observer, “very beautiful” and, in another’s, “very handsome.”36 Jefferson’s eldest granddaughter was thought attractive, but her mother, Martha, was variously described as plain or even homely. Jefferson’s daughter and granddaughters may have looked down upon Harriet, but the sense of competitiveness about appearance is a great leveler, even if not expressed openly. As Deborah Gray White and others have shown, despite their more important social status and greater power, white plantation mistresses were often jealous of enslaved women who were as attractive as, or more attractive than, they. Indeed, Jefferson had to be especially careful in how he treated Harriett, when his daughter and his granddaughters were about.
Jefferson had another important reason to be on special guard. While his affair with Hemings certainly helped keep Martha free of a stepmother and legitimate half siblings, the kind of people who could have been rivals for his unfettered affection and property, his eldest daughter had suffered greatly because of the way the world viewed his personal life.37 The public exposure during his presidency, at the exact moment when the eyes of the world were upon him, went far beyond anything any of them could have expected to have to endure when Martha first had to accommodate herself to her father’s life. Her precipitate marriage in 1790 brought the hope of a future with the new man in her life and offered the promise of emotional refuge. During the following nearly two decades, that bright future withered and the refuge crumbled. She returned, not even as a widow, to the home of her girlhood. The two most important men in her own life, her father and husband, each in his own way, had made her life difficult. Though he would not send Hemings away, as Jefferson’s grandson said Martha wanted him to, Jefferson would not repay her forbearance with a final indignity: treating the enslaved mixed-race children of his affair as if they were the same as her free white ones. If Maria Jefferson Eppes had taken second place in her father’s affections, Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings could never have expected their father to place their interests above those of Martha Randolph and her offspring. Their hopes for true and deep family connections within the context of a nuclear family lay in their expectations for the future their mother and father had planned for them.
29
RETIREMENT FOR ONE, NOT FOR ALL
WHILE JEFFERSON MAY have left public life, the public life never really left him. A virtual horde of visitors began to descend on the mountain almost as soon as he came home in March of 1809—nineteen years after he left home on a similar March day to begin his political career in 1790. The flow of people did not cease until his death in 1826. They came from all over—strangers, friends, and family—to catch a glimpse or be in the presence of the lion in winter. Some were quite bold about this, peering through the windowpanes at Monticello, watching him as he went about his life, as if he were, indeed, the main attraction at the zoo. A large number wanted more than just a glimpse. They came to stay at Monticello as complete households—parents with children and, sometimes, servants in tow, relying on Jefferson’s radical hospitality.
It seems clear that many of these people simply wanted to tour the beautiful Virginia countryside, see Jefferson’s much talked-about home and its famous resident while, in Jefferson’s overseer Edmund Bacon’s words, saving themselves “a tavern bill.”1 Martha Randolph had that sense as well. Jefferson, however, preferred to see the attention as a token of his countrymen’s esteem and turned aside suggestions that he find ways to discourage the aggressive visitations. His openhanded nature and hatred of direct confrontation prevented him from doing anything that approached being openly inhospitable, though the deluge of visitors added greatly to his already strained finances. All of them, along with whatever horses they brought, were put up and fed at his expense. Some even stayed for weeks at a time. Once, he roundly scolded Bacon after discovering that his frugal overseer was rationing the feed for his guests’ horses as a cost-saving measure. He made him restore full portions.2
It was not just the money that caused tension in Jefferson’s retirement household. Martha Randolph and her daughters resented the constant presence of company. The enslaved laborers no doubt resented them as well. Although Monticello did not legally belong to them, some, like Betty Brown, had spent far more actual time there than Jefferson. The mountain was theirs in a way that mattered greatly. They had created a community born of years of shared experiences and dependence upon one another—and now here came another set of masters and mistresses to get used to for however long they chose to stay. This community had ample reason to feel besieged by the multitude of demanding strangers interrupting daily routines and expectations.
While these visitors would have had no great effect on the daily lives of the enslaved agricultural workers at Monticello, Edith Fossett, Joseph Fossett’s wife, whose cooking so impressed Jefferson’s visitors, was no doubt the most sorely tasked. She had to prepare multiple meals a day for these people, and do it at a consistently high level. But Fossett was probably not the one who had to make the greatest adjustments. What she was now doing at Monticello was a continuation of her job at the President’s House, held for almost eight years. She was used to hard and constant work. And as the cook, she had a measure of control over her activities, working within a rather defined set of parameters. Because she
approached artistry in her work, Fossett surely liked cooking and could have the occasional sense of satisfaction of having achieved perfection and the benefit of compliments for having done so.3 Although she is often referred to as Jefferson’s “cook,” that title really does not do justice to Fossett’s training and experiences, for she, just like James Hemings, was trained for years by a real French chef.
It was the other household servants—the Hemings women and their children—who saw the biggest increase in their daily responsibilities, with fewer possibilities for psychological rewards. Changing linen, making beds, and lighting fires for guests, though less labor-intensive than cooking—left less room for creativity and love of craft than being a chef or a cook. By every measure, the end of Jefferson’s formal employment actually marked the start of a new era of drudgery for those who worked in the house. His long absences during his almost two decades of public service after he returned from France left Sally Hemings and her female relatives with little to do when he was away. The men, artisans, always had work—whether Jefferson was there or not. With his daughters returning to their homes when he went back to Washington, and no reason for many visitors to come to the mountain when the center of attention was away, the Hemings women were idle during Jefferson’s presidency. Indeed, it is hard to imagine just how these women occupied themselves during the many months when there were no daily household duties to perform.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 75