Because her “formal” employment focused on taking care of Jefferson’s chambers, Sally Hemings’s work routine necessarily became steadier when he returned permanently to the mountain. It is not likely, though, that she personally attended visitors to Monticello. Even before the name Sally became linked with “Jefferson,” and it would have been imprudent to have her interact with curious and likely-to-gossip strangers, her female relatives and their children are the ones who appear in the record as performing the tasks of domestic service. She had ceased being connected to Martha after their return from France, and Martha had a personal maid and complement of enslaved people from her own plantation, Edgehill.
Besides what her son Madison said she did, and the description from a newspaper account in the early 1800s that correctly pegged her as a seamstress for the family, Hemings did help her sisters bottle cider when the season arrived. Neither of those tasks would have required much contact with guests. We know that Hemings’s female relatives, like all the other adults at Monticello, kept gardens or raised animals because all of them sold produce or chickens and eggs to the Jefferson family. Hemings did not enter the market with the Jeffersons. Whether she spent any of her time gardening is thus unclear. Her son Beverley, showing an early sign of the entrepreneur at age eight, did sell three quarts of strawberries to the household in 1806.4 It seems improbable that the youngster planted the fruit himself, so he likely gathered them wild or had been given a section of a family member’s garden to call his own. Many later years, after he had left Monticello to begin life as a white man, his teenage brothers, Madison and Eston, would sell to their father cabbages they had grown.
Sally Hemings evidently spent most of her time during Jefferson’s retirement years looking after her children—seeing them through childhood illnesses and helping them prepare to become adults. This African American enslaved mother was in a singular circumstance. She had children who would not be slaves once they reached adulthood. They might not even live as African Americans. Hemings’s task was probably not so much about how her children would speak or carry themselves, for there is little reason to believe her speech and presentation were all that different from what theirs turned out to be. As noted earlier, antebellum and postbellum writers and commentators grossly exaggerated the distance between the speech patterns of black and white southerners, in their determination to enforce, even on the written page, a supposed uniform norm of essential racial differences. Hemings had had ample time and occasion to know the ways of whites and, in her case, a particular type of white person to serve as models of behavior for her children. In his late-in-life recollections of Monticello, her great-nephew Peter Fossett spoke with extreme condescension about some of the whites he encountered after leaving Monticello. In his eyes, they were merely crude people, who knew nothing of the rules of etiquette he had learned through his observations of life at Monticello.5 Sally Hemings, of course, had seen much more of that type of world than her great-nephew. There is no way to know whether she was as snobbish as he about this sort of thing, but she certainly had the opportunity to be.
Hemings, like other mothers of girls, would have spent considerable time teaching her daughter, Harriet, to sew and mend clothing while doing a great deal of that herself. Harriet learned spinning along with the other enslaved girls, probably under the direction of her aunt Nancy, who had been brought back to Monticello in the 1790s for the express purpose of starting Jefferson’s small textile operation. Sewing, spinning, and weaving were staple signifiers of feminine virtue, made even more important by the embargo and War of 1812, which disrupted the country’s trade with Europe. As it had been just before the American Revolution, homespun became a potent symbol of American self-sufficiency and independence from foreign goods. While his daughter was learning to spin and weave, Jefferson was extolling the virtues of homespun to correspondents like John Adams, at the very beginning of their famous rapprochement in 1811. He praised it as an important example of the “economy and thriftiness” of America’s “household manufactures.”6
Although Sally Hemings was likely the primary influence in the life of her daughter, an important masculine influence began to shape their daily lives once her sons—Beverley, Madison, and Eston—reached the age of twelve or so. They were put under the direction of her brother John, who undoubtedly ended up being something of a surrogate father to them. Though their mother continued to have an important role in their lives, their apprenticeships to their uncle marked the beginning of their transition into manhood. Hemings and his wife, Priscilla, were extremely devoted to one another and, as far as the record shows, had no children of their own. So Jefferson’s decision to put his sons in the daily care and under the tutelage of their uncle was not only a sound practical move; it served an important affective goal as well. Standing in Jefferson’s place, the much respected carpenter and joiner could be the father they could not have, and they could be like sons to Hemings.
The Monticello joinery was an active place, where John Hemings and his assistants made desks, chairs, and tables, often from Jefferson’s designs and from his own inspiration. When Jefferson saw items he liked, such as the Campeche or “siesta” chair for lounging made popular in New Orleans in the early 1800s, he turned to Hemings. Jefferson had wanted a Campeche chair for many years, but was unable to obtain one until 1818. Even before the chair arrived, he described it to Hemings, who made his own version. When the much sought-after object arrived at Monticello, Hemings made at least two more after studying the genuine article. Given whom he worked for, Hemings had to be extremely versatile. In 1814, when the seventy-one-year-old Jefferson grew tired of making his thrice-a-year visits to Poplar Forest on horseback, he drew up plans for a landau, a coach that could seat at least four people. Hemings built the vehicle’s body, Joseph Fossett did the necessary iron work, and Burwell Colbert painted it. The vehicle was a source of great pride to Jefferson—and the men who actually worked on it probably felt the same way. Others were less than impressed with a design that seems to have owed a bit too much to Jeffersonian quirkiness.7
Perhaps Hemings’s grandest achievement, however, was one that did not survive long at all. In 1825 he made a desk for Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen, who had married Joseph Coolidge and moved to Boston. His great time and effort ultimately came to nothing, for the desk was lost at sea on its way to her. Hemings wept at the news. Jefferson reported his utter devastation to Ellen. Hemings had apparently seen the desk as his masterpiece, and Jefferson said that he was as torn apart by the loss as Vergil would have been had his Aeneid perished in a fire.8
Hemings occupied important space in the lives of Jefferson and his family. Like his nephew Burwell Colbert, he received an annual gratuity and was allowed to have a line of credit at the local store to purchase his own clothing.9 There was no artisan on the plantation Jefferson respected more, or with whom he worked more closely. About a dozen letters of their correspondence to one another survive, indicating the importance they attached to keeping in contact. The two must have been an interesting sight in conversation—Jefferson, who was six feet two and a half inches tall, and Hemings, who stood just under five feet six inches. As an amateur woodworker himself, Jefferson approached his discussions with Hemings from a more personal vantage point than if he had been less interested in the process of woodworking and building. The two men talked about the work Hemings did for Jefferson, and they very likely discussed whatever items Jefferson worked on himself.
The connection between Hemings and Jefferson spilled over into their immediate families. Jefferson’s younger grandchildren, in particular, were close to Hemings, calling him “Daddy” and his wife, Priscilla, who was their nurse, “Mammy.” Priscilla Hemings, who, like her husband, was religiously devout, traveled to the President’s House to care for the Randolph children when Martha Randolph visited her father there. Edmund Bacon remembered that she had complete charge of the young Randolphs and said that “if there was any switching to be done,
she always did it.”10 This was a time when corporal punishment of children was generally expected, and this enslaved woman was allowed, probably directed, to spank Jefferson’s grandchildren when they fell outside of the basic norms of behavior that small children of all races were expected to observe.
The Randolph children, whose father was at various times estranged from the family, may have been in special need of male attention from someone younger than their grandfather. Although Jefferson was known for his attentiveness to them, as Madison Hemings remembered, he spent an enormous amount of time during his retirement in his study, reading the countless letters he received, replying to many of them, and initiating his own correspondence.11 In addition to whatever plantation matters he had to deal with and note in his Farm and Garden Books—along with attending to visitors—this was also Jefferson’s time for planning and building the University of Virginia. He simply did not spend as much of his day romping with his grandchildren as some memories of Monticello might indicate. When they were not in school, the joiner’s shop at Monticello was a favorite place for some of the younger Randolphs. They pestered Hemings to make things for them, requests he sometimes turned aside for a while, reminding them that his primary duty was to their grandfather. Hemings had a clear internal sense of the nature and extent of that duty, mentioning to one of the Randolph children that he was saving a large stock of wood to make Jefferson’s coffin, an act that he did eventually perform.12
We can see the extent of Hemings’s identification with Jefferson in an episode at Poplar Forest in 1821. During one of his extended stays at the plantation, he wrote to Jefferson about the activities of Nace, the foreman and gardener at the plantation. After noting that he did not care much for complaining, Hemings said he felt he had to say something because Nace was taking “everything out of the garden,” carrying it back to his cabin, and hiding it. When Hemings asked Nace for vegetables, he claimed that he was saving them for Jefferson. Other residents of Poplar Forest revealed Nace’s real game: he was taking the vegetables into nearby Lynchburg and selling them in the market.13
While Hemings’s act of informing on Nace at first glance appears traitorous to a member of the enslaved community, the truth is more complicated. Hemings and his nephews, who were not at Poplar Forest year-round and would not have had their own gardens, evidently got their vegetables from Jefferson’s kitchen garden. By taking all the vegetables for himself, Nace was “hurting” not just Jefferson but also Hemings, who had no access to a valuable foodstuff that Nace was appropriating for monetary gain. Hemings faced the common dilemma of members of any subordinated group within a given society. Certain individuals within the group are often willing to commit bad acts that seriously harm their fellows. They then rely upon the group members’ natural inclination to stand together in the face of oppression to keep doing whatever they are doing. Of course, the individual bad actor has no real loyalty to the community, or else he or she would never deliberately hurt one of its members. Such persons are motivated by the kind of extreme selfishness that can be found in any race, class, or other subsection of the human population. Often the oppressed community closes ranks and will continue to suffer rather than expose the bad actor to the wrath of their common oppressor—unless the problem passes some threshold of intolerability. Then they can either exact retribution themselves or have the oppressor deal with the one who is causing the problem. That is what seems to have happened with Hemings and Nace.
Nace erred by going too far. His greed adversely affected members of his own enslaved community. Had he been willing to share, there would have been no problem. The difficulty with community policing of Nace’s activities was that he was the foreman at Poplar Forest and in a position of power. The only ones “above” him were the overseer and Jefferson, the community’s oppressors. We really do not know what steps Hemings took before bringing Jefferson into the matter. His letter suggests, however, that writing to Monticello was a last, desperate resort.
EVEN BEFORE JEFFERSON left office, his life as a public man began to intrude upon his private world at Monticello, and he took what steps he could during his presidency to protect himself. The front line in the battle was his private chamber, which he guarded almost obsessively. A visitor to his home, Margaret Bayard Smith, described it as his “sanctum sanctorum.” It is not that no one ever went into Jefferson’s private living quarters, though he did create the strong presumption that the area was generally off-limits. Anna Maria Thornton, a visitor during his presidency, noted with great interest, and some bewilderment, that the multiple doors leading to Jefferson’s bedroom suite were always locked and that he used only one entrance himself—the door leading into the library. He did allow visitors. Thornton was eventually given a tour, and Isaac Jefferson and Edmund Bacon mentioned having conversations with Jefferson in his living area. And, of course, in the daily life of the place, Sally Hemings, Burwell Colbert, and, probably, many others were in Jefferson’s bedroom and living area for one reason or another over the five decades he lived on the mountain. Two entrances into his living quarters from the outside may have on occasion doubled as service entrances as well as a means for Jefferson to have quick access to the outdoors. These entrances also allowed his world with Sally Hemings, and perhaps even with their grandchildren, to remain resolutely separate from the world he lived in with others.14
As more strangers came to visit Monticello and wander freely about the grounds, it became clear that the very open nature of the house posed a problem. The picturesque walkway just off the south piazza next to his chambers created a bird’s-eye view into his living chambers. With the help of John Hemings, Jefferson took steps to rectify this problem during his presidency. Hemings built, and James Dinsmore also worked on, what Jefferson called “porticles”—structures attached to the exterior of his private living area. The porticles, with their louvered blinds, blocked outside views into his bedroom chamber and study and enclosed the two small private porches on the western and eastern flanks of Jefferson’s bedroom that essentially extended his living area. The porticles, or Venetian porches, as they are also known, preserved at least some of the sense of being outdoors, allowing him to look out, but preventing those outside from seeing in.15
Jefferson never said why he built them and, in the process, destroyed the perfect geometric symmetry of Monticello’s Palladian design. There are no porticles on the north side of Monticello. Indeed, later owners of Monticello thought them ugly and tore them down, but they have since been restored. It has been suggested that Jefferson got the idea of building them after the exposure of his relationship with Sally Hemings. The bedroom shades and the closed blinds of the porticles made it harder to see into his living area when she was there.16 Whether that was the impetus or not, her ability to enter his rooms from the steps of the outside porches leading into his quarters created privacy for them both. Ellen Coolidge’s claim that no female servant could have entered Jefferson’s rooms without being seen by anyone is patently untrue. Hemings never had to enter Jefferson’s rooms from the entrance hallway on the inside of Monticello that visitors and other members of his family traversed. If Hemings, or anyone else, for that matter, used one of the two sets of outside steps leading into his bedroom suite late enough at night, no one in the house would have known she had entered. Only sentinels keeping watch over those two outside entrances twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, could have done that. As far as we know, such sentinels never existed at Monticello.
Changing the physical structure of the most intimate part of his home, however, was not enough to ensure privacy when Jefferson really wanted it. In Paris he had had his hermitage for work and relaxation in solitude, and he needed something similar in the United States. Poplar Forest, in Bedford County, about ninety miles from Monticello, was Jefferson’s second home during his retirement. It was part of the land that he and Martha inherited upon the death of her father. This is where the Jeffersons retreated after his narrow escape from the
advance of Tarleton’s troops on Monticello in 1781 and where he began to write Notes on the State of Virginia, an obscure place where no one would come looking for him, an aspect that had changed little even into the nineteenth century. Obviously, it was not obscure to the people who lived there, for Poplar Forest was a working plantation with an enslaved labor force that provided steady income for Jefferson’s family. Here he grew tobacco, long after he had switched to wheat at Monticello. Enslaved people traveled back and forth between the two plantations, and families were sometimes split up in the process. A number of teenage boys were taken from Poplar Forest to work in Jefferson’s nail factory at Monticello, and their female counterparts also came there to learn spinning and weaving until he opened a weaving shop at Poplar Forest and they stayed there to learn.17
The remoteness of the place clearly appealed to Jefferson, and amid the travails of his presidency, he began to build a house in what had once been a dense forest of poplar trees. He started in 1806, and the building was finished in 1809, just in time for his retirement. Because few people knew he even had a second home, this was the ideal place to go to escape the throngs at Monticello. It was, indeed, a very Jeffersonian solution, an act of circumvention rather than confrontation. Instead of suggesting, directly or indirectly, that people leave Monticello, he simply decided to leave Monticello to them periodically. At first he went alone, but in later years he sometimes took his older grandchildren, who developed a love-hate relationship with the place. They, like he, enjoyed escaping the overabundance of company, but the members of this younger generation were not always happy with the long sojourns.18 Whether Sally Hemings was ever there with him is unknown, because there is virtually no chance that any persons in the Jefferson household would ever have mentioned that in their correspondence.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 76