The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  In contrast to Joseph Neilson (John Hemings’s father), James Dinsmore, William Stewart, James Oldham, and the many other white artisans and workers who came in and out of Jefferson’s life, none of the people mentioned above—Colbert, Hughes, Fossett, and John and Sally Hemings—could leave him unless he was willing to let them go. He was not willing to do that until after he had died. With the exception of Sally Hemings, Jefferson could easily have freed these Hemingses during his lifetime and kept them on as paid workers. John Hemings, Colbert, and Hughes would almost certainly have worked for Jefferson as an employer rather than as a master. Although Fossett did run away, that was under the parameters of slavery. Being the paid head of Jefferson’s blacksmith shop, while continuing to live with his wife and children would have been a different matter altogether.

  For all the reasons discussed earlier, it would have been extremely problematic if Jefferson had attempted to free Sally Hemings and have her live at Monticello as his mistress. Jefferson, Thomas Bell, and many other slaveholders used slavery to cover their relationships with enslaved women. The very patriarchal Jefferson could easily rationalize holding Hemings in slavery as keeping her within what he would call the protection of his family. Again, he saw women, slaves, and children as suitably disabled under law, people who should not be free in the way white men or even emancipated black men were free. Given the gender conventions of the day, that Jefferson wanted to maintain control over Sally Hemings, a woman, makes far more sense than keeping control over men he apparently respected. Jefferson knew that all of these men could take care of themselves, and he felt it necessary to hold them in a status that mixed the attributes of the free laborer with those of the slave. He could not, while he was alive, bring himself to follow things to their logical conclusion.

  The problem for Jefferson was that giving any of these people freedom would have created the possibility that they could leave him, just as Robert and James Hemings had done in the 1790s. One supposes that if any of the men had tried to leave after Jefferson had freed them, he could have punished them by refusing them access to their spouses and children. Colbert’s and Hemings’s wives were Randolph family slaves, so Jefferson would have had to enlist the aid of his daughter and son-in-law to carry out such a prohibition. That would have required summoning and sustaining over the years an amount of negative energy that was uncharacteristic for Jefferson, since it would have made him look mean and small in the eyes of others, something he always tried to avoid. A freed Sally Hemings would most likely have had to leave the plantation and be out of the constellation at Monticello, if not Virginia. The only way for a man to control a free woman was to marry her, which he could not do. Selfishness and self-absorption seem far too inadequate as reasons for the way Jefferson treated these members of the Hemings family. There is often great power in simplicity, and the simple, terrible fact is that the law vested Jefferson, and other slave owners, with the powers of a tyrant, as he said himself. This domestic tyrant tried to mitigate the meaning of that reality by being as benign as he could. That made it easier for him to see himself as a good man as he indulged his impulses and met his needs—economic, social, and affective—through his control of these family members, to whom he was tied by years of intimate acquaintance, experiences, and blood. He created his own version of slavery that he could live in comfortably with the Hemingses. It suited him. There was never any serious chance that he would have given this up.

  NEARLY THIRTY-FIVE YEARS had passed since Wormley Hughes had witnessed the return of his cousins James and Sally Hemings to Monticello after their years in France with Jefferson. As noted earlier, as an elderly man, Hughes would describe the enthusiastic response of those enslaved at Monticello to the return of Jefferson, whose continued existence offered the best assurance that they might be able to remain in place with their families. Now, in 1824, one of the most famous episodes in the life of the mountain, and the country, helped put what happened on that Christmas Eve in 1789 into perspective.

  The marquis de Lafayette, Jefferson’s old friend from the days of the American Revolution and Paris, made his triumphant return to America for about ten months in 1824 and 1825, stopping at the sites of old Revolutionary War battles and being feted and honored everywhere he went. There was scarcely a chance that he could have come to America and failed to visit the man with whom he had shared many memories and much correspondence. Indeed, their letters—Lafayette’s announcement that he wanted to see Jefferson and Jefferson’s invitation for Lafayette to stop by—passed each other in the mail not long after the Frenchman arrived in the country.13

  The ten days Lafayette spent at Monticello in November of 1824 produced numerous recollections, including that of Peter Fossett, son of Joseph and Edith Fossett. The young Fossett, then nine years old, was part of the last generation of Hemingses to live at Monticello. His siblings and first and second cousins, numbering more than a dozen, were the first Hemings cohort to grow up with either no memories or only faint ones of the matriarch of the clan, Elizabeth Hemings. Peter Fossett echoed the observations of newspaper accounts of Lafayette’s arrival on the mountain. A number of citizens of Charlottesville who had come up to witness the event gathered on the front lawn, along with those enslaved at Monticello. When Lafayette reached Albemarle County, Jefferson sent him the landau that John Hemings had built for the final leg of his guest’s journey to Monticello. At the sound of a bugle, which alerted those milling about on the lawn that Lafayette and the honor guard accompanying him were near, the crowd hushed and parted as they waited for Jefferson to emerge from the house and greet his old friend. The now eighty-one-year-old man moved gingerly down the steps, walking slowly at first, then more quickly, toward Lafayette. Fossett recalled the words spoken as the two old compatriots fell into each other’s arms and wept, “My dear Lafayette” and “My dear Jefferson.”14

  The emotional valence of that deeply human moment resonated among those assembled. Tears welled and then flowed, even among the people who had virtually no stake in these proceedings: the enslaved community at Monticello. One says “virtually no stake” because they were given the day “off” in honor of the special celebration that was to be held at the soon to be officially opened University of Virginia.

  The journey to the new university the following day provided another occasion for a member of the Hemings family to comment upon Lafayette’s visit. Robert Scott, the twenty-one-year-old grandson of Mary Hemings and Thomas Bell, and thus Peter Fossett’s first cousin, was living as a free man in the house that his mother, Sally Jefferson Bell, had inherited from her father, Thomas. Although Bell apparently never formally freed Sally or her brother Robert, but instead simply left them property as if he considered them free, his white family and the white community had gone along with that informal path to emancipation. Thus, Sally Bell Scott and her children escaped partus sequitur ventrem. That is how Scott came to be watching from his home on Main Street as the landau passed by, carrying Jefferson, Lafayette, James Madison, and James Monroe on their way to the university’s famous rotunda for the dinner. Either because it was true, or out of his sense of personal connection to Jefferson, who often visited Scott’s home to socialize and hear him play the violin, Scott recalled that “Mr. Jefferson was by far the most distinguished looking of the four.” As it turned out, Scott would get an even closer look at the French general because he and his relatives, a famous family of musicians, were invited to Monticello to play for Lafayette and his party. It is not at all improbable that their musician relatives already on the mountain accompanied them. Beverley Hemings, who played at the parties Jefferson’s teenage grandchildren threw, had left the mountain by 1824. But his younger brothers, Madison and Eston, could easily have joined their cousins.15

  Lafayette almost certainly saw and spoke to Sally Hemings. She, Jefferson, and Martha Randolph were the only people on the mountain who had seen the general in Paris, making Hemings the only enslaved person on the plantation who had laid eyes
on the Frenchman’s native land in the 1780s. He had been a guest at the Hôtel de Langeac and eaten her brother James’s cooking many times. Whether he remembered the now fifty-one-year-old woman who had been a teenage girl in Paris or her brother, now dead for twenty-three years, is unknown. Hemings, however, had every incentive to remind Jefferson’s guest of her own days in Paris and her memories of him there, if only to be polite.

  Lafayette’s visit presented an opportunity for nostalgia as much for Sally Hemings as for Jefferson and Martha Randolph, evoking memories of her time in Paris and how that had helped shape her life over the decades. It had a particular and poignant meaning now for she was probably still feeling the effects of the departure of her two eldest children, Beverley and Harriet, not quite two years earlier. This was what she had asked of Jefferson long ago in Paris—to have her children leave slavery after they became adults and were old enough to leave her. Jefferson’s records indicate that Beverley left Monticello a few months before Harriet in 1822, most likely to prepare the way for his sister, who would not have been expected to live in a city by herself. Jefferson arranged to have Harriet put on a stagecoach with fifty dollars when her time came to depart.16

  Now, as the celebration of Lafayette’s visit unfolded, only two of Sally Hemings’s children, Madison and Eston, remained. It would have been almost impossible for Lafayette, over the course of his ten days on the mountain and upon his return visit at the end of his stay in America, never to have encountered these two young people—the nearly twenty-year-old Madison and the nearly seventeen-year-old Eston—as they moved about Mulberry Row, just outside the “great house” at Monticello. He may actually have gone into the joinery where they both worked. Jefferson showed important visitors around Monticello, and the place where his most valued artisans worked was a likely site to showcase. All of Jefferson’s children with Hemings were said to resemble him, one of the sons so much that a person coming upon the young man at dusk dressed as Jefferson would have assumed that it was Jefferson himself. That could well have been Eston. A group of men who knew him in Ohio later visited the University of Virginia and, upon seeing a statue of Jefferson, remarked that the likeness was a close image of Eston Hemings. If Eston, now in his late teens, had experienced the growth spurt that would take him near his father’s height of six feet two, he certainly would have been difficult for Lafayette to miss, since he would have towered over most of the people on the mountain. Madison was shorter, in the neighborhood of five feet ten, but facially the two brothers were younger versions of Jefferson, a resemblance that Lafayette, who had known Jefferson many years, would have noticed.17 The Frenchman could easily have figured out, with the wisdom of a worldly man, and perhaps with a sense of relief, that his old friend had not spent the past nearly four decades alone.

  Lafayette came to the mountain with his private secretary, Auguste Levasseur. Both men were quite interested in the subject of slavery, in general, and slavery at Monticello, in particular. Jefferson evidently told his French visitors that enslaved workers had built the landau that had brought Lafayette to Monticello. Levasseur complimented the vehicle’s construction, saying that it was “a powerful argument against those who pretend that the intelligence of negroes can never be raised to the height of the mechanic arts.” Levasseur strongly favored emancipation, wanting to turn slaves into servants. At the same time, going a little over the top, because he clearly revered Jefferson, he wrote that the “good appearance and the gaiety of the negroes at Monticello attested the humanity of the master; if so noble a character had need of an attestation….”18 He talked with some of the people enslaved on the mountain, and his report of what they told him about their lives appear as a somewhat ironic bookend to Wormley Hughes’s description of the way they responded when Jefferson returned from France. Indeed, Levasseur may well have spoken to Hughes himself, who as the head gardener would have been one of the African Americans visitors saw when they called upon Jefferson for any length of time.

  Aside from the fact that it would not have served their interests to speak ill of Jefferson to strangers, whether he grasped it or not, the people Levasseur spoke to presented him with a very clear-eyed and hard view of the reality of their lives. Given the balance of power in Virginia, they understood that a major, positive change in their situation was unlikely for the foreseeable future. They were happy to work at Monticello in the meantime, because they knew that as long as Jefferson remained alive, there was a good chance that they would not be sold away and separated from their families.19 Of course, Jefferson was not going to live forever, as they well knew. The “gaiety” Levasseur observed and the happiness they described to him were thus very tenuous forms of the emotion indeed.

  Levasseur’s report on Monticello’s enslaved community confirms that the spontaneous display of affection and love for Jefferson in 1789 grew out of an underlying anxiety that existed within enslaved people. The death of a master—hated or “loved”—was almost always a calamity for them, as creditors came to satisfy debts, and children and other relatives took their share of the property, human and otherwise, that the decedent left behind. Jefferson’s almost eight-year absence from Monticello in the 1780s had kept alive the fear that such a calamity might befall the enslaved community.

  Thirty-five years later, in 1824, Jefferson was still a vital presence at Monticello. But he was definitely a man of very advanced age for those days. As he lived in his twilight, the enslaved people on his plantations were marking time to a painful day of reckoning. His daughter Martha’s presence may have stirred some hope of continuity. Monticello had been her home for more than a decade and a half, so why would she leave it? She had no legal white siblings to share her father’s property. In the end, this turned out to be far worse than a false hope for anyone on the mountain who might have held it. A full-fledged cataclysm was in store.

  By the time of Lafayette’s visit, Monticello was in physical decay, as was the man who had willed it into existence. It was not enough to build a mansion; the mansion had to be maintained, and Jefferson’s shattered finances did not allow him to do that. Visitors noted the house’s and grounds’ worn and tattered appearance. Jack McLaughlin has posited that adequate maintenance of the exterior of the structure would have required painting it every six years to protect the wood from the elements, particularly rain and the general humidity of Virginia’s climate. If that was ever done, there is no record of it.20 Matters were made worse by the sheer number of people who moved through the house—Jefferson’s relatives and the endless parade of visitors who wore down the interior just in the normal business of living.

  Although Jefferson himself had been in poor condition for a number of years, his stamina and will to go forward were so great that he continued to strike observers as hale and hearty for a man of his age. Late in his life, visitors like Daniel Webster remarked upon his continued vitality, and even his son Madison remembered his father as a generally robust man until near the very end. There were the usual infirmities of old age, along with at least two harrowing accidents. When he was seventy-nine, he fell and broke his arm and wrist. Later, with his arm still in a sling from the previous accident, he was thrown from his horse Eagle as he forded a stream. He would have drowned had he not been able to hold on to the bridle and been dragged out of the water as the horse climbed onto the banks. After that accident his family wanted Burwell Colbert to ride with him, but Jefferson declined. Having fallen into the habit of riding alone, he said that he would prefer not to ride at all if he could not ride in solitude.21

  The most notable illness that Madison Hemings recalled occurred in 1818, and the treatment for it may have contributed to Jefferson’s slow decline and the eventual failure of his health. Long troubled by what he called rheumatism, Jefferson went to Warm Springs, Virginia, to bathe in the mineral waters to help ease his pain. Whatever relief he gained was offset by a viral or bacterial infection that caused him to break out into painful boils. The application of large amounts
of sulfur and mercury apparently ended the outbreak—or the disease just ran its course. Whatever claims might be made for sulfur as a medicine, mercury in all but trace amounts is an unqualified poison. Certainly the exposure to large amounts can cause permanent physical damage, and Jefferson suspected that the course of treatment for his illness at Warm Springs had permanently damaged his health.22

  The mounting evidence of Jefferson’s mortality was as alarming to members of the enslaved community as to his white family, if not more so. Only a handful of enslaved people, all Hemingses, could have had any reasonable assurance that they would still have their loved ones around them after Jefferson died and his estate was distributed. The men Jefferson eventually freed all knew he was going to free them upon his death, because he had told them he would. Each passing day brought the overwhelming majority of those enslaved at Monticello closer to the moment when community and family ties would be severed forever.

  The white family at Monticello, Jefferson included, had been pondering various ways to avoid a total collapse. According to Martha’s later recollections, Jefferson lay in bed one evening worrying about his financial state when the idea of a lottery for the sale of property hit him “like an inspiration from the realms of bliss.”23 Lotteries had been previously used in Virginia to dispose of burdened private estates and to raise money for public causes. Tickets were sold at low prices with the land as the prize. Then as later, many people opposed lotteries on religious and moral grounds as a form of gambling. In fact, Jefferson himself had publicly positioned himself over the years as an opponent of speculative enterprises. That he resorted to this scheme shows the depth of his fear during this period.