12. Ibid., 4–5.
13. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
14. Charles F. Robinson II, Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South (Fayetteville, Ark., 2003), 49–50.
15. Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s recollections, ViU:1874.
16. Journal of John Hartwell Cocke, Jan. 26, 1853, in John Hartwell Cocke Papers, Box 188, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.
17. See, generally, Philip J. Schwarz, Slave Laws in Virginia (Athens, Ga., 1996).
18. Boston Repertory, May 31, 1805; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 566–82, 567–68; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 245.
4: Thomas Jefferson
1. Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, March 12, 1767.
2. Papers, 3:532; Martha Jefferson’s Account Book, Feb. 27, 1772 (Account Book with Record of Cases Tried in Virginia Courts, 1768–69), LOC.
3. Jefferson’s Family Bible, LVa.
4. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in Writings (New York, 1984), 7–8; Malone, Jefferson, 1:430, 21, 21–33; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 41–45.
5. Susan Kern, "The Material World of the Jeffersons at Shadwell," WMQ, 3d ser., 62, no. 2 (2005), at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/62.2/kern.html, 14–18.
6. Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (New York, 1970), 9.
7. Douglas L. Wilson, ed., Jefferson’s Literary Commonplace Book (Princeton, 1989).
8. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 43.
9. Kern, "Material World of the Jeffersons," 14.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3 vols. (1858; reprint, New York, 1972), 1:33.
13. TJ to William Fleming, March 20, 1764, "11. o’clock at night," Papers, 1:16.
14. Susan Kern, "The Jeffersons at Shadwell: The Social and Material World of a Virginia Plantation" (Ph.D. diss., College of William and Mary, 2005), 1:87–92, discussing the implications of Jane Jefferson’s history of childbearing.
TJ never referred to Jupiter as "Evans." However, his son’s name was John Jupiter Philip Ammon Evans. See Stanton, Free Some Day, 22. In several listings, including his 1801 record of vaccinations of enslaved people and some of his grandchildren, TJ did refer to Philip Evans as "Phil Ev." Evans was thus the family name during slavery. See Papers, 35:34.
15. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 577; Martha Jefferson Carr to TJ, March 27, 1787, Papers, 15:655.
16. Thomas Worthington’s diary, entry for Jan. 25, 1802, LOC.
17. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 247.
18. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 577.
19. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 34.
20. TJ to Giovanni Fabbroni, June 8, 1778, Papers, 2:196; Malone, Jefferson, 1:90; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 15, 51.
21. Malone, Jefferson, 1:129, 120; the indenture between Richard Corbin, Robert Carter Nicholas, John Wayles, and Benjamin Waller and Philippa Lee, wife of William Lee, dated Nov. 5, 1770, in Lee Family Papers, VHS.
22. MB, 34, 35.
23. Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, Feb. 22, 1770.
24. Malone, Jefferson, 1:157–58.
25. See, e.g., Farm Book, 77. Betty Brown was listed along with her children. Thomas Jefferson Randolph identified his uncle Samuel Carr as the father of Brown’s children. If he was telling the truth, these were most probably her two youngest, born in the late 1790s. See Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 254.
26. Howell v. Netherland, 1770 Va. Lexis 1: Jeff. 90, p. 2. Samuel Howell ran away with his younger brother. Wade Netherland placed a notice in the Virginia Gazette (Aug. 8, 1770) of Howell’s escape. After describing Howell as a "sensible fellow and good sawyer," he mentioned that "Samuel lately brought a suit in the General Court for his freedom, which was determined against him."
27. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, "Logic and Experience: Slavery, Race and Thomas Jefferson’s Life in the Law," in Slavery and the American South: Essays and Commentaries, ed. Winthrop Jordan (Jackson, Miss., 2003), discussing Howell v. Netherland.
28. Jefferson, Autobiography, 9; MB, 1:285.
29. Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York, 2003), 3–62.
30. The Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols. (Troy, N.Y., 1913), 14:93–144.
31. Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst, Mass., 1989). See also Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, 1983).
32. Parent, Foul Means, 147.
33. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (1961; reprint, Chapel Hill, 1996), vii; "Two Dawns of Freedom," in R. Jackson Wilson et al., The Pursuit of Liberty: A History of the American People, vol. 1, To 1877 (New York, 1984), 121–40.
34. Malone, Jefferson, 1:169.
35. See, generally, Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, 1986), 300–312.
36. Farm Book, 18; MB, 1:341.
37. De Ende v. Wilkinson’s Administrator, 1857 VA. Lex. 55, 2 Patton & H. 663.; Synder v. Grandstaff 96 VA. 473 (1898).
38. How Slaves May Be Emancipated, Laws of Virginia, 1723, chap. 4.
39. MB, 329 n. 15; Farm Book, 9, 18, 15.
5: The First Monticello
1. This is a nod to Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, 1996). The first chapter of the book is entitled "The Well Ordered Dreamworld," referring to Monticello. Rhys Isaac, "The First Monticello," in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1993). The title of this chapter and the concept of there being two physical and social "Monticellos" are taken from Isaac’s essay. A chapter below, entitled "The Second Monticello," will complete the set.
2. MB, 30. See also n. 48.
3. Rhys Isaac, "Monticello Old and New," in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1999), 116–17.
4. Malone and Jefferson: A Conversation with Anne Freudenberg (Charlottesville, 1981).
5. Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988), 154–55.
6. Ibid., 156–57.
7. MB, 212 n. 20; McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 153, 161.
8. Farm Book, 3. Betty Brown was listed as one of Jefferson’s "proper slaves" as of Jan. 1774, distinguishing them from the enslaved people who were to come into his possession as a result of the distribution of Wayles slaves upon his death. This indicates that John Wayles had given Brown to Martha before his death, most likely upon her wedding. See also Stanton, Free Some Day, 124.
9. See, e.g., MB, 263, 285, 297.
10. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 113–19.
11. Stanton, Free Some Day, 105.
12. See Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), chap. 4, discussing the early construction of slaveholder attitudes about women of African descent; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004), 64.
13. "Memorandums on a tour from Paris to Amsterdam, Strasburg and back to Paris," March 3–April 22, 1788, Papers, 13:27–28.
14. TJ to William Drayton, July 30, 1787, Papers, 11:647–48.
15. G. Ugo Nwokeji, "African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic," WMQ, 3d ser., 58 (2001): 47–68.
16. See, e.g., TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Dec. 13, 1792, Papers, 24:740–41; Stanton, Free Some Day, 106.
17. "Critta Hemings," Monticello Research Department.
18. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 254; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 288. While denyin
g that his grandfather had fathered children by Sally Hemings, and asserting that Peter Carr had fathered all her children (a claim destroyed by DNA testing of Hemings and Carr descendants in 1998), Thomas Jefferson Randolph named his uncle Samuel Carr as the father of "Betsy" Hemings’s children, meaning Betty Brown, who in addition to her older children had three relatively late in life children, Edwin, Robert, and Maria.
19. Stanton, Free Some Day, 106–7.
20. Ibid., 119.
21. MB, 371, "Recd. From the Forest 4 Doz. 10 bott. Of Jamaica rum (Note I shall keep a tally of these as we use them by making a mark in the margin in order to try the fidelity of Martin."
22. Stanton, Free Some Day, 35–51; Monticello Research Department; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 566–67. On the question of family names, it has become apparent that many of the enslaved families at Monticello had last names that Jefferson and his family either did not know, simply never used, or were not in the habit of using—Gillette, Granger, Hern, and Evans, for example. Jefferson was not alone in this. As Herbert G. Gutman showed, throughout slavery slave owners were very often totally unaware (or, again, acted as if they were) that their slaves had surnames. See The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), chap. 6, "Somebody Knew My Name." Laws’ failure to recognize slaves surnames no more means that they did not have them than that the law’s treatment of them as real estate actually turned enslaved people into land. Slaves kept these names alive in their own families and consciousness and handed them down. Why would it have been otherwise, given the nature of their surrounding society? One could understand why a peasant during feudal times might be content to call himself "John of Surrey," when last names were not the convention in the surrounding community. It would make no sense in the context of the world that Jefferson’s slaves lived in, particularly since some slaves were called by their last names—the Hemingses and the Hubbards, for example. By the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, first and last names were a matter of course throughout the society in which blacks lived and moved. Black families, as had white families, picked their own last names to try to fix the boundaries of their families as best they could.
23. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Merrill D. Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York, 1984), 267.
24. Stanton, Free Some Day, 34–40; TJ to Nicholas Lewis, July 11, 1788, Papers, 13:343.
25. Monticello Research Department records on the hiring of Critta and Thenia Hemings.
26. Stanton, Free Some Day, 104.
27. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, draft letter, Dec. 25, 1873, VI:U8937.
28. See, e.g., MB, 419, entry for June 7, 1776, "Pd for shoes for Bob 8/."; 420, entry for June 25, 1776, "pd. For 2pr. Stockings for Bob 15/."; 423, entry for Aug. 19, 1776, "Gave Bob 3d."
29. Farm Book, 24; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 245; Papers, 9:624n.
30. Stanton, Free Some Day, 115.
31. Woods, Albermarle County in Virginia, 29.
32. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 84.
33. Stanton, Free Some Day, 115.
34. Ibid., appendix (Hemings family tree); Monticello Research Department, on Betsy Hemings and her son Fossett Hemings. The oral history of some lines of Mary Hemings’s descendants indicates that Joseph Fossett was the son of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson freed Fossett in his will. In the Fossett descendants’ view, the name Fossett was just given to Joseph by Jefferson or someone who assumed that William Fossett was his father. While anything, within the laws of physics, is possible, the prime difficulty with this idea is that Joseph Fossett, and his contemporary relatives of the time, acted as if the name Fossett had real meaning in their lives. Joseph Fossett wore his last name when he did not have to. He and other enslaved people knew that last names signified paternity. Fossett named one of his sons William. Again Joseph’s nephew Joseph Hemmings named his son Fossett. In short, the Hemingses of the generation still in slavery were very serious about naming their children, because it was the only way to achieve some semblance of formality in their family relations. It seems unlikely that they would have accepted a name of a true outsider foisted upon them by mere whim.
If Mary Hemings was, in fact, Jefferson’s mistress before Sally Hemings—indeed, before Martha Jefferson’s death—his relations with her must have been of a character completely different from that of his relations with Sally Hemings. He repeatedly did the thing that most effectively encapsulated the heinous nature of slavery, the thing that every mother dreaded: he separated Mary Hemings from four of her six children, giving three of them away as wedding presents. The one child of hers that he did free, Joseph Fossett, he freed not as soon as he left childhood, as he did with his children with Sally Hemings, but when he was a forty-six-year-old man. Jefferson made no provision for Fossett’s children, and the supremely determined father then spent years buying back his children—children who would have been Jefferson’s grandchildren.
35. Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Dumas Malone (New York, 1958), 44.
36. Martha Jefferson to Eleanor Conway Madison, Aug. 8, 1780, Papers, 3:532.
37. TJ, Autobiography, in Writings, 3; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 44; Mclaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello, 46–47.
38. Jefferson Family Bible; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 567; Stanton, Free Some Day, 33–34.
39. Martha Wayles Skelton, 1772–1782, Part B Household Accounts, Thomas Jefferson Papers Series 7, Miscellaneous Bound Volumes, LOC. March 5, 1777, "made 100 lbs. of soft soap"; March 20, 1777, "made…hard soap not weighed"; June 23, 1773, "brewed a cask of beer"; Dec. 16, 1772, "brewed a cask of beer—20 gallon cask."
40. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 566.
6: In the Home of a Revolutionary
1. Papers, 1:121–35.
2. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 99–103; Malone, Jefferson, 1:181–82.
3. MB, 419–20.
4. TJ, Autobiography, in Writings, 45–46; Richard Henry Lee to TJ, Sept. 27, 1776, Papers, 1:522; TJ to John Hancock, Oct. 11, 1776, ibid., 1:524; Richard Henry Lee to TJ, Nov. 3, 1776, ibid., 1:589.
5. TJ to William Phillips, June 25, 1779, Papers, 3:15; TJ to James Monroe, May 20, 1782, ibid., 6:184.
6. TJ to John Page, June 1779, Papers, 2:279.
7. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 568.
8. Ibid., 569–70.
9. Dunmore’s proclamation of Nov. 14, 1775, Purdie & Dixon’s Virginia Gazette, Nov. 25, 1775; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, & the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1999), 155–56.
10. Farm Book, 29. Lucia Stanton has noted the change in TJ’s characterization of the actions of the enslaved men and women who left his plantation to join the British forces. His first notations in the Farm Book describe them as having "fled to the enemy" or "joined enemy." Later he characterized these slaves as having been "carried off." TJ to William Gordon, July 16, 1788, Papers, 13:363–64; Stanton, Free Some Day, 53. Cassandra Pybus has challenged Jefferson’s estimates of the number of slaves who were "taken from Virginians" by the British forces. After noting that historians have relied on Jefferson’s statement that at least "30,000" slaves were taken from Virginia alone, Pybus reminds us that Jefferson made the comment while he was in Paris away from the scene and that his letter gives no hint of how he had arrived at that number. Without entering the larger debate about exactly how many African Americans joined the British, we should note that Pybus argues that Jefferson, as time wore on, was careless in his statements about how many slaves he actually lost to the British. Only twenty-three left, but by 1786 he said that "thirty" had been gone, including in that number four slaves who had actually been recovered, one who died soon after his return, two who were sold, and one who was given away. The other three were slaves who had never been accounted for and were not included in his 1783 listing of losses. Catherine Pybus, "Jefferson’s Faulty Math: The Question of Slave Defections in the American Revolution" WMQ,
3d ser., 62 (2005): 243–64.
11. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 569; Malone, Jefferson, 1:339.
12. Malone, Jefferson, 1:336–41.
13. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 570–71.
14. MB, 507. According to the oral history of some descendants of Wormley Hughes, Jefferson was his father. As with the Fossett family oral history, the first question that comes to mind when considering this is why Wormley had the last name Hughes, instead of Brown, which was the last name of his mother, Betty. Betty Brown had several children with the last name Colbert. One of those children she named after herself—Brown Colbert. Pulling names out of a hat did not seem to be the family’s style. Wormley was, in fact, extremely close to Jefferson and was informally freed, along with Sally Hemings, at Jefferson’s instruction.
While Joseph Fossett’s family was dispersed after the 1827 auction at Monticello, Jefferson’s grandson Jeff, just days after Hughes’s wife and four youngest children were sold at the event, purchased all of them and brought them to live together at his Edgehill plantation. Was this family-based remorse? As will be discussed later, it is more likely that Hughes’s wife, Ursula, was the impetus for this action. Further reason to doubt that Hughes was Jefferson’s son is that the Randolph family acquiesced in Henry Randall’s apparently extensive interviews with him as he prepared his biography of Jefferson. It is near inconceivable, given their extreme secrecy and sensitivity about Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings, that they would have directed (allowed) Hughes to talk to a man who was writing a book about their family if Hughes were, in fact, Jefferson’s son.
The oral tradition of Mary Hemings’s family holds that Jefferson had children by three enslaved women, including their ancestor, Mary, and Sally Hemings. These individuals did not name the third woman, but given the Hughes tradition and Wormley’s relationship with Jefferson, the most likely third woman they were talking about was Betty Brown. In the 1940s Pearl Graham spoke with these Hemings descendants and Charlottesville residents (not Hemings family members) who knew descendants of others enslaved at Monticello. They all painted a picture of Jefferson as promiscuous with "colored women." He had a habit, they said, of accosting one of his mistresses, a laundress, on her way back from doing her work. See Lucia Stanton "Through the Other End of the Telescope: Jefferson in the Eyes of his Slaves" WMQ, 3d ser., 57 (2000): 145.
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