The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  10. Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery (Philadelphia and Savannah, 1858), 98–100. There have been many studies of European attitudes toward black women. See, e.g., Jordan, White over Black; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 27–46, on the "Jezebel" stereotype.

  11. Sloan, Principle and Interest, 14–17. On the question of the value of the Wayles fortune, see ibid., 254 n. 15; on the decision to take the Wayles assets, see ibid., 15–16.

  12. Ibid., 16.

  13. TJ to Nicholas Lewis, July 11, 1788, Papers, 13:343.

  14. "Critta Hemings," Monticello Research Department, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.

  15. TJ to Nicholas Lewis, April 12, 1792, Papers, 23:408.

  16. See Hemings family tree in this book; Lucia Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street: The Hemings Family and Charlottesville," Magazine of Albemarle County History 55 (1997): 100.

  17. Melton A. McLaurin, Celia: A Slave (Athens, Ga., 1991), provides the most extensive treatment of the legal case that grew out of Celia’s killing of Robert Newsome. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, "Celia’s Case," in Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, ed. Annette Gordon-Reed (New York, 2002), 48–59.

  18. Gordon-Reed, "Celia’s Case," 49.

  19. Ibid., 50.

  20. Ibid., 51–52.

  21. Ibid., 57.

  22. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

  16: "His Promises, on Which She Implicitly Relied"

  1. TJ to Andre Limozin, May 3, 1789, Papers, 16:86.

  2. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 246.

  3. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre, 56–57; White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 85–86, 126.

  4. TJ, Notes, in Writings, 180.

  5. Stanton, Free Some Day, 105.

  6. See White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 20, Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 172–77. Both White and Genovese make the point that, however white society chose to see them, enslaved women maintained their own sense of themselves as women, developing their own sense of style and understanding about what role they were to play in the society they were forced to live in. See also Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 234–37, discussing how "gender socialization from their mothers" taught female slaves how they were to behave as women.

  7. See Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), 1, referring to "Denmark Vesey’s insurrection" as the "ultimate form of resistance." Historians of slavery have, in fact, expanded the definition of what acts can be considered forms of resistance to slavery as it has become clear that counting up actual slave revolts was an unfair and inadequate way to measure enslaved people’s responses to their situation. With respect to women in particular, the headings in the index to White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? (p. 242) tell the story that resistance is defined as "aggressive behavior," "feigning illness," "schemes and excuses," "uses of poison," and "work slow-downs." In his introduction to Slave Counterpoint, xxii, Philip Morgan explains the lack of a separate chapter on slave resistance by saying, "In work and in play, in public and in private, violently and quietly, slaves struggled against masters."

  8. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 88–89. Infanticide was "atypical." Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 244–45, takes the same view: "a few slave mothers went so far as to commit infanticide." See Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004), and Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 542, on the greater prevalence of mothers running away with children.

  9. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 526.

  10. Thomas Gibbons to Jonathan Drayton, Dec. 20, 1802, William L. Clement Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, copy at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Library. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 171, 245.

  11. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 665–66; "An Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves," Laws of Virginia, 1782, chap. 61.

  12. Despite all their talk of their paternalistic attitudes toward their slaves, a wealth of recent scholarship has shown the extremely limited nature of that paternalism as massive numbers of slaves, "members of the family," were sold as the circumstances of their owners obliged. See, e.g., Johnson, Soul by Soul; Deyle, Carry Me Back; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

  13. See above, chap. 1. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, a book devoted to tracking and analyzing the process through which Africans became African Americans, stops at 1830 because, by then, "a translation [had] taken place, consistent with the demographic evidence, that delineates the demise of a preponderant African sociocultural matrix and the rise of an African American one in its place." SH died in the 1830s, and her mother, Elizabeth Hemings, lived until 1807, when her youngest daughter was thirty-four years old; both lived their lives almost totally within the African sociocultural matrix Gomez describes. See also Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 459–77; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 134.

  14. Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 233–34; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 553–55. One configuration of male-female relations that was quite widespread across the continent was the practice of polygamy, in which "wives were generally subordinate to their husbands." John Thornton has noted the "oft repeated assertion that African wealth was measured in wives, in the sense that polygamy was indicative of prestige and that such wives were often in labor forces." John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1998), 86. Elizabeth Hemings’s mother would likely not have expected to be the sole wife of a man, an understanding that would have given her very different perspectives on her life as a woman, whether positive or negative, from a woman whose culture promoted monogamy. There is an overall sense that in the West and Central African countries from which the majority of American slaves were brought, male dominance was very much the norm, and many slaves carried that attitude with them across the ocean. Of course, African men were not alone in their preference for dominance over females. That can almost be called a universal tendency among males. See also White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 106–18, discussing West African conceptions of motherhood.

  15. Bear, The Hemings Family, 9.

  16. Barbara J. Heath, Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (Charlottesville, 1999), 51.

  17. Stanton, Free Some Day, 106; Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann Wright, "Bonds of Memory Identity and the Hemings Family," in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1999), 170–72.

  18. Frederick Douglass, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford, Conn., 1882), 28. On the history of racial classifications, see Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife (London, 2004); Robinson, Dangerous Liaisons, 655. Ariela Gross has cautioned against taking too much stock in "statutes and appellate opinions as evidence of social beliefs about race—for example, ‘one-drop-of-blood’ rules of racial identification as evidence of the growing power of biological racism—[she] found that the legal rule articulated by statute or high court often made little difference at the local level. Ancestry rules did not usually decide actual cases." Ariela Gross, "Beyond Black and White: Cultural Approaches to Race and Slavery," Columbia Law Review 101 (Apr. 2001), 654.

  19. For works devoted to the various modes of black activism during the eighteenth century, see, e.g., Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1961); Robert Colley, Slavery and Jeffersonian Virginia (Urbana 1973); Sidney Kaplan and Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Amherst, Mass., 1989); Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill
, 1999).

  20. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 220.

  21. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 245, 246. Hemings’s seeming pride that his grandmother was a full-blooded African was not unusual. Michael Gomez endorses John W. Blassingame’s findings on how many enslaved men and women viewed Africans with respect. See Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 191, 236, referencing Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972), 39–42.

  22. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 235–36.

  23. Stanton and Wright, "Bonds of Memory," 178.

  24. Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 222. Although Stevenson’s book centers on slavery in one county in Virginia, it can be seen as a corrective to the notion that a female-headed household is necessarily a dysfunctional one. Because the legacies of slavery are still with us, there has been much discussion about whether current-day dissolution of black family life can be attributed to blacks’ experiences during slavery. The famous Moynihan report fingered the black "matriarchy," with its purported roots in slavery, as the source of problems in the black community. Herbert Gutman’s important work The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), a direct response to the Moynihan report, suggested that enslaved people more often lived in nuclear families than was thought. Subsequent work, including Stevenson’s, suggests that perhaps Gutman went too far in the opposite direction from Moynihan and understated the effect that the sales of slaves had on the lives of enslaved families.

  25. See, e.g., Farm Book, 28.

  26. TJ to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, in Writings, 1486–87.

  27. None of this is unique to our age. Throughout his life, Jefferson, with the utmost sincerity (who knew more than he about the perils of debt), advised against spending more money than one had. Yet he did that to the very end of his days. The last letter he ever wrote was not the one famously thought to be his final one—the very eloquent and stirring missive to Roger C. Weightman in which he had to decline, owing to his poor health, an invitation to participate in the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His last letter was an inquiry about a shipment of expensive wine that he had ordered, even as he faced financial ruin and the loss of his beloved Monticello. He was absolutely right to have ordered the wine, since he was not going to save Monticello by doing without it. There was no point in suffering more than he already was, the time to have listened to himself having long since passed. If he had lived the preceding forty years not spending money that he did not have, or lending money to others that he did not have, the troubles of his old age would have been greatly lessened. TJ to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, in Writings, 1516–17; J. Jefferson Looney, "Thomas Jefferson’s Last Letter," VMHB 112 (2004): 178.

  28. TJ to John Banister Jr., Oct. 15, 1785, Papers, 8:636.

  29. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 252.

  30. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 40–43.

  31. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (New Haven, 1981), quoted ibid., 40–41.

  32. Lucia Stanton, "The Other End of the Telescope: Jefferson through the Eyes of His Slaves," WMQ 3d ser., 57 (2000): 146.

  33. See above, chap. 12.

  34. Peabody, "There Are No Slaves," 101–3. Howell v. Netherland, 1770 Va. Lexis 1; Jeff. 90 (April 1770). 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).

  35. There is, of course, extensive literature on enslaved people who succeeded in liberating themselves from their enslavement, or attempted to do so. That literature makes clear that these individuals ran whether there was a chance, let alone a guarantee, that life outside of slavery was going to be a certain way. See, e.g., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790, ed. Lathan A. Windley, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1993); Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 696; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974), 239. Washington University in St. Louis maintains an online database of hundreds of freedom suits through the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project at http://stlcourtrecords.wustl.edu.

  36. James Hemings’s inventory, see photograph in the first insert.

  37. Pierre Boulle, "Les Gens de couleur à Paris à la veille de la Révolution," 1:160–61.

  38. Jennifer Heuer, "The One Drop Rule in Reverse?: Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France," forthcoming article.

  39. One of the more popular novels of early nineteenth-century France was Ourika, based on the true story of a young woman from Senegal who is taken in by a French family. Ourika seeks to move above her station, and the novel recounts her struggle in Paris. Claire de Duras, Ourika: An English Translation, trans. John Fowles (New York, 1994).

  40. Wister and Irwin, Worthy Women of Our First Century, 20–22.

  41. Robert Darnton, "What Was Revolutionary about French Revolution?," quoted in David Brion Davis, "American Equality and Foreign Revolutions," Journal of American History 76 (Dec. 1989): 735.

  17: "The Treaty" and "Did They Love Each Other?"

  1. For the past decade, I have traveled the country, speaking about Hemings and Jefferson. I do not recall a setting where this question was not asked explicitly or implicitly.

  2. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 246.

  3. The question whether historians should focus on the hegemony of the slaveholding class—the power they exercised over slaves and the larger society—or examples of the agency that enslaved people exhibited in the face of that attempted hegemony is part of a continuing conversation among those who write about slavery. See Ariela Gross, "Beyond Black and White," 664, referring to the "circularity of the ‘hegemony v. resistance’ debates that have sometimes dominated slavery studies."

  4. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 166–69, discussing "Mammy love."

  5. W. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1765), chap. 15.

  6. Hendrik Hartog, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 2–3, 23–24, on law’s shaping of the meaning of marriage.

  7. See above, chap. 3, on the marriage settlement of John Wayles and Martha Eppes. See also "Marriage Settlement for Martha Jefferson," Papers, 16:189.

  8. See Hodding Carter, "Mrs. Means Married Women," from Where Main Street Meets the River (1953), reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1941–1973 (New York, 2003), 134–40. Carter describes a meeting with a "Negro woman" who came into his office to complain because the Democrat-Times refused to refer to married black women as "Mrs.," "instead giving their unadorned names, as Lucy Jones and Mary Smith" and "listing only the initials of their husbands as if their first names could not be learned." Carter wrote, "I might have brushed her aside with the usual comment that this was the established policy of the paper and of most Southern papers from time immemorial. Or I might have evaded the issue by saying that I would like time to think about it since if I complied, I would be violating one of the longest lasting of deep Southern taboos."

  9. From Mrs. Drummond, March 12, 1771, Papers, 1:65–66; TJ to T. Adams, June 1, 1771, ibid., 71–72.

  10. Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson, 25–26; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 245.

  11. For a discussion of the implications of the Married Women’s Property Acts, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982). Basch and other historians have emphasized the limited nature of the reforms—they were not meant to completely overthrow traditional notions about marriage and the relationship between husbands and wives. Though a given law may have limited application, it may also carry a powerful symbolic message that shapes the attitudes of the public. See also Lawrence Friedman, A History of American Law (New York, 1985), 209–11, 295–96.

  12. Sloan, Principle and Interest,
15–16; Papers, 1:100, 103.

  13. See Gross, "Beyond Black and White," 649.

  14. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 246.

  15. White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 7–8, 76–77; Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 236–37.

  16. Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, 2006), 67–74.

  17. TJ to Maria Jefferson, May 25, 1797, Papers, 29:399.

  18. TJ to William Evans, Feb. 22, 1801, Papers, 33:38.

  19. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 548–49.

  20. Francis Say to TJ, Feb. 23, 1801, Papers, 33:53.

  21. Rhys Isaac, "Monticello Stories," 119.

  22. John Quincy Adams, "The Character of Desdemona," in Hackett, Notes and Comments upon Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare, 235.

  23. Ibid., 237, 247–48. It is not uncommon today to hear interracial couples described, jokingly some might say, as having a malady: "jungle fever." But, of course, humor is often used as a soft way to communicate a hard message. Americans clearly prefer to characterize the attraction between black and white couples, as opposed to the attraction between intraracial couples, as an inherently more degraded—or less serious—form of love.

  24. Ibid., 247.

  25. TJ to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, June 26, 1786, Papers, 10:63.

  26. Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, 2005), 325–26.

  27. Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill, 2006), 353.

  28. Hamilton W. Pierson, In the Brush; or, Old-Time Social, Political, and Religious Life in the Southwest (New York, 1881).

  29. See Bernie D. Jones, "‘Righteous Fathers,’ ‘Vulnerable Old Men,’ and ‘Degraded Creatures’: Southern Justices on Miscegenation in the Antebellum Will Contest," 40 Tulsa Law Review 40 (2005): 699–750; Adrienne D. Davis, "The Private Law of Race and Sex: An Antebellum Perspective," Stanford Law Review 51 (Jan. 1999): 221–88.