Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  12

  The Double Aspect

  Mary Hemings Bell had the good fortune, and the misfortune, to be a Hemings. As a Hemings, she had autonomy, which allowed her to leave Monticello in Jefferson’s absence and marry a respected Charlottesville businessman. But she lost four of her children to Jefferson precisely because they were Hemingses, members of the family Jefferson valued highly for their “superior intelligence, capacity and fidelity to trusts,” as Jefferson’s grandson recalled.1 Jefferson wanted those children as servants, as artisans, and as gifts, but they were also his relatives, so they occupied a hazy no-man’s-land that the grandson, Jeff Randolph, struggled to describe: “Having the double aspect of persons and property the feelings for the person was always impairing its value as property.”

  There can be no doubt that “feelings for the person” ran deep. A touching story captures the special relationship between the Hemings family and Jefferson. When Jefferson’s wife, Martha, was dying in 1782 from complications of a difficult childbirth, she was tended through her long, agonizing decline by a small group of Hemings women. According to Edmund Bacon’s account, Betty Hemings and her daughters Sally, Critta, Betty Brown, and Nance “were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died” and witnessed a poignant scene: “They have often told my wife that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done…. she wept and could not speak for some time.”2 Betty Hemings had been the mistress of Martha’s father, and her daughters were Martha’s half sisters. Martha might have resented Betty for being her father’s mistress, but evidently not: she took Betty into her household at Monticello when she could easily have put the whole family out of sight on some distant farm, or sold them.

  The kinship tie enfolded and protected the extended Hemings family. For them, Jefferson devised a quasi-slavery: he put them in responsible, highly skilled positions; he paid some of them; the Hemings men even traveled on their own (Jefferson sometimes did not know where they were). While most of the slaves at Monticello toiled “in the ground,” living and working at sites scattered over the slopes of the mountain, the Hemingses lived and worked on the summit and in the house itself. Jeff Randolph said that their status “was a source of bitter jealousy to the other slaves.” They wore better clothes, ate better food, and were not at the overseers’ beck and call. Edmund Bacon remembered the directive he got from Jefferson regarding the Hemings women: “I was instructed to take no control of them.” Unlike the other slave women at Monticello, Betty Hemings and her daughters never worked in the field, even at harvest when all hands were called out to get in the crops on a crash basis. Some of the Hemingses scarcely mingled with the people who worked in the ground. Young Hemings boys served time in Jefferson’s nailery, but they were on their way up to responsible positions as artisans or in the mansion.3

  The status of the Hemingses obviously raises doubts about Jefferson’s oft-stated opposition to the mixing of the races. If miscegenation disgusted him, why did he staff his household with his mixed-race relatives? In the 1790s the brothers James and Peter Hemings were cooks; their older brother Robert was Jefferson’s valet; the younger sisters Sally and Critta sewed and washed clothes, cleaned rooms, and waited on Jefferson’s grandchildren; and the oldest Hemings brother, Martin, served intermittently as butler. The son of Betty Hemings and an unknown father, Martin was born before Betty began her relationship with John Wayles. Because he was a Hemings, he held an important position, but he had no blood tie to Jefferson’s late wife, and his dealings with Jefferson were ambiguous and contentious. The next generation of Hemings offspring bustled around the house carrying dishes and firewood, running errands, and waiting on guests. “The boys,” as they were known, included Mary Bell’s son Joseph Fossett and three sons of Betty Brown Hemings—Wormley Hughes, Burwell Colbert, and Brown Colbert.4

  Surrounding himself with these enslaved relatives—well dressed, well fed, highly trained—Jefferson created a buffer between himself and the harsher reality of Monticello’s slavery farther down the mountain. Everyone in the household was utterly dependent on his favor and utterly devoted to him, bound as they were by ties of blood and affection.

  John Hemmings felt an extremely close emotional bond to the white Jefferson family. In 1928 a white Jefferson descendant wrote a letter to the Monticello curator about a table made on the plantation for her grandmother Virginia Randolph Trist at the behest of Jefferson’s daughter Martha: “I have a little sewing table made by the old colored cabinet maker at Monticello for my dear Grandmother, when she was a girl.”5 She passed along the story of what Hemmings had said when Martha made her request: “yes Mistis I have a piece of wood I am saving for old Master’s coffin, and it is just the thing, I will take a piece of it.” His remark reveals a profound regard for family connections. Being instinctively mindful of the traditions cherished by families, Hemmings knew the family would keep this child’s table forever, that everything that came from this place would one day be held sacred, that when little Virginia was grown, she would be moved by a relic made from the wood of her grandfather’s coffin. And that was precisely the story “Miss Virginia” passed down to her offspring.

  When you walk through Monticello, you see everywhere the handiwork of John Hemmings, whose skill received the highest possible accolade from the most exacting judge. Hemmings worked alongside Jefferson’s Irish joiner, James Dinsmore, in the creation of Monticello’s interior. It is impossible to find any variations in the quality of the woodwork, any spots where even a sharp-eyed connoisseur could say, “here Dinsmore left off and Hemmings took over.” Of this woodwork Jefferson said, “There is nothing superior in the US.”6

  Born in 1776, John Hemmings was the eleventh of Betty Hemings’s twelve children; his father was Joseph Neilson, a white Monticello carpenter. Jefferson had his eye on the boy from an early age. John first worked in the fields, but at age fourteen Jefferson put him on the crew of “out-carpenters,” cutting down trees and shaping logs—rough, strenuous work that served as prelude to finer skills and tasks. Two years later John joined the crew building log houses on Mulberry Row.7 When Hemmings was seventeen, Jefferson put him to work with a recently arrived house joiner from Scotland on making window frames “exactly of the size of those now in the house and of the same mouldings.”8 A few months later he was placed under another white artisan “for the purpose of learning to make wheels, and all sorts of work.”9 Dinsmore arrived in 1798 to work at Monticello, and he had John Hemmings under his wing. For the next decade Dinsmore and Hemmings collaborated on making Jefferson’s vision of Monticello a reality. Jefferson’s notes give the two men equal credit for one twelve-day task of making and installing one of the distinctive architectural features of his study or “cabinet”: “Dinsmore and Johnny prepared & put up the oval arch.”10

  When President Jefferson hired Edmund Bacon to manage Monticello in 1806, he gave instructions exempting John and three other slaves from Bacon’s control: “Joe [Fossett] works with Mr. Stewart; John Hemings and Lewis with Mr. Dinsmore; Burwell paints and takes care of the house. With these the overseer has nothing to do, except find them.”11 When Dinsmore left Monticello in 1809, Hemmings took over the joinery and ran it for seventeen years. The inventory of tools suggests that the Monticello joinery may have been the finest, best-equipped cabinetmaking shop in Virginia, with 125 different planes, rasps, gouges, chisels, drawing knives, saws, and other tools. Bacon said that Hemmings was “a first-rate workman, a very extra workman. He could make anything that was wanted in woodwork.”12 Recognizing Hemmings’s value to him, Jefferson paid his enslaved joiner $15 in 1811, an “annual gratuity” he thereafter raised to $20.

  George Washington once commented sarcastically that at Mount Vernon any complex piece of machinery would have the life span of a mushroom because neither his white nor his black workers had the brains to run such a thing, let alone repair it. The situation was quite diffe
rent at Monticello. Hemmings and other skilled slaves like Joseph Fossett, David Hern, and Burwell Colbert became even more valuable to Jefferson when he shifted from planting tobacco to planting wheat; many new agricultural machines and other equipment had to be fabricated or regularly maintained by mechanics who knew what they were doing.13 Once, Jefferson had Hemmings direct two other slaves in repairing a threshing machine, instructing him to keep an eye on the fixed thresher and “rectify it…if it gets out of order.” He was obviously confident that Hemmings understood the workings of this device. Hemmings also rebuilt a harpsichord that had fallen apart.14

  Bacon was right when he said Hemings “could make anything that was wanted.” He fashioned bedsteads, venetian blinds, dressing tables, and a set of items Jefferson prized—several Campeche or “siesta” chairs that he found exceptionally comfortable. “I long for a Siesta chair,” he wrote to his daughter from Poplar Forest. “I must therefore pray you to send…the one made by Johnny Hemings.” Jefferson was so proud of Hemmings’s handiwork that he gave some of these chairs as gifts.15 Hemmings and Joe Fossett built Jefferson’s landau, which Burwell Colbert painted. (Though Colbert’s main job was butler, he was also a painter and glazier.)

  We will never know the true level of Hemmings’s skill because his masterpiece burned. Hemmings created all the woodwork at Poplar Forest, which suffered a catastrophic fire that gutted the house in 1845. Hemmings had labored on it for a decade (1815–25): “I am at worck in the morning by the time I can see and the very same at night.”16 A dozen letters between Jefferson and Hemmings survive from this period, when the slave was working more or less on his own on the complex task of creating the interior of a neoclassical villa for the most demanding architect in America. Following Jefferson’s designs, Hemmings created neoclassical trim throughout the interior—entablatures in the Tuscan, Doric, and Ionic orders—a Tuscan entablature for the exterior, a classical balustrade, and a Chinese Chippendale railing.17

  Another of Hemmings’s creations was lost as well. When Ellen Randolph married Joseph Coolidge of Boston in 1825, John wished her to have a wedding present from him and Priscilla. He built her a writing desk, which was sent north by ship. A letter came with news that the ship had wrecked; the passengers were saved but all the cargo lost. Jefferson wrote to Ellen:

  John Hemmings was the first who brought me the news. He had caught it accidentally from those who first read the letter…. He was au desespoir! That beautiful writing desk he had taken so much pains to make for you! Everything else seemed as nothing in his eye, and that loss was everything. Virgil could not have been more afflicted had his Aeneid fallen a prey to the flames. I asked him if he could not replace it by making another? No. His eyesight had failed him too much, and his recollection of it was too imperfect.

  Ellen’s mother, Martha, added further information: “The writing desk Johnny insists upon it that he has no longer eye sight to execute. He actually wept when he heard of the loss.” Hemmings’s eyesight was indeed failing. Three years earlier Jefferson had bought him a $1 pair of spectacles.18

  The lost wedding gift symbolizes the personal connection Hemmings felt for the Jeffersons. The youngest granddaughter, Septimia, “Tim,” was a special favorite of John and Priscilla Hemmings from the time she was an infant. John and Priscilla had no children of their own, and Septimia became their substitute. “She has learnt to crawl a little,” her sister Cornelia wrote, “but mammy [Priscilla] dont like her to do that because she says that it makes her too dirty.”19 When “Tim” was two, Ellen wrote to her mother that “John Hemmings makes frequent enquiries after Septimia—& told me the other day that last year when he left Monticello to come here—he had cried for about five miles of the road after taking leave of her.”20 Later the young mistress and the slave corresponded: Hemmings wrote to eleven-year-old Septimia, “Your Letter came to me…and happy was I to embrace it to see that you take upon yourself to writ to me…. I hope you ar well and all the family.”21

  But a slave could rise only so high. The psychological gulf between whites and blacks is evident in Jefferson’s dealings with Dinsmore and “Johnny.” Jefferson wrote to Dinsmore that he “salutes him with esteem,”22 or “tender my esteem to mr Nelson & be assured of it respectfully yourself,”23 or “I salute you both with friendship and respect.”24 Even a hasty, dashed-off note ends, “accept my best wishes.”25 No such respectful esteem is expressed in Jefferson’s letters to Hemmings. Elizabeth Langhorne, a Virginia historian descended from Jefferson and never one to suggest that Jefferson did anything wrong, was compelled to note, “Jefferson’s letters to this key servant are businesslike, rather lacking in sentiment.”26 Lucia Stanton writes, “Jefferson’s letters to this highly skilled workman have no complimentary closings, except for an occasional ‘farewell’ or ‘I wish you well.’”27

  Hemmings began doing productive work for Jefferson when he was fourteen, but he was thirty-four before he drew a paycheck. Jefferson’s records usually characterize payments to Hemmings as “a gratuity” or “a donation,” but in one entry he admits that he gave Hemmings one month’s pay for a year of work—“the wages of one month in the year which I allow him as an encouragement.”28 Along with “encouraging” Hemmings with literacy, training, satisfying work, and payments, there was also a diminishment of the man through a careful calibration of recognition.*

  Thus did Jefferson receive the services of a top cabinetmaker for $20 a year plus food. What did slavery cost the slave? It is a simple calculation to come up with a dollar figure, but there is a more compelling way of calculating the much larger loss. Imagine for a moment that John Hemmings was white and free; what would his services have earned him on the open market? When he was doing the fine woodwork at Poplar Forest—which a Monticello curator has called “incredible”—the white carpenter John Perry was doing the lesser tasks like structural work and laying a floor. Hemmings was the far better craftsman, but Perry was paid well in the marketplace open to whites: “His work on residential buildings and churches in Albemarle and surrounding counties enabled him to purchase large amounts of land, part of which he sold in 1817 to…the University of Virginia. A condition of the sale was that he would have carpentry and joinery contracts.” Another Monticello joiner, James Oldham, earned enough money to open a public house.29

  John Hemmings’s three older half brothers, Martin, Robert, and James, enjoyed the quasi-freedom to travel around Virginia on their own and earn money off the plantation. (The average Monticello slave needed a written pass from an overseer just to attend church off the plantation.30) They had access to cash and many opportunities to flee.

  Robert Hemings went to Annapolis with Jefferson in 1783 and had two months of tonsorial training there under a French master barber.31 He also journeyed with Jefferson to Boston the following year when Jefferson took ship for France. With cash in hand and three of his master’s horses in his care, Hemings then made his way back to the land of slavery.32 At that time Jefferson may or may not have known that Robert Hemings and an enslaved woman named Doll were in a relationship that would culminate in their marriage. Jefferson wrote to an acquaintance in 1790 that “if you know anything of Bob,” tell him to report to Monticello; “I suppose him to be in the neighborhood of Fredericksbg.”33 That was where Hemings had met and married Doll, who later moved to Richmond with her owner, Dr. George Stras.

  With a wife and child in Richmond, Robert decided in 1794 to extract himself from Monticello with the aid of Dr. Stras. The negotiation that ensued left Jefferson feeling angry and cheated, complaining that Stras had “debauched him from me.” He convinced himself that Robert’s new family had nothing to do with his request to leave Monticello; rather, a conniving outsider had simply offered him a better deal. But it was his own family tie that may explain Jefferson’s annoyance. Robert’s kinship to Jefferson gave him leverage over his master. Kinship entangled Jefferson in a connection he could not break or evade, subverted his control of a prized servant, and bre
ached the wall of slavery.

  Despite his anger, Jefferson relented and on Christmas Eve 1794 wrote in his account book, “Executed a deed of emancipation for Bob, by the name of Robert Hemmings. He has been valued at £60.”34 Dr. Stras advanced Robert the purchase price, which was paid to Jefferson, securing Robert’s release from Monticello. Robert worked for the doctor until 1799 to pay off the debt.35

  Robert knew he was leaving Monticello under the cloud of Jefferson’s disapproval. For all practical and legal purposes he was free from Jefferson for good, but he tried to repair the rupture with his kinsman as soon as he could. Right after his release, he saw Jefferson’s daughter Martha in Richmond and took the opportunity to beg forgiveness. Martha wrote to her father in January 1795:

  I saw Bob frequently while in Richmond he expressed great uneasiness at having quitted you in the manner he did and repeatedly declared that he would never have left you to live with any person but his wife. He appeared to be so much affected at having deserved your anger that I could not refuse my intercession when so warmly solicited towards obtaining your forgiveness. The poor creature seems so deeply impressed with a sense of his ingratitude as to be rendered quite unhappy by it but he could not prevail upon himself to give up his wife and child.