Martha’s sympathy for Robert may have arisen from their kinship; after all, he was her half uncle.36
After working off his indenture to Dr. Stras, Robert became fully independent and acquitted himself in a manner that confounded Jefferson’s theory that freeing slaves was like abandoning children. By 1799 he was listed on Richmond’s tax rolls as a property owner. Three years later he resided on a half-acre lot he purchased with the income from a livery stable he owned. He may have run a small freight-hauling operation. The Monticello family never lost touch with him. He handled a cash transaction for Jefferson in Richmond and sent a shipment of oysters to Monticello in 1809.37
A little more than a year after Robert left Monticello, his brother James departed as well—another great loss for Jefferson, who had invested substantially in training him. As early as 1784, Jefferson was thinking of hiring a French chef in Annapolis to come to Monticello to train a slave. But when he was dispatched to Paris as U.S. minister, he had a better idea. He took nineteen-year-old James with him “for the particular purpose of learning French cookery,” arranging apprenticeships with Parisian caterers and cooks, including a pâtissier.38 Soon Hemings was preparing meals for distinguished visitors at Jefferson’s Paris residence. All did not go smoothly, however. Hemings had a violent dispute over a bill with his French-language tutor, beating and kicking the man—an outburst that may have resulted from drinking, since Hemings later showed signs of alcoholism.39 Despite being able to claim freedom under French law, Hemings returned to the United States.
James had other opportunities to escape. He worked for Jefferson in Philadelphia, which had a large free black community (later in the 1790s two of George Washington’s household slaves escaped from him in Philadelphia). As part of his household duties James got to know a former slave of James Madison’s who was living as a free man with his wife, who worked for Jefferson as a washerwoman.40 A year later Jefferson brought Hemings along when he toured New York state with Madison. At New York City, Jefferson boarded a boat for Poughkeepsie, giving Hemings expense money to bring his phaeton and horse to Poughkeepsie by land. Hemings could have escaped then and there.41
Jefferson fully expected that this expensively trained slave would become chef for life at Monticello, but in 1793, while serving his master in Philadelphia when Jefferson was secretary of state, Hemings decided he wanted to go off on his own. He struck a deal with Jefferson that he could go free after training his brother Peter as his replacement. The document Jefferson drew up to seal the arrangement seems calculated to instill some guilt: “Having been at great expense in having James Hemings taught the art of cookery, disiring to befriend* him, and to require from him as little in return as possible, I do hereby promise and declare” to set James free if he will train his own replacement. It took James more than two years to complete Peter’s training to Jefferson’s satisfaction, whereupon Jefferson drew up the manumission document “to be produced when & where it may be necessary.” He also gave his freed servant $30 for travel expenses to Philadelphia. A few months later Jefferson and Hemings saw each other there, and Jefferson wrote, with evident concern: “James is returned to this place, and is not given up to drink as I had been informed. He tells me his next trip will be to Spain. I am afraid his journeys will end in the moon. I have endeavored to persuade him to stay where he is, and lay up money.” 42
It seems that Peter Hemings was not as talented in the kitchen as his brother, whom he replaced as Monticello’s head chef in 1796, though Jefferson characterized him as a man of “great intelligence and diligence.” 43 When Jefferson became president and the quality of White House cuisine was much on his mind, he tried to bring James back rather than entrust the presidential table to Peter. (It is also possible that Jefferson left Peter at Monticello out of respect for his family. There is evidence that Hemings had a wife and family off the plantation.)44 The only creations of Peter’s that Jefferson singled out for praise were his muffins.
When Jefferson sent word to James in Baltimore that his services would be welcome at the White House, Hemings begged off, saying he would be uneasy living “among strange servants.” He briefly went back to work for Jefferson at Monticello but was dissatisfied and left, returning to a job at a Baltimore tavern. An accumulation of small bits of evidence—his fight in France with the tutor, rumors of drinking, his wandering from place to place, his weak excuse for refusing the White House post—suggests a growing instability of some kind that in fact culminated in a tragic end. Jefferson heard shocking news from his servants and received written confirmation from an acquaintance: “The report respecting James Hemings having committed an act of suicide is true…. he had been delirious for some days…and it was the general opinion that drinking too freely was the cause.” 45
The historian Elizabeth Langhorne saw a cautionary moral in the sad fate of James Hemings: “Jefferson’s interest in colonization of the blacks, and his increasing conviction that free black and white could not prosper together in the new world may well have taken its strongest impulse from the troubled career and tragic end of his servant James.” 46 Such is the heavy symbolic burden borne by America’s black men. She did not mention that Jefferson’s white French maître d’, after leaving Jefferson’s service at the White House, also committed suicide. No conclusion as to the impossibility of Frenchmen living in America was drawn from that melancholy demise.
Martin Hemings, Jefferson’s butler, left Monticello under very different circumstances. When Jefferson first acquired the Hemingses from the Wayles estate, he did not entirely trust Martin. In 1774 he wrote that he was keeping a count of his bottles of rum “in order to try the fidelity of Martin.”* 47 As described earlier, Martin proved his loyalty during the Revolution when a detachment of British raiders ascended Monticello Mountain and swarmed about the house and Jefferson barely escaped capture. What happened next became part of the oral tradition of the Jefferson family. His grandchildren Ellen Coolidge and Jeff Randolph shared the story in the 1850s with Jefferson’s biographer Henry Randall, who noted in his text that the details of the account “are given on the statements, oral and written, of several members of Mr. Jefferson’s family, who repeatedly heard all the particulars from his lips, and from those of other actors on the scene.” Martin Hemings defied a British soldier who shoved a pistol to his chest and demanded to know where Jefferson had gone. At the risk of death, Martin refused to betray his master.48
The oral history of the Jefferson family preserved an image of Martin’s character that does not fit the stereotype of loyal, contented slave. He was “one of those sullen and almost fierce natures, which will love and serve one, if worthy of it, with a devotion ready to defy anything—but which will love or serve but one.” This portrait suggests a unique reciprocity between slave and master. Martin accepted enslavement only from a master who was worthy, and the judgment of worthiness was Martin’s—“he served any other person with reluctance, and received orders from any other quarter with scarcely concealed anger.” His relationship to Jefferson imparted a status he would yield to no other; as Jefferson’s body servant, he “would suffer no fellow-servant to do the least office for his master; he watched his glance and anticipated his wants.”
When Jefferson was in France in 1786, Martin found himself another temporary master of sufficiently high status to be worthy of his service. He hired himself out as an attendant to Jefferson’s neighbor James Monroe, apparently without presenting any written authorization from his owner, which was customary. Monroe hired Hemings on the latter’s assurance that “he was at liberty to engage for himself.” Monroe took Hemings at his word, and Martin pocketed extra earnings instead of idling at Monticello for nothing. (In contrast, Jefferson hired Jupiter out for £25 a year; as trusted and valued as he was, Jupiter did not have the status of a Hemings.) Martin became accustomed to going around Virginia as he pleased when his master was not in residence. Jefferson countenanced Martin’s independence as long as his servant returned to
the mountaintop when needed. From New York, Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha in 1790, “I must trouble you to give notice to Martin to be at Monticello by the 1st. of September that he may have things prepared.” And when he was leaving Philadelphia for Monticello in 1792, Jefferson wrote to his tobacco agent, Daniel Hylton, “If you should know any thing of my servants Martin or Bob, and could give them notice to be at Monticello by the 20th. I should be obliged to you.” 49
Martin, James, and Robert did not marry at Monticello. It may be a coincidence, but it is likely that they knew that having a spouse owned by Jefferson might have permanently chained them to Monticello. At least it would have vastly complicated any attempt to leave.* When Robert married, he did not ask Jefferson to purchase his family and bring them to Monticello; he wanted to get away.
Jefferson’s requests indicate that he wanted Martin around, but the last time the servant is mentioned in Jefferson’s household financial accounts is in 1783, which suggests that Jefferson had less trust in him or that Martin was losing interest in household management.50 In the summer of 1792, after some twenty years on and off as Jefferson’s butler, Martin’s “sullen and fierce” nature grew restive, and he did something very, very few slaves would have dared: he argued with his owner and insisted on being sold. In the fall Jefferson wrote again to Hylton about Hemings in a much sharper tone than in the earlier, breezy, “where is Martin?” note:
Martin and myself disagreed when I was last in Virginia insomuch that he desired me to sell him, and I determined to do it, and most irrevocably that he shall serve me no longer. If you could find a master agreeable to him, I should be glad if you would settle that point at any price you please: for as to price I will subscribe to any one with the master whom he will chuse…. Perhaps Martin may undertake to find a purchaser…. I would wish that the transaction should be finished without delay, being desirous of avoiding all parley with him on the subject.51
Jefferson’s remark suggests a power struggle between two strong-minded men. For a master to admit having a disagreement with a slave is extraordinary, disagreement being tantamount to mutiny. The last time Martin Hemings appears in Jefferson’s Farm Book is in the roster of Monticello slaves taken in November 1794. In January 1795, Jefferson wrote to his daughter about two items to “be disposed of”—a carriage and Martin. The devoted servant, the savior of Monticello, has become another piece of surplus equipment, and he disappears.52
There was something very disturbing to the Jefferson family about this final transaction. When Jefferson’s grandchildren told their stories about Martin, they said that their scant personal memories of him were from their earliest childhood and most of what they knew had come from Jefferson and their mother, Martha. Randall wrote, “The stern Martin died so early that nothing of him but infantile recollections of his gloomy, forbidding deportment, is preserved by any of the living generation.” Died? The letter from Jefferson to his daughter Martha, mother of Randall’s informants, shows quite clearly that Martin had not died but been “disposed of,” that is, put up for sale; the family must have disliked admitting what Jefferson had done. Jefferson himself made no note anywhere of his manservant’s ultimate fate. In his records and perhaps in his conscience Jefferson resolved the problem of sullen Martin Hemings off the books.53
James, Robert, and Martin all enjoyed an unusual measure of independence and freedom of movement, and yet there was a stark difference among them. The first two managed to negotiate their way to freedom; Jefferson resisted and complained but granted it. That path was never open to Martin, and he knew it. He did not have the blood tie to Jefferson’s wife, and he looked different from his half brothers. Isaac the blacksmith said in his memoir: “Jim and Bob bright mulattoes, Martin, darker.”54
One task Jefferson assigned John Hemmings was to make the beautiful wooden railings along Monticello’s terraces. They feature a delicate interplay of diagonals and rectangles—a casual display of geometry that Jefferson always loved—in a style known as Chinese Chippendale. The original fences deteriorated and were torn down, but they have been reproduced from Jefferson’s drawings, and you can see them today. One of the best viewpoints, oddly enough, is from Mulberry Row. From that point the magnificent architectural features of the mansion seem to peek out from over the railing, offering an odd-angled, understated view of the house’s greatness. This is the view the slaves had of the house from their quarter. That lovely railing, Hemmings’s handiwork, is a kind of demarcation line between the worlds of the slave and the free.
On the terrace, all is beautiful, ethereal, with that majestic dome gleaming in the sun. Down below is the workaday architecture of the kitchen wing—drab in comparison, extremely plain. There is hardly any distance between these two realms. Even today one can feel the psychological state this architecture induces when seen from below—a sense of the tantalizing proximity of untouchable beauty. That railing is the emblem of an odd borderland: down here stood people who were related by blood to those up there, yet they were slaves. There is the tunnel, the dark opening on the right, where they entered the upper realm to serve the others. If you stood here two hundred years ago, you instinctively knew your place in the chain of being. Builders were acutely sensitive to how their creations would be viewed. Did Jefferson plan this contrast, as he planned everything else so meticulously? Or is it an accident of architecture and topography? Every morning he appeared behind that railing, surveying his domain. Down below, in that drab kitchen block, was the room where Sally Hemings lived.
13
America’s Cassandra
From Sophocles to William Faulkner, the family has been the microcosm that reveals the society. When a plague ravages the realm of Oedipus, an oracle tells him there are murderers in his city, but the king’s investigation into affairs of state soon transforms into a search through his own family history, driven by the haunting question Who was my father?
The search for the father in the Sally Hemings story is similarly an affair of state. For two centuries some white Americans have viewed her as a threat not just to Jefferson’s reputation but to the country. Jefferson’s chief scholarly defender, Professor Robert F. Turner of the University of Virginia School of Law, puts it in stark terms. Referring to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he writes:
The events of that historic date made it all the more important that the record be set straight, because—perhaps more than any other human being in history—Thomas Jefferson is the antithesis to the bigotry and intolerance of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist followers…. As we seek to deal with these new threats from abroad, all Americans should cherish the traditions of human freedom Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries bequeathed to us…. [Establishing] the truth in the Jefferson-Hemings controversy is all the more important in the wake of the terrorist attacks.1
The discovery in 1998 that DNA samples proved a link between the bloodlines of the Hemings and Jefferson families did not convince everyone that Thomas Jefferson had been the father of Sally Hemings’s children. Jefferson’s defenders raise the possibility that another Jefferson family member had been the father and point to Thomas’s younger brother, Randolph. Given that the historical evidence is very confusing even for specialists, the defenders have been able to persuade a growing number of people that the case against Thomas Jefferson has not been proved. Several books, including one by the widely respected historian Thomas Fleming, have systematically argued Jefferson’s innocence.2
The body of evidence in the Hemings case consists of a vexing accumulation of eyewitness and earwitness testimonies;* recollections that are biased or partially mistaken; an African-American’s memoir that contradicts the Jefferson family’s assertions; accounts by African-American families that contradict each other;3 newspaper articles written in a poisonous political atmosphere; a variety of reliable, unreliable, incomplete, or partially erased documents; and many missing documents whose contents can only be surmised.
When Jefferson le
ft for France in 1784, he took along his daughter Martha and later wrote to his sister-in-law Elizabeth Wayles Eppes requesting that she send eight-year-old Maria to France with a servant to care for her. Eppes chose fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings for the journey.
In Paris, Sally was reunited with her older brother James, whom Jefferson had with him in France to train as a chef. Almost exactly the same age as little Martha, Sally may have resided in Jefferson’s house or in the convent where his daughters were being schooled. Jefferson gave her small payments from time to time and bought her clothes appropriate for a servant who went out on social occasions with her young mistress. French law did not allow slavery, so Sally and her brother could have left Jefferson’s employ and lived as free people if they hired a lawyer to instigate the required legal proceeding.
Sally’s son Madison later said that she became pregnant by Jefferson in Paris, did not want to return to Virginia, where she would be “re-enslaved,” but made a “treaty” with Jefferson: she would return to Virginia and become his “concubine” (Madison’s word) if he would agree to free their future children when they turned twenty-one. According to Madison, Jefferson consented to the treaty, and after their return to Monticello Sally gave birth to a child who died. Aside from Madison’s statement, there is no record of the childbirth. Hemings’s first recorded childbirth, noted in Jefferson’s Farm Book, took place in 1795, when she had a girl named Harriet, who died as a toddler. Hemings had four children who we know survived to adulthood. Her recorded childbirths are:
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 21