Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Jack’s updates to Jefferson chronicle the rise and fall of his hopes and fears as he watched his wife’s life ebb away. Martha too had been hopeful at first, having moved into Maria’s room to care for her around the clock. Her report to Jefferson on March 2 had lifted him from despair; indeed, he felt positively buoyant. He even sent Maria a jovial message to “be of good cheer and to be ready to mount on horseback with us” when he returned. But Jack’s report on March 12 was more guarded. If Maria was getting better, he said carefully, “it cannot be discerned by me.” Remembering Tom’s prescription that had saved Maria’s life when her first daughter was born, Jack resolved to “Prevail on her to leave her room immediately, to lay aside her phials, and depend on gentle exercise and fresh air for her recovery.” From Washington, Jefferson suggested adding light food and cordials to the prescription. Raid the stores of Monticello for anything that would tempt her, Jefferson told Jack; “the house, its contents and appendages and servants are as freely subjected to you as to myself.”

  By the nineteenth, Jack was getting worried. “A rising of her breast” threatened to revive that habitual complaint, she was taking no food, and for the first time, he admitted, “I feel dreadfully apprehensive that the great debility under which she labours may terminate in some serious complaint.” On the twenty-third, he allowed his hopes to rise again. Yes, Maria was “a mere walking shadow” of herself, but since weakness seemed to be her only complaint, Jack told Jefferson, “I have the pleasure of feeling that the recovery of her health although slow is absolutely certain.” He planned to move her to Monticello in a few days to give her a change of air and scene. There, they could take her out on the lawn when the weather permitted. On the twenty-sixth, he could only tell Jefferson that “Maria is not worse,” as they all looked forward to Jefferson’s imminent departure from Washington.

  By the time Jefferson finally arrived home on April 4, a much-debilitated Maria had been moved from Edgehill to Monticello. “I found my daughter Eppes at Monticello. Whither she had been brought on a litter by hand,” a stunned Jefferson told his neighbor James Madison on the ninth. He found her “so weak as barely to be able to stand, her stomach so disordered as to reject almost everything she took into it, a constant small fever, & an imposthume [abscess] rising in her breast.” He hoped that his arrival would act like a tonic and revive her spirits. But she remained in her weakened condition for days; like Jack before him, Jefferson could detect no discernible change a few days later.

  By April 16, however, all reason to hope was gone. “We have no longer ground left whereon to build the fondest and most fantastic hopes of Mrs. Eppes’ recovery,” Tom Randolph wrote in despair to a friend. “How the President will get over this blow, I cannot pronounce,” he continued, “I can tell you how he bears it now. He passed all last evening with her handkerchief in his hand.” Overcome by grief and weeping, Tom confessed the need for his own handkerchief as well.

  Maria died the following day. Jefferson opened his family Bible, and next to her name wrote simply, “died Apr. 17, 1804 between 8. and 9. A.M.” He sat in his room alone for hours. When he called for Martha, she found him with his Bible in his hands. Maria’s death caused an uproar of grief and confusion in the household. “The day passed I do not know how,” Martha’s daughter Ellen, then eight, recalled. By the time she was taken to see her aunt, someone—likely a woman, Martha or Sally or one of the other slaves—had covered Maria’s body “with a white cloth, over which had been strewed a profusion of flowers.” Maria Jefferson Eppes was buried in the family graveyard two days later.

  Jack stayed two or three weeks after his wife’s death before returning to Washington. He left his baby behind at Monticello. No sooner had Jack departed than his mother arrived, just missing her grieving son. As she had once before, at the end of her visit Elizabeth Eppes brought a motherless child back to Eppington. She had pressed Jefferson to allow her to care for the baby, promising to bring her back to Monticello when Jefferson and Jack would return for the summer recess. “It will be a great comfort,” Jefferson wrote to Jack, “to have been brought up with those of her own age, as sisters and brothers of the same house.” As he struggled to look forward to a future without his daughter, Jefferson assured Jack that Maria’s death would “in no wise change my views at Pantops.” He would be happy to help Jack build the house that he anticipated would one day belong to Francis.

  But Jack had lost all heart for the project. The outgoing man of the frank and engaging manners was undone by his wife’s early death. His great love for her had not been able to save her. He buried his grief and memories so deeply, they never resurfaced. No portrait hung at Monticello to remind him of Maria. None had ever been commissioned, perhaps at her command. She had always hated compliments about her beauty, her niece Ellen remembered, “saying that people only praised her for that because they could not praise her for better things.” Only two when his mother died, Francis would frequently lament that he had no recollection of her face because no image of his mother existed. Nor did his father ever talk about her, even after he had found happiness with a second wife. Unlike Jefferson, who frequently prefaced a story with “Your grandmother would say,” Jack Eppes could not talk about his wife after she was gone. All he could do was keep her letters. If little Francis wanted to know anything about his mother, his aunt Martha and his grandfather would have to supply the history.

  In his own suffering, Jefferson sank under a wave of pessimism as he responded to a friend’s expressions of sympathy. “When you and I look back on the country over which we have passed, what a field of slaughter does it exhibit! Where are all the friends who entered it with us, under all the inspiring energies of health and hope? As if pursued by the havoc of war, they are strewed by the way, some earlier, some later, and scarce a few stragglers remain to count the numbers fallen.” Death beset him on all sides, and he was fearful. “Others may lose of their abundance, but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life.” But what if he lost Martha, too? In this world, he knew, he could count on nothing. “Perhaps I may be destined to see even this last cord of parental affection broken,” he acknowledged in near despair. “The hope which with I had looked forward to the moment, when, resigning public cares to younger hands, I was to retire to that domestic comfort from which the last great step is to be taken, is fearfully blighted.”

  With Maria’s death, Jefferson’s most cherished dream of living out the rest of his days with his family gathered around his fireside was gone.

  JEFFERSON HAD NOW BURIED HIS wife and five of the six children born of his marriage. His admission of his searing pain was a rare view into his interior landscape, revealed only to a much-trusted friend. But as he looked up from his letter, surveying his bleak future, his vision failed him, editing out completely the little son and daughter who were growing up on Mulberry Row. Martha was not his only surviving child. By 1804, Sally Hemings had borne him five children, two of whom still lived: Beverley, six, and Harriet, three. And before he left Monticello to return to Washington that dark spring, he and Hemings would conceive another child, Madison, as Jefferson fought the specter of death that threatened to overwhelm him.

  Although born into slavery, Sally Hemings’s children lived very differently from the hundreds of other slaves Thomas Jefferson owned over the course of his lifetime. First and foremost, they knew they were destined for freedom. The perpetuation of slavery required that enslaved children be trained in habits of submission to their masters, even as their parents attempted to raise them as individuals within their own community of family and friends. Harriet was spared the brunt of the tensions most enslaved children endured as they were caught between these cross-purposes. Jefferson did not embrace Harriet as his third daughter, but neither did he train her for a slave’s life.

  With next to no documentation of her childhood, we must cobble together a picture of Harriet’s world from a variet
y of sources: Jefferson and the overseers he employed, accounts from former Monticello slaves, and the stories that Jefferson’s grandchildren would later tell to preserve his legacy as a beneficent slave owner. These records need to be scrutinized carefully, particularly because the subject of Jefferson and slavery has been so very contentious. Nonetheless, they can be quite useful in helping us understand the larger world of slavery on Jefferson’s plantations and the place of the Hemingses within it, and to imagine what it was like for Jefferson’s enslaved daughter to grow up knowing that one day she too could live her life in the pursuit of happiness.

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  HARRIET HEMINGS WAS BORN into a family that had stood at the apex of the slave community at Monticello ever since Elizabeth Hemings’s arrival in 1775. In Virginia’s slave society, whites considered it a mark of favor to position slaves in the plantation house at tasks that required skill and artistry, from woodworking to cooking. With only two exceptions (an undercook and a carriage driver), the positions of service closest to Jefferson’s family were filled by Elizabeth Hemings’s extended family. Jefferson’s grandson even believed that the Hemingses’ privileged position incited what he called “bitter jealousy” among the other slaves. We cannot rely on the master class to give us a true understanding of the dynamics of the relationships among their slaves, but even historians today who have pored over the historical records at length conclude that the Hemings family members were a caste apart. They experienced a stability of family life uncommon to most slaves, at Monticello or anywhere else; they were employed in positions of trust (as butlers, valets, chambermaids, and nurses) and of skill (as cooks, carpenters, and artisans); and, as products of interracial relationships, they were fairer-skinned than most slaves. Harriet, who was seven-eighths white (and therefore, under Virginia law, legally white), was described by Jefferson’s overseer Edmund Bacon as “nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful.”

  The first notation of Jefferson’s daughter Harriet Hemings in his Farm Book appears on this page, dated 1810. Jefferson grouped enslaved families together, noting the year in which each person was born. At twelve, Beverley appears in the list of tradesmen. On the next leaf (not shown), Jefferson organized his workforce by age. On that list, he recorded that Harriet and Beverley had “run” in 1822.

  But not until February 1810, as Jefferson was assembling his Roll of Negroes in Albemarle County, would he make a note of her in his Farm Book: “Harriet. 01. May,” he wrote, recording her birth date. Perhaps he recalled the year because he associated it with the beginning of his first administration as president, but nine years later he had forgotten the precise date. This was not unusual among slaveholders. Former slave Frederick Douglass recalled of his childhood in 1820s Maryland that “by far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.” Jefferson had been home during the last month of Sally’s pregnancy. But after leaving money to pay the local midwife, he had left Monticello, returning to Washington on April 29 to throw himself into the hard work of his new presidency. If he ever asked the birth date of his daughter, he did not record it. In any event, by 1810, Jefferson also entered the names of Harriet’s two younger brothers, Madison, born January 19, 1805, and Eston, born May 21, 1808, below hers in the column headed “House,” under their mother’s name. Almost twelve, Beverley, the eldest, was already a “Tradesman” and listed in a separate column.

  Paging through the Farm Book, where these records appear, provides a bird’s-eye view from which to watch Jefferson manage the operations of his plantations, this world into which his enslaved daughter was born. This is where we see him recording the propagation of his mares, cattle, and sheep; distributing to his slaves blankets, yardage for clothing, bread, fish, and pork; moving his slaves over his various holdings; making plans for an efficient wheat harvest; deciding how and when enslaved children were to be put to work; and measuring the wasted scraps of an iron nail rod in proportion to the weight of usable nails hammered out from it. This spare little book, not quite eight inches tall and six and a quarter wide, tells a truth that his philosophical pronouncements, his family’s fierce vindications, and his persistent apologists down the years cannot discount: in cataloguing the human beings he owned with his “work horses, mules, breeding mares, colts, steers, cattle, ewes, lambs, sows, shoats, and pigs,” Jefferson participated fully in a system that dehumanized the more than six hundred people whose lives intersected with his, those, he rationalized, “whom fortune has thrown on our hands.”

  Through the Farm Book, for instance, we can watch Jefferson distributing food resources to his labor force. There are several pages headed “Bread list,” for example; Harriet appears for the first time on the one dated February 1810. When eighty-three hogs were slaughtered at Poplar Forest in December 1795, ten were slated “for negroes” there; sixty were sent on to Monticello. He rationed out fish and beef, although in portions that were stingy in comparison with other slave owners. In Jefferson’s accounting, four children counted as one adult, although he counted as half a person the girls who worked in his textile factory as spinners. To the men sweating their days out in the nailery, he allocated the full measure of pork. Corn fed both slaves and livestock; on one page, Jefferson calculated how much he would need to feed “90 persons…44 weeks @ 4½ Barrels a week” and then distributed the leftovers to the “breeding sows,” shoats, one plantation horse, six mules, sixty-three sheep, and four oxen. Slaves of all ages received the weekly ration of a peck of cornmeal—picture a gallon jarful—but no allowance was made for the different nutrition needs of adults. Field hands (male and female), pregnant women, and nursing mothers all received the same weekly allowance of one pound of meat, some fish, and occasionally salt and milk.

  Because this was all the food that Jefferson provided to his slaves, they had to supplement their diets with their own garden produce. We do not know where their gardens were, but we do know what they grew. On Sunday afternoons, they would sell their produce to the Monticello family: watermelons, cucumbers, potatoes, squash, cabbages, and eggs from the hens they raised. The family of Jefferson’s chief gardener, Wormley Hughes, must have kept a good number of chickens; on one day alone, he sold nine dozen eggs. The skills that Jefferson’s enslaved workers brought to the plantation house, they used as well to feed their own families. Following the seasons, they too planted, harvested, and put up foods for winter; they made butter and cheese and brewed beer. Gardening particularly was a universal skill, cultivated for survival but, at Monticello, also turned to profit of a Sunday afternoon at the door of the master’s kitchen.

  Slave clothing was likewise spare. Most of Jefferson’s slaves wore clothing made of osnaburg: a coarse, itchy linen fabric that was the universal uniform of the southern laborer. Twice yearly, in spring and in December, Jefferson’s slaves would receive yardage for their clothing allotments: linen for summer and woolens for winter. Every three years, Jefferson instructed his overseers to supply his slaves “a best striped blanket.” As with their food, clothing allotments depended on age, so, for instance, Jefferson decided in December 1794 that the blanket and linen supplied to a mother for her newborn infant “serves till the next clothing time”—that is, six months, until the next summer or winter allotments were distributed. The skeins of thread required to turn yardage into clothing were also carefully measured out, three to make each shirt, for example, along with an extra three for repairs. He also apportioned out hats, shoes, and stockings to adults. To slaves such as “Dick’s Hanah,” he awarded a bed and a pot, “which I always promise them when they take husbands at home,” that is, from among his own slaves rather than a neighbor’s, in hopes that “others of the young people follow their example.”

  Besides documenting the material life of slaves, the Farm Book is also a study in agricultural methods. Jefferson thought his plantations neglected and dysfunctional on his return from F
rance in 1790, but he could not begin his reform measures in earnest until he retired to Monticello in 1794 after his dispiriting experience as secretary of state. Disappointed that neither the American people nor their government turned out to be as responsive to natural law as he had anticipated, he applied “the principles of reason and honesty” to the management of his farms and his slaves instead. In true Enlightenment fashion, Jefferson applied geometry, mathematics, and the clock to develop ways to maximize the efficiency of his plantation’s operations.

  Like many Virginia planters in the late eighteenth century, Jefferson diversified from tobacco, with its ruinous impact on the soil and constantly fluctuating markets, to grains. By 1799, his plantations were on a rotating schedule, producing wheat, rye, oats, corn, and tobacco. Tobacco crops required little skill: just hoes and the repetitive human labor to plant and weed the hills, deworm the plants, cut the harvest, and dry and package the leaves. Wheat, however, introduced new technologies and methods: mills, threshers, and scythes, and a hierarchy of jobs, even in the harvesting fields, from mowers to carters and the cooks who would feed his workers their lunch.

  Dissatisfied with the inefficiency of the 1795 harvest operations, Jefferson laid out his plan for improvements for the following year in his Farm Book. Too much time was lost when proper advance arrangements were not made. He would begin, for example, by making sure that spare scythes were at the ready when replacements were required. His trusted slave and overseer, George Granger, would roam the field in a cart with his tools and grindstone, sharpening scythes dulled from work. These changes would eliminate the idle intervals Jefferson had observed while cutters waited for their useless implements to be sharpened. Jefferson also wanted the treading floors to be laid out before the harvest, allowing the work of separating the grain from the stalks to begin without delay after the cutting of the wheat. With an attention to detail that most slaveholders delegated to their overseers, Jefferson organized his army of agricultural workers—sixty-six in all just at Monticello—into the work classifications to which he thought them best suited: the most skilled workers for cutting and cradling the grain, women and strong boys who would bind the cut wheat, younger boys to gather up whatever was left behind, three strong men to load the carts, seven men to stack, four carters to drive, eight women to keep the plows going, and two cooks to feed the whole crew. “In this way,” Jefferson reckoned, “the whole machine would move in exact equilibrio.”