Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  These distinctions are not readily apparent in Jefferson’s Farm Book, however, where we can see Sally and her children receiving their portions just like everyone else. As a toddler, Beverley received his first woolens in 1799, his yard and a half exceeding Jefferson’s rule of distribution by half a yard. Having received her blanket in 1798, his mother got a bed and a pair of shoes in 1799. Similarly, the Farm Book records blanket distributions for her in 1808 and for her four children in 1809. She is probably the Sally who received a bed in 1809, perhaps marking her move from Mulberry Row up the slope to the completed south dependency of the main house. In December 1812, they received their yardage of linen proportionate to their ages, as Jefferson’s rule specified: Sally received her full seven yards; four-year-old Eston received two and one-third. Beverley received a hat in 1811, and by December 1813, as a fifteen-year-old, he was listed separately from his mother and younger siblings for his shirting, cotton plains, and woolens. And it was in the Farm Book’s bread list that Jefferson recorded the birth dates of Sally’s children. So Jefferson left almost nothing in the general run of his plantation record to alert even the closest reader that Sally Hemings and her children were unlike any other Hemingses at Monticello.

  Jefferson did make clear to his overseers, however, that his house slaves—comprising mostly Hemingses—were different from all the others. After losing Gabriel Lilly, in 1806 he hired Edmund Bacon, who would work for him at Monticello for the next sixteen years. Returning to Washington, Jefferson left a memorandum of instructions for his new overseer. He was particular about his most favored slaves; they each had their own individual supervisor who alone directed their skilled labor. Bacon was to have nothing to do with them, Jefferson emphasized, except to provide their provisions. Nor was Bacon ever to send John Hemings to assist in the harvest. Bacon was also relieved of responsibility for clothing the house slaves, who were considerably better dressed than the field hands. “Mrs. Randolph always chooses the clothing for the house servants; that is to say, for Peter Hemings, Burwell, Edwin, Critta, and Sally,” Jefferson directed. They received Irish linen instead of the rough osnaburg, calamanco (a soft wool with a high gloss), flannel (to make warm undergarments), and knitted cotton stockings rather than the baggy woven stockings worn by field hands. Bacon was to supervise the distribution of “colored plains,” a woven wool cloth softer on the skin, to Jefferson’s house slaves, Betty Brown, Betty Hemings, Nance, and Ursula. These women, Bacon remembered, were “old family servants, and great favorites” who remained at Monticello during Jefferson’s absence. Remarkably, to Bacon at least, he “was instructed to take no control of them.” They may have been the only enslaved women in the state free of an overseer’s control.

  So this too was little Harriet’s world. It explains why she was able to spend her childhood at her mother’s side—a deceptively simple observation but one that packs a punch. Harriet was almost eight before Jefferson returned to live permanently at Monticello. In the meantime, in his absences, the Hemings women “had very little to do,” according to Bacon, except airing the house in preparation for Jefferson’s twice-yearly visits and the cider-making that consumed two weeks every March, following Jefferson’s persnickety directions. (Thirty years later, Bacon could still recall Jefferson’s unusual “instructions to have every apple cleaned perfectly clean when it was made.”) Harriet’s earliest memories, then, were of growing up among a loving, relatively stable network of aunts, uncles, and cousins, her mother and brothers, and until she was six, even her grandmother. Without the driving presence of a master and an overseer, and exempt from field labor, Sally Hemings had more time than most enslaved women to devote to her small children and relations at Monticello. Until age fourteen, Sally’s children spent their days at her side in the great house, unlike most slave families whose parents labored at sites away from their children.

  Harriet’s childhood was also exceptional because she was raised by a woman whose experiences as a young girl set her apart from every other slave at Monticello: She had survived the perils of transatlantic travel and had lived in the glittering city of Paris. During Harriet’s earliest years, her father and sisters Martha and Maria were only intermittently at Monticello, and her uncle James Hemings had died tragically just months after she was born. So the only person who remained on the mountain consistently throughout Harriet’s childhood, who retained the memories and who frequently told stories of those years, was her mother. Bacon listened to them, too. “They crossed the ocean alone,” he said. “I have often heard her tell about it.”

  Sally Hemings had a lot of stories to tell. She had learned early in her life what it meant to be enslaved. In 1783, at age ten, she had been sent with Maria to Eppington, and then again the following year. Her mother had remained behind at Monticello, a twenty-seven-hour hard cavalry ride, or three days’ coach travel, away from Eppington. We do not know how Elizabeth Wayles Eppes treated her house slaves, but certainly her constant visitors kept them busy. The warm hospitality for which she was known would not have extended to slaves, not even to Sally, whom she had last seen at the deathbed of their half sister Martha Wayles Jefferson. Elizabeth Eppes was there when, according to a Hemings family tradition, Martha gave nine-year-old Sally a bell, a token of their tie as sisters and as mistress and slave. But when Sally arrived at Eppington, Eppes probably sent her to the second floor, to sleep in the open space that was the nursery for the youngest children. Perhaps she slept on a pallet at the foot of Maria’s bed, at hand if Maria awoke, crying in the night. There she would have helped Elizabeth Eppes care for the children stricken with whooping cough that terrible October 1784, perhaps fearing for her own safety with every coughing fit in that crowded room. Certainly Sally Hemings matured at Eppington in ways that Francis and Elizabeth Eppes recognized when they decided that she was the best choice to accompany their precious niece to France. Only fourteen, Sally Hemings then crossed the Atlantic virtually alone: No one provided her with a male protector to shield her from the coarse leers or worse of roughened sailors. As Bacon noticed in her accounts of those days, she felt her vulnerability keenly. Indeed, Harriet Hemings was raised by a mother who, of necessity, had learned how to stand on her own two feet at a very young age.

  Once in Paris, as historian Annette Gordon-Reed remarked, Sally Hemings “learned that another type of life was possible.” Under the tutelage and guidance of her elder brother James, she had experienced the sights and sounds of the city, mixing with other people of color to whom James introduced her. She had learned to speak French, watched the beginnings of revolution, and realized enough about French law regarding slavery to know that if she chose, she could remain in France, a free woman. She also had been inoculated against smallpox by the most prominent practitioner in Europe, spending six weeks away from Jefferson’s household as she recuperated. She had mixed in elite Parisian society as a lady’s maid, maybe attending Jefferson’s daughters occasionally at their school but certainly present at the balls Martha frequented in her last months in Paris. As we saw, the girls’ schoolmates even included greetings to “Mademoiselle Sally” in their letters. Sally Hemings was a caste apart from other slaves, then, even before she entered into a relationship with Jefferson. Learning self-reliance at an early age, and living in a much wider world than was visible from Monticello, Sally Hemings was a mother of uncommon character and experience in the slave community. And in the new life she had negotiated for herself on her return from France, she occupied a new status: no longer a lady’s maid to either Martha or Maria, off-limits to the governance of the overseer, and a mother of children destined for freedom.

  The names of Sally Hemings’s children are another indication of the special status this family occupied at Monticello. It was a common enough practice of slave owners to name their slaves, frequently bestowing names like Zeus, Apollo, and Hercules that contrasted cruelly with their subordinate status. But the names for Sally’s children, drawn from Jefferson’s family lines and circle
of friends, were meaningful to him. Each had a story attached to it. Harriet’s name came from a beloved Randolph, a younger sister of Martha’s husband, Tom, who had sought relief from her young stepmother at the more congenial fireside of Monticello. Jefferson and Sally Hemings used the name twice; Harriet was named for an elder sister, who had died in 1797 at two. William Beverley was likely named after a relative from Jefferson’s mother’s Randolph line, who in 1746 had traveled with Peter Jefferson on his first expedition to survey the far western reaches of Lord Fairfax’s lands in Virginia. At the suggestion of Jefferson’s family friend Dolley Madison, James Madison was named for Jefferson’s closest friend and political associate, Thomas Eston for a favorite Randolph uncle. There had been no other Harriets in Jefferson’s records before Sally’s daughters; her sons’ names are especially distinctive standouts in the Farm Book lists of slaves. And when we consider the names of Martha Jefferson Randolph’s sons (James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Meriwether Lewis, and George Wythe), the pattern of all the boys’ names (Hemings and Randolph), one historian noted, resembles “the act of a white man who has no white sons to name.”

  But as a very young child, Harriet would have been unaware of these nuances of status. She may have played with the Randolph girls on their occasional visits to Monticello. Two were particularly close to her in age: Virginia, born just three months after Harriet in August 1801, and Cornelia, born two years earlier. It was not at all unusual in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for very young children, free and enslaved, to spend their days playing together until they began to learn their respective conditions in life. Nor would a stranger looking at the three little girls have been able to distinguish among them: Both Cornelia and Virginia had their father’s dark coloring, with olive skin and dark hair. The Randolphs had prided themselves on their descent from Pocahontas, after all. We do not know the color of Sally Hemings’s hair; Isaac Granger Jefferson had said only that she had “long straight hair down her back.” Harriet may have had the auburn hair and gray eyes of her Jefferson line, as did her brothers; all four of Sally Hemings’s children, Ellen Randolph wrote in 1858, were “fair,” as was Ellen herself. Either way, Harriet would have fit right into a Randolph family tableau. Certainly her skin, “nearly as white as anybody’s,” Edmund Bacon said, would not have marked her as anything other than the freeborn white girls her Randolph nieces were.

  But, of course, Harriet Hemings was no Randolph and so could not enjoy their privileges. It is not likely that she was a recipient of Jefferson’s largesse in her childhood. She would not have received the kinds of gifts Jefferson bestowed with such a generous hand on his granddaughters: a saddle and bridle, an elegant watch, a guitar, or silk dresses. But neither was Jefferson stern or cold to her. He was, Madison thought, “undemonstrative” by temperament, but at the same time “uniformly kind to all about him.” But, he added, “he was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us [Sally’s] children.” So it is not likely that he bestowed the gifts upon Sally Hemings’s children that he did upon Martha’s.

  Nor did Jefferson follow the example of many planter-fathers in his own day who lived openly with their slave consorts, claimed the children of those unions, and provided for them. Bachelor fathers in New Orleans made a point of asserting paternity in baptismal records. Prominent white Floridians had large mulatto families, freed and educated their children, and provided for them in their wills, bestowing on them homes, land, and even slaves. In Jefferson’s own state, there were multiple examples of fathers who freed their children with enslaved mothers, educated them, and bequeathed their own acreage to their progeny at their deaths. Of the several who also freed the mothers of their children, one even requested that he be buried beside her.

  Against these fellow Virginians, Jefferson’s provisions for Sally and her children were parsimonious by comparison, and always beneath the radar. On their return from Paris, he installed her, with her sister Critta, in the stone structure he had built in the 1770s for his hired white builders. But when he anticipated hiring white artisans for the remodeling project in 1793, he instructed Tom Randolph to move them out to the new houses he had built for them on Mulberry Row. Sally Hemings’s house was built of wood, with a wood chimney and, by Jefferson’s own description, “earth floors.” There she raised their children until the south dependency was completed in 1808 and they were moved to a room there. Tucked under the terrace that afforded Jefferson and his family and guests a pleasant outdoor promenade from the house to the south pavilion, the south dependency contained the kitchen, cook’s room, dairy, smokehouse, and washhouse—all functions necessary to the smooth functioning of Jefferson’s household but, like the slave labor required to run them, hidden from the family’s view.

  Ever conscious of the threat of smallpox endangering Martha’s and Maria’s families, he vaccinated his slaves in several rounds: seventy or eighty of them in 1801, and dozens more in 1802, 1816–1824, and 1826. At four years of age, Beverley was in that second round of inoculations, as was Harriet, who may have reached her first birthday by that late May morning. Although the vaccination method was considerably safer than the inoculations practiced in the 1790s, Sally Hemings may well have felt as Martha Randolph had when she sent Anne and Jeff, six and five, to Richmond in 1797 for the procedure: “The idea of exposing my children to such a disease…makes me perfectly miserable. I never look at them but my eyes fill with tears to think how soon we shall part and perhaps forever.” Or, remembering her own successful inoculation in Paris, she may have sent them off in confidence that they, too, would emerge unscathed and forever protected from the dreaded pox. Either way she would not have had a choice in the matter.

  Jefferson would have entrusted Harriet’s education to her mother, however, as tended to be true as well in most white households in the nineteenth century. The goal of white female education was the same, whether girls were schooled at home or in the numerous female academies that began to dot the southern landscape after the 1820s: to train them for lives of domesticity as wives and mothers. The “curriculum” was as various as the situations of the students themselves, whether daughters of wealthy slaveholders, urban artisans, or rural farmers, but at its most basic would have included at least reading and writing literacy, “ciphering” (basic math), and needlework. At home, mothers would also ensure that their daughters knew how to make a pudding, truss and roast a chicken, raise a vegetable garden, and tend a poultry yard. There is no reason to think that Sally Hemings would have wanted anything less for the daughter she knew would live her adult life in freedom.

  We do not know if Harriet learned to read and write, but given the culture of learning and teaching on both Mulberry Row and in the great house, it is eminently possible that she learned at least the rudimentary skills necessary to position herself to be the wife of a respectable man one day—perhaps even a white man. Literacy was a key badge of both respectability and whiteness; ex-slave Israel Jefferson considered it “a legitimate fruit of freedom.” Sally’s older brothers Bob and James Hemings were literate; an inventory of Monticello kitchen equipment from February 1796 in James’s hand has survived to this day. So, too, have several letters written by Sally’s younger brother John to Jefferson and to his favorite Randolph, Martha’s youngest daughter, Septimia. And archaeologists working on Mulberry Row have excavated a piece of slate bearing the chalk markings of a writing lesson, so Harriet could have learned to read and write from members of the enslaved community.

  Or, as Madison had, it is possible that Harriet may have picked up literacy from her Randolph nieces. Madison recalled “inducing” the Randolph children to teach him his alphabet and more besides. Joseph Fossett’s son Peter similarly remembered that “Mr. Jefferson allowed his grandson to teach any of his slaves who desired to learn, and Lewis Randolph first taught me how to read.” We know that Harriet’s youngest brother, Eston, had also learned how to read and write. Perhaps Virginia and Cornelia taught Harriet her
letters as they were learning them as well. Or maybe Harriet learned from Ellen, five years her senior, who was actively interested in slave education. When Burwell Colbert’s wife, Critta (not to be confused with Sally’s sister), died in 1819, Ellen asked if she could have one of his daughters. She had been “lamenting very seriously that I had not secured one of her elder children. Mama promised I should have any one of them not disposed of,” and Ellen was thinking she would like “little Martha.” Even though she was not sure exactly which of Burwell’s children was Martha, she hoped no one else had claimed her and assured her mother that “I am more than ever anxious to have it in my power to befriend, and educate her as well as I can.” (Ellen’s mother kept the child.) So even if Sally Hemings could not have taught Harriet to read and write, there were many ways to enlist someone who could. Tellingly, Jefferson took no notice of this daughter’s education as he had of Martha’s and Maria’s.

  Sally Hemings would certainly have taught her daughter the needlework skills for which she herself was well known and that were an essential part of a well-bred woman’s preparation for marriage and housekeeping. Jefferson, who had recommended stitchery to Martha as a productive way for women to pass the time, would have heartily approved. Under her mother’s eye, Harriet began with simple straight stitches to join seams, progressing to a hemming stitch for handkerchiefs, skirts, and sheets, and finally advancing to decorative stitches to adorn dresses, pillows, chair covers, and bed hangings. Sally would have passed to Harriet all the skills she had learned in Paris and continued to hone at Monticello as she looked after Jefferson’s clothing and chambers. From a mother experienced in caring for a range of fabrics and garments, Harriet would have learned how to clean and preserve the clothes she created with the higher-grade fabrics Martha Randolph provided. Jefferson sometimes supplied piece goods as well; twice at Christmas he sent special packages from Philadelphia for Sally, Critta, and Betsy Hemings.