Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  A central feature of female preparation for marriage was training in cookery, whether the bride would section, salt, and cure the ham herself or direct her servants or slaves to do so. No nineteenth-century woman was spared kitchen duties, regardless of her rank. The women of Jefferson’s family both directed and cooked: One of Isaac Granger Jefferson’s early memories was Jefferson’s wife, Martha, perched on a kitchen stool, reading a cake recipe to Ursula Granger; Maria’s father had constantly nagged her about whether she had yet learned to make a pudding. Therefore it is inconceivable that Sally Hemings would have neglected to arrange a culinary education of some sort for Harriet.

  Just a few short months after Harriet was born, her uncle James, the French-trained chef, left Monticello for the last time to seek his fortune in the free black community in Baltimore. His younger brother Peter took charge of Jefferson’s kitchen. As president, Jefferson hired a Frenchman named Honoré Julien to supervise his Washington kitchen and there train slaves Edith Hern Fossett and her sister-in-law Fanny Gillette Hern in French cookery. Their skills drew praise, both in the President’s House and back at Monticello, where they returned in March 1809 to cook for Jefferson in his retirement. “Served in half Virginian, half French style,” Daniel Webster noted after his visit in 1824, Edy Fossett’s meals delighted. Her “balls” of ice cream “inclosed in covers of warm pastry” were a particular highlight of dining at Jefferson’s Washington table and may have appeared in Monticello as well.

  Edy Fossett’s days began early to ensure that breads and muffins were baked and on the table by eight or nine A.M. Then followed the rush of the day to get the main meal prepared for serving by four P.M. The pace of kitchen work was compounded by the numbers of visitors to Jefferson’s table, sometimes as many as fifty at a time. According to Jefferson’s records, Harriet was never assigned duty in the kitchen. But at exceptionally busy times, she may have worked under the supervision of the undercooks and taken her turn at whipping cream, stirring sauces, kneading bread, preparing vegetables, or learning to bake the muffins that were Peter Hemings’s specialty and Jefferson’s particular favorite. Harriet could have learned a great deal in the well-equipped kitchen of the French-trained chefs that Edy and Fanny had become, when they brought their skills back to Monticello with their master’s retirement from the presidency. She would have been able to produce more elegant fare than most American girls and know how to serve it.

  Shown newly restored in this photograph, the kitchen in Monticello’s south wing is Jefferson’s re-creation of a French gourmet cuisine of that era. Completed in 1809, the kitchen was ready to serve Jefferson in his retirement. Note the eight-burner stove on the left as well as the bread oven in the rear, attesting to the skills of the enslaved cooks who prepared the elegant dishes and sauces that graced Jefferson’s table.

  From the colonial period, housewives had also been responsible for planting kitchen gardens, from which they would harvest herbs and vegetables, and for raising poultry. Harriet had plenty of opportunity to cultivate these skills as well. It is clear that Monticello’s slaves were enormously productive in both. Not only did they raise enough to supplement the meager diet their master supplied them, but as mentioned they sold great quantities of food to the great house, including cucumbers, cabbages, watermelons, potatoes, strawberries, and eggs and chickens. Martha Randolph had appointed her eldest daughter, Anne, to make and record these transactions, paid for in cash, as part of her preparation for managing her own household when she married.

  Of the slaves who sold eggs and poultry to the Monticello household, Wormley Hughes sold the most, on forty-five different occasions over three years. But his prodigious output relied on the work of his wife and children; the care, housing, and maintenance of the poultry were community affairs. Adults built the henhouses; children chased away predators. Twenty years older than Harriet, Wormley Hughes, the son of Betty Brown, was her cousin; his wife, Ursula, a grandchild of Great George Granger, worked in the kitchen. Blood ties and their favored status at Monticello bound them all together. It is easy to imagine Harriet, who lacked a fond father, tagging along after Wormley, gathering eggs, peppering him with questions, and with a child’s fascination with chickens, following them—perhaps with wailing protests—from the henhouse to the butchering table. This was not just the work of slaves: Only months before Maria’s death, Jefferson was happily planning the establishment of her henhouse at Pantops, starting with the “two pair of beautiful fowls” he had received from Algiers; and from Washington, he had told his granddaughter Anne he would send her a pair of bantams to raise. Harriet, however, would have learned about this key element of nineteenth-century housekeeping directly from Monticello’s most successful poulterer.

  Cousin Wormley was also at the center of other activity in the spring seasons of 1807 through 1809, in which Harriet, too, may have been much interested. Thinking ahead to his retirement, Jefferson sent his wagoner, Davy Hern, on several trips from Washington back to Monticello, beginning in the fall of 1806, with carts laden with trees, bulbs, thorns (for natural fencing), and seedlings to begin laying out the gardens that today are a central feature of Monticello’s beauty. Jefferson put Anne, who shared his passion for gardening, in charge of nursing his Peruvian grasses through the winter, and she and Ellen were responsible for riding over from Edgehill to Monticello to keep an eye on his tulips. Ornamental gardens were considered a perfectly suitable interest for well-bred girls, as was botany.

  In the letters that flew between Jefferson and his two eldest granddaughters, Anne and Ellen, their mounting excitement with each passing season is palpable. Wormley prepared the beds for Jefferson’s design in the spring of 1808, and he, Jefferson, and Anne finished the project the following spring when Jefferson returned home, finally to begin his retirement from public life. Reminiscing years later, Ellen still smiled at the memory. Wormley planted each seedling under Jefferson’s “own eye” with a “crowd of happy young faces,” she recalled, who inquired “anxiously the name of each separate deposit.”

  Throughout these spring plantings, however, Harriet Hemings remains obscured in the shadows. Would she, too, have been interested in all the varieties of bulbs and plants going into the ground? Enjoying comparative freedom as a little girl, except as her time was structured by her mother, would she have dug tulip holes, or passed the bulbs to Wormley for planting, or checked for spring shoots before Ellen and Anne arrived from Edgehill? And in the process, could Wormley Hughes have furnished her with something of the warmth and care that Jefferson did not?

  Thinking about Harriet’s life requires peering into these shadows, asking questions to which answers are not always discoverable. Did she trail Jefferson in the quiet of the morning, when, as was his habit, he checked his flower beds right after breakfast? Did she share in the Randolph girls’ delight over the rich colors of the flowers as they bloomed? Family passions and aptitudes do seem to be inheritable. True, you don’t have to carry Jefferson blood to be entranced by the beauty of fifty-five hundred tulips on the west lawn; visitors still marvel at their appearance every spring, massed in their oval beds and ringing the reflecting pond. But in their adulthood, it became clear that Madison and Eston Hemings inherited their father’s love of building and music; it is not too much of a stretch, then, to wonder if their sister inherited Jefferson’s passion for gardening. It would have been a perfectly appropriate interest for a girl to pursue. It could also have been a way to connect with her rather distant father, especially if an approving word or smile occasionally broke through his reserve as together they bent their fair heads to a fragrant flower.

  At least until she turned fourteen, when he decided her childhood was over and sent her to work in his textile manufactory.

  AS SHE MADE HER WAY to work each day, Harriet Hemings walked the path that led down the slope from the south dependency. Connecting Mulberry Row to the main house, the path ended directly across from the cottage that was now Jefferson’s textile
manufactory. Did she ever pause there, looking up to measure the short distance that separated her workday from that of her half sister Martha’s? From the bottom of the slope, she could see the graceful curve of the brick wall that was the exterior of Jefferson’s library. Above the library one of Monticello’s four great chimneys was visible, rising behind the ornamental spindle railing that trimmed the roofline of the house. She could see, too, the pediment that crowned the four massive pillars at the east entrance of the mansion, covering the portico. It was barely twenty-four paces to the top. But it might have been a world away.

  In his study, which he called his cabinet, Jefferson had started his day before breakfast. Just before the sun’s rising he, too, had risen, bathed his feet in cold water as was his habit (he believed it staved off sickness), dressed, and sat at his desk to attend to his voluminous correspondence. Taking breakfast with Martha and her children at eight, he returned to his desk for a morning of reading and writing. His cabinet is furnished today much as it was in his own day: A tall handsome clock chimed the passing of each hour, which Jefferson could track in any event as the light that flooded his work space moved from the south windows on his left to the west-facing windows in front of him. His desk held a polygraph copying machine to create a duplicate of each letter he wrote, a book stand that permitted him to work with five books at a time, a copious supply of ink, and his spectacles. Two candles were rigged to his chair to provide light for evening reading, and a long upholstered bench allowed him to elevate his feet while he read.

  Bathed in natural light, Jefferson’s cabinet is visible through his library. Inspired by the apartments he enjoyed in Paris, Jefferson redesigned his home upon his return. The light from the double glass doors of the greenhouse to the left (unseen) illuminates his books (right). The graceful arch seen here is one of the surviving specimens of John Hemings’s skill that can be seen at Monticello today.

  Adjoining his cabinet was his library, composed of two rooms, their walls lined with books, designed so that each room opened to the next. The easy flow facilitated by the floor plan—from bookshelves to desk and back again—mirrors the exchange and development of ideas in which Jefferson delighted. Angled to capture the best light the Virginia sun could afford and sheathed in windows, Jefferson’s cabinet was itself both symbol and wellspring of one of the greatest minds of the American Enlightenment. In his bright study, Jefferson took pen in hand and resumed his day’s work. At the bottom of the path, his daughter Harriet opened the door to his textile manufactory, took her place at the spinning jenny, and put her hand to the wheel.

  In the South Square Room, immediately off the entrance hall, Martha Jefferson Randolph began her working day. Measuring fourteen feet ten inches by fifteen feet four inches, the room offered cramped quarters for the several functions it had to serve, its meager floor space reduced further by a fireplace that jutted out into the room. One of the windows faced east, admitting morning light as Martha assigned the house slaves their tasks for the day; the other faced the east portico, allowing her to see approaching visitors. A small desk was tucked into the tiny corner alcove created by the fireplace’s footprint, enabling her to literally turn her back away from the commotion in the room to concentrate on her work. Her sewing table, probably crafted by John Hemings, and chair were drawn up to the window to take advantage of the light. Here Martha supervised the running of her father’s household and received the guests who congregated in the entrance hall in hopes of seeing him. And here as well, in this overcrowded room far from the glittering life she had known in Paris, Martha Jefferson Randolph schooled her children.

  However remote her girlhood years in Paris may have seemed, they had decidedly molded her vision of female education as she constructed a plan for her own daughters. Her ideas for them contrasted sharply with her father’s for her. For all the attention historians have lavished on Jefferson’s ideas about education, it was instead the years spent in the company of girls and women devoted to the intellectual life, and supervised by an abbess who herself epitomized female intelligence, capacity, and energy, that shaped his daughter’s ideas of the content and meaning of female education. Here at Monticello, under her instruction, her daughters would mature in the study of Latin, literature, history, and the sciences that they had begun as children at Edgehill. Over the years, they would delight in the life of the mind, vie with each other for precious study time away from housekeeping chores at Jefferson’s Bedford County hideaway of Poplar Forest, and be praised as the best-educated young women in America. But as Jefferson expended the final energies of his life building the university that remains his monument, it never occurred to him that his brilliant and vivacious granddaughters should ever take seats in its classrooms. And, in fact, the architectural innovations that Jefferson designed at Monticello reveal important clues about his opinions of the contrasting ways men and women should live their lives, and help us to understand why he never envisioned his granddaughters at his university.

  From the desk on the left, Martha Jefferson Randolph supervised the daily operation of her father’s household. The books in the alcove on the right supplied the lessons she dispensed daily to her ever-growing family. In the center of the room stands her sewing table, made for her in the joinery at Monticello. Through the door can be seen Jefferson’s own library, where Martha sometimes sat with him while she sewed.

  —

  INSPIRED BY ALL HE had seen in France, Jefferson embarked upon a twenty-year renovation project to remake Monticello after his return. In the finished house, public and private spaces were clearly demarcated. The public north wing contained dining and tea rooms, located near guest bedrooms. Taking advantage of the light and warmth of a southern exposure, Jefferson’s private apartments occupied almost the entire south wing. He ensured his privacy by keeping all three doors to his apartments locked, to the dismay of many a guest who observed how much more pleasant their stay might have been had they enjoyed access to Mr. Jefferson’s books.

  Family life, however, was architecturally all but invisible at Monticello. This is particularly curious given Jefferson’s hope that his daughters and their families would be frequent visitors, if not residents, there with him. Although Jack Eppes had turned down Jefferson’s offers to lodge at Monticello while he built a home at Pantops, the Randolphs found it convenient to move their family from Edgehill to Jefferson’s mansion. Using his father-in-law’s house as their headquarters, Tom could more easily help the aging Jefferson manage all their plantation operations and Martha could run his household and receive his guests. By 1809, most of his renovations were complete and the house was infinitely more comfortable, a fact Martha must have appreciated since she was expecting her tenth child when Jefferson returned home from Washington for the last time. Her son Meriwether Lewis was born in 1810; Septimia (so named because she was the seventh daughter) followed in 1814 and, last, George Wythe in 1818.

  Viewed from the east entrance, the house seemed smaller than its eleven thousand square feet and appeared to be just a single story, graced by floor-to-ceiling windows. In fact, the tops of the windows extended up to the second floor—but only waist-high. The five second-story bedrooms were thus lit from the floor, while Jefferson’s cabinet and library enjoyed the fullest benefit of natural light that full-length, south-facing windows could provide. In each wing, an impossibly narrow staircase ascended steeply from basement to third floor; positioned discreetly away from the guest rooms, the stairs were not visible to visitors, who could remain oblivious to clues of family life inside the house as well. Lacking natural light, the steps required the use of a candle to light the way, an additional encumbrance to hands already full. Two-year-old Septimia was scarred in more ways than one when she took a spill down those stairs in the arms of her brother’s wife, Jane. Ever after, when anyone spoke of the incident, Virginia told Jane, “Septimia pitied her self very much, without bestowing a single thought on the bruises which you got in trying to save her.”

/>   This view makes clear the hazards of negotiating the interior staircases, particularly for women. Built into stairwells that are six-feet square, the steps are just twenty-four inches wide, have dangerously high risers, and ascend in almost a spiral, with two turns on each floor. The only illumination comes from a small skylight in the roof. Jefferson’s design certainly rejected the grand European staircases, which were used to assert rank, but it does more: It reveals his lack of concern with his family’s convenience, even as he ensured his own.

  Historians studying the home as closely as they have its builder have been puzzled by what they view as an architectural flaw in an otherwise convenient house. But if we acknowledge that Monticello is a “very self-centered” kind of house, to quote one architectural historian, the puzzle is solved: Jefferson never routinely climbed those stairs, carrying small children, bedclothes, laundry, chamber pots, or candles. Downstairs, where he lived, domestic efficiency did reign. He had learned the delights of private apartments at the Hôtel de Langeac; such refinements were unknown in America. But although his renovations of Monticello had clearly been inspired by European architecture, he ignored the precedents of seventeenth-century Rome—a most masculine city where men outnumbered women by a ratio of three to two. Even there, apartments for women were still very much a part of their architectural planning. A wife might have parallel apartments in a mirror image of her husband’s, either across the house or upstairs from his. Newly married husbands remodeled their homes if they lacked space for the bride’s needs. Yet in spite of his expectations that Maria and Jack Eppes would live with him after their wedding, Jefferson did not reconfigure his designs for Monticello to accommodate them, much less Martha’s sprawling family.