Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  As he did at home in Monticello, Jefferson occupied the sunniest room for reading at Poplar Forest, while his granddaughters retreated to their bedroom to study. The campeachy chair shown here (named after the Mexican province of Campeche, which supplied the wood) was Jefferson’s favorite reading chair, providing comfort against his rheumatism. John Hemings made several based on the design. At least five of Jefferson’s campeachy chairs are known to survive today.

  Perhaps Jefferson’s favorite, Ellen accompanied her grandfather to Poplar Forest almost every time. She treasured her days there; it was where she learned to think of herself as a bluestocking. Certainly it mattered mightily to Ellen that while they were there, Jefferson “interested himself in all we did, thought, or read” and that he in turn shared with her what he was reading. But the secluded location, only occasionally intruded upon by a few visitors, mattered as well. That Ellen associated this space with study is apparent in the reflections she wrote during a visit, three years after her first one. She roamed nostalgically from room to room, reveling in the memory of her studies in each, and later calculated that she had enjoyed four times the leisure to read at Poplar Forest than at Monticello. Jefferson attested to her study habits; at Poplar Forest, he told Martha, Ellen and Cornelia “are the severest students I have ever met with. They never leave their room but to come to meals.” The results of their disciplined study were obvious to all who met them. Visiting Monticello in 1820, for example, a Maryland engineer was clearly impressed by his evening’s conversation with Martha and “her highly polished and highly instructed daughters,” for whom “it seems to be a matter of equal facility with them to write or converse, in French, Spanish, Italian, or their mother tongue.”

  Quiet rural living did not always provide the society that kept such educated minds stimulated, however; Ellen once complained that “Bonaparte might die, or the pope turn turk, and we should be none the wiser for it.” That may be why, at twenty-seven, Ellen was so attracted to a young New Englander who made the trip to Monticello to meet Jefferson in the spring of 1824. Joseph Coolidge, Jr., the son of a wealthy trading family in Boston, had graduated from Harvard seven years earlier and just completed his grand tour of Europe. The two young people took an instant liking to each other, and Coolidge so impressed Ellen’s mother and grandfather that when he asked them the following spring if he could visit again, their reply informed him that they could not provide her with a dowry. Coolidge didn’t care; he returned to Monticello, married Ellen in Jefferson’s parlor in May 1825, and brought her home to Boston.

  In spite of her trips to Richmond in search of suitors, Virginia also met her husband at home at Monticello. Like Coolidge, Nicholas P. Trist, the grandson of Jefferson’s old friend Eliza House Trist, was drawn there by Jefferson’s reputation. At eighteen, Trist spent a year reading law with Jefferson, during which time he and seventeen-year-old Virginia fell in love. Although Martha grew to love Nicholas like a son, she thought the pair too young to marry and asked them to wait. Nicholas left to study at West Point and to attend to property he owned in Louisiana. But ever steadfast in his love, he returned to Monticello to claim Virginia for his bride after six years in 1824.

  The prospects for livelier intellectual society for the remaining Randolph daughters improved markedly when their grandfather began his project of building a university in Charlottesville, and they followed its progress with great interest. Jefferson had chosen Francis Walker Gilmer, a young local lawyer whose education he much admired, to go to Europe to recruit the finest minds to teach in his university. As they began to arrive in Virginia, it was with great anticipation that the new professors and their wives were welcomed to dine at Monticello, where Jefferson’s granddaughters took the opportunity to look them over. They were “more and more pleased with Dr. Dunglison both as a man and a physician,” Cornelia wrote to Ellen, who had just moved to Boston. Robley Dunglison, a Scotsman who had been hired to teach anatomy and medicine, increasingly endeared himself to Jefferson’s family through the relief his ministrations offered to Jefferson’s chronic complaints.

  Mary thought Mrs. Bonnycastle, the new wife of the professor of natural philosophy, “no very great acquisition to our neighborhood…but apparently perfectly inoffensive.” Generally Cornelia agreed, finding that “as we become better acquainted with all of the professors and their wives we like them better.” The exception was Mrs. Blaettermann, the wife of the German professor hired to teach modern languages, “who from all accounts is a vulgar virago.” Cornelia’s pen reproduced the reputation the unfortunate Mrs. Blaettermann acquired in Charlottesville. “If she does not steal,” she said cuttingly, “it is very probably because she has no occasion to do so.” Judge Dade, who had been offered the law professorship, on the other hand, pleased the young Randolph women mightily. “He has that frankness about him that you would suppose was the effect of perfect honesty and integrity….It is so rare to meet with a Virginian who is a man of education it is always an agreeable surprise to me,” Cornelia said of the distinguished forty-two-year-old judge; “I am quite in love with him.”

  Jefferson intended his university to train the young men of the southern states for productive lives in civic service, agriculture, commerce, or manufactures. The champion of the separation of church and state, Jefferson intentionally rejected any religious affiliation that, until this point, had been the raison d’être of American colleges. Indeed, one of only three achievements he wanted included on his tombstone was his authorship of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, passed in 1786. Instead his university would school students in habits of reason, discipline, and virtue in preparation for the leadership roles they would assume in their adulthood. Some of the young men would disappoint Jefferson severely; within six months of the university’s opening, three students (of an enrollment of about one hundred) were expelled for two successive nights of alcohol-fueled rioting that included throwing bottles through windows, cursing the European professors, and striking with both sticks and stones the professors who tried to restrain them. Jefferson did not forgive these three, but he did excuse the fourteen masked students who created a disturbance on the Lawn that weekend as just indulging in youthful hijinks.

  Although the younger Randolph boys (Lewis, Benjamin, and George) would eventually attend the university, there was never any question that their studious and well-behaved sisters would not be able to do so. But the girls’ avid reports of professorial hirings were only one indication of their great interest in Jefferson’s university. They visited his “academical village,” as he called it, whenever they were in Charlottesville and, to the extent they could, visited the library and attended public lectures. On one occasion, after attending an oration given by a student member of the Patrick Henry Society, Mary climbed to the gallery of the Rotunda to listen to the echo, which produced “the effect of a whispering gallery.” Several times, she reported to Ellen, she visited the university’s library, where she could browse through its holdings and sit and read like any student during the library’s opening hours. But, she sighed, “it is forbidden to carry a single volume beyond the precincts of the Institution.” Unable to bring a book home with her, Mary could not continue her reading in whatever pockets of time she could carve out of her housekeeping duties.

  But as in the rest of America, admission to the university’s classrooms was denied her. Charlottesville’s celebration of the visit of the Marquis de Lafayette poignantly illustrates women’s marginalization. In 1824, Lafayette was making a triumphant tour of the Unites States, whose independence he had been so instrumental in winning. Charlottesville went out of its way to welcome him. A grand dinner, attended by five hundred men of the community, was given at the Rotunda, which Jefferson designed after the Roman Pantheon and which remains today the very heart of the University of Virginia. A great number of women attended as well to pay tribute to the aging French patriot; however, they occupied a space in one of the wings of the Rotunda, invisible to the mai
n event.

  The Randolph sisters attended the grand dinner, but they also enjoyed quieter moments with their illustrious guest at Monticello, where they had witnessed firsthand the emotional reunion of the two old revolutionaries. In the portico on a “golden November day,” Martha and her daughters stood at Jefferson’s side as Lafayette arrived “with all the military show of gay scarfs and prancing horses, whose glittering accouterments flashed in the sunshine.” As Jefferson embraced his friend, “all was so still that [they] heard the words distinctly, ‘My dear Jefferson,’ ‘My dear Lafayette.’ ” This privileged group then followed the men into the house for a private dinner, quite different from the crush of the dinner celebration at the university. “A party of 20 ladies & gentlemen sat down to dinner,” a niece of Martha’s later recounted. “Mr. Jefferson sat at one side with Mr. Madison & Genl. Lafayette on the other. Mr. Geo. LaFayette was at the head of the table between Miss [Ellen] Randolph & her mother. As usual there were fewer gentlemen than ladies, & one side of the table showed an almost unbroken line of beautiful young girls.” Even in this more intimate event, as at the university, women were necessary for the festivities, but as ornaments rather than full participants. For Jefferson they rounded out a picture of female beauty and domesticity in his well-ordered world that he wanted to display to his visitor.

  Despite being surrounded with these women, loving them mightily, and even encouraging their reading, Jefferson demonstrates to the modern observer the limits of his revolution. Women should not be trained to contribute to a growing nation, or to prepare for citizenship; rather, their education should produce agreeable, rational companions and conversationalists. His perfect confidence in Martha’s ability to educate her daughters in the privacy of his home was justified by the admiration and praise of his visitors. But for all that Martha Jefferson Randolph was, for all her learning, all that she cultivated within herself and her daughters, she was relegated to the sidelines, her brilliance confined to her fifteen-foot-square sitting room—as her father had designed.

  BOUND TO JEFFERSON BY THE strongest ties of admiration and love, Martha loyally ensconced herself in her cramped schoolroom. Happy in the company of her family, she would not have had it any other way. Harriet Hemings, however, would have preferred to be doing something else as she made her way down the slope from her home in the south dependency of the great house to Mulberry Row, where the textile manufactory stood. Opening the door, she braced herself for another workday. At least the brick floor and stone walls offered her cool respite on hot Virginia mornings; in winter, the stone chimney radiated warmth while the solidly built walls kept the wind at bay. A single story high, the stone cottage had been built in the late 1770s for the white artisans Jefferson had hired when he first began building his great home. Measuring thirty-four by seventeen feet, its proportions were much larger than the smaller wood houses he later ordered built for his slaves. Two windows flanked the central door; the second floor and gambrel roof that today’s visitors to Monticello see were added after Harriet’s day.

  Now known as the textile workshop, this building saw numerous uses and renovations after Jefferson first built it in 1776 to house the white laborers he employed to erect his home. It housed Sally Hemings on her return from France, as well as her sister Critta; it then reverted to housing for white builders working on Jefferson’s extensive renovations; and, finally, it was converted in 1814 into the textile manufactory where Harriet worked as a teenager. The gambrel roof and the addition on the left are twentieth-century changes.

  Others lived here in the stone cottage after the artisans left: Harriet’s mother, when she first returned from France, and then later the talented carpenter James Dinsmore, who had found Harriet’s uncle John such an apt pupil. But since then, the building had been reconfigured from dormitory to factory when Jefferson moved his textile operations onto the mountain in 1814. Now, instead of workers, the stone cottage housed three spinning jennies, a carding machine to disentangle and clean the raw fibers of debris, and a loom. But, Harriet reminded herself as she closed the door behind her and looked around at her co-workers, this would not be her life forever. Her elder sister might draw her daily fund of endurance from the great love she bore her father and from the privileges he bestowed on her family. But Harriet would choose a different road.

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  IT IS UNCLEAR WHEN Harriet began working in the textile factory. Not until 1815, when she was fourteen, did Jefferson document her as a worker in his Farm Book, but with his extended absences during his presidency, his entries had been sporadic since her birth. It is possible that she was working as early as ten, one of the unidentified “spinning girls” Jefferson noted in 1811. More likely, however, Jefferson’s record for Harriet aligns with the pattern her younger brother Madison Hemings recalled of his childhood, in which he was not sent to work as a carpenter with his uncle John Hemings until he, too, was fourteen. This was unusually late for the enslaved children owned by Thomas Jefferson to begin working. Even children under ten could be useful, he thought, helping the elderly women who were no longer productive in the fields to mind the youngest children. This, of course, freed their mothers to work for him. Between ten and sixteen, “the boys make nails, the girls spin,” Jefferson directed, and at sixteen, they “go into the ground or learn trades.” In this way, Jefferson maximized the returns on the labor of his youngest slaves as he also screened for and built an efficient workforce. But until Harriet became a spinner, she would have spent her days in Jefferson’s home with her mother, running errands as Madison did as a boy and perhaps working as a child minder for the Randolph babies; Martha birthed several more children by the time Harriet had turned ten. However she spent her childhood, one thing is certain: It deviated significantly from the norm Jefferson set down for the rest of his workforce.

  Jefferson made different kinds of arrangements for his sons. Beverley, Sally’s eldest child, was already working as a tradesman’s apprentice at age eleven, probably alongside Sally’s brother John in the joinery. When they were young boys, Beverley, Madison, and Eston accompanied John Hemings on his working trips to Poplar Forest as his “aids,” as Jefferson called them. There, as Hemings crafted the interior work on Jefferson’s vacation home, Sally’s sons learned the trade of carpentry far from the demands of life on Mulberry Row, apprenticed to a much loved and talented uncle. And in the relative isolation of Poplar Forest, they may also have spent time with their father. Building had always been a passion for Jefferson—he called Monticello his “essay in architecture”—and in the leisure afforded by his retirement it became one of his chief preoccupations. Born a decade beyond the days when Jefferson assembled his agricultural “machine” at Monticello, Madison Hemings remembered that Jefferson “had but little taste or care for agricultural pursuits.” (He was correct; Jefferson was turning more and more of those responsibilities over to his grandson Jeff.) Instead “it was his mechanics he seemed mostly to direct and in their operations he took great interest. Almost every day of his later years he might have been seen among them.” This daily contact apparently never translated into intimacy between father and sons—we remember Madison’s comment that Jefferson never showed partiality to them. But the craft of woodworking did give them common ground on which to meet around shared interests, skill, and a passion to create objects of beauty.

  Carpentry training prepared Sally Hemings’s sons to earn their livelihood as free men, but of course that would not suit a girl in the nineteenth century, so Jefferson had to make other provisions for his daughter. There are several possible reasons why he decided that the best place for Harriet was his textile factory as a spinner. In his own youth, his mother and sisters owned spinning wheels; his sister Martha (who had married his best friend, Dabney Carr) received a spinning wheel when she was sixteen. Perhaps Jefferson saw spinning more as a polite hobby and accomplishment than a productive skill vital to the household economy. If so, then he may have been equipping his daughter for the l
ife of domesticity he expected her to have in her life in freedom.

  His reasons were probably more practical, however, particularly considering how the world had changed in the generations from his mother’s day to his daughters’. Although Americans made most of their everyday clothing in the early eighteenth century, they relied largely on imports from Britain for cottons and luxury fabrics. With the colonial resistance movements in the 1760s and 1770s, however, women showed their patriotism by stepping up their production of cloth, demonstrating their independence from the British markets. When he was inaugurated president, George Washington wore a homespun suit as a matter of American pride. But American-made textiles would not really take off until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793 freed factory owners from dependence on British resources. And until Jefferson set up his own textile operation in 1812, he himself bought, rather than made, most of the clothing for his slaves.

  In the next decade, small manufactories sprouted up all over the country, partially as a response to the embargo of 1807 that Jefferson imposed as president, hoping it would persuade Britain to cease its impressment of American sailors—between six and seven thousand, by his count. The economic sanctions had no impact on Britain and were ultimately lifted, but they did finally spur greater cloth production both in cities and on farms. When war with England did come in 1812, during the presidency of his friend James Madison, Jefferson could report that his whole neighborhood was immersed in household manufactures of cloth and clothing. He himself proudly reduced his own reliance on imports of coarse clothing for his slaves to less than 20 percent of his total requirements. “The embargo has set every body to making homespun,” Martha’s eldest daughter Anne had reported to him from Edgehill in 1808. “Mama has made 157 yards since October, you will see all the children clothed in it.” By the end of the war, Jefferson boasted that his broadcloth could rival England’s best. There would be no need ever again to import such items when the peace came; of that, he was certain.