Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Jefferson knew the industrializing Northeast was well ahead in this manufacturing trend, even before the second war with England erupted in 1812. As he contemplated his country’s preparedness for an embargo of British goods, Jefferson had looked to Philadelphia for examples of how to set up home manufactories. He particularly appreciated a model in which children could work at home under the watchful eye of their parents, who would also ensure their health and exercise. Although Jefferson was thinking of rural domestic arrangements rather than urban, this plan may have been Jefferson’s vision of Harriet’s future. His own daughter’s household had modeled this picture of an industrious family during his embargo. He may have satisfied himself that he met his obligations to Harriet by training her for her future role as a housewife in a working-class household, busily spinning and teaching her children to do the same under the family roof.

  This is why Jefferson assigned his enslaved daughter to the newer technology of the spinning jenny rather than to the old-fashioned spinning wheel. Yet the spinning jenny was not generally found in private homes, as the colonial spinning wheel had been. It was too big, for one thing. When Jefferson gave his instructions for a weaving factory to be built in Poplar Forest, he told his overseer to make sure that the door was at least four and a half feet wide to accommodate the machine. For another, the spinning jenny was one of the machines that inaugurated the industrial revolution. In the old days, when one spinner produced a single spool of thread at a time, it required three spinners to keep up with one weaver. The genius of James Hargreaves’s invention had been to devise a way in which one worker could spin eight to as many as 120 spindles at one time. Output on such a massive scale could be accomplished best in factories, and only by those with sufficient capital to set them up.

  By 1815, Jefferson had bought three Hargreaves-type spinning jennies and transferred textile production to Mulberry Row, steps away from his house. There Harriet Hemings spent her days spinning wool. Although spinning requires skill to ensure the quality of the finished product, she may not have taken any pride in her ability to spin. Rather, because the workers were producing textiles to clothe her father’s enslaved workforce, it is more likely that Harriet would forever associate spinning with her enslavement.

  With his access to labor, the resources to hire an expert to build the machinery and train his workers, and a large building whose footprint could accommodate the work, Jefferson began thinking about a factory of his own. In June 1812 he estimated that he needed “2000 yards of linen, cotton, & woolen yearly, to cloathe my family,” by which he meant his enslaved force. “This machinery, costing 150. Dollars only, and worked by two women & two girls, will more than furnish” what he needed for his workforce of 130 slaves, he thought, and at reasonable start-up costs. Together with his son-in-law Tom Randolph, Jefferson set up a factory at Edgehill in the summer of 1812. By 1814, Jefferson had one forty-spindle and three twenty-four-spindle jennies installed at Monticello, for a total of 112 spindles. He had experimented with a couple of other models, each inventor eagerly assuring him of the efficiency of his own manufacture. In the end, however, Jefferson decided to go back to the “antient Jenny,” which had been patented in 1770, because its straightforward design made it easy for his workers to replicate and repair themselves. By March 1814, he was able to dismiss the man he had hired to train his slaves in the manufacture, repair, and operation of the spinning jennies.

  Best of all, even a child could learn to operate the jenny. In 1813, Jefferson had moved a fifteen-year-old slave named Maria from Poplar Forest for training. Her teacher was “a girl younger than herself,” Jefferson reported to her overseer. It is a tantalizing reference; if, in fact, Harriet had been spinning since 1811, she could well have been Maria’s teacher. Jefferson recorded her success: Under her instructor’s tutelage, Maria was already “becoming a capital spinner” in just a few days. Closely measuring Maria’s output, he saw that “she does her ounce. & a half a day per spindle on a 12. spindle machine,” producing approximately seventy-five yards of wool per spindle. With the longer days of spring and summer, he hoped she would get to two ounces, “a reasonable task,” he judged. Sally on the other hand, another slave from Poplar Forest and the same age as Maria, he thought “hopeless. She seems neither to have the inclination nor the understanding to learn.” As Jefferson did with his nailers, he gave her a warning: “If there be no improvement she must cease to spin more cloth and go out to work with the overseer,” a reference that, Sally knew, meant field work, away from Jefferson’s more benign supervision.

  Work in the textile factory was not altogether unpleasant for Harriet. Her co-workers were young (at least nine of the twelve were between ten and seventeen years of age, four of them boys), and the factory seemed to lack strict oversight. At thirty-six, Cretia Hern was the elder in the factory; although she had been a house slave, in 1815 she was spinning cotton—and keeping the teenage boys in line. Two of them were her sons; another was Israel Gillette Jefferson, who would later serve Jefferson as postilion, a sign of his favored status, working in close proximity to his master. The boys carded, disentangling and cleaning the raw cotton and wool fibers to ready them for spinning. Agnes Gillette, seventeen, and Nanny Granger and Isabel, both fifteen, spun the hemp, which combined with some cotton was used for the slave children’s clothing; Dolly, nineteen, and Mary Hern, thirty-five, each wove four yards of cloth per day. Ten-year-old Eliza removed the full spools from the jennies and brought them to the weavers’ looms.

  The supervision of the factory’s output apparently fell to Martha Jefferson Randolph; in her presence the “work used to be weighed out…and partly with her own hands.” As early as 1815, Jefferson’s factory achieved his needed two-thousand-yard-per-year production level and even had so much left over that Bacon “sold wagonloads of it to the merchants.” But if Martha attempted to impose a rigid order upon the textile workers, she was unsuccessful. Fifty years after Jefferson’s death, one of his former spinners chuckled that “we were so bad, so troublesome, I wonder how mistress [Randolph] had the patience to bear with us as she did.” The work of spinners and weavers was not so engrossing as to preclude sharing stories, jokes, gossip, riotous laughter, and other behaviors that Randolph found “troublesome.” Because the textile factory was one of the few spaces on the plantation that were primarily female, overseen by Martha Randolph’s quick visits and Cretia Hern’s responsible eye, the women’s stories and other talk could have forged deep connections among them. That four teenage boys were among the factory crew would only have added to the boisterousness, especially when the constant whirring of the wheels and clacking of the machinery required that they shout to be heard. So Harriet did not spend her working days under a strict regime enforced by the lash. Instead she worked in the company of other young people in a somewhat relaxed but still very productive environment.

  The work in the textile factory was less onerous and physically taxing than most slave labor on the plantation, of course, but Harriet’s work was easier still. She alone worked with wool, which is much easier to handle than flax or hemp. It is the easiest of all fibers to spin, and wool’s natural lanolin would have been softer on her hands than the stiffness of flax or hemp, which irritates the thumb as it is drawn through the hand and needs constant wetting to keep it supple. And since Jefferson gave wool for stockings to those slaves who could spin and knit it themselves, Harriet was in a position to put her skills to work for her family’s interests. Edmund Bacon recalled that Harriet “never did any hard work.” An overseer’s perspective would not align with a slave’s, of course, so it is unclear whether he meant that she did not have to produce as much as everyone else did, or that he thought spinning was considerably easier than field work.

  Although there is no evidence that she absented herself from work for a whole week as Beverley once had, Bacon’s comment suggests that Harriet did not take her work in the manufactory very seriously. But Jefferson did. Sally Hemings’s daughter
was never going to be like his granddaughters; not for her would there be training on the harpsichord or guitar, or in Latin. The intellectual activities and feminine accomplishments that were so critical to the Randolph girls’ sense of themselves as elite white women would not be a part of Harriet Hemings’s training for adulthood. Nor would spinning be part of the Randolphs’ training. Even as an eleven-year-old, Ellen laughed off her grandfather’s suggestion that she spin him a waistcoat. “I cannot now even spin candle wick,” she told him spiritedly, with no apparent interest in learning how. But for Harriet Hemings, the child of a slave, industry meant spinning, not writing. In fact, Jefferson had long associated spinning with women of color rather than white women. Early in his presidency, he had envisioned Indian men settling down to “cultivate their lands; and their women to spin and weave for their families.” Of course, the task was also well suited to the enslaved women, whom he could readily assign to his textile manufactory. By the time Harriet turned fourteen, Jefferson thought this work matched her rank in life, both on the mountain and wherever she would live out her life in freedom.

  And certainly, a critical part of education in the South was to learn one’s status in the world as free or enslaved and its requisite behavior. This was not immediately apparent to the very young. Remembering his childhood at Monticello, former slave Peter Fossett pointed out that “a peculiar fact about [Jefferson’s] house servants was that we were all related to one another, and as a matter of fact we did not need to know that we were slaves. As a boy I was not only brought up differently, but dressed unlike the plantation boys. My grandmother was free, and I remember the first suit she gave me. It was of blue nankeen cloth, red morocco hat and red morocco shoes.” Living in freedom after Thomas Bell’s death, Mary Hemings Bell delighted in dressing her grandson in colorful clothes that set him apart from the dull beige osnaburg the other slaves wore; he did not even think of himself as one of the “plantation boys.” But he discovered what it meant to be a slave after Jefferson’s death. He bitterly recalled the day just after his eleventh birthday when he was “put upon an auction block and sold to strangers.” He would not be reunited in freedom with his family again for almost twenty-five years.

  Harriet was just about the same age, weeks from her eleventh birthday, when she learned something about the meaning of slavery: At Jefferson’s orders, the Monticello slave community was forced to witness the full authority of their master with the whipping of Jame Hubbard. Since his move from Poplar Forest, Hubbard had become one of the most productive workers in the nailery. He had worked hard at other tasks as well, eager for the pay that Jefferson gave as an incentive for doing extra work. But brought back to Monticello in irons after a second escape attempt, Hubbard had exhausted Jefferson’s patience. So on that April day in 1812, Hubbard’s no-nonsense owner determined to make an example of him. “I had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions,” he told Reuben Perry, who had contracted to buy Hubbard, “and committed to jail.”

  Hubbard had made a mockery of Jefferson’s previous leniencies toward him. Using his earnings, the twenty-one-year-old slave had furnished himself with such a fine set of clothes that in his first escape attempt in 1805 he had gotten almost as far as Washington before he was challenged. Later, back at Monticello, Hubbard was Bacon’s chief suspect when several hundred pounds of nails went missing. Mystified by the behavior of this “favorite servant,” Jefferson had relented at Hubbard’s tears and refused to order a whipping for a theft that was worth close to fifty dollars. Now, however, furious that his benevolent authority had been so completely flouted a second time, Jefferson ordered Hubbard’s whipping as an object lesson to the rest of his slaves, before he turned him over to his next owner. “All circumstances convince me he will never again serve any man as a slave,” Jefferson warned Perry. “It will therefore unquestionably be best for you to sell him…out of the state.” The slave owners of the Deep South were notorious for breaking the spirits of recalcitrant slaves and ensured that escape to the free states in the North was almost impossible.

  If the laws of God and nature had consigned women to the sole task of motherhood, so too, Jefferson believed, the inherent inferiority of people of African descent fitted them to work under the direction of whites. It is unlikely that Harriet Hemings would have watched Hubbard’s brutal punishment, but she certainly would have heard talk about it. If she had not quite understood the full meaning of slavery before, she surely learned that day. Admittedly, Jefferson preferred the smooth operation of a system in which his natural inferiors acknowledged the legitimacy of his government in return for the indulgences he dispensed. But if he could not secure their assent, he had the whip. And like every other slaveholder in the South, he was the law on his plantations. Public whippings were a ritual of terror aimed at the entire community; Hubbard’s would have made a deep impression on a young girl as she realized what her father could command in a system that would not restrain him.

  Harriet had other lessons in rank and status at Monticello that were considerably less dramatic but no less real. Most slaves learned early to exhibit the deferential behavior their masters required even if it was more show than genuine, the price they paid to keep their families together, to earn indulgences, or sometimes just to survive. These lessons were relentless and were particularly clear to Harriet every time the Randolphs and the Eppeses arrived for their extended visits when Jefferson was in residence. Although it is true that, as Annette Gordon-Reed wryly observed, “there can be great comfort in knowing that visitors are eventually going to go home,” little Harriet would have noticed substantial changes in her family’s daily routine during these visits. Her mother, and indeed all her relatives, would have had considerably less time for her and one another as the focus of their daily duties shifted to the comforts of Jefferson and his white family. The house had to be aired and cleaned, meals cooked and delivered on schedule, and fires and lamps lit. Once, after the Randolphs had moved to Monticello permanently and Jefferson had taken Burwell Colbert with him to Poplar Forest, Ellen complained, “You know we never have the comfort of a clean house whilst Burwell is away.”

  Years later, married and living in Boston, Ellen compared free white servants and southern slaves, providing an unwitting picture of the expectations of the white Monticello family and the work of the Hemings house slaves. In Boston, Ellen explained, servant women made the beds, straightened the rooms, and swept the carpets once each day; their work schedule was not interrupted by a hapless mistress who could not keep a room tidy. Unlike elite southern girls, Ellen was learning, northern ones “take care to require from the servants no running about from place to place,” adding that Boston girls left “no clothes tossed about, no drawer open, combs, pins, curls, ribbons, trinkets here and there on the dressing table, shoes in the middle of the floor, and so forth.” Watching her mother’s sisters spending their days picking up after the Randolph girls would have taught Harriet a great deal about the privileges of whiteness and the place of slaves.

  These differences became clearer still when Martha Randolph and her children moved into Monticello permanently in 1809. Harriet had been too young—just a toddler, in fact—to notice when the storm first broke around the Monticello family, disrupting the quiet arrangements Jefferson had made in his life with Sally Hemings and his daughters’ equally quiet accommodation of them. Aggrieved that he had not been rewarded for past services attacking President Jefferson’s political enemies, a hack journalist named James Callender publicly exposed Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings in the pages of the Richmond Recorder. “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves,” Callender charged in September 1802. “Her name is SALLY….By this wench Sally, our president has had several children,” he added, one of whom (a son) bears “features [that] are said to bear a striking resemblance to those of the president himself.” Several more
articles ensued, adding details—most of which turned out to be accurate—that Callender culled from Jefferson’s neighbors.

  Jefferson met Callender’s accusations with silence, neither admitting nor denying them. The story did not go away, however. Almost ten years later, a Vermont schoolteacher named Elijah P. Fletcher visited Monticello. His visit was cordial: Jefferson offered him wine and showed him his library. But Fletcher discovered that the story about “Black Sal is no farce,” as he put it in a letter to a relative. As news of the arrangement continued to circulate in Charlottesville, Jefferson was “little esteemed by his neighbors, Republicans as well as Federalists,” perhaps, Fletcher reasoned, because he “keeps the same children slaves.” Although the New Englander saw that in Virginia “such proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful,” Martha Randolph suffered the humiliation of this exposure greatly for years afterward, and in the fallout of her pain Sally Hemings and her children surely did as well, in the thousands of subtle gestures of daily life.

  Such practices were common in the slaveholding South, of course, and white men had pursued them with impunity since the seventeenth century. No one should be surprised they persisted in Albemarle County when, as one of Jefferson’s neighbors observed, “Mr. Jefferson’s notorious example is considered.” But after the Revolution, new conventions of etiquette required the protection of southern white womanhood from the sordid details. The unwritten rule of the day was that as long as the man was discreet and did not insist that his white family accept the children of his slave liaisons as one of them, neither his wife nor the community at large had anything with which to reproach him. But Callender’s articles broke this southern consensus of silence, and Martha’s suffering was acute. She “took the Dusky Sally stories much to heart,” her son said more than fifty years later. Although she did not have the status of a wife to lodge a complaint, Martha was pushed to the breaking point by a poem she read a few years afterward that alleged Jefferson “dreams of freedom in his bondmaid’s arms.” “The calm, gentle Martha’s passion-gust was irresistible,” wrote Henry Randall, an early Jefferson biographer, describing the way she stormed into her father’s library. “Mr. Jefferson broke into a hearty, clear laugh,” which Martha chose to read as a denial.