Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  But the question never receded. How could it, when after her move back to Monticello she was confronted daily with her father’s visage in at least two of Sally’s three sons? It bothered Martha’s son Jeff as well. He told Randall that “the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave [probably Eston], dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” There was even the time when “a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.” As Martha had confided to Ellen in 1825, she had endured “the discomfort of slavery” all her life. According to Jeff, if she had had her way, Sally Hemings and her children would have been moved off the mountain years before. That did not happen, of course, yet she still strove to mold her father’s memory. Near the end of her life, Martha asked her sons Jeff and George to check their grandfather’s records, directing them to notice that Jefferson had not been at Monticello for a full fifteen months before the conception of one of Hemings’s children. “Remember this fact,” she bade them. In fact, Jefferson’s records showed precisely the opposite.

  Schooled, then, by their mother and grandfather in the habits and attitudes of white slaveholding Virginians, the Randolph girls would also have given Harriet daily lessons in what it meant to be a slave. The curtain of silence that Jefferson drew down around his life with Sally Hemings veils the character of daily contacts between Sally’s children and Martha’s; beyond Madison’s few words about “inducing the white children to teach me the letters,” we simply do not know. But the Randolphs’ later actions reveal what they were taught, explicitly or otherwise, about slaves and people of color, and those attitudes would have been inscribed in every look, gesture, and comment directed toward Harriet.

  That the young Randolphs were as discomfited as their mother by the “yellow children,” as Ellen called them, is apparent in their various attempts to explain them away. In 1858, Ellen wrote a long letter to her husband, Joseph, explaining that “there is a general impression that the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of Col. Carr.” Ellen agreed with this assessment of Samuel Carr, her mother’s cousin; his licentious “deeds are as well known as his name,” she thought. It was Jefferson’s principle to “allow such of his slaves as were sufficiently white to pass for white men, to withdraw quietly from the plantation,” she stated categorically; “it was called running away but they were never reclaimed.” There was nothing notable, then, about the “four instances of this, three young men and one girl, who walked away and staid away. Their whereabouts was perfectly known but they were left to themselves—for they were white enough to pass for white.” The notion that Jefferson could have fathered Sally’s children, Ellen flatly denied. “There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities,” she declared. Jeff Randolph, on the other hand, identified Sam Carr’s brother Peter as the father of Sally’s children to try to explain away the family resemblances that were so obvious to visitors.

  The white family stories about the “yellow children” of Monticello are shot through with holes, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies that have been thoughtfully analyzed at length elsewhere. But there are several points to consider here as we think about Harriet’s interactions with the Randolphs at Monticello. One is the way in which Ellen talked about Sally Hemings and her children. Although she had known Sally all her life and knew she was light-skinned, Ellen nonetheless still referred to her as “dusky Sally,” the denigrating name given to her in sensationalized print stories almost sixty years earlier. When Madison Hemings told his family story to an Ohio newspaper in 1873, he named every one of Martha’s eleven surviving children; in her account, Ellen refused to name Beverley and Harriet when she described the escaped slaves Jefferson never hunted down. Similarly, in his conversation with his grandfather’s biographer, Jeff failed to explicitly identify the son who so resembled Jefferson but rather referred to him only as a “slave.” In her feigned ignorance of their names, Ellen would like us to read an insurmountable distance between her world and theirs, a chasm that she neither cared nor was forced to bridge. But she did know them—she grew up alongside them; and as long as the stories linking them to Jefferson continued to circulate, she could hardly be indifferent. In fact, the whole point of Ellen’s letter to her husband—otherwise inexplicable after more than thirty years of marriage—was to establish her credentials as Jefferson’s legitimate descendant and consign her cousins to nameless oblivion, erasing Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings from contention.

  But Ellen and her family were also grossly indifferent to the plight of all the other female slaves at Monticello, who she admitted were at the mercy of the “Irish workmen” and the “dissipated young men in the neighborhood,” and subsequently bore the “yellow” children whom visitors to the plantation noticed. Ellen’s letter makes plain how little she thought of the humanity of the slaves who spent their days picking up after her and her sisters, but then suffered, unprotected, the sexual assaults of her grandfather’s hired help and Jeff’s schoolmates. To Ellen, slaves were inferior beings, no matter what color their skin might be. So certain was she of the truth of that view that when she weighed the relative freedoms of American and English women, she was comfortable omitting enslaved women entirely from her calculations. “Putting domestic slavery out of the question,” she wrote, easily dismissing the weight of this American institution, “it has never been my lot to see any thing like oppression of the many by the few.” Jefferson had been able to proclaim that all men were created equal without any sense of contradiction precisely because he denied the full humanity of slaves. So too could his privileged granddaughter judge American women as the freest in the world, by excising from consideration the many who were more oppressed by race than she was by gender.

  But, as one jarring incident shows, not even well-bred and educated women could escape their part in upholding this system of oppression. “You will laugh to hear what disciplinarians we have turned out to be,” Cornelia wrote to her sister Virginia from their rented home in Washington several years after Jefferson’s death. When a young slave girl named Sally admitted stealing a pair of satin shoes from Septimia and some stockings, Martha and Cornelia conferred about her punishment. Not a week earlier, they had sent Sally for a whipping in the city’s public facility where slaveholders could pay others to administer punishment, but it was, Cornelia thought in hindsight, “by far too moderate correction.” To send her back would be an admission that the white women could not control a slave girl. Instead Cornelia continued, “we…took her down into the basement, Melinda & myself held her & mama inflicted the flagellation pretty severely.” As much as they abhorred administering physical punishment, they nonetheless could sacrifice their discomfort to ensure their authority over their slaves.

  Nothing in this family’s record, then—their stories to “protect” Jefferson, their account of a slave’s whipping, or their efforts to distinguish themselves from the children of a slave woman—suggests that the Randolphs would have treated Harriet Hemings as anything other than the slave that the law said she was. If Jame Hubbard’s whipping taught Harriet about slavery, growing up with the Randolph girls taught her about the power of whiteness. It did not matter who her father was. All the Randolphs had to do was to look past her and, in their willful blindness, deprive her even of her name to ensure she understood her place.

  Like Jefferson, Sally Hemings never publicly commented on their relationship or her relations with the Randolphs. She made no statement in the wake of Callender’s firestorm. She left no memoir after Jefferson’s death. So we cannot know exactly how she felt about her Randolph relations. Perhaps a French ointment pot, found by archaeologists on Mulberry Row, may provide a clue. By the time Jefferson retired from public life in 1809, the south dependency of the house had been completed. It housed his state-of-the-art French kitchen and several dormitory rooms. I
n one of them lived Sally Hemings and her four children. Two centuries after her move to the south dependency, Monticello archaeologists unearthed the shards of a pharmacy ointment pot in Mulberry Row. Carefully reassembled, it revealed its Parisian origins: “in Rue de Richelieu vis a vis [facing] Le Café Foi, Paris.” If Sally Hemings had kept it for twenty years, a mute testimony to the significance of her two years in Paris, why did she not bring it with her up the slope to her new quarters in the south dependency? Did the pot represent a time in her life when she envisioned a life at Monticello absent the governing hand of a mistress? With her new status, Sally Hemings could reasonably have looked forward to that eventuality. But that prospect crumbled with Martha Randolph’s move to the mountain in 1809. Perhaps Sally tossed her French memento into the trash pit, not wishing to be reminded of a scenario that would never be realized.

  Broken, buried, and now resurrected, the ointment pot is not unlike the history of Sally Hemings’s life, and both stories remain a tantalizing mystery. In the end, what Sally felt about her niece Martha Randolph, or Martha about Sally, really did not matter to the dynamics of life at Monticello. Like Martha, Sally was bound by Jefferson’s will and determination to avoid confrontation. In the face of Ellen’s sneers about “yellow children,” or Jeff’s discomfort with the resemblance her four “fair” children bore to Jefferson, or Martha’s obvious unhappiness with the arrangement, Sally Hemings would have taught her daughter the value of holding her tongue. Discretion was a small price to pay for peace and the freedom that would be hers when she turned twenty-one.

  Neither a Randolph nor an acknowledged Jefferson, Harriet nonetheless knew that there were still tangible benefits to being Sally Hemings’s daughter. During the newspaper revelations of 1802, readers learned that Sally Hemings was “treated by the rest of his house as one much above the level of his other servants.” And at first glance, Harriet’s transfer from the great house to the textile factory was not as dramatic as her mother’s had been, at the same age, from Virginia to Paris; Harriet’s journey was a matter of steps, not thousands of miles. But unlike her mother, Harriet was no one’s maid; with her work in the textile factory, Jefferson had ensured that. She grew up “measurably happy,” as her brother Madison had said about their childhood, always with the knowledge that she would be free. And if Jefferson’s white laborers or Jeff’s friends sexually exploited Jefferson’s female slaves, Harriet Hemings was clearly off-limits; there is not a whiff of a suggestion in the historical record to suggest she bore any children at Monticello. It is ironic that, as a slave, Harriet Hemings needed the protection of the very man who had impregnated his own sixteen-year-old slave, her mother. But unlike most enslaved women in the South, who bore children by age nineteen, Harriet was apparently held safe from sexual assault at Monticello. And tellingly, she would be the only female slave Jefferson ever allowed to go free.

  In all these ways, then, Harriet Hemings was an utter anomaly: named by Thomas Jefferson, fair in her coloring, and clearly favored in the protections afforded her and her expectation of freedom, yet never comparable to her Randolph cousins who were born free and, in the language of Virginia law, “legitimate.” In the way that the Randolph sisters cultivated a sense of themselves as a kind of Jeffersonian aristocracy, could not their aunt Harriet have done so as well, given all of her advantages? And in the insidious workings of the slave system, which created and enforced a color hierarchy, might Harriet have harbored some sense of superiority over dark-skinned slaves? If Harriet Hemings saw herself as privileged, and even deprived because she was not accorded the same privileges she saw her sister and the Randolph girls receive, it may help to explain why she decided to leave. “The slave is always the stranger who resides in one place and belongs in another,” historian Saidiya Hartman learned when she journeyed to Africa to study the captives of the slave trade. Born at Monticello, Harriet Hemings was “of the house” that Jefferson built, but she had no stake in it.

  Leaving Charlottesville may not have been what her mother initially intended for Harriet, although it is impossible to know with any certainty what hopes Sally Hemings harbored for her daughter’s future. Perhaps she fondly hoped for the kind of extended family experience she herself had known at Monticello, except transplanted in freedom among the Charlottesville community. Relying on Jefferson’s promise, Sally Hemings could reasonably have hoped that her own family would do even better than her sister Mary, who lived in town in quasi freedom with Thomas Bell and their two children. Several of Mary Hemings Bell’s older children had remained enslaved, however. Sally Hemings, on the other hand, could have anticipated that all her children would live as free people of means, in the beauty and familiarity of Albemarle County, within easy reach of relatives both free and enslaved.

  It was not to be. In 1806, the Virginia legislature mandated that henceforth all manumitted slaves must leave the Commonwealth within twelve months or be reenslaved. Six years earlier, Richmond had been shaken by the sophisticated organization of rebellious slaves who planned to torch the city, seize its arsenal of weapons, and capture the governor and his officials. Saved from the coup by torrential rains that prevented the conspirators from launching their revolt, Virginia legislators methodically began tightening the manumission laws that had been considerably loosened during the Revolution. Evading the 1806 edict was possible only by a successful petition to the legislature, but that would require a public declaration of responsibility that Hemings knew Jefferson would never make. His determined silence in the face of Callender’s attacks had made that plain. Unless he would allow her to leave the state, Sally Hemings knew that her family would not be exempt from the enforced separations that were the daily lot of slaves in the United States. The law must have hit her with brute force as she looked upon her little children—then eight, five, and one—and realized she might have to prepare them to leave her forever.

  The point of the law was to remove the obvious evidence that contradicted white claims—Jefferson’s included—that people of African descent were incapable of caring for themselves. It was a maxim on which the system of slavery rested. But the law also highlighted the problem created when white men had sex across the color line: the growth of a significant population of mixed-race people. In their newspaper ads, white Virginians used at least sixty-one different phrases to describe the varying skin tones of their runaway slaves. This remarkable list itself was proof that, as one historian noted, “the racial order was breaking down.” But even the law did not stipulate a neat divide between black and white. In 1785 the state legislature changed the boundary between whiteness and mulatto from one-eighth African ancestry to one-quarter, but it failed to address the ambiguous racial category of people with less than one-quarter African blood. They remained raceless, the law exempting them from the legal category of color but still unwilling to categorically denote them white.

  In practice, white Virginians tended to be a bit lax about these racial categories when it suited them. No one in Charlottesville, for example, contested Thomas Bell’s will, which left his property to Mary. Although Bell had never formally freed her, there was clearly a community consensus about Mary’s free status, although it depended on the locals’ acceptance of his standing and hers in the town. When the 1830 census taker knocked on Sally Hemings’s door, he judged her, Madison, and Eston “white,” an indication of both their skin color and the community understanding of their free status after Jefferson’s death. Three years later, however, another official judged them mulatto. These are precisely the sorts of situations—endlessly duplicated—that explain the legislature’s refusal to follow their reasoning to its logical conclusion and say that if you do not meet the criteria for black, you must be white.

  Nothing was as simple as black and white in Jefferson’s Virginia. Fair as they all were, Sally Hemings’s children appeared in a list Jefferson entitled “Negroes retained,” on which he sorted out those slaves he leased to his neighbors from those who remained to work
for him. Ultimately, of course, one’s status depended not on the lightness of one’s complexion or hair but on the condition of one’s mother. Because Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston were the children of an enslaved woman, their emancipation would therefore require their departure. The inevitable separation, however, would not have altered their mother’s essential goals for them: that all marry free persons, that her sons be well positioned to support themselves and their families, and that her daughter become the wife of a respectable man. These were not substantially different dreams than any free white mother would have nurtured for her children, but they were prodigiously challenging for an enslaved one. To the extent that her duties would allow, Sally Hemings had worked to make the most of their time together before the inevitable partings and to ensure her children’s readiness when that time came; the same force of will that in Paris elicited Jefferson’s promise of freedom for their children would only have been strengthened under these new circumstances.