With all these considerations, Harriet had a decision to make as her twenty-first birthday approached. What would she do? Would she leave Albemarle County? Where would she go? Her options presented her with a different kind of dilemma than her brothers faced. There was the obvious gendered difference common to almost all nineteenth-century women: Her brothers had marketable skills and could be self-supporting; Harriet, on the other hand, may not have even known how to read or write. Indeed, a self-supporting woman in the nineteenth century was synonymous with poverty. As for almost all women of her time, her survival strategy would have to center not on work but on making a good marriage.
Harriet also had to consider the gender differences inherent in the slave system. To avoid a paper trail that would connect them to him, Jefferson facilitated Beverley’s and Harriet’s departures without furnishing them manumission papers; in fact, for anyone who might examine his papers after his death, he wrote in his Farm Book “run [18]22” next to their names. So at law they remained fugitive slaves until the United States abolished slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Although some states had already abolished slavery or put it on the path to extinction by gradual emancipation before then, the force of the federal government had always been marshaled in support of slavery, first with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and then its stronger successor in 1850. Not only was it a federal offense to assist fugitive slaves, the 1850 act required the free states to return runaways to their masters, so that even in the North they were not safe.
For forty-three years, then, Harriet risked forcible return to Virginia and slavery if her identity was discovered and reported. And because Virginia law perpetuated slavery through women rather than men, Harriet’s very body would condemn her children to that status if she was discovered. Thus her only hope to break the bonds of slavery in her generation was to disappear into the anonymity of the North. With her departure, Harriet did not reject her mother or her brothers, but whites’ evolving definition of slavery. Like her father, who had compared Britain’s rule to enslavement, she knew exactly what slavery was and, as he had, claimed independence as her right in her own pursuit of happiness.
We do not know for sure where she was headed the day she left Monticello. Bacon remembered that “by Mr. Jefferson’s direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars.” In fact, Philadelphia would have been an ideal place to begin her new life. First of all, she could get there, since her father had paid the fare; it was far enough away from Charlottesville that the Hemings name (if indeed she kept it) might not betray her origins; and, with a population of nearly sixty-four thousand, it would be easier than in Washington City to disappear into anonymity. The city had attracted many manumitted slaves from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, as well as from the Pennsylvania hinterlands, between 1790 and 1820. Its reputation for abolition appeared to have been justified by the 1820 census that for the first time entered a zero under the city’s category of Slave. Hemings would have stayed far away from the free black community, of course, but she may have been reassured that Philadelphia’s approach to slavery appeared to be very different from her home state’s.
Jefferson would not have sent her to Philadelphia without making careful arrangements for her initial placement and care. He had known the city well and still had close and trusted friends there from his days serving as delegate to the Continental Congress, and later as secretary of state and vice president. Remembering his fond friendship with Francis Hopkinson, who had since died, he may have considered approaching Hopkinson’s son, Joseph, drawing upon those old ties and Hopkinson’s abolitionist sympathies to obtain a situation for Harriet. He may have asked his good friend Dolley Madison whether she had any old connections from whom he might request a favor. Or he may have made discreet inquiries through another Philadelphia contact, James Ronaldson, who had recommended so enthusiastically the small manufactories there. Might he suggest an available position for a well-bred though financially distressed young woman in his neighborhood who could spin and weave? Whether Jefferson entrusted his secret to anyone in Philadelphia or kept it hidden, the city would only have been a possibility for Harriet Hemings if her father had made it so. And in paying her fare to that city, it is clear that for him, at least, it was Harriet’s destination.
But just because Jefferson thought spinning and weaving was a good job for a woman does not mean that Harriet and her mother thought so. More likely, Harriet Hemings would always associate spinning with her enslavement. Perhaps it could serve as a fallback position, but Harriet probably had very different ideas about her life as a free woman. In fact, Madison specified that she had gone to Washington, at least at first. If Harriet alighted from the stage at Washington City (as is most probable) rather than continuing to Philadelphia, it was because the Hemingses had made other plans. A new and growing city, Washington offered a wide variety of employment possibilities for women—with the notable exception of textile manufacturing.
Even though Harriet had never been there herself (there is no evidence that she ever left Charlottesville and environs before her final leave-taking), Washington was familiar to a lot of people at Monticello. Of course, Jefferson had spent eight years there, and his daughter Martha had taken two winter sojourns with him during his presidency. But more important for Harriet was the daily contact she enjoyed with Edith Hern Fossett, who had lived at the White House, and her brother Davy Hern, the driver who knew every inch of the roads between the capital and Monticello. Although the Herns left Washington in 1808 before Jefferson did, they clearly maintained contact with friends they had made there. When their younger brother Thruston ran away in 1817, Jefferson looked for him in Washington, where, he was sure, Thruston was “lurking under the connivance of some of his sister’s old friends.” Betsy Hemmings, the enslaved daughter of Sally’s older sister Mary Hemings Bell, also knew Washington, staying there with Jack Eppes (after Maria’s death) while he was serving in Congress. Betsy was apparently able to make the journey there alone. In one instance, after Jefferson had retired from the presidency, his Washington servant Joseph Dougherty arranged that she be charged with transporting some of Jefferson’s valuable books home from Washington as far as Fredericksburg. Besides having at least two children with Eppes (who continued the pattern of shadow families begun by his grandfather John Wayles), Betsy served as a nurse for Francis and would have accompanied them to Monticello to visit her own relations when Francis and his father visited there in the years after Maria’s death. Paul Jennings, the enslaved valet of James Madison, accompanied his master on his twice-yearly retirement visits to Monticello, beginning in 1817, and would have been another, more updated source on Washington as the time for Harriet’s decision drew near.
This dizzyingly interconnected network of slaves and ex-slaves makes clear that while masters commandeered slave labor to facilitate their careers in Washington, their workers used every opportunity to shape their own lives even while enslaved and to study possibilities for constructing new futures for themselves in freedom. Indeed, one historian persuasively identified Paul Jennings as the person who helped Thruston Hern escape; Bacon guessed that the young man “had gone with Mr. Madison’s cart to Washington, and had passed himself off as Mr. Madison’s servant.” One human link forged to another, layer upon layer, story upon story: Thus Harriet would have learned a lot about the city long before she decided to go there.
But perhaps the most important consideration of all was that her brother Beverley Hemings was there. We know from their brother Madison that “Beverley went to Washington as a white man.” Although he had turned twenty-one in April 1819, Beverley had remained in slavery for almost three additional years, according to Jefferson’s Farm Book. Never a meticulous daily record, the Farm Book is imprecise about the departure of brother and sister. One of the last records for both is when the entire family appears for the 1819–1820 cloth and blanket distribution, although twenty-one-year-old Beverley is listed apart
from his mother and younger siblings, as he had been for several years. The last time Jefferson records both names is in January 1821, in his list of house slaves. It appears the two of them had left by the Christmas 1821 distribution of cloth, blankets, and hats, or at least, their departure was so imminent they did not receive allowances meant for the following year; Sally Hemings’s name is joined only by Madison’s and Eston’s. Jefferson even made a point of scratching the siblings’ names off the blanket list; given their ages and having received their blankets for 1818–1819, they would not need the next scheduled allotment three years later in 1821–1822. Perhaps it was Beverley whom Mary Randolph saw playing the fiddle during that otherwise quiet Christmas week in 1821—his last at Monticello?—“as he stood with half closed eyes & head thrown back with one foot keeping time to his own scraping in the midst of a circle of attentive & admiring auditors.” As did her elder sister Ellen when talking about Sally Hemings’s children, Mary left the talented enslaved musician unnamed.
Hemings scholars believe that Beverley probably left Monticello near the end of 1821. There is no particular evidence in the Farm Book to show that Beverley left before Harriet did, although it makes eminent sense that he would go ahead to scout out living quarters and work prospects before his sister joined him. Washington offered countless work opportunities for the young man, who was well trained as a carpenter and as a cooper.
We know very little about Beverley Hemings, but if he was anything like Paul Jennings, who was just a year younger, he was a man who claimed the right to improve his circumstances and to succeed. Jennings had learned to read and write as he stood attendance on his young master during his lessons; he spoke French; he played the violin with flair; he was scrupulously polite to the Madisons’ guests, cultivating a network of potential contacts and allies; he negotiated a loan from the eminent Daniel Webster to buy his freedom; and after a career working for the government, he died possessed of valuable city property that he bequeathed to his sons. Such achievements were possible for well-placed slaves who adroitly made the most of the limited opportunities they were allowed, without alienating their masters upon whom their advancement depended.
We do know that Beverley was successful enough to win the hand of a white woman from Maryland whose family, Madison noted, “was of good circumstances.” We also suspect, thanks to the account of another Monticello slave, that Beverley was the man who launched a hot-air balloon in Petersburg on the Fourth of July 1834, an event that Madison attended. That he would have inherited something of his father’s intelligence and interest in science and innovation is perhaps not surprising; that he possessed the time and money to pursue such an undertaking is more so. It certainly indicates a man who, like Jennings, refused to let his talents and drive be stymied by his society’s system of racial hierarchy. Instead Washington became Beverley’s launchpad.
Whatever her mother or father thought best for her, in the end it was Harriet’s own decision that prevailed. To Washington she would go. As Madison explained, “She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman.” His phrasing is interesting. “She thought,” he said. The decision does not sound like either a parental directive or a family consensus. “To her interest,” he said. Harriet would have recognized the difference between her situation and that of her brothers. Maybe there were long conversations about the priority of keeping the family together once Beverley turned twenty-one; we have seen how close a family the Hemingses were. The idea of allowing the law to force a permanent fracture may have been more than her mother and younger brother could bear. But in Madison’s view, the family interest did not prevail; Harriet’s particular individual interest did. “To assume the role of a white woman,” he said. Madison’s careful wording hints at anguished conversations about identity. Perhaps she had to assure him strenuously that she would be no less a Hemings because she had to drop the family name to pass, that she would be no less her mother’s daughter or his sister. Perhaps she had to explain to him that it was a role the law forced her to play so that her children would be born white and free, with all the privileges of citizenship the Constitution afforded such people. Ultimately, we can only guess whether Madison’s words convey Harriet’s sensibility about what she was about to do, or his anger and grief at losing her to the white world.
What we do know is that Harriet played her role as a white woman perfectly. “By her dress and conduct as such,” Madison continued more than fifty years after her departure, “I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.” Lacking formal freedom documents, there would be no documentation to gainsay her ruse by pointing to her birth in slavery or to her distant African ancestor, her unnamed great-grandmother. She possessed the advantages of her father’s fair coloring to play upon whites’ unthinking assumption of her free status, and of her mother’s beauty to play upon gender conventions to charm and disarm. In most levels of society, beauty and manners were enough to attract a husband, particularly in a racist society that assumed genteel manners could only be white. Still, there would be significant details to attend to, to ensure a smooth and unquestioned transition from “black” to “white.”
Clothing was the most obvious detail, as universal a signal of status in Harriet Hemings’s time as in our own. In the South, slave garb was a particularly striking demarcation between enslaved and free. In 1735, South Carolina had even passed a series of laws to ensure that the distinction was observed, for example forbidding slaves to wear the cast-off clothing of their masters. Jame Hubbard had relied on his new suit to carry him to freedom, and if it hadn’t been for a poorly written pass, it would have worked. Harriet had never worn the costume of an enslaved woman: the jacket and loose-fitting short gown that allowed both mobility of movement for field work and layering in the winter, or an osnaburg shift in summer. She did not suffer the tortures of wearing coarse flax garments that Booker T. Washington remembered felt like “a dozen or more chestnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh.” It is not likely she wrapped her head in the turban headdress characteristic of African women and carried to America. She never “worked in the fields in rags, breasts exposed,” as a French visitor saw in Louisiana; she would not have worn “pantelettes made an’ tied to dere knees, to wear in de fields to keep dew off dere legs,” as a Mississippi slave recalled of her work clothing. Although there are no notations in Jefferson’s accounts that he spent extra money on Harriet’s clothing, he had authorized Martha to clothe well the Hemings women who served in the house. Not for them the defeminized, shapeless, identical clothing of the field hand; the master who sent them fabrics of different colors and patterns from Philadelphia was clearly conscious of the ways women should present themselves, particularly in his home. There is no reason to think that his sensibilities would not have extended to his daughter.
Even so, Harriet’s trousseau for her life in freedom would have to look more like the Randolphs’ clothing than her mother’s. But a well-chosen wardrobe was a challenge, it turns out, even for the privileged Ellen Randolph. Feeling completely out of her depth in rural Albemarle as she prepared for her wedding trip and move to Boston in 1825, Ellen enlisted the aid of the mother of her brother Jeff’s wife, who lived in the rapidly expanding port city of Baltimore. “The clothes which served me through my Richmond & Washington [husband-hunting] campaigns are gone,” she wrote to her brother’s mother-in-law, Margaret Nicholas. Ellen placed her trousseau entirely in Margaret’s hands. “I have lived so much at home & particularly of late, have dressed so little, that I am completely ignorant of what I shall myself want. Will you then make out a list of such articles?” she asked, as Margaret “shall determine to be necessary.” Although Harriet would have reduced the quantities considerably, the return list gives us an idea of the kinds of articles she would have needed to dress like a white woman of her class: fifteen pairs of cotton hose, six dozen silk hose, three pairs of corset
s, a dozen pairs of gloves, twelve pairs of shoes, two worked capes, a black silk dress supplemented by two other silks (presumably in different colors), a dress cloak, a beaver bonnet for winter travel and straw for summer, eighteen pocket handkerchiefs, gauze hands (to protect arms and hands from summer sun, such as Abigail Adams had provided for Maria), breakfast dresses, a variety of muslin and edging for everyday capes, lace and edging for dresses, a trunk to cart it all in, and a carpetbag for stylish conveyance of articles one would prefer to keep close at hand. Harriet probably would have dispensed with the recommended bridal bonnet.
The tab for Ellen’s ensemble ran just short of three hundred dollars, or a male day laborer’s pay for a year and a half—hardly anything Harriet Hemings could have afforded. This list of necessaries for women of Ellen’s rank also contrasts starkly with the clothing allotted female slaves, who received only two seasonal outfits and coarse woven stockings. They were lucky if they received a pair of shoes and a hat; there were no corsets, gloves, bonnets, silk or breakfast dresses, cloaks, lace edgings, or handkerchiefs. Slave mistresses certainly had no interest in enhancing the attractiveness of their female slaves, and given their limited mobility, slaves needed neither trunks nor carpetbags.
White women’s dress differed noticeably in style as well. Their custom-fitted dresses were instantly distinguishable from the identical, shapeless, and color-restricted clothing of female slaves. All white women wore stays or corsets to provide shaping; this practice continued even as the fitted bodices of the eighteenth century gave way to the high-waisted comfort of empire dresses of the next. Dresses were long enough to cover the ankles, although in the fashion of the early 1820s they featured low necklines. Whether of homespun or of silk, in their colors, trimmings, and embellishments white women’s dresses were as varied as the women wearing them. True, the choice of textile was significant in denoting class: For both formal occasions and everyday, middling-class women wore not silk but worsted wool. But it was comfortable, durable, and unlike slave clothing, draped well about the body to make the most of the fashions of the period.
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