Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Worsted wool would have been an excellent middle ground for Harriet’s clothing, and the sewing skills her mother taught her would have been critical for her to fashion a wardrobe that would enable her to pass as a white woman. It is not difficult to imagine the Hemings family pooling their resources to outfit Harriet for her departure: perhaps giving up some of their own fabric allowance; or persuading Martha Randolph to allocate them just a little bit more than last December; or John Hemings apportioning some of his clothing charge account in Charlottesville to add to Harriet’s trousseau; or Wormley Hughes selling some eggs or chickens to the main house to raise cash to buy necessaries in town. And if John Hemings lovingly crafted a lap desk for Ellen Randolph before her departure, surely it is not a stretch to imagine the trunk he could have presented to his niece. If Jefferson did not send her away empty-handed, it is inconceivable that her relatives would have.

  Madison’s reference to “dress,” then, is not a difficult word to decipher; but what could he have meant by “conduct”? Perhaps, thinking about his brother Eston, he meant an attitude of reserve, or speech and vocabulary, or carriage, or one’s choice of associations. An article written about Eston almost fifty years after his death by a former neighbor vividly recalled “a remarkably fine looking” man, tall, “well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn, and his face, indistinct suggestion of freckles.” But more impressive than his appearance was his bearing. “Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent, he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody’s attention to him,” one of his Ohio neighbors remembered. Sold to another family after Jefferson’s death, even eleven-year-old Peter Fossett found the tables turned when, “being with and coming from such a family as Mr. Jefferson’s, I knew more than they did about many things.” Perhaps white conduct meant forgetting forever the kind of spirited dances she could have known in the slave quarters and learning instead the more fashionably restrained dances of the Randolph sisters during their soirées, for which Beverley used to play.

  What would it mean for a woman to “act white”? We do not know if Harriet was tall like Eston (who was six foot one, like his father and perhaps Beverley) or shorter like Madison, who stood just under five foot eight. Either way, wearing stays or corsets would straighten her back, forcing the regal posture common to white women even when seated. In addition, respectability dictated that women refrain from gossip, loud voices, and expressions of anger. They were to cultivate grace in their demeanor and carriage. This emphasis on manners became more important just as Harriet was coming of age, as Americans tried to throw off the last vestiges of colonial habits of deference to social superiors and to develop manners that would reflect democratic sensibilities instead. Interestingly, conduct books addressed their advice to both men and women, as the presence of women outside of their own homes, in the streets, markets, shops, and theaters, became increasingly taken for granted in the nineteenth century.

  Cleanliness in her person and clothing would also have been important. This was not a subject to which Jefferson had ever been indifferent. Almost forty years earlier, he had lectured eleven-year-old Martha about “the subject of dress, which I know you are a little apt to neglect.” “Let your clothes be clean, whole, and properly put on,” he began. She was not to wear clothes repeatedly until “the dirt is visible to the eye.” She was to dress neatly, as if for company, from the moment she rose in the morning. “Nothing,” he finished sternly, “is so disgusting to our sex as a want of cleanliness and delicacy in yours.”

  Sally Hemings would have taught this important lesson to her daughter. Once described as “an industrious and orderly creature in her behavior,” Sally Hemings modeled exactly the virtues that Harriet would need to enter with confidence the world into which her mother must send her. At precisely this time, Americans were beginning to pay a great deal more attention to the question of health and hygiene (Jefferson had been somewhat ahead of that curve in the 1780s), charging mothers with ensuring the freshness of the air in their homes, the sanitation of their households, and the good health and appearance of their families. As cleanliness became a concern of middle-class households, so too did related questions of body control around coughing, sneezing, and spitting tobacco juices. As a result, attention to questions of posture, manners, cleanliness, neatness, and even the use of handkerchiefs (recall Margaret Nicholas recommending that Ellen get eighteen!) had further set respectable white Americans off from enslaved blacks. Far from leveling societal barriers in the young democracy, then, manners solidified them. But the Hemings family had always been a caste apart, and Harriet was evidently successful in passing as a freeborn white woman in Washington City. From Eston’s “personal appearance and gentlemanly manners” and Peter Fossett’s critiques of whites who did not live up to standards he had seen at Monticello, we begin to understand how.

  When she left for her new life is unclear. The fact that Jefferson noted 1822 for both siblings suggests that, at least in his mind, her departure was coordinated with Beverley’s—whether that meant that Beverley would take care of Harriet when she arrived in Washington, or that he would return to escort her, or that they left together. Maybe they left during the Christmas season when slaves traditionally were given the week off from their year’s labors and allowed passes for visiting. When Bacon said that Harriet left “when she was nearly grown,” perhaps he meant before her twenty-first birthday, in May 1822, had actually arrived. The weather had been bleak that year as winter set in. At Monticello, Martha Randolph found December a “month…of unusual discomfort here.” Her husband was serving as governor and their daughters had gone to be with him in Richmond for the social season. Madison and Eston may have been gone as well; a week before Christmas, Jefferson told John Hemings down in Poplar Forest that “the boys set off this morning” for the three-day trip from Monticello, and gave instructions that “Eston must drive the cart.” With the house thus emptied, it might have been a good time to leave without fanfare. Through one of the elegant windows of the house, bound to Monticello by her love for their father, Martha may have watched her younger sister go.

  The pain of Harriet’s final leave-taking with her mother and brothers is past imagining. Madison was just turning seventeen and Eston was not yet fourteen when they said goodbye to her forever. They all knew she could never risk the exposure of her enslaved origins by visiting them. There is no indication of a fond farewell with Jefferson; he seems to have delegated responsibility for her departure to his overseer, who relayed to her a sum the equivalent of three months’ wages for a laboring man. Jefferson intended it not as a dowry but to cover her expenses on the road; twenty years earlier, he had given James Hemings thirty dollars for lodging and food for the week’s trip to Philadelphia, and to his two other daughters one hundred for their trip to Washington.

  Jefferson would have ensured that she had an escort who would not raise the eyebrows of her fellow travelers. Perhaps a white man: maybe Joseph Dougherty, Jefferson’s Irish employee who had served him so well in Washington during his presidency and continued to write and visit Monticello from Washington long afterward. Or perhaps Jefferson sent one of the slaves with her. Peter Fossett remembered that “Mrs. Randolph would not let any of the young ladies go anywhere with gentlemen with the exception of their brothers, unless a colored servant accompanied them.” Maybe his gardener Wormley Hughes: Jefferson had once entrusted Francis Eppes to Hughes for the eighty-mile trip between Monticello and Eppington. Or his valet, Burwell Colbert, who could combine the errand with a visit with his sister Melinda, who lived in the city. Indeed, a Hemings relation would be particularly suitable: He would be protective of her and she would be comfortable traveling with him. Or—least likely but nonetheless a possibility—did Ellen accompany her? We know Ellen traveled to Washington for the winter social season in November 1821. That may have bee
n too early for Harriet to leave, but one wonders, did Madison name his youngest daughter Ellen Wayles Hemings as a tribute to the Randolph who escorted his sister into freedom?

  However unobtrusive her departure from Monticello may have been, it caused quite a stir in the town of Charlottesville. “There was a great deal of talk about it,” Bacon said. “People said he freed her because she was his own daughter.” From Court Square in the small town of about four hundred houses, they could easily see Jefferson’s home perched atop his little mountain. Over whiskey or peach brandy in Charlottesville’s Swan Tavern or the Eagle Hotel, Jefferson’s neighbors had freely discussed, among themselves and with snooping strangers, his relations with Sally Hemings and the children who looked so much like him. Now, jaws agape, they animatedly sought to explain why Jefferson would free Harriet Hemings. Everyone knew, as Jefferson himself acknowledged, that an enslaved “woman who brings a child every two years [is] more profitable than the best man of the farm.” That would explain why Jefferson had never done such a thing before. Why else would the man let a perfectly healthy young female slave leave, tavern patrons demanded of one another, if she wasn’t his daughter?

  Frustratingly, we simply do not know the details of Harriet Hemings’s departure. Nor can we know what she was feeling the day she left. She had heard so much about Washington, and now it was time to go. If Beverley was not at her side, he was waiting for her at the end of the line. True, she carried no manumission papers that would secure her the privileges of freedom, but neither would there be any clues for another James Callender to ferret out years later and bandy about in the newspapers.

  Sally Hemings had trained her daughter well for this day. From her, Harriet had learned that in spite of the insidious laws that governed the lives of Virginia slaves, including her mother’s, she could, with care, craft her own future. Now, dressed in her new traveling clothes, her baggage secured and fifty dollars in her reticule, she boarded the stage and left Charlottesville forever, ready to begin the performance of her life.

  IT WAS A THREE-DAY TRIP to Washington: three days of cramped, shoulder-to-shoulder, bone-bruising travel. The heavy steel springs on which the carriage was suspended did nothing to absorb the jarring thumps of the rough Virginia roads. It was a good road, and safe, Jefferson had told Martha when she prepared for her visit to the capital twenty years earlier. But the route became hilly as one approached Alexandria, requiring the driver to ask passengers to get out of the carriage at several points to lighten the load for the horses.

  However uncomfortable Jefferson found stage travel, it presented additional challenges for women. Just four years after Harriet’s departure, Cornelia Randolph journeyed to Boston to visit her sister Ellen. She found the crowded stagecoach “excessively disagreeable,” complaining that “the being squeezed in among so many strange men frightened me & the thought of their falling upon me & crushing or suffocating me in case of an upset not infrequently occupied my mind.” Her elder brother, Jeff, accompanied her, but even he could not shield Cornelia from suffering the affronts for which her pampered life at Monticello had not prepared her. At first she had found tavern keepers kind and hospitable, and she enjoyed the dutiful attendance of their slaves who served her at each stop, leading her to a room reserved for women where she could rest apart from the men. She detected the attention to white female sensibilities fading, however, as they approached Maryland, and by the time they reached Washington the difference was quite striking. Forced to stand in a crowded passageway along with male travelers, she found herself eye to eye with one of them in spite of her efforts to avoid contact. Brunswick, New Jersey, was even worse. There, to her great dismay, Cornelia found “perfect equality of ranks & sexes, that is, we all had to serve ourselves and I soon found that my being a woman was no sort of reason why the men should yield me a place at table or a chair when I was standing.”

  What Cornelia found daunting and excessively disagreeable as she traveled north from Virginia may have been utterly refreshing to Harriet Hemings. The press of bodies in the coach might have been distasteful, but the gradual disappearance of slaves would not have been. And what Cornelia Randolph had expected as her due as a southern woman, an experienced English traveler thought exhibited “the cool selfishness with which they accept the best of everything.” In other words, it was only proper that others make sacrifices for her comfort. But once the stage had been emptied of anyone who knew her origins, Harriet, like Cornelia, may also have enjoyed the solicitous concern of gentlemanly travelers who gallantly helped her in or out of the coach, provided a sheltering umbrella when needed, or made sure she was comfortably seated at table.

  As her stage headed north and each mile took Harriet farther away from her enslaved origins, a whole new world was opening up for her. How she navigated her way through that world is the question. People leave their historical tracks in many different ways: the great portraits, writings, and speeches; the less visible people of the past can sometimes be found in letters, baptismal records, or court complaints. Or they leave no traces at all—or at least not in the usual places historians are trained to look. So to begin the project of finding Harriet Hemings, we must first imagine a range of possible theories on which we can base our plan of investigation. From there we can begin to search for the surviving records from this period that might yield any useful information. Finally, we must settle in, with patience and curiosity, prepared to go down an infinite number of rabbit holes. To map the terrain, we shall take a look, through Harriet’s eyes, at the city that would become her home.

  —

  REACHING THE CAPITAL, HARRIET’S coach drew to a halt in front of the Indian Queen. The hotel occupied practically the entire block on the north side of Pennsylvania Avenue between Sixth and Seventh streets. Its proprietor, Jesse Brown, was a popular tavern keeper and much respected by his fellow townsmen. The dining hall took up most of the second floor and was said to be the largest in the city; indeed, some Washingtonians boasted, in the whole country. There Brown’s fresh repasts, including vegetables grown in his own garden, drew a lively and lucrative trade. In the winter season, when Congress was in session, the Indian Queen was a social center where Brown hosted numerous dancing assemblies. His hotel could accommodate one hundred people at a time; for seven to ten dollars a week, patrons could rent a chamber, as the rooms were described, each furnished with a fireplace. From here, stages left almost hourly for Baltimore, every four hours for Georgetown, and daily for the West. Hacks (horse-drawn taxis) were easily called to get to the steamboats that served points south. Brown’s hotel was both a Washington landmark and a bustling depot—in short, a destination for anyone arriving in the city. It was precisely the sort of place where Beverley would have arranged to meet his sister at the end of her trip before taking her to the lodgings he had arranged for them.

  As she stepped out of the coach onto the packed dirt of Pennsylvania Avenue, Harriet could clearly see the Capitol building high above the city on the hill in one direction and the President’s House in the other. Both had been burned by the British just eight years before but since restored; by 1819 both houses of Congress had resumed business in their usual quarters. The Capitol presented a different prospect for Harriet than it would have for later travelers. Not for another two years would the original rotunda and its first dome be completed, linking the north and south wings.

  The placement of these two buildings in the landscape had been carefully designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant, George Washington, and Harriet’s father, as they imagined a capital city that would embody the very principles of the new republic: separation of powers, transparency of government, and government’s accountability to the governed. High upon the hill, in separate wings but linked together in a single building, the people’s representatives would do their work in clear sight of the electorate. The executive branch was located a mile and a half away from the legislative, so that the traffic of people, ideas, and legislation between it and Capitol Hill
would be clearly visible on the broad way of Pennsylvania Avenue. And the diagonal spokes of roads emanating from both branches symbolized government’s accountability and accessibility to the American people, far beyond the boundaries of the District.

  Occupying a strategically located block on Pennsylvania Avenue, Jesse Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel was an important transit depot in early Washington City. Its elegant entrance welcomed visitors; its impressive size could accommodate one hundred guests; and a good view of the city could be enjoyed on the rooftop walkway five floors aboveground. The Indian Queen is likely the spot where Harriet Hemings began her new life in Washington.

  As the stage had made its way up Pennsylvania Avenue, Harriet caught her first glimpses of the city. She saw the great variety of grocery, apothecary, dry goods, and fancy goods stores that had sprung up to serve Washington’s residents. A gentlemen’s tailor shop was located conveniently across the street from Brown’s hotel. Milliners and boardinghouses were a few blocks west. The avenue was lined with the Lombardy poplars Jefferson had planted in his first term as president, forming delineated walkways for pedestrians.

  But the bustle and buildings of Pennsylvania Avenue were hardly typical of the entire city. Washington was a capital still very much in the making in 1822, its population a mix of affluent planters from the outlying areas and Alexandria and Georgetown merchants, joined by an array of government clerks, office holders, and white and black laborers. By the time Harriet and Beverley arrived in Washington, its population was only thirteen thousand, but growing. In the next decade it would increase almost 50 percent to nineteen thousand, with an influx of government workers to staff a growing bureaucracy, construction workers, newly manumitted freedmen and -women, and a variety of shops to serve the expanding population. Even so, vast empty distances would separate the city’s most prominent buildings, and many of L’Enfant’s streets lacked any houses at all.