Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Familiar only with the little town of Charlottesville, Harriet Hemings may not have been as put off by the cityscape as were so many better-traveled European visitors, who viewed it as an enormous design blunder. English visitors, particularly disinclined to admire anything about the capital of their former colonies, complained about the haphazard way in which houses were often situated a quarter of a mile apart. Paying calls required leaps across ditches and walks across grassy fields to get from one street to another. One 1822 visitor guessed that it would be many years before even half of the city, with its vast scale, would be completed.

  But to a young person fresh from rural Albemarle County, Washington was new and exciting. In the spring of 1822—just the time of Harriet’s departure—Jeff Randolph’s mother-in-law feared that when Ellen came home to Monticello after spending the winter season in the capital, she “will find this place very dull and heavy,” adding that a certain “Miss Spear has just got home…and speaks in raptures of the joys of Washington.” And even though unfinished, the Capitol may have impressed Harriet as it had English author Frances Trollope, who remarked on her return to England that she had never “expected to see so imposing a structure on that side of the Atlantic.”

  Most significantly, Harriet would have arrived at the national capital with a clearer understanding of the city’s meaning and what it represented than most visitors. She certainly knew the difference between free and unfree, and who got to enjoy the privileges of freedom that the capital city was meant to embody and celebrate, and who did not. What did she think when she first saw the presidential mansion in which her father had been living when she, his enslaved child, was born? As she first strolled alongside the trees he had planted? As she first climbed Capitol Hill and saw below her the city he helped design? For twenty-one years, she had been excluded from all that the new city seemed to promise; her mother would forever be so. How would the daughter of Sally Hemings and the former president now go about claiming the rights that her father had so eloquently declared universal but clearly had meant for whites only? They could belong to her now. She could use her fair skin to take advantage of the presumptions of other whites who would see her as no different from themselves. Newly freed, her enslaved origins buried, and clothed in her new dress and identity, Harriet surveyed the place where she would start her new life.

  This very early view of the Capitol shows the building before it was burned by the British in the War of 1812. Saved from utter destruction by a timely rainstorm, the Capitol would be repaired after the war. The construction of the center building connecting the wings would have been under way when Harriet Hemings arrived in Washington; she would have watched the ascension of the copper dome over it in 1826. Note the rows of poplar trees planted during Jefferson’s presidency.

  Exactly how she did so is a mystery, but stories of passing from the antebellum era give us an idea of how Harriet accomplished her deception. One escaped slave, later described as being “well dressed, and of genteel deportment,” boarded a steamboat in New Orleans in 1852. He boldly “sat at the first table, in the cabin, near the ladies,” and made it as far as Memphis before he aroused any suspicion. With the “appearance of an unassuming gentleman,” he had traveled almost eight hundred miles, easily mixing with white society before a steward’s suspicions launched an onboard investigation. In another case, a Monsieur Dukay arrived in Memphis in 1838 with a manufactured history: In his affected French accent, Dukay told his new friends that he sought to escape the malarial climate of the South. Charming the ladies “who smiled delightedly in his presence” and talking “eloquently of finance” and of his two sugar plantations, he ensured that no party that summer was complete without him. Fleecing his newly made friends, Dukay quietly left town with a new horse, saddle, bridle, and even a diamond ring for a sister he had invented. In what was a much more common scenario, a young seamstress passed for white in the home of the mother of a young tradesman. He became enamored of her and married her in 1849, fully convinced that she was white. His subsequent discovery that she was a slave, and therefore black, voided the marriage, but her story shows how it would be possible to cross the color line, even without the flamboyant performance skills of Monsieur Dukay.

  That Harriet Hemings was successful cannot be doubted—she obliterated her historical tracks so well, there has not yet been a single credible claim of descent from her. She may have started by trying out her freedom in small steps: following the servant who guided her to the ladies’ chamber at the various tavern stops, as her cousin Cornelia had; or accepting the hand to steady her as she alighted in Washington; or making her first independent purchases there. When a fugitive slave named Harriet Jacobs arrived in Philadelphia after her escape from North Carolina in 1842, she decided to buy some veils and gloves. Like any tourist befuddled by an unfamiliar currency, when told the price she held out her largest denomination, a gold coin, and waited for the change that would tell her how much her purchases actually cost her. Harriet would not have been quite so inexperienced, given the shop trade in Charlottesville and her aunt Mary’s common-law marriage to merchant Thomas Bell, but her first purchase in freedom would have been quite different with the clerk’s respectful “May I help you, miss?” and her full command of her own money and choices.

  Still, with years of preparation, all would not have been experimental firsts; there had been time to map out a strategy for her new life. Given Jefferson’s notation in his Farm Book that both Beverley and Harriet had “run, [18]22,” it stands to reason that their departures from Monticello or their arrivals in their new city (or both) were somehow connected. Jefferson’s paternalism would not have allowed him to let a pretty young woman travel unprotected. An escort to Washington (or to Philadelphia) and a safe place to stay when she got there were critical to her safety and to his purposes: keeping his promise to Sally Hemings and relieving his daughter Martha of a source of mortification and tension. At the very least, it is reasonable to believe that Beverley was part of Harriet’s life, even if just initially, in Washington. There is no evidence that Harriet or Beverley ever returned to Charlottesville or saw their mother again. As a white man, Beverley would have enjoyed infinitely greater mobility than his sister and might have visited his mother, but it is unlikely that Harriet ever did. So it makes sense that, having to hide their Monticello family connections, brother and sister would have concocted a new family history and agreed on a new last name, the better to conceal their origins and to preserve the one remaining family tie they could openly claim. Because names are central to one’s identity, and Beverley would carry their choice for the rest of his life, the name might have had some meaning for him, particularly. At the very least it needed to be sufficiently innocuous to avoid drawing attention.

  Their anonymity would not have been threatened by Washington’s relatively smaller population, since new faces were the norm in a city of transients. And the Hemingses were more fortunate than most fugitive slaves in that their former owners had no interest in tracking them down and exposing them. In fact, it is likely that the Randolphs did not keep track of Harriet and Beverley at all once they left. In 1836, Jeff Randolph had to ask a relative in Washington for help in locating Beverley, presumably to inform him of the death of his mother fourteen years after his departure. (“I will make every inquiry,” the reply read, “but from the length of time will render it very doubtful whether any trace can be found of him. I have no recollection whatever of him.”) In any event, the friends of Jefferson and his family had no incentive to expose Harriet or Beverley, resurrecting a subject that had only caused Martha Randolph much pain. And if Harriet Hemings’s path ever crossed those of Martha and her children (who resided for a time in Washington after Jefferson’s death), the family records are silent on the matter.

  The ability to earn a livelihood was also key to a successful transition from slavery to freedom. In assigning Beverley to an apprenticeship under the highly skilled John Hemings, Jefferson had ens
ured that his son was prepared with the skills necessary to support himself. Opportunities for skilled carpenters were ubiquitous in Washington City, making it a perfect place for Beverley Hemings to build his new life. Dolley Madison had thought the new capital infinitely preferable to the former one, as she advised a future grandson-in-law of Jefferson’s, where “people in straightened circumstances enjoy greater advantages of society than they do elsewhere.”

  Temporary living quarters were also available in the growing city until Beverley decided where to settle. Mrs. Stewart’s boardinghouse was the first option a new arrival would notice, right across the street from the Indian Queen. “Gentlemen preferring comfort and retirement” might favor Mrs. C. P. Gardiner’s “two single rooms at $8 [per week], fire and candles included,” in the quieter neighborhood on Twelfth Street. Once he had accumulated some means, Beverley could also consider John Hughes’s two-story brick house, “situated near the corner of E and 12th Streets.”

  Under the protective wing of her brother, Harriet, too, could establish herself. Few government employees who boarded in the city brought their families with them in these early years, so working women supplied the needs ordinarily tended to at home by wives and daughters. The directory to the city, published the very year that Beverley and Harriet arrived, shows that women ran boardinghouses, schools, grocery stores, and “fancy” stores; they were milliners, seamstresses, and in a couple of cases “tailoresses,” who undoubtedly catered to a male clientele. In her search for employment, Harriet may have advertised her skills in the Daily National Intelligencer, the paper begun by Samuel Harrison Smith, the husband of Martha Randolph’s friend Margaret Bayard Smith. Perhaps she placed the ad that ran that year, seeking “a situation” that would make use of her “thorough knowledge of the Dress maker business, and…management of domestic affairs.” To preserve her anonymity, she omitted her name and instead directed interested parties to a local bookseller. Or she may have been the “young lady well skilled in both…millinery and mantua making,” recently hired by Mrs. Seaver, whose business three blocks down from Brown’s hotel pledged to “execute work in the most fashionable style.” If she was literate, Harriet may have applied to teach in one of several small schools headed by women. The infant city was ripe for talented, hardworking people looking to make their way in the world, and Harriet’s white skin would open more doors for her than for women of color.

  But as was true for any nineteenth-century white woman, Harriet’s best bet for a secure future rested on her ability to identify a good marital prospect and to cultivate his interest. She would not have had to read one of the many advice writers for young women to know, as one book warned, that this decision would shape “the destiny of [her] life and the whole of its happiness.” Nor, as she pondered the qualities to look for in a potential husband, would she disagree with its counsel that “industriousness and regular habits…should weigh more in a decision of this nature than any possession of present wealth,” which, in the volatile and changing economies of the nineteenth century, could evaporate in an instant. The financial Panic of 1819 had plunged Jefferson deeply—and, as it turned out, irrevocably—into debt, as Harriet could have overheard from the anxious conversations that followed in his home.

  For her part, we know Harriet Hemings possessed beauty, a critical attribute on the marriage market. Did she polish that presentation by cultivating the manners that were becoming the mark of middle-class respectability: expecting to be accorded the right of way on a crowded sidewalk, refraining from saying someone’s name too loudly when met on the street, walking along with an acquaintance to talk rather than intruding on their time by stopping them on the street? Her sewing skills would likewise recommend her as a wife, enabling her to adorn a home with the pillows, bedclothes, curtains, and chair covers that distinguished a middling-class home and to clothe herself and her children well.

  Any training she received in cooking would have been essential for her to perform one of the primary chores of housewifery throughout the day. She would know how to lay a good fire for warmth, knead and set the bread to rise, and prepare breakfast; and, after clearing breakfast, to turn her attention to pulling together a “standing dinner,” such as that which Margaret Bayard Smith supervised daily in her Washington home, which was composed of soup, meat, and vegetables. A good housewife would tend a garden to provide vegetables and chickens for eggs. In Washington, Harriet would have had access to the Centre Market, an enormous farmers’ market stretching two full blocks on Pennsylvania Avenue. Smith occupied an entire morning “running about” and “salting away beef” herself, even with all the help she was able to employ. Harriet may have known how to serve her dinners in the “half Virginia, half French style” that Daniel Webster had enjoyed at Jefferson’s table, and to change plates with each course. (A cousin once told Ellen Randolph that “Monticello is the only place I can ask for a clean plate in America.”) Even by age eleven, slave Peter Fossett had learned enough about elite manners from his observations of Jefferson’s family to be disdainful of whites who lacked them. Harriet had had twenty years at close range to see how to present a table with the taste and abundance that guests like Webster so appreciated.

  All of these attributes would have been particularly crucial for Harriet Hemings, since she did not have the family connections to secure a good alliance or to tempt a husband looking for a hefty dowry. With its growing population of government clerks and other minor officials, tradesmen, and builders, Washington drew many ambitious men on the make, who may not have cared as much about traditional family alliances as rural gentry did. A beautiful woman, neatly presented, who could transform a home with her needle and keep a good table would have been a most appealing candidate for a wife. As Jefferson’s friend Benjamin Franklin had advised young men in his popular almanac so many years earlier, “He that hath not got a Wife, is not yet a Compleat man.”

  Whatever the details, with courage, intelligence, and grit, Harriet Hemings honored her mother’s gift to her in her ability to pass as the freeborn white wife of a “white man of good standing in Washington City,” whose name Madison knew but refused to reveal “for prudential reasons.” “She raised a family of children,” Madison continued (whether in Washington or elsewhere, he never specified), and as late as 1863 he was “not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.” Her continued invisibility in the historical record is the best measure of the achievement of her mother’s training and provides the most convincing evidence that Harriet successfully adopted the dress and conduct of a white woman. But how did her life play out? Is it possible today to ferret out the details that Madison Hemings rightly hid in 1873? The historian—this historian—yearns to know.

  My search began with all the key sources about and by the Monticello slave community. Jefferson’s Farm Book, taken together with his overseer’s recollections and the various explanations of Jefferson’s grandchildren to explain away the “yellow children,” constituted one set of sources. Madison Hemings’s family story, augmented by Isaac Granger Jefferson’s and a close study of Jefferson’s own actions as recorded by himself and others (for example, freeing all of Sally Hemings’s children), constitutes another. A third set of sources is the remarkable Getting Word project on Monticello’s website, designed to locate descendants of the Monticello slave community and chronicle their stories. Recorded there is the testimony of Edna Jacques, a descendant of Elizabeth Hemings through the line of Betsy Hemmings (the enslaved consort of Jack Eppes), who recalled her elderly “Auntie” Olive Rebecca Bolling (1847–1953), saying sometime in the 1940s that “Sally Hemings’s and Thomas Jefferson’s daughter’s white family lives right here in Washington DC.” Her curiosity piqued (she was a little girl at the time), young Edna “asked about that. And they said ‘as a matter of fact, yes, they had a daughter and she passed for white and her family’s prosperous and lives right here now.’ Matter of fact.” Pressing for details, the little
girl was silenced. “Somebody said shhh. It’s family business. That meant ‘don’t ask me any more’…That’s family business.” To this day, Edna Jacques cannot provide a name in answer to my inquiries. But the clue is still an important one: Harriet Hemings’s family remained in the capital district at least until the 1940s, in a way that was, if not prominent, present in some way in the historical records.

  The prospects are tantalizing. I take the plunge. I am quickly convinced that Harriet and Beverley constructed a new family history for themselves, since it becomes immediately clear that they dropped the telltale Hemings name; it does not appear in marriage or census records for the District of Columbia or its immediate environs. None of the Beverleys I locate in the census records are a match, so Beverley seems to have dropped that name also as too distinctive. Remembering that Madison named one of his sons William Beverley, I begin to look instead for a William or William B. In the District’s marriage records, I look for a surname shared by both a Harriet and a William B. But Beverley married a “white woman in Maryland,” Madison had said, while Harriet probably married in the District, so their names would not necessarily appear on the same registry. I look for a family into which Harriet might have married that has longevity in the District. Most of all, I look for children’s names. As historian Annette Gordon-Reed noted, “The Hemingses had a positive mania for naming their children after one another.” If Harriet had sons, and if her husband allowed her the privilege of naming any of them (a big “if,” given nineteenth-century gender conventions), and if she used any of her brothers’ distinctive names (which would stand out in a sea of names such as James, John, Joseph, or Thomas), I could make an argument that I had found the start of the path that would lead to Harriet Hemings.