Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Just a quick sampling of deeds from the 1840s at the National Archives shows Williamson’s deep immersion in buying, developing, and selling improved lots in Washington City. In that decade, he was busily “erecting some frame houses on the corner of 11th and K streets,” creating a neighborhood in what had been a gravel bank. By 1860, he owned more than seventeen thousand dollars’ worth of property in the city. When he died in 1864, his widow hired thirty carriages to carry the mourners from their home on Eleventh Street (near K) to his burial site in Congressional Cemetery. Benjamin certainly met Madison’s description of a man of good standing, as did his sons John and Joseph, who followed his trade. The Williamson men literally helped build Washington, D.C., including buildings that still stand on the block formed by K and Eleventh streets NW. In 1898, Benjamin’s son Joseph B. Williamson joined the Society of the Oldest Inhabitants with pride, and when Joseph helped build a new building for Fourth Presbyterian Church in 1898, the church reserved pews for the Williamson family.

  Harriet and Benjamin “raised a family of children.” Seven survived childhood; they buried at least three who did not. Sons John, Joseph, and Charles all bore the middle initial B. As expected, the eldest son carried his father’s name, John Benjamin. But might Joseph or Charles have received Beverley’s name? My exhaustive search in every public record imaginable—baptismal, marriage, census, deeds, even his death certificate in 1914—fails to turn up a document that spelled out Joseph’s middle name. Not until I meet with a descendant who showed me his Bible, inscribed by his mother as a wedding gift, do I finally confirm that he too was named Benjamin. Charles migrated to Missouri, but neither his marriage nor death certificates in that state spell out his middle name.

  Harriet Garner Williamson may not have named her sons, but she appears to have named her daughters. As was entirely conventional in this period, she named her first daughter after herself. Next followed Virginia in 1832 (after the place of her birth or Virginia Randolph, also born in 1801?), Sarah in 1836 (after her mother?), and Elizabeth in 1838 (after her grandmother?). Taken separately, of course, these names prove nothing; their use is quite unremarkable in this era. But considered in the aggregate, in precisely the sphere in which Harriet would have had leverage, they are intriguing.

  Almost certainly propelled by Benjamin’s Scottish sensibilities (his ethnicity is even proclaimed with pride on his tombstone in Congressional Cemetery), Harriet and Benjamin presented themselves for marriage to a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend James Laurie, also a Scottish immigrant. They may not have heard the story of Reverend Laurie’s encounter with Jefferson almost two decades earlier, but Harriet would surely have relished it if she had. As church historian Elaine Morrison Foster relates, “Laurie was conducting a service in the Capitol on one occasion when Thomas Jefferson entered the gallery. Laurie used for his text the second chapter of 2 Peter, which speaks of false teachers who try to deceive with feigned words and speak evil of things they do not understand, and who shall perish in their own corruption. The Massachusetts congressman Abijah Bigelow, who reported the incident to his wife, declared that he had it from the parson’s ‘own mouth’ that Jefferson never spoke to him again.” In an era of fierce political partisanship, Federalists had accused Jefferson of being an atheist whose election would bring destruction to Christianity in America. Presbyterian preachers typically spoke extempore rather than from prepared notes, so Laurie would have had no trouble shifting gears when he noticed the president join his congregation that day.

  But just as her husband worked his way up from off-the-boat-immigrant to American success story, Harriet Williamson also worked her way to respectability as befitted her sex. Like many women of her middling rank, she turned to religion. In May 1835, “having applied for admission to the church” and been “examined with reference to her Christian knowledge and experience,” the records note, Harriet Williamson was received by the elders into Fourth Presbyterian Church. With the exception of a two-year interval beginning in 1845, she was a faithful member of that congregation for the rest of her life, and when she returned in April 1847 she brought Benjamin with her. Her devotion to her faith clearly overflowed the bounds of dutiful church attendance and spilled into her home. From 1848, when Harriet’s son John and his wife, Mary, brought their firstborn, Harriet Elizabeth, to be baptized, until well into the 1870s, when Harriet Elizabeth, now married and a mother herself, brought her son to the baptismal font, the records of Fourth Presbyterian Church document the succeeding generations’ commitment to Harriet’s church. In 1897, Harriet’s son Joseph was elected vice president of the church’s board of trustees; the following year, he joined the committee to build a new church, replacing the one that his family had attended at 9th and G streets NW for decades. When Harriet’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1917, she had been a member for sixty-five years.

  Literacy was another mark of middling-class status that Harriet Williamson eventually acquired. When Benjamin sold a lot on L Street in June 1847 that he and his wife had bought the previous September, both transactions required Harriet’s written consent. This feature of the law of coverture (recall, not overturned by the Revolution) was designed to help wives retain their dower right to property, that is, the percentage a widow could claim for her support if her husband died without a will. But Harriet could not sign her name; instead the clerk supplied “Harriet Williamson, her mark” next to her X. By 1864, however, the year her husband died, Harriet had learned to write. Among the bills and receipts in Benjamin’s probate records is a signed promissory note in her hand.

  This question of literacy is an important one, as we consider how Harriet Hemings could have kept in touch with her younger brother. If Harriet Williamson was actually Harriet Hemings, Benjamin’s death in 1864 could well have ended her communication with Madison. The timing certainly fits Madison’s memory. Perhaps Benjamin knew of Harriet’s background and had been her point of contact with her brother during the years of her illiteracy. But since she had learned to write by the time her husband died, why did she not stay in touch with her brother? It may be that she felt her secret was safer if her husband was the conduit of information. Unlike their wives, nineteenth-century men enjoyed unquestioned rights to privacy for their business and personal affairs. Benjamin could receive letters with unfamiliar writing, or from unexplained places—such as Ohio—in ways that Harriet most certainly could not. With his death, that link would have been broken, particularly if they had destroyed Madison’s letters after they were read, leaving Harriet with no address for him and no way to find one. (Where Beverley was at this juncture is a mystery; if he had been providing news to Madison about their sister, by this point he obviously was not any longer.) Ultimately, of course, Harriet’s priority was to protect her children’s white identity; that could have entailed keeping from them any knowledge of their enslaved origins that may have been betrayed by an unexplained letter. Whether by accident of Benjamin’s death or her own determination to protect her secret, Harriet could have sacrificed her connection with Madison.

  Finally, when I weigh the case for Harriet Williamson’s candidacy, the Williamson family’s longevity in the Capital District is an important factor. Here, too, Harriet Garner’s descendants are a fit. When Harriet’s son Joseph B. Williamson died in 1914, his obituary recalled that he had been “prominent in the affairs of the city.” His son Joseph Boteler Williamson lived until 1955. He too was a successful builder who supported members of his wife’s large Italian family in addition to his own. Charles Williamson, son of Harriet’s son John, was a wealthy attorney by the 1940s, whose wife appeared in The Washington Post’s society pages. These are but a few examples of a large extended family, many of whom remain in the District and surrounding areas today.

  But if there is a case to be made that Harriet Garner Williamson could well have been Harriet Hemings, there is also evidence to suggest that she was not. On June 6, 1821, a year prior to our Harriet Garner’s marriage, a Wi
lliam Jones published a warning to the public against a Harriet Garner’s charges that he stole “two copper candle sticks, a copper hoop, and a rat trap.” She had reported the theft to his superior, Captain Cassin, but Jones retorted that her claim was malicious, “as it is said that she is not given to speak the truth and a person who has no right to claim the character of a decent woman.” It is highly unlikely that Harriet Hemings was in Washington that early; nor would she have risked calling attention to herself in that way. There were other Garners in the city, and a later marriage record, in 1847, places another Harriet Garner in the District, so it is possible that the Garner of the ad was not the woman who married Benjamin Williamson. But the ad certainly raises questions.

  There are other inconsistencies, although considered in the context of someone trying to pass, they may actually help make the case for Harriet Garner. In her determination to hide her origins, Harriet Hemings would have manufactured information about her birth dates and parental origins, easily enough done when we remember the uneven state of record-keeping in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Conveyed to her children, who would then report it in official documents like census records and death certificates, that information becomes both legitimate and permanent. So her birthday became November 5, 1805, rather than the May 1801 date Jefferson recorded. Census records variously attribute Harriet Garner’s birthplace to Maryland or Washington, depending on who was giving the census taker the information; in contrast, her children were never confused about their father’s Scottish origins. Harriet Garner Williamson’s death certificate says that her parents were born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which, if true, clearly would eliminate her as Hemings, but I have not been able to find a marriage record for Joseph and Mary Garner there or in neighboring Montgomery County, nor baptismal records for a Harriet Garner to substantiate that claim. For a researcher trying to see through the smokescreen created by someone intentionally trying to cover her tracks, the public record can be a cleverly placed red herring.

  The most compelling reason to dismiss Harriet Garner Williamson, however, may lie in Congressional Cemetery. In 1844, the cemetery interment books show, Benjamin Williamson paid $2.50 for “opening a grave in Range E East No 109 for Mrs. Garner.” Walking out to the gravesite from the cemetery offices, I find the headstone. Parts of the inscription are difficult to read, but one can see that it marks the final resting place of Joseph Garner, who died in 1824, and Mary Garner, who died in 1844. Beneath their names, clearly etched in the stone are the words: “Erected by their affectionate daughter, Harriet Williamson.” If Joseph and Mary Garner are the parents of Harriet Williamson, clearly Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson could not be.

  Yet again, I wonder. If Mary Garner really was Harriet Williamson’s mother, why did not Mary’s name appear in any one of Harriet’s six daughters’ names? Harriet even named one of her children (who died in childhood) Amelia Victoria in honor of her English friend Amelia Stanley. Why would her mother not merit such a distinction? And why does Elizabeth (the name of the Hemings matriarch, we remember) recur so frequently? Daughters Virginia and Sarah both bore Elizabeth as their middle names, as did granddaughter Harriet, and Harriet’s youngest was named Elizabeth.

  Could Harriet Williamson née Hemings have erected the gravestone for another purpose? Slave graves and cemeteries were usually unmarked. Freed slave Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker, grieved that she could never visit her enslaved mother’s grave. She had been buried in an anonymous burying ground, Keckley explained, where her grave was “so obscure that the spot could not be readily designated.” Likewise, no one knows if Sally Hemings’s grave had ever been marked, but by 1837 her sons had left Charlottesville for Ohio, leaving their mother’s grave untended after their departure. Since then, Sally Hemings’s gravesite has been completely lost to us. (Today historians guess that her remains lie under the paved parking lot of a Hampton Inn on Main Street.) In any event, Harriet could never go there again. Perhaps this is why Harriet Williamson erected and signed the gravestone for Mary Garner. If Mary Garner had taken Harriet in when she arrived in Washington, serving as a surrogate mother, perhaps Harriet tended her grave as a way to honor Garner’s gift to her, when, like Keckley, she did not know where her own dead mother lay. In any event, the inscription certainly discourages any detective on the trail of Harriet Hemings, an effect that may well have been just what Harriet intended.

  It is impossible to say, of course. But whoever she was and whatever her origins, Harriet Garner Williamson became the founding matriarch of a large family, whose many descendants went on to live successful lives and who named daughters and granddaughters after her. Just like the family of Elizabeth Hemings.

  In such shadows, alternately seeming to lift and then darkening again, does the search for the identity of Harriet Hemings proceed. In so many important ways, Harriet Garner Williamson seems to be the most likely of the fifty-eight Harriets on my list to have been Harriet Hemings, but the historian can ignore neither the contradictions raised by the public record nor the evidence literally engraved in stone. Lacking any other viable options on my list, I concede defeat. Harriet Hemings will keep her secret.

  But does it really matter if we never find her? If we are never sure? True, it is jarring to realize how easily we lost the president’s daughter. But it is also instructive to see how effortlessly new identities could be created and accepted in the antebellum period; it certainly gives new meaning to the much proclaimed American ideal of the self-made man. Harriet’s success also shows how necessary was the collusion of others—whether of Jefferson or the Randolphs and their friends, or of the free black community forming in Washington (many from Albemarle and Orange counties, who would have known her), or of Harriet’s husband and perhaps even her children. All had a stake in preserving the secret of her bold imposture as a white woman who had been born in freedom.

  It is a tale almost as fantastic as the sixteenth-century story of a French imposter, Arnaud du Thil, who strolled into the village of Artigat one day, claiming to be the long-lost soldier Martin Guerre. Guerre had gone off to war eight years earlier, leaving behind his wife, children, four sisters, and an uncle. If he did not look exactly as they all remembered, they chalked that up to the effects of war and welcomed him home—his wife, Bertrande, particularly. For three years, the imposter ingratiated himself in the community, only to find himself in court when his business dealings ran afoul of Guerre’s suspicious uncle. In a plot twist that defies belief, the real Martin Guerre turned up unexpectedly at the trial, just as the judge was trying to sort out the contradictions between the uncle’s accusations and the insistence of Bertrande and Guerre’s four sisters that du Thil was the real Martin Guerre.

  Stories of assumed identities fascinate. Martin Guerre’s story has been taken up by novelists, playwrights, and movie scriptwriters. Part of the attraction, historian Natalie Zemon Davis explained, is that they remind us “that astonishing things are possible.” Davis’s deep research into this episode penetrated a world rarely visible to historians: She showed how French peasantry thought, believed, felt, and related to one another in times of tumultuous change. Davis’s careful exploration of the characters in the French tale revealed more about peasant life than historians had understood before, precisely because she was undeterred by the conventional wisdom that it was unknowable.

  So, too, in the search for Harriet Hemings we stumble upon hidden stories not usually seen of the ordinary people who built Washington. They are not exactly secrets, since all this information is there to be mined from the records if we will just look. But they are stories that have been muscled aside by heroic narratives of great politicians and social elites. Collectively, the lives of ordinary men and women tell us a great deal about Harriet Hemings’s Washington: the successes of many men in government jobs, trade, and business; the difficulties for unskilled laborers like Rezin Pumphrey even in a city that seemed to offer potential for
work, because so much of that work was still being done by slaves; the ways in which the city grew in the forty years (at least) that Harriet Hemings lived there; the daily labor of women to sustain their families with their gardening, marketing, cooking, and sewing; the women who died in childbirth; and the heartbreak of women who rose from childbed only to bury their children who had hardly had a chance to live. In the process, we can begin to imagine Harriet Hemings’s life, ordinary in its surface appearance but extraordinary in the secret it concealed.

  But there is another history of Washington to consider as well, one that Harriet Hemings would have followed with both interest and horror, however detached her white skin rendered her from it: the worsening predicament of blacks, free and enslaved. Unlike many states, the District of Columbia did not at first impose restrictions on newly freed men and women that constrained their movements or work opportunities. As a result, the free black population expanded rapidly after the capital’s founding. By 1850, free and enslaved blacks made up almost a quarter of the population, and their increasing numbers made many whites nervous. Even as early as the War of 1812, Martha Randolph’s friend Margaret Bayard Smith feared that “our enemy at home”—the city’s enslaved workforce—would join the British in their attack on Washington.

  Initially, the District’s regulations governing free black workers had resembled those of northern cities, as, for example, when the 1820 Washington city charter required that all free blacks post a bond to ensure they would not become a public charge, requiring government assistance. But just seven years later, the city fathers attempted to slow the number of free blacks entering the city by requiring residency permits, and they tried to control any attempts at resistance by placing limits on blacks’ ability to assemble in groups. In 1828 blacks were even forbidden to be on the Capitol grounds unless they had been sent there on business.