Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Contrary to Margaret Smith’s suspicions that blacks would destroy the city, however, the black population of Washington built it up, energetically erecting churches and schools. Mt. Zion Methodist Negro Church was constructed in 1814, and the first African Methodist Episcopal church was built in 1820. In the 1820s, blacks founded schools to educate their children for American citizenship, offsetting the efforts of southern whites who had established the American Colonization Society to repatriate its enslaved population in Africa. Schools met under trees or as Sunday schools. A few black children even attended white schools. With the general emancipation of the District’s slaves on April 16, 1862, a generation that became known as the First Freed formalized these efforts, which, they were convinced, explained their great financial and social successes for the remainder of the century, especially compared with slaves who were not freed until after the end of the Civil War.

  In spite of Washington’s increased fear and regulation of its free black residents, antislavery sentiment began to build in the city in the antebellum period, although slowly. A black press began publishing a newspaper, The National Era, in 1847 to point out the evils of slavery, particularly in the nation’s capital. Even the much loved Dolley Madison, revered for her courage in saving the Stuart portrait of George Washington from the British torching of the White House, came under attack in the abolitionist press because of her slaveholding. Leading the charge for abolition from Boston, William Lloyd Garrison excoriated her in his famous publication, The Liberator, for selling slaves in the nation’s capital. “This thing is not done, let it be noted, in the darkness of the Alabama cotton-field, or of the Louisiana cane-brake,” he thundered in March 1848, “but at the heart of the Federal City” and, he pointed out, “in the midst of genteel, fashionable life.” Public rebukes continued the following month, after a failed attempt of seventy-seven slaves to escape from Washington on a ship, the Pearl. One of the fugitives was Dolley’s slave Ellen Steward, whom Dolley promptly punished by selling her to a slave dealer, who in turn would sell her far away in the Deep South. Remembering the woman who had been such an intimate friend of the white family at Monticello but who had defaulted on her promise of a gift to her mother if Sally had named her son James Madison, Harriet would have read these attacks with grim satisfaction.

  The abundant evidence of the capacity of Washington’s free black community to be productive citizens of the republic might seem to indicate progress for blacks in the capital. But even though it would have served the nation’s diplomatic purposes to outlaw slavery and the slave trade in the District (European diplomats were appalled at seeing slavery at every turn), Congress did neither. Just four years after Harriet’s arrival, a free black from New York who was sightseeing in the city was arrested as a runaway and saved from a lifetime of enslavement only by the governor’s intervention. Blacks who could not prove themselves free could be jailed and sold back into slavery if they could not pay the fine. Visitors observed with disgust processions of slave coffles driven through the streets of the District, men, women, and children bound together with ropes or irons. Like Charleston, a bastion of slave society in the South, the national capital had its own correctional facility in the city jail to which masters could send recalcitrant slaves to be whipped. So even if Washington residents could not actually import slaves into the District, the city served as a kind of depot for slaves en route to other destinations and perpetuated all the barbarities of the institution.

  This illustration appeared in A Popular History of the United States, published in New York a dozen years after the end of the Civil War. The unfinished Capitol building overlooks the procession of chained slaves as they transit Washington in 1815. The absence of the dome highlights the two chambers that housed the people’s elected representatives, who, unlike foreign visitors, were oblivious to the contradiction between this iconic American symbol of freedom and the American practice of slavery. The image reminded A Popular History’s readers of the awful cost of that willful blindness.

  Then, barely a dozen years after the Hemingses’ arrival, Washington in 1835 erupted in its first race riot. The alleged attempted murder of a white woman, Anna Maria Thornton, widow of Capitol architect William Thornton, frightened whites, already jittery about the numbers of freed blacks who were settling in the District. Thornton had been awakened in the middle of the night by Arthur Bowen, her drunken nineteen-year-old slave, who appeared at her bedroom door, ax in hand. Although Bowen had fled without harming anyone in the house (including his mother, who was sleeping in the same room as Thornton), the story spread like wildfire. Three days later, a newspaper report accused him of having shouted threats at his owner that could only have been inspired by the antislavery materials he had been reading. Fearing that Bowen’s attack was meant to launch a slave rebellion, whites unleashed a wave of rioting that targeted successful blacks in the city.

  A particular object of the crowd’s wrath was Beverly Snow, an enormously successful restaurateur, whose fresh daily menus, prepared on request for patrons seated at their own rather than a common table, were a striking departure from the usual tavern operations. But amid the swirling rumors of slave rebellion were whispers that Snow had been heard disparaging the wives and daughters of the city’s white laborers. So when a mob was thwarted in their attempts to drag Arthur Bowen from his jail cell and lynch him, they turned instead to Snow’s restaurant. Protected by his friends and employees, who stalled the crowd, Snow fled out the back door of his restaurant, barely escaping with his life. He would eventually head for Canada, where he operated a restaurant in peace for the rest of his life.

  Blacks remaining behind in Washington, however, found that thenceforth their job options were overwhelmingly restricted to menial labor such as digging foundations or moving vast quantities of building materials in a city that was rising from the swamps. Very quickly, then, anywhere they turned in their adopted city, Beverley and Harriet could see the fate they escaped when they decided to pass as freeborn whites.

  Harriet Hemings’s story also teaches us about the power of community consensus and the costs of breaching that consensus. During the course of Harriet’s life, the United States strengthened its commitment to the preservation and spread of slavery in several important ways: the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which prevented free states from outnumbering slave states; the gag rule of 1836, which forbade discussion of slavery and antislavery petitions on the congressional floor; the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso in 1846, which would have outlawed slavery in Texas territory; and the Compromise of 1850, which made it a federal crime for any citizen anywhere to assist fugitive slaves. In addition, most northerners and southerners agreed, almost without exception in the nineteenth century, on the idea of the natural inferiority of nonwhites. In such a nation, the exposure of Hemings’s secret would have been catastrophic: Before the outbreak of the Civil War, it would have meant a return to slavery for her and, by law, all of her children. After the war, exposure would have meant exclusion from the white community and all its privileges. Her crime: the violation of racial boundaries by “posing as white” (her white skin notwithstanding) when she knew she carried African blood. She would not have suffered physical death, as did the sixteenth-century French imposter, but she would have died a social one.

  Instead, by passing, Harriet Hemings won the privileges of white womanhood. Her fair skin entitled her to the presumptions of purity and piety, and because her parents had protected their daughter’s marriageability, she conformed to standards of white female virtue. None of this was remotely possible for enslaved women, even Harriet’s formidable mother. Nor would she have to settle for a common-law marriage, as had her aunt Mary Hemings. Instead she would enjoy the full legal sanction of the institution. She could bear and raise her children in freedom. She would never have to worry that her husband and children would be beaten or sold away from her. She could be mistress and the emotional center of her home, claiming the moral authority that was in
creasingly ceded to wives and mothers during this period. She could join a church, apply gentle pressure on her husband to join her there, and put her piety to work outside her home in benevolent societies that helped the poor, orphaned, and widowed. She, too, could read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, from the safe distance her color, sex, and rank allowed, look on the plight of slaves with horror and pity.

  But these gains came at great cost. Harriet had to give up the Hemings name of which the family was so proud and endure a permanent separation from her mother and her younger brothers. She would have to live in a state of eternal vigilance so that she never betrayed her enslaved origins and fugitive status by a stray letter or utterance. Although no infant of questionable skin color ever gave her away, each pregnancy brought with it the terror of exposure. And if she ever saw the features of her mother or father or brothers in the faces of her children, it would have been a bittersweet knowledge she would have to keep to herself. To the extent that she was proud of her connection with the great statesman Thomas Jefferson, she would have to remain mute whenever she heard him discussed. She would face the unique kind of loneliness that such a secret would forever inscribe on all her relationships, particularly if she kept it from the family she created in Washington.

  We will never hear her story in her own voice. As Saidiya Hartman observed, “Silence was the only reasonable position to be assumed by a descendant of slaves,” especially by one who passes. We are fortunate that Madison Hemings refused to be defined by slavery or bound by silence. But in his account, the pain of a fractured family is palpable as he reflected on his family’s experience of slavery and all that was lost to him when his brothers and sister crossed to the white side of the color line, leaving him behind. Not even the destruction of slavery restored his family to him. In 1873, the process of rebuilding the country with a new vision of citizenship that admitted black men as well as white met with severe and violent challenges in the Reconstruction South. With the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states in 1877, the northern states would also abandon the project. But even before our country once again surrendered to racism, Madison’s language makes clear how important it was that Harriet’s neighbors never suspected her of being “tainted with African blood” or that “the white folks” of Beverley’s neighborhood never knew that his daughter “had any colored blood coursing in her veins.”

  For their life in Washington, Harriet and Beverley Hemings created a new story of their origins. As Linda Schlossberg, a scholar of American literature, has said, passing is “the creation and establishment of an alternative set of narratives.” This would not necessarily have been a new experience for Harriet. If, as Schlossberg observed, it is true that every person’s history “is a work in progress—a set of stories we tell ourselves in order to make sense or coherence out of a frequently confusing and complicated past”—Harriet had been working on that history long before she left Monticello. She had to construct for herself an alternative narrative to the Virginia laws that defined her and her family as property. She needed to dismantle the stories told by the infinitely more powerful Jefferson-Randolph family when they perpetually denied Jefferson’s paternity, to get to the real truth about her parentage. She had to cut through the Randolphs’ condescension toward the Hemingses to claim an appreciation of her own intelligence, strength, and capability. “Poor creature,” Martha Jefferson Randolph had said of Sally Hemings’s older brother Robert, who bought his freedom in 1795; and of John, her younger one, freed in Jefferson’s will, she had clucked, “His liberty poor fellow was no blessing to him.” One of the “yellow children” to whom Ellen Randolph Coolidge referred, Harriet would have detached herself from the elitist world of the Jefferson-Randolph family even while she still lived among them.

  Ultimately, Harriet’s decision to pass was about setting her world to rights, rejecting her classification as property. In asserting her humanity, she claimed for herself the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—at least to the extent to which white women could enjoy them in the nineteenth century. “Passing never feels natural,” one journalist commented in light of America’s racialized contemporary culture. “It is a second skin that never adheres.” Maybe so. But for Harriet Hemings, it was the artificiality of legal codes and social custom that rendered her black and enslaved that did not feel natural. Passing, she could do.

  FOR NINE DAYS RUNNING, MARTHA had been complaining of headache and nausea. Worried, Virginia decided to keep watch in her mother’s room. Camping out on the sofa, she dozed a little, but woke up just after one A.M. Martha’s sleep had been restless and she had woken suddenly, her pulse racing. Gently, Virginia tried to pacify the sick woman, murmuring her reassurances and urging her not to worry about anything. But convinced she was dying, Martha would not be soothed back to sleep. “There was no knowing what might happen the next day,” Virginia recalled her mother insisting, and there was urgent business she had left undone. To put Martha’s mind at rest, Virginia reluctantly agreed to help her with her last will and testament.

  Virginia hastily assembled paper, pen, and ink and knelt on the floor by the lamp’s light, prepared to serve as scribe for her mother’s last words. She dated the will carefully: “April 18th [1835] at 2 o’clock in the morning Friday.” Martha’s first concern was her daughters. “To my five daughters, I wish to bequeath my property in the funds,” she began. The “funds” were what was left of two issues of bank stock worth ten thousand dollars each, which South Carolina and Louisiana had granted to her in Jefferson’s memory. Her eyes, Martha once said, “often filled with tears of gratitude and affection when I look round upon the comforts, and consider the life of ease and quiet” she owed to them. Her life had taught her much about women’s vulnerability in this world, even under the protective mantle of her father’s roof. His revolution had done little to improve the position of women, who remained excluded from the professions, the pulpit, and colleges, barred from voting and holding political office, and still rendered legally invisible by marriage. So Martha’s impulse was to protect her daughters the best she could, bequeathing them the means that custom and law prevented them from earning and owning.

  Even more vulnerable than white women in this society, however, were slaves. Weakened though Martha was by her persistent illness, debilitated as she was by her financial distress, the dying woman held the future of seven people in her hands. She disposed of two in short order, transferring ownership of them to her sons Ben and Lewis. But the remaining five were a different case altogether. They were Hemingses. And as Martha Jefferson Randolph agitatedly dictated her will through labored breaths that night, the long history of their two families weighed heavily on her. “The happiness of so many depended on the arrangements she wished to make,” Virginia remembered her mother saying. Emily and Martha Ann Colbert, two of Elizabeth Hemings’s great-granddaughters, could look forward to freedom in the near future, Martha decided. “To Betsy Hemmings, Sally [Hemings] & Wormley [Hughes] I wish my children to give their time,” she directed, ensuring that the informal freedom the former slaves were already enjoying in Charlottesville would not be jeopardized by her death. Unlike many Virginia families who challenged such bequests, Martha knew she could rely wholly on her children’s love, admiration, and respect to carry out her dying instructions, as her father had on hers.

  To her son and sons-in-law, she left small mementos of the Monticello household, now broken up forever. She divided the family silver among them; she particularly wished Jeff to have the casseroles, and Ellen’s husband, Joseph, the silver duck, which the family used as a chocolate pot. To Virginia’s husband, Nicholas, she bequeathed the clock that had always been at the head of Jefferson’s bed. To her youngest son, George, the darling of her elder years, “I have nothing but my love to leave,” she finished.

  “Written at Mama’s request,” Virginia documented at the bottom of the page. She rose from the floor and went to her mother’s bedside. “It’s do
ne,” Virginia assured her, hoping that Martha would now rest. “Should I not sign it?” Martha asked anxiously. Virginia shook her head, reminding her that the doctor had forbidden all exertions. Still, Martha remained distressed. The daughter of a lawyer, she was not sure that a will dictated on a slip of paper in the middle of the night would have any legal standing without witnesses. She asked Virginia to summon Ellen and Cornelia to her sickbed. Not until she had repeated all her wishes to them was she satisfied. Finally, having discharged the last of her obligations to her father and children, Martha fell back on the bed. Perhaps her blinding headache receded with the release of that burden. She was like her father in so many ways; he, too, had suffered debilitating headaches when grief and anxiety pressed in on him. Tranquil now, she rested.

  Still, as Martha reviewed her meager legacy, she may have fretted that she had nothing but her love to devise to her cherished youngest child. How could her life be summed up by so little? She was the daughter of one of the most prominent founders of the nation. She had grown up in a house of such beauty that a European visitor had remarked that Jefferson was “the first American who has consulted the fine arts to know how he should shelter himself from the weather.” She had lived in Paris, gone to school with princesses and daughters of diplomatic officials, and danced with French aristocrats. She had met some of the leading salonnières of the Enlightenment. Life had been so rich with promise then.

  But her life in Virginia as a planter’s wife had been difficult. Although she bore twelve children on whom she doted, Martha’s marriage had become progressively troubled by her husband’s brooding depressions. His violent explosions alienated their eldest son, Jeff, as well. Tom’s volatile temper added to Martha’s already incalculable affliction when their eldest daughter, Anne, only thirty-five, died in February 1826. “Her husband has gone on since his daughter’s death more like a demon than ever,” a relative reported; “he has given her positive orders not to let either of the younger children go down to Tufton [Jeff’s home] that the very moment they cross that threshold he will take them from here—did you ever hear of such a brute?” Then just four months later, Jefferson’s death dealt Martha yet another bitter blow. By January 1827, Monticello—the house, its contents, and its slaves—were all heaped on the auction block to repay the massive debt Jefferson left behind.