Raised by her aunt according to the principles of genteel female education, Maria instead endeared herself to everyone with her beauty and modest self-deprecation, rather than with displays of learning. Like her father, who also hated large gatherings, she shone in smaller circles. “When alone with you,” their friend Margaret Bayard Smith remarked, Maria had the most “communicative and winning manners.” She had a gentle sense of humor, once chiding her brother-in-law for not having replied to the letter she had intended to write to him. In short, Maria followed her culture’s prescriptions for proper female behavior, pleasing those around her and entering into a loving marriage. But her life was cut short by childbirth, a death common to countless women, from time out of mind, for whom motherhood was a woman’s only acknowledged calling.
Her only surviving child knew little about her. Francis had no portrait of her, no art from her days at Mrs. Pine’s school or the convent, no needlework from Mrs. Fullerton’s. Her death when he was just two deprived him of any maternal letters to guide him as he grew. His father never spoke of her. In fact, Jack Eppes had taken comfort after Maria’s death by following the example of his grandfather and father-in-law: he took an enslaved consort, Betsy Hemmings (who was a wedding gift from Jefferson in 1797), and fathered a shadow family with her. And five years after Maria’s death, Eppes remarried; with his new wife, Martha Burke Jones, he had four more children. Except for Francis himself (his baby sister, Maria, died at two), then, no evidence of Maria Jefferson Eppes’s life seemed to have survived.
So Francis’s accidental discovery, years after her death, of his mother’s neglected harpsichord and her rotting music books must have pierced his heart. Once, as they traveled from Monticello to Poplar Forest in early September 1820, his cousin Ellen and his grandfather had called in at Jack Eppes’s plantation home. Jefferson wanted to see what had become of Maria’s harpsichord, thinking he might take it to Poplar Forest. Rummaging about, Francis and Ellen found it in the cellar. It was in very bad shape, Ellen reported to her mother, “the sound-board split for 12 or 14 inches, the strings almost all gone, many of the keys swelled so that when pressed down they do not rise again, and the steel part of the different stops so much rusted that several of them refuse to obey the hand.” When Francis reached for his mother’s music books, they fell apart in his hands, “dropping to pieces,” Ellen said. They had lain in the basement—about “six or seven years,” the second Mrs. Eppes guessed vaguely—where she had consigned them to the damp and mold. Ellen was appalled.
Gently, she helped her stupefied cousin retrieve his mother’s books. Together they gingerly went through each one. Turning them over, they saw Maria’s handwriting everywhere. “We found the name of Maria Jefferson, & the initials of M. E. written in Aunt Maria’s own hand in a great many different places,” Ellen said. And not only her signature; they also discovered entire song manuscripts that she had copied. It had been sixteen years since Maria’s death; Ellen was only eight at the time and had practically forgotten her. But in the cellar that day, carefully going through Maria’s moldy music with her eighteen-year-old only child, surrounded by “so many mute memorials,” Ellen felt the loss anew. “I don’t know how Francis felt,” she wrote in this fresh burst of grief, “but when I looked round that comfortable establishment, and saw all those blooming children I could not help feeling as if a stranger had usurped her rights, and as if none other should have been mistress or mother there.”
Her life cut short at twenty-five, Maria’s only legacy was those mute memorials. But would she even have chosen these as her legacy? We know how reluctantly she practiced, yet in the way that young girls in the early republic lovingly proclaimed their ownership of their favorite novels, Maria claimed her music by inscribing every book with her name. She had even written out some songs by hand, a discovery that must have stunned her son, who had never even owned a letter by which to remember her. Ellen ached for the lost life and lost potential. “Had she lived,” Ellen grieved, “I should have been at home at this sweet place and in this charming family.” Even more, she dreamed on, “in my mother’s sister and her children, I should have found another mother & other brothers and sisters.”
Lacking the technologies of birth control available to women today, of course, Maria Jefferson Eppes had no way to limit the hazards of childbirth that had killed her mother as well. Maria’s seven-year marriage produced four pregnancies (three live births and a miscarriage), and not even her husband’s great love could protect her from the genetic inheritance that rendered childbirth so dangerous for her. Neither she nor her sister seem to have entertained the thought of a small family, a pattern of family planning that one historian has noted began in the Revolutionary era. White family size declined precipitously and deliberately, from 7.4 children in 1800 to 3.56 by the end of the nineteenth century. Not all women were able to limit their pregnancies, but those who did were upper- and middle-class women who lived in the North and Middle Atlantic. This trend does not appear to have spread to the southern states, where both free and enslaved women served the organic function of reproduction without limits. So thoroughly ingrained was that idea for southern women, Ellen overlooked completely the toll that pregnancy and childbirth had extracted from Maria’s fragile body as she imagined the additional cousins she might have had, had Maria lived.
There is no evidence that Maria Jefferson Eppes wanted to limit the number of her pregnancies in spite of the suffering they brought her; but she would not have had many contraceptive choices if she had. There is little evidence from this period about how northern couples succeeded in reducing family size, although an occasional letter makes clear that their efforts were intentional. But in an age when women waited for quickening (feeling movement) to confirm a pregnancy, they sought other options until then to clear what they understood to be a menstrual blockage. Eighteenth-century physicians still understood human health to be governed by the four humors: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. Illnesses resulted when these bodily humors were out of balance; remedies such as purges and bleeding restored balance. The absence of menstrual blood (a “hot” humor), for example, meant that a cold humor was dominant, and so the hot humor had to be induced to restore balance. In such a medical universe, it was possible to confuse a pregnancy with rheumatism, consumption, pleurisy, or similar ailments that involved an obstruction of humors.
We are long past the day when physicians confuse pregnancy with a cold. Technologies exist to ensure the good health of both mother and child. However, the effect of twenty-first-century policies that increasingly restrict women’s access to reproductive healthcare is to return women to the conditions endured by their nineteenth-century forebears. So the questions raised by the story of Maria Jefferson Eppes remain both timely and crucial.
Maria’s hopes for a long and happy life with her little family were tragically cut down by her early death in childbed. Martha Jefferson Randolph had raised her daughters with great expectations that were deflated both by conventions of female domesticity and by their country’s apparent indifference to Jefferson’s legacy. Unlike most enslaved girls, Harriet Hemings, too, had harbored great expectations for her life, but while Maria and Martha had played by the rules of a patriarchal society, Hemings had broken one of the most inviolate of them when she rejected racial hierarchy. In expanding the boundaries of the life into which she had been born, she was spectacularly successful, arguably even more so than the privileged Jefferson and Randolph women had been.
But unlike the Randolphs, whose voluminous letters map out lives devoted to one another and to Jefferson’s legacy, Harriet lived out her life in the oblivion of exile. We can’t know how heavily Harriet’s motherlessness, forced upon her fourteen years before Sally Hemings actually died, weighed on her. We don’t know when her correspondence with her brother Madison began, or what she knew about her family’s lives after Jefferson’s death, or when or how she learned of the death of her mother. Was she at least able to maintain an open relat
ionship with Beverley, so that she was not cut off from all her family members? “Slaves did not possess lineage,” historian Saidiya Hartman pointed out. “The ‘rope of captivity’ tethered you to an owner rather than a father and made you offspring rather than an heir.” Harriet may have been Jefferson’s offspring, but as the daughter of Sally Hemings and the granddaughter of Elizabeth Hemings, she was an heir of the proud Hemings line, which would have meant as much if not more to her. But passing forced her to bury that lineage.
It was only because Madison refused to be defined by slavery and left a public testament to the Hemings pedigree that we know something of what happened to Harriet’s family. Careful research has revealed even more. Back home in Charlottesville, Sally Hemings had left the mountain sometime after Jefferson’s death. Madison and Eston bought a house on West Main Street, between Jefferson’s university and the town, where the three lived together. Sally’s sons married free women of color. While Eston settled with his bride in a two-story brick building on East Main Street that the couple received from the bride’s parents, his mother remained with Madison in the house on West Main. Sally Hemings died in 1835, living long enough to see her first grandchild born in freedom.
Within two years of their mother’s death, Eston and Madison headed west to the free state of Ohio, pressured to leave by Virginia’s increasing restrictions on free blacks in the wake of a slave rebellion that had killed dozens of whites. Eston settled in Chillicothe, a town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, in a topography that bears a striking resemblance to the little town he had left behind. There he bought a house and, with the talents he had inherited from his father, supported his wife and three children as a carpenter and musician. “A master of the violin,” one of his neighbors remembered, Eston was “an accomplished ‘caller’ of dances [who] always officiated at the ‘swell’ entertainments of Chillicothe.” Madison put down roots in nearby Waverly, among other free blacks who had also migrated from Virginia. He, too, worked as a carpenter, and raised ten children with his wife. By 1865, he owned a sixty-six-acre farm. His white neighbors admired him as a man “whose word,” they said, “was bond.”
But even in a free state neither man could escape the burdens imposed by a white supremacist society. In Madison’s neighborhood, one resident remembered, whites “made almost constant war” on the successful free people of color who lived there. Madison held his ground, but by 1852, Eston quietly pulled up stakes. In an effort to avoid the fracture that had separated him from his elder brother and sister, he took his family to Madison, Wisconsin, before his teenagers reached marrying age. There he changed his name, relegating Hemings to an innocuous middle initial and claiming his father’s name. Eston H. Jefferson then passed as a freeborn white man.
Eston’s daughter, Anna, likewise passed and married a white man. His sons served in white regiments in the Union army as officers during the Civil War and later went on to lucrative careers. Beverley Jefferson owned a hotel and launched a successful omnibus company in Madison; his three sons graduated from the University of Wisconsin with degrees in medicine and law. Beverley’s brother John Wayles Jefferson moved to Memphis, where he became a successful cotton broker after the war. He never married, perhaps because of his anxiety about the secret he hid. A chance meeting with a Chillicothe friend during the war revealed the depth of his fear of being discovered. “He begged me not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins,” his friend recalled. None of the white soldiers under his command suspected a thing.
The prosperity he enjoyed as a businessman is apparent in this photograph of William Beverley Frederick Jefferson (left) and his three sons. The younger son of Eston Hemings Jefferson, Beverley served in the first volunteer Wisconsin regiment raised during the Civil War. Thereafter, he returned to run the family business, a successful restaurant in Madison. Without the discriminatory restrictions that bound many of Madison Hemings’s descendants, Eston’s descendants flourished in careers as doctors, lawyers, and businessmen.
There are no portraits of Sally Hemings or any of her children; this is the first generation of whom we have images. John Wayles Jefferson, elder son of Eston Hemings Jefferson, served as a major and then colonel in the Union army during the Civil War. His men praised him for his bravery, gallantry, and coolness under fire, and idolized him for his kindness and courtesy off the battlefield, never guessing that the man who commanded them was the son of an ex-slave.
Although Madison remained on the black side of the color line all his life, his descendants did not all follow suit. Two of his sons, William Beverley Hemings and Thomas Eston Hemings, served in the Union army in white regiments. Thomas Eston died during the war, probably at the infamous Confederate prison of Andersonville. William Beverley died alone and unmarried in a veterans’ hospital decades later. Other stories of grandsons who passed populate Monticello’s Getting Word project. “They tended to cross over to the white community,” one descendant said, and communication was just “sort of cut off.” Some returned to their Ohio families, such as the relative who resurfaced as a mysterious uncle whose Italian accent matched his olive skin tone. His sister, who had remained a member of the black community, cared for him until his death.
By this time, of course, the Union victory in the Civil War had destroyed slavery, so arguably Madison’s grandsons should not have had any need to leave their families behind to pass as white, since they were already free. When masters posted runaway slave ads before the Revolution, they often referred to fugitives who dressed and posed as free, regardless of their skin color. One slave owner thought his escaped slave might “go to Sea and Pass for a free Negro,” for example. But by the 1820s, when Harriet left Monticello, this fluidity in categories of race and condition was calcifying, marking the turn one historian has traced from “passing as free” to “passing as white.” We need to see how this happened if we are to understand why, long after the abolition of slavery, people continue to cross the color line.
Emboldened by the refusal of the Founding Fathers to eradicate slavery after their Revolution, southern state legislatures and courts busily redefined the meaning of skin color. As the practice of hiring white servants was dying out, especially in the South, unfree labor became increasingly associated with black skin. The landmark case Hudgins v. Wright (Virginia, 1806) made that link explicit, ruling that skin color determined a person’s condition as free or enslaved. That same year, by forcing freed slaves to leave the state, Virginia legislators attempted to cement this racialized regime by expelling any evidence of self-sufficient free blacks, whose very presence contradicted the white rationale that slavery was good for blacks, since they were incapable of caring for themselves. The federal government would not disturb the Revolutionary settlement, as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 made clear when it admitted Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave one to maintain the tenuous balance between free and slave states.
In any event, Harriet could not follow the example of many fugitive slaves who dropped their pretense of being freeborn whites once they arrived in a free state and sought out communities of free blacks instead. Her journey to Washington had not ended in free territory; the capital district protected slavery until its Compensated Emancipation Act in 1862. Instead, in this increasingly racialized society, she used her white skin and its implicit claim of free birth to protect herself and her children from enslavement. And while it is true that the abolition of slavery in 1865 and Reconstruction’s project to incorporate newly freed slaves into citizenship were important historical markers in the transition from “passing as free” to “passing as white”—abolition having eliminated the reason to pass as free—neither provided Harriet with any incentive to reveal her origins.
By the end of the Civil War, Harriet Hemings had successfully manufactured a white history and lineage for her children while becoming a new person herself. As one novelist reflected in a fictional rendering of Harriet’s life, it was not only that she had re
invented herself but also that people saw her differently. Not a single one of her neighbors saw a former slave when they looked at her. The end of Reconstruction, with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 (if Harriet Hemings lived long enough to see that day), would only have confirmed her choice to claim the privileges of whiteness, as northerners turned their attention to matters more important to them than the rights of freed black men and women. Of course, Harriet could not have foreseen the passage of laws by the 1890s known as Jim Crow that would sharply segregate Americans by racial categories. Still, little in her experience would have led her to expect anything other than this improvised legal system of segregation that southerners borrowed from its more experienced northern practitioners. “The dangers of blackness,” a professor of ethnic studies observed, remained for all who shared African ancestry, dangers unrelieved by abolition.
That is why the practice of passing, which has its own troubled history, has continued from Harriet’s time through to our own. After abolition, passing as white brought tensions into black communities that passing as free during the slave regime had not. Black activists had made good use of Reconstruction’s political opportunities, filling legislative seats and judicial benches. It was an auspicious time, full of promise, however short-lived. Even when they were ejected from government by Jim Crow laws in the 1890s, black activists continued the fight on many fronts, such as educational and occupational, but also in restaurants and on rail- and streetcars. So to pass as white in this era was to desert not only one’s family and community but the cause of black equality as well.
In their relentless efforts to forge what one historian called the “bright-line differences between blacks and whites,” white Americans supplied light-skinned blacks with many reasons to cross. For example, Harriet’s home state of Virginia passed one of the nation’s first “one-drop rule” laws. In 1924 the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity for the first time defined a white person as one who has “no trace of other blood.” (They exempted the white descendants of Pocahontas, however; too many of Virginia’s first families, including Tom Randolph’s, proudly laid claim to descent from her.) To ensure racial purity, the law also prohibited interracial marriage. That kept whites in line by banishing to blackness anyone who accepted a black person as a spouse. The law was a return to the strategy of their forebears, who had legislated the same thing in 1691. These efforts at marking the bright-line differences were further enforced at the federal level when the 1930 census dropped the mixed-race mulatto category, leaving Americans with only two choices: to identify themselves as either black or white.
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