Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  This hostile climate explains why Clare Kendry, the main character in Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, Passing, believed more “coloured girls” should pass. “If one’s the type,” she declared in a fit of bravado, “all that’s needed is a little nerve.” But it was desperation to feed her family, rather than nerve, that propelled the grandmother of legal scholar Cheryl I. Harris to pass as white to obtain a job at a Chicago department store in the 1930s. Harris watched the pain flit across her grandmother’s face when she told stories of those days, remembering the monumental effort of self-effacement they required. “She was transgressing boundaries, crossing borders, spinning on margins, traveling between dualities of Manichean space, rigidly bifurcated into light/dark, good/bad, white/Black,” Harris now understands. Because she had migrated far from her Mississippi roots, her grandmother had left behind the neighbors and friends who could have identified her. She could therefore “enter the white world, albeit on a false passport, not merely passing, but trespassing.” Surely echoing the lesson Harriet Hemings had learned a century earlier as she hid her family story behind the impassive façade of her white face, Harris’s grandmother knew that “accepting the risk of self-annihilation [of her black identity] was the only way to survive.”

  The inducement to pass as white in a one-drop-rule America has not disappeared. In spite of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement, whiteness has retained value as a material asset that has been consistently upheld by the courts. “Property is a legal construct by which selected private interests are protected and upheld,” Harris explained. “In creating property ‘rights’ [such as the right to white identity], the law draws boundaries and enforces or reorders existing regimes of power.”

  Americans have made use of this idea in many ways. Property rights allow the right to exclude, as when white Americans limit blacks’ access to certain jobs, home mortgages, and education. The courts protected their right to do so. To take another example, slander and libel are infringements for which the offended also have legal recourse. To call a white person “black,” American jurisprudence repeatedly determined throughout the 1950s, was defamation.

  White Americans understand this well, even if they know nothing about legal theories of whiteness as property. When a group of white students was asked in the early 1990s how much compensation they would require if, through no fault of their own, they had to live the next fifty years of their lives as blacks in America, “most seemed to feel that it would not be out of place to ask for $50 million, or $1 million for each coming black year.”

  The students’ responses make perfect sense in a culture that unthinkingly makes the leap from what historian and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois in 1911 called “the differences of color, hair, and bone,” to ideologies based on nineteenth-century theories of race. Du Bois debunked the theories, fashionable in his time, that linked size and structure of the skull (Du Bois’s “bone”) to the varying mental capacities of different races. “Such things are on the whole, poorly correlated with genetic difference,” he asserted. His beliefs have been borne out time and again, for example, by studies that have found no reason to isolate rare blood types to any particular racial category, proving that all human beings are of the same blood. Nonetheless, there are those who still argue a biological foundation for race. As the British sociologist Stuart Hall remarked, “The biological, physiological, or genetic definition [of race], having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around the veranda and climb back in through the window.”

  But we can no more discern a person’s genetic code from their skin color than could the nineteenth-century Virginia judges who used what was visible to the eye to declare the existence of what was not visible, that is, race defined by blood. Those who continue to believe that blood is synonymous with race have taken advances in genetic technology to further the two-century-old racial equation rather than to challenge it. “But once invoked,” as the authors of Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life argue, “the metaphor launches a logical program of its own: If ‘blood’ is synonymous with ‘race,’ and ‘DNA’ is synonymous with ‘blood,’ then ‘DNA’ is synonymous with ‘race.’ ” To be taken in by a logic that equates genetic with racial is to fall for the tricks of the long discredited nineteenth-century pseudo science of racialism.

  Indeed, genetic indicators of ancestry are often invisible. For example, almost a third of white Americans possess up to 20 percent African genetic inheritance yet look white; while 5.5 percent of American blacks have no detectable African genetic ancestry. Marriage practices in the United States explain why: Whites tend to marry those that look like them. This helps us to understand how Eston Hemings’s children Anna and Beverley could marry white spouses, even when the story of his parentage had followed him to Wisconsin. Eston’s Chillicothe friends had heard the rumor that he was “a natural son of President Thomas Jefferson” and so knew his enslaved origins. It was a story, they said, “a good many people accepted…as truth, from the intrinsic evidence of his striking resemblance to Jefferson.” When Beverley died half a century after his father, a Wisconsin admirer wrote to the Milwaukee Tribune that Beverley’s “death deserves more than a passing notice, as he was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson.” As “one of God’s noblemen—gentle, kindly, courteous, charitable,” Beverley Jefferson had clearly crossed the tribal line of acceptability by whites, even if he had not passed as white in the sense of deceiving anyone about his origins. Since the national consensus around the one-drop rule in the 1920s, however, that flexibility has disappeared. That explains why even now between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand blacks still cross the color line each year.

  As an authority on the history of passing observed, these numbers make glaringly clear how both “specious but utterly real” racial categories remain in America today. As a biological category, racial difference has been exposed as a sham, yet as political, economic, and social categories, racial difference and its consequences remain profoundly real. White Americans face fewer inconveniences and challenges at polling booths. Whites obtain home mortgages more easily and at cheaper interest rates, rendering the American dream of home ownership much more accessible to them than to blacks, who for decades have paid higher rates. That is why, as Cheryl I. Harris observed of her grandmother’s experience in 1930s Chicago, passing has “a certain economic logic.”

  Passing is also about survival. Despite their numerical minority, blacks, both male and female, have been and are still incarcerated in epic proportions compared to whites. The long devaluation of black lives since the seventeenth century has created a white way of seeing, so deeply ingrained that most white Americans are unconscious of the way it shapes their thinking. The lesson we take away from all of this is that Americans are not color-blind. Quite the contrary: The meaning of color remains deeply significant. The care with which they have crafted laws to regulate categories of race makes clear that whites insist on the right to know who carries the drop of African blood that renders a person black. And whites enforce penalties when a passing person is exposed as such, as though blacks have trespassed onto the grounds of white privilege, from which, blacks are supposed to understand, they are barred.

  This was exactly the problem with Harriet Hemings. In her birth into slavery and its long history of oppression, she was black, but the Virginian jurists of her day, who based their rulings on the skin color they saw, would have judged her white; she was neither free—because Jefferson gave her no manumission papers—until the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, nor enslaved, since she lived as a free person. She does not fit any of the terms that seem to have such clarity of meaning in our American experience. This is why her story is so important, whether we find her or not. Her invisibility, then and now, is precisely the point. When we can so easily lose the daughter of a president and his slave, it forces us to acknowledge that our racial categories are utterly fallacious and that our racialized systems are built on a science that ha
s been thoroughly discredited.

  As far as the Randolphs were concerned, however, Harriet Hemings was a trespasser, properly barred from the privileges of their common descent from Jefferson of which they were so proud. Trespass remains a sore point between recognized Jefferson descendants, who claim the right of burial in the Monticello graveyard, and any Hemings descendants who seek access to the same. A rapprochement may have seemed faintly possible in 1999, when Hemings descendants were invited for the first time to a meeting of the Monticello Association, an organization of Jefferson descendants through the lines of Martha and Maria. But in 2002, the association roundly voted down a proposal to admit Hemings descendants to the graveyard. A dozen years later, when white Jefferson descendant Tess Taylor arranged to meet slave descendant Gayle Jessup White at Monticello, they walked to the graveyard together. “I unlocked the gate,” Taylor recounted simply, apparently unconscious of the fullness of that moment, sitting atop two centuries of family history: the white person in possession of the key, while the other remains locked out.

  —

  BELIEVING THAT SHE WAS living her last night on earth, Martha Jefferson Randolph had labored to shape her own legacy with her newly dictated will. But how does one account for one’s life as it is drawing to a close? Ellen would later recall her mother’s “deep affections, her high principles, her generous & magnanimous temper, her widely diffused benevolence, her sound judgment and glowing imagination, [and] her highly cultivated understanding.” But was that enough of a legacy? Even Ellen, who could “never think, speak, or write of my mother without forgetting, for the time, all other things” (meaning the loss of everything they had known with her at Monticello), feared that it would not be. “She has passed away and the world has not known her,” she lamented, “she has left no memorial but in the recollection of her friends & the hearts of her children….A few short years and perhaps all record, all remembrance of her name, her qualities will be gone.”

  Legacies are rarely simple or straightforward. Mired in debt, Jefferson had little materially to leave his daughter, but in the words “all men are created equal” he bequeathed a national legacy that continues to inspire Americans in the pursuit of justice. Yet that legacy was tarnished by his record as a slaveholder who, after the Revolution, consistently refused to lend his name to slavery reform and who, despite his stated belief in the natural inferiority of slaves, fathered children with one of his own. Even the legacies of Jefferson’s beloved Revolution were problematic: a firmer commitment to slavery, even as abolitionist agitation was rising; a wider franchise that added increasing numbers of white men, even as free black men were being excluded; a consensus that domesticity and motherhood were women’s only callings, even as it meant permanently barring them from the equality proclaimed in the nation’s founding documents.

  The legacies of Jefferson’s daughters were no less complex, but until now they have gone almost completely unremarked. Over the course of her life, Martha Jefferson Randolph had seen the legacies of her father’s Revolution come to pass, but she was more preoccupied with those of her family. She would live another year beyond that fitful spring night, but her determination to leave a written legacy that would hold up in a court of law was intentional and crafted. Like her father, who with the help of his daughter and granddaughters assiduously kept an archive of more than eighteen thousand of his letters, Martha understood the value of the written word. And if she did not have much to leave behind to her daughters besides their illustrious connection, she had flung open for them the doors to the joys of the intellectual life that they had treasured, relishing their studies and taking pride in their learning. Maria’s legacy was less intentional: the moldy music books, covered with her signature, the imprint of her identity, but falling apart in her son’s hands. Like most mothers of her era, Maria had hoped to establish her legacy in her children. But her only surviving child could not remember her and, in 1828, would turn his back on Virginia forever when he moved his family to Florida.

  Legacies depend on continuity. But in her departure from Monticello, Harriet Hemings broke with her history and, with her move to Washington, deliberately erased it from view. Her story, enabled in her own day by the colluding silence of Jefferson, the Hemingses, and the Randolphs, is certainly part of the national legacy of slavery and race in America. But we cannot forget that there is also Harriet’s personal legacy, which must be reconstructed by historians from traces that are even more ephemeral than Maria’s music books but no less significant than either of her sisters’.

  It is the historian’s job to excavate these buried stories, to capture these historical legacies, to make visible an invisible past. In the same way that Martha determinedly shaped hers, and a grieving Ellen struggled to articulate the value of her remarkable mother’s life, I have tried to recover both Maria’s and Harriet’s legacies from the dustbin of history. As we look back at them, these stories prompt us to ask: Why were the lives, gifts, and passions of so many women excised from the Revolution’s historical legacy? Why, long after the Revolution, were people still forced to choose between their family connections and the color of their skin? And why do the discredited ideologies of gender and race continue to control and separate Americans so powerfully?

  The locked cemetery at Monticello, like Jefferson’s locked library, cabinet, and wine cellars, marks boundaries of privilege that cannot be breached except by invitation. When Jefferson founded a public university to train an educated electorate and a productive citizenry, it too was a place of privilege: Only white men could attend. His limited vision could not comprehend the ways in which women and people of color could also cultivate the very civic virtues to which he devoted his life. The tragedy of the American experience is how much has been lost following Jefferson’s lead. America’s hope, however, lies in the vision of those who reject those limits and strive to build the legacy embedded in his most famous words.

  For James P. Whittenburg, who encouraged my study of the past,

  and

  For Everett, Luke, and Madeleine—my hope for a more just future.

  ….

  I ENTERED THE WORLD OF JEFFERSON scholarship with some trepidation. Over the past century, it has been contentious to the point of acrimony. However, I have found it to be populated by historians of enormous talent and generosity, whose work made my own possible and who gave of their time to read and discuss my research. Their contributions have made this book infinitely better than it would have been otherwise. I am deeply grateful to them all.

  For their helpful comments when I presented early versions of these chapters at conferences, I thank Jon Kukla, Cynthia Kierner, Sheila Skemp, Jeffrey Young, and the audiences at the Paris conferences sponsored by the European Early American Studies Association. I thank the anonymous readers of “The French Education of Martha Jefferson Randolph,” who encouraged me to do a deeper reading of Martha’s convent schooling. I am grateful to Elaine Forman Crane and the late C. Dallett Hemphill for their assistance in shepherding that article to publication in Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. I have been particularly fortunate to count Cynthia Kierner as a friend as well as a colleague. From the day I talked with her over lunch in Charlottesville to make sure we were not writing the same book, her generosity in helping me map my way through the Jefferson/Randolph papers, discussing my ideas, and inviting me to contribute to Virginia Women: Their Lives and Times has been unparalleled. I thank Frank Cogliano for his unstinting support of my project and his invitation to contribute an essay to A Companion to Thomas Jefferson. Even though she was supposed to be retired, Lucia Stanton read and commented on that essay and several chapters of this book. As readers of the endnotes will see, my work owes a great debt to hers and to that of Annette Gordon-Reed, both of whom inspired my search for Harriet Hemings.

  I am blessed beyond all measure to teach in the Department of History at Villanova. In their dedication to their students and their award-winning scholarship, my
colleagues daily inspire me to give my best. Their supportive generosity to my project has been exceptional. I thank Marc Gallicchio for twice paving the way to allow me to accept the fellowships that were necessary for the research and writing, and my colleagues who have read chapter drafts and fellowship applications and devoted several Friday afternoons to discuss them, including Craig Bailey, Marc Gallicchio, Judith Giesberg, Elizabeth Kolsky, Adele Lindenmeyr, Andrew Liu, Whitney Martinko, Timothy McCall, Lynne Hartnett, Paul Rosier, Paul Steege. I thank my former graduate students (now friends) Jacqueline Beatty and Emily Hatcher McCloskey for reading drafts of articles and book chapters, and Claire Bohall, Nicholas Mumenthaler, and Michael S. Fischer for their research assistance along the way. My longtime friend in Virginia studies, Tatiana Van Riemsdijk, generously provided her careful and appreciative reading of the manuscript. For their willingness to serve as my general readers and to rein my slippages in to academic-ese, I thank Anne Horne Bridgers, Wendy Hamilton Hoelscher, and Justin Foster.