The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (54 page)

The reality Rush described had particular consequences for slaveholding societies. Hamilton W. Pierson, who took down the memoirs of Jefferson’s overseer, Edmund Bacon, wrote his own memoir of his days riding circuit as a minister in the nineteenth century. He wrote of how common it was, more common than many wanted to believe, he said, to come upon farmhouses with bachelor or widowed white men living and having children with black women who had started out as their housekeepers.
²⁷
More formal evidence of this can be found in legal cases from southern states that pitted the free white children of masters against their enslaved siblings in challenges to their slave owner fathers’ bequests of freedom and/or property to their enslaved children. The facts recounted in the cases are telling. These fathers, usually widowers, lived with enslaved women, usually housekeepers with whom they were in close daily contact, as if they were married. The patterns of their behavior, and sometimes their words, show that these couples conducted themselves for all intents and purposes like married people, even though the law did not recognize their unions—the man providing a home and material goods, the woman cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the man. Interestingly enough, the judges hearing these cases often referred to how common, though lamentable in their view, these unions were.
²⁹
For every case that made it to court, let alone to a published opinion, some multiple number of similar situations did not. Rather than air family business in public, some white family members accepted the emancipations of their enslaved relatives and whatever grants of property were made to them. It would not have saved Monticello, but Martha Randolph could have contested the emancipations of her siblings Madison and Eston and employed slave catchers to try to go and get her brother Beverley and sister Harriet, and bring them back to be assets in the hands of the executors of their father’s estate. She chose to abide by her father’s wishes.

The conflict between social rules and human impulses operated at all levels of society. Think again of Celia’s George. If anyone should have absorbed the lessons of society’s laws and rules, and adjusted his feelings accordingly, it was he. The relatively powerless, enslaved George should have known better than to fall in love with and feel possessive toward Celia and jealous of Newsom. But he did, and his love and possessiveness put in motion a chain of events leading to Celia’s execution. Although George’s responses are completely understandable, his “error” was to seek something beyond what his society would tolerate from him as an enslaved black man: the right to be in an exclusive relationship with the woman for whom he cared.

Jefferson was the complete opposite of George in terms of the power and freedom he possessed. Still, however he felt about Hemings, he would never have flaunted his relationship with her or made public declarations that would alienate friends like Benjamin Rush, offend the social order, and harm him politically, and it would be wildly romantic and naïve to make such actions the litmus test for his inner feelings. The very savvy and legacy-conscious Jefferson knew the way these things worked. As long as he did not issue a direct challenge to the announced values of Anglo-American society—he did not attempt to marry Hemings or legally establish his paternity of her children—he could do as he pleased, feel as he pleased at Monticello for reasons that were entirely his own. She and their children left slavery in ways designed to draw the least public attention possible to how Jefferson had lived for thirty-eight years. But, though he would never openly challenge society’s expectations of him as a white man, society could not demand everything of him. To have freedom, privacy, and dominion over himself was why he had built his mountain home in the first place.

As for the transformation by love so important to modern sensibilities, we can see little trace of it in Sally Hemings, because of her status and relative invisibility in the record. One looks at Jefferson and sees none of the transformations that some, ignoring the clear limitations of his eighteenth-century Anglo-American heritage, might hope would naturally have flowed from his having loved her: giving up career and legacy and openly acknowledging her and their children, working to get himself in the position to free all of his slaves, recanting any disparaging comments about the nature of black people. Jefferson did none of those things. What he did instead was to ring down a curtain on his relations with Hemings and their children so heavy and thick that it took over a century and a half to effectively raise it. Any personal transformation that took place was conducted behind that curtain at Monticello, off-limits to all who did not see Hemings and Jefferson there and experience what it was like to occupy the same space with them.

Perhaps the most salient question for our times about Hemings, Jefferson, and love is about history, definitions, and who has the power to define. On the question of beginnings and love, some of the most important and often repeated stories illustrating the completely affectionate (as opposed to partially utilitarian) origins of Jefferson’s relationship with his wife come to us from his legal white great-granddaughter, born many years after their deaths. Those stories have played a major role in defining Jefferson in relationship to his wife. For most of American history, Jefferson’s biographers had the power to write the “official” record of his family life, and they essentially wrote the Hemingses out of it. Moreover, they accepted the Jefferson family’s denial of Sally Hemings’s connection to him, citing that family’s insistent and much repeated alternative version of who she was at Monticello, a version that ultimately could not withstand the close scrutiny of either careful analysis or modern science.
³⁰

It is also true that a Jefferson great-granddaughter through the Hemings line told a similar story about Hemings and Jefferson’s origins in France when explaining why her great-grandmother gave up the chance for freedom and came back to Virginia, saying, “Jefferson loved her dearly.”
³¹
In other words, she and other family members answered the questions why Hemings trusted Jefferson and came back to Virginia with him, by referencing her confidence in her knowledge of that fact, a confidence that allowed her to take what seems a breathtakingly large risk. Other members of that generation had their own stories about their family. Of course, they were no more in Paris at the Hôtel de Langeac in 1789 than Jefferson’s legal white descendants were present at their ancestors’ beginnings in Williamsburg. There is, however, every reason to believe that both sets of descendants correctly described the state of affairs in their forebears’ lives.

Jefferson wanted Hemings to come back to Virginia with him, so much so that he took to bargaining with her about this. He well knew that in Virginia there were many other women, enslaved and not, who could satisfy any merely carnal impulses as soon as he returned to America. The problem was, however, that they would not actually have been Sally Hemings herself, a requirement that was evidently very important to him. Her siblings and other relatives seemed to have gauged this. As suggested earlier, their attitude toward Jefferson after Hemings’s return to Virginia is in perfect keeping with the idea that they believed he cared for her. If what had happened between them in France had been along the lines of more typical master-female slave sex, Hemings’s expressed desire to stay in the country, especially after she became aware that she was pregnant, would have been exactly what Jefferson needed. He could have left her in Paris with her quite capable older brother, helped the pair financially, and found James Hemings employment, thus ridding himself of a potentially embarrassing problem in a way that actually bolstered, instead of hurt, his image. History, and his philosophe friends of the moment, would have recorded that Jefferson (breathing the rarefied air of Enlightenment France) so identified with the Freedom Principle that he let go of two of his own slaves. He would have been a veritable hero.

Instead of doing that, Jefferson insisted on setting up an arrangement with a young woman that he knew could easily result in a houseful of children whose existence would be easily tied to him. He could not have foreseen in 1789 his eldest daughter’s problematic marriage, which eventually required her to spend more time with him than was normal, and complicated his life at Monticello with Hemings and their children. Even without knowing that, his resolution of his conflict with her created many other potential problems for his personal life and reputation that were entirely foreseeable. He accepted the risks and forged ahead. During the decades that followed their time in France, and after an extremely hurtful public exposure that threatened his stature and legacy, this most thin-skinned of individuals persisted on his course, ignoring his family’s wishes to send Hemings away, and having more children with her who were named in the same fashion as the older ones: for his important and favorite family members and his best friends.
³²
James Madison Hemings was born almost at the virtual height of the public and political scandal surrounding Sally Hemings. Jefferson continued on, guided by his own internal compass and, no doubt, his awareness that the woman being vilified in the press had given up to him a thing whose value he understood: her freedom. He knew very well that these people, really, did not know what, and whom, they were talking about.

If sex had been the only issue, it would have been a far simpler and more practical matter, for himself and his white family when they returned to Monticello, for Jefferson to have installed Hemings in one of his nearby quarter farms at the base of the mountain and visited her there when the mood hit him. Then his daughters, their children, and visitors would have had scant opportunity to come upon either Hemings or her children who looked so much like him. Instead, Jefferson arranged his life at Monticello so that Hemings would be in it every day that he was there, taking care of his possessions, in his private enclave.

What most disturbed contemporary commentators about the arrangement at Monticello was not that the master had a slave mistress but that she was not sufficiently hidden away.
³²
Hemings was a visible presence in his home when everyone knew that Jefferson had the resources to have her be someplace else. The racism and sexual hysteria this unleashed among white Americans was a thing to behold. It was common at the time, and remains so among many today, to construct whites who have sex with black people as inherently licentious, or as the victims of some version of sexual voodoo expressed crudely in the phrase “once you go black, you can’t go back.” If Jefferson had one enslaved African American mistress, he must have had a thousand. Yet, through all the talk during Jefferson’s lifetime of his “Congo Harem,” “Negro Harem,” and “African Harem,” only one woman’s name emerged: Sally. Jefferson’s enemies of the day could list each of Hemings’s children, their order of birth and ages, what her duties were at Monticello, but they could never produce the name of another specific woman to be a part of his alleged seraglio.

From her side, it was Hemings who backed down from her decision to stay in France in return for a life at Monticello in which Jefferson would be a very serious presence. While she certainly had another compelling reason for wanting to remain tied to the mountain—her family—she was, for a time, prepared to forgo a life with them, although she may not actually have believed that she would
never
see her family again. Enslaved people who ran away often had thoughts of reunions with loved ones under changed circumstances. It is harder to interpret her actions once she returned to America and before she left Monticello upon Jefferson’s death because in those years she was legally under his control. But during an almost twenty-year period of childbearing, she conceived no children during Jefferson’s sometimes prolonged absences from Monticello as he acted as a public servant, indicating that she had no other sexual partners.
³⁴
That could well have been at his insistence as much as her own personal desires. Still, the expectation of fidelity—on her part at least—suggests something about the nature of their relationship. Hemings was apparently not supposed to, or did not want to, be involved with another partner. Whatever she felt for Jefferson aside, she was not acting under the cover of Anglo-American marriage, which presumes that all the children of a marriage are the children of the husband. That legal presumption has enabled wives, in countless situations, to require husbands to pass along resources to children who were not their biological offspring. Hemings’s connection to Jefferson, held together totally by whatever was going on between them, was her children’s way out of slavery, so long as her children were his, too. She was apparently unwilling to do anything (as in having babies by other men) that might jeopardize that connection and bring the effects of
partus sequitur ventrem
back into her life.

Before Hemings died, she gave one of her sons as heirlooms personal items that had belonged to Jefferson, a pair of his eyeglasses, a shoe buckle, and an inkwell that she had kept during the nine years after his death. These artifacts—things she saw him wear and a thing he used to write words that would make him live in history—were seemingly all that she had left of him. Monticello and virtually all its contents were sold to pay debts or were in the control of his legal white family. These items were quietly passed down in the Hemings family until well into the twentieth century.
³⁵
Slavery and racism worked such a distortion of human emotions (and continue to do so) that we may not feel comfortable attaching to this gesture the first inference that we would draw if the man whose belongings Hemings carefully saved and passed on to her offspring had been an enslaved black man or if she had been a white woman, even an unmarried white woman, handling a white man’s possessions in this fashion. The meaning of her sister Martha’s valediction to Jefferson—her unfinished copying of a passage from one of his favorite books,
Tristram Shandy
—is easy to discern.
³⁶
Whether she knew the passage from her own reading, or whether she heard it first during the weeks that Jefferson helped to take care of her in her final days and may have read to her to keep her amused, she was attempting to tell him, and anyone who might read her transcription, what she felt as her life was ebbing away. It is both literal and literary, the very thing that historians love to see: words on a page that tell without much effort what the writer is saying. Words are not everything, and in the realm of deep emotion, quite often fail. Hemings’s action, which at the very least exhorted her descendants to both remember Jefferson and her connection to him, indicate that she wanted them to know he meant something to her. She had, after all, lived with him for decades, and he had given her valued children whom he had let go to make their way in the world, something her father had not done for her and her siblings. Jefferson had kept his promises to her.