The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (7 page)

But Virginia was not England. It was a frontier society, complete with an inhospitable terrain and an often hostile native population that the colonists felt had to be conquered or removed. Upper-class Englishmen could dominate ordinary people who at least looked like them, who spoke the same language, and who, for the most part, had religious traditions they could understand. Imagine the scene. Virginia’s soi-disant elite imported thousands of people who looked nothing like them, spoke foreign languages, and had cultures and religions that white Virginians could never have truly comprehended. The colonists knew exactly what it took to bring these people to their shores, into their fields, and into their homes. Theirs was a society built on and sustained by violence, actual and threatened. The Eppeses and their kind thus led a fragile existence among people they had to subdue, uncertain whether that job could ever really be done.

This was the hostile world into which Elizabeth Hemings was born. Besides the story of a tug-of-war between her father and her owner, no other details of Elizabeth’s earliest years at Bermuda Hundred survive. That story and what we know of her subsequent history suggest that her life as a slave who worked primarily in the house began during childhood, establishing a pattern for her family that would extend well into the nineteenth century.

The house where Elizabeth worked as a child no longer stands. The Eppes family seat became Eppington, a structure built by Francis Eppes VI in 1766. That residence would play a recurring role in the lives of Elizabeth and her children as they lived there off and on even after the family was moved permanently to Monticello. We do not have physical evidence of what young Elizabeth’s immediate surroundings were like, but given her owners’ wealth and prominence, in that very status-conscious environment, they would have built a home suitable to persons of their station.

Before they were sent “into the ground” to cultivate tobacco or whatever crop their owners chose, or before they took their places as servants in the house, young slave girls were often used to serve as companions or playmates to the master’s children, to run errands, or to watch over other slave children while their mothers worked in the fields. Their experiences and duties varied according to the material circumstances and needs of their owners, their mothers and fathers having no capacity to override the owners’ control over their children’s lives. Elizabeth, after being taken into the “great house,” apparently never made the transition to fieldwork. Instead, she began a life that would require daily interactions with and the immediate service of whites. She would come to know, indeed have to know, white people in ways that slaves more isolated from them would not.

We can only wonder what this might have meant to the development of Hemings’s attitudes about herself and her place in life, understanding that it must have meant something. There is some evidence from the actions of her children and grandchildren that the Hemingses saw themselves as a caste apart. Whether this was an idea born in their individual generations or whether the seeds were planted when Elizabeth, because of her mixed-race status, began to live a life different from that of other slaves cannot be known. We do know that at every stage of her existence Elizabeth Hemings ended up being singled out for special consideration.

One obvious aspect of Elizabeth Hemings’s story often gets lost in dealing with the gravely serious issues of slavery and race, and that is the issue of how she looked. Superficial as it is, appearance matters; and it matters even more for women—it probably mattered as much in the eighteenth century as it does today. The only physical description we have of Elizabeth Hemings is that she was a “bright mulatto” woman. But descriptions of several of her daughters and granddaughter refer to them as having been extremely attractive women. White men said this as well as black men. Elizabeth herself was able to attract males of both colors well into her forties, when by the standards of that day she would have been considered relatively old. Saying that whites reacted to Elizabeth Hemings in a particular way because she was mixed race, and thus physically more familiar to them, may not do justice to all that was going on with her. Not all mixed-race women would have been considered attractive. If Hemings, as a child and later as an adult, was seen as pretty, that might also account for the way people reacted to her, and not only in a sexual sense. Being pretty, of course, would not have made her free, nor would it have made those who dominated her life see her as an equal human being. Those truths, however, are not the only criteria for considering the important influences in her life.

While work shaped the daily routines of slaves, and a few like Elizabeth were “favored” in some sense by their masters, being considered property made all slaves’ lives inherently unstable. Designating an item (of whatever form) as property gives the owner the right to use, sell, and prevent others from having access to that item. Whim, caprice, careless indifference, cruelty, grim determination, self-centered passionate attachment—every emotion or thought that owners can have about their property ranged over the lives of Elizabeth and other enslaved African Virginians. They, this inappropriate property, responded as best they could within the small spaces their circumstances allowed, but the regime of private property set the tone, pace, and progress of their lives. When a master died, when one of his children got married, when a creditor had to be paid, a slave’s life could be transformed in an instant. Husbands were separated from wives when they were given as wedding presents. Slave families, assets in the hands of executors, were often scattered to the four winds to pay off a decedent’s debts. All of these things would touch the lives of various members of the Hemings family for more than a century. But one, the marriage of John Wayles to Martha Eppes, would turn out to be the signal event in the young life of the African and English woman who was to become the family’s matriarch.

E
LIZABETH
H
EMINGS LEFT
her childhood home at Bermuda Hundred in 1746, when Martha Eppes married a prosperous English immigrant named John Wayles. As a woman of the eighteenth century, Eppes became a feme covert when she married Wayles—a wife under the cover of her husband, who gained the right to control her property, among other things, in return for his protection.
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Wealthy families very often had great concerns about losing property that could have been in the family for generations simply because one of its female members got married. Marriage settlements, essentially prenuptial agreements usually entered into before the couple wed, provided a way out of the bride’s and her family’s predicament. The couple, or typically their fathers, negotiated a contract that allowed the wife to maintain control over specified property that she held before she married. The prospective bride, in turn, often gave up the right to the dower interest that would have given her a life interest in one-third of her husband’s freehold estate upon his death.

That was the way Elizabeth Hemings came into John Wayles’s household, as part of the property that Martha Eppes wanted to keep in her family line even after she married. Some men found these premarital arrangements vaguely insulting—a hint that they as prospective husbands would not necessarily have their wife’s best interest at heart or were incapable of managing their affairs. One wonders whether Wayles’s lower-class origins played any role in the decision to have a premarital agreement keeping certain Eppes property in the Eppeses’ hands. Although he was already wealthy by the time of his marriage, and had strong connections to an extremely well-regarded patron, he had no family ties in the colony, a definite drawback in a society run on family linkages and influence. If ever there was a case for a rich and powerful family’s reticence about a future in-law, this might seem to be one. Given their relative positions in society, Wayles had more to gain through his alliance with an old Virginia family than he lost by giving up what would be, in the absence of a contract, his property rights as a husband.

As it turned out, Elizabeth’s move away from the Eppes family was not permanent. Over the next five decades, she, her children, and even some of her grandchildren returned to them periodically as items of property passing between and among the extended families of the Eppeses, Randolphs, and Jeffersons. Actually, Elizabeth did not have far to go. Her new home, “the Forest,” John Wayles’s plantation, was in Charles City County, across the James River from Bermuda Hundred.
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Wayles chose to build his home among the hardwood trees just inland from the banks of the James.

Most prominent planters in Wayles’s region built their homes as close to the river as they could, for very good reasons. The James, with its numerous tributaries, meanders before emptying into the Chesapeake Bay, which gives it a direct link to the Atlantic Ocean and the world beyond. The very first settlement in the colony, Jamestown, lay forty miles upriver. The people who lived in the area and knew the river before the white settlers arrived named it after Powhatan, the leader of the powerful Powhatan tribe and the father of Pocahontas, whose name has lived on in history and myth. As the years passed, and the Native Americans were displaced, other settlements and Tidewater plantations stretched out along the river to take advantage of its connection to the bay and Atlantic markets. A similar process unfolded along the Potomac, York, and Rappahannock, three of the other major waterways in Virginia. The waters of all these rivers carried indentured servants, African slaves, and consumer goods into the colony and transported its life-defining staple crop, tobacco, out to foreign markets. Wayles was intimately familiar with all aspects of life on the James. He lived and worked as a lawyer in the area, and it was from Bermuda Hundred that he sometimes carried out one of the most important parts of his life as a businessman—selling slaves.

Elizabeth’s move from one home to another in 1746 was symbolic. We would consider the nearly twelve-year-old a child. By the standards of Elizabeth’s day, twelve marked the beginning of the end of childhood for most females, but particularly for female slaves whose status as property made the designation “child” short-lived. At the Forest the life Elizabeth would lead as an adult started to take shape. There she continued to serve as a house slave, became a mother to children by a black man, and a mother to children by John Wayles, thus forming blood and family ties that ensured that her father’s name would echo across the years. We know nothing of the man, or men, who fathered her first four children. We do, however, know some things about the man who fathered her next six.

Jefferson noted in a family Bible that John Wayles was born in Lancaster, England, on January 31, 1715,
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but gave no additional information about Wayles’s parents or family. Little is known of his early life in England or Virginia. The loss of the official records of Charles City County, along with the loss of Wayles’s papers, which were taken to Eppington with his daughter Elizabeth, helps explain the dearth of personal details about him. History books define Wayles solely by what he accomplished in America, as if he had had no life before he arrived, no family, and no parents. If the boy is father to the man, nothing of the boy’s life has appeared in print to shed much light on what sort of man he really was. The people who would have known what Wayles’s early life in England was like—his daughters Martha, Elizabeth, Tabitha, and Anne—apparently did not write of their father’s early beginnings, or, if they did, those writings are not extant or have not been included in historians’ writings about the Wayles and Jefferson families. When the issue was addressed at all, the assumption was that Wayles had been trained as a lawyer before he arrived in America. That bit of information, which would tend to point toward an upper-or at least middle-class birth, appears not to have been correct.
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On August 14, 1715, “John, son of Edward Wales of Lancaster,” was christened in St. Mary’s parish. As no other child named John Wales (or John Wayles, as he became known) was baptized between 1712 and 1724 in Lancaster, this record of baptism almost certainly referred to John Wayles of Virginia and confirms Jefferson’s notation about his father-in-law’s date of birth. Following the pattern common in those days, the record listed only the father’s name. In the year before Wayles’s baptism, however, the parish records noted the November 11 marriage of “Edward Wales of Lancaster and Ellen Ashburner of Bulk,” a small town north of Lancaster. Ellen was about seven months pregnant with John when she married Edward, but in those days the betrothal began the union of the couple. The marriage sealed it. If Ellen was born in Lancaster, there is no record of her baptism. Ellen Wales would be memorialized in the names of two of her son John’s great-granddaughters through his white family line, and one great-granddaughter through his black family line. Edward and Ellen Wales apparently had only one other child in Lancaster, a daughter, Mary, whose baptism took place in November of 1718. No other records of children born to Edward are noted in the parish records.
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Whatever the town may be like today, one gets the sense that Lancaster was a place to be from rather than to run to during John Wayles’s early life. The noted author Daniel Defoe was there in 1726, when Wayles was eleven years old. He characterized it as a

A town with “little or no trade and few people” held no real prospects for a person as ambitious as John Wayles. This is especially so given that Liverpool, which Defoe also visited and accurately described as having “an opulent, flourishing, and increasing trade to Virginia and English colonies in America,” lay just to the south. Liverpool, a thriving entrepôt at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was booming because of the trade that would help Wayles make his fortune: the transport and sale of African slaves. Even farther south, London beckoned young people from all over the country. Slavery, and the staple crops tended by enslaved people, had created a truly global economy, tying together European, North American, and African villages in the traffic in human beings. Although Lancaster may not have been an economic powerhouse during John Wayles’s boyhood, it did have a long-standing connection to Virginia, through its tobacco trade with the colony, which started in the late seventeenth century. Tobacco did not bring prosperity to Lancaster. It was, instead, the trade in Africans that transformed the place from the somewhat sleepy village that Defoe described in 1726 into a smaller version of neighboring Liverpool, though Lancastrians came somewhat late to the game. It was not until 1736, when Wayles was twenty-one, that Lancaster began its involvement in the slave trade. The
Prince Frederick
sailed to the coast of Guinea, thus beginning a trade that lasted until the first decade of the nineteenth century, during which period Lancaster became the fourth-most-prosperous slave-trading port in England.
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Although Wayles was in Virginia by the time the Lancaster slave trade was at its peak, he probably knew before he came to America about its ability to make rich merchants out of men who otherwise would likely have been small farmers or artisans. As one observer of Lancaster’s society, writing about the men who had participated in the trade, put it, “Here lived the wealthy merchants who flourished, so it is said on the slave trade, and grew rich on their importations of mahogany and rum.”
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Away from his native Lancaster, John Wayles grew rich himself off of Africans. He used them as items of trade, held them in bondage, and mixed his blood with theirs.

Nothing in the record suggests that the Wayleses were prosperous people. The name, spelled with or without a
y
, was not common, and it is very likely that people who shared that last name in tiny Lancaster were related in some fashion. The Wayleses who appear in the public records around the time of John Wayles’s early life were definitely what we would call working class, and in some instances they were struggling mightily. In 1719 an Elizabeth Wayles of Lancaster, described as a widow with several unnamed children, was sent to debtor’s prison for about two years. John Wayles’s father’s profession is unknown, but his probable grandfather, also named Edward Wayles, was a butcher who died in 1686. His wife, Elizabeth, handled the letter of administration concerning his property on behalf of their four children: John, Thomas, Edward, and Anne. Neither Edward nor Elizabeth could write, and both signed the testamentary documents with their marks as signatures. Edward Wayles clearly wanted more for his children. In a rare move for his area, he left a bond with instructions to his wife to make sure that his children received as much education as the money would provide.
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That John Wayles’s life was a version of a rags-to-riches story is further supported by a note appended to an 1839 copy of a Lee family memoir transcribed from a document that William Lee wrote in 1771. Lee, who died in 1795, chronicled the family history, discussing individual members’ lives, fortunes, and contributions to society. The note states that Wayles came to Virginia as a “Servant Boy” brought over by a Lee family ancestor, Philip Ludwell, a name renowned in early Virginia history.

There were three Philip Ludwells of note in Virginia’s colonial period: father, son, and grandson. The Philip Ludwell referred to in the Lee papers was Philip Ludwell III, who was born in 1716 and died in England in 1767. Like his father and grandfather before him, Ludwell III ranked high in Virginia’s political and social hierarchy. The family’s connection to William and Mary was close because his father had been the rector of the college. Ludwell III, who attended the college and was also on the board of visitors, was in the perfect position to have furthered Wayles’s education. In later years, one of Jefferson’s slaves, Isaac Jefferson, mentioned Wayles in connection with Archibald Cary, a graduate of William and Mary, in a way that suggested that the two men had gone to school together—“he went to school to old Mr. Wayles.” This is a somewhat cryptic comment, but there was evidently talk within Isaac Jefferson’s earshot of a William and Mary connection for Wayles.
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Each generation of Ludwells held a seat on the Council of Virginia. The first Philip Ludwell had married Governor Berkeley’s widow, Frances Culpepper, thus bringing the well-known plantation Green Spring, about five miles from Williamsburg, into the family line. It was, evidently, to Green Spring that Philip Ludwell III brought John Wayles, probably in the late 1730s after one of Ludwell’s trips to England. The
Virginia Gazette
noted that he had traveled there in 1738, and Wayles once referred to one of his earliest memories in the colony as having taken place in 1740. Ludwell was the last of the male line of his family. In the convoluted and circular world of early Virginia’s family life, the Ludwell connection continued into the next generation when Ludwell’s daughter Lucy and her husband, John Paradise, became friends with Thomas Jefferson (Lucy perhaps too friendly for Jefferson’s tastes) while he was in Paris, France, with Wayles’s children James and Sally Hemings.
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