The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (70 page)

Martin Hemings

Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest son, Martin, who had no Wayles connection and was less likely to have had children with a white person who could buy his freedom, evidently did not fare as well as his sister or his half brothers Robert and James during this period. On the surface the three oldest Hemings brothers’ circumstances were alike. Jefferson reposed a great amount of trust in all three men and gave them privileges that others did not have. Their ultimate destinies suggest that all along there was, in fact, a profound difference in their situations: only Robert and James were destined to be emancipated by Jefferson. And when he did let them go and decided to have another personal servant, he did not replicate the relationship he had had with either Robert or James.

Martin Hemings had a very tense and fateful moment with Jefferson during one of his infrequent trips back to the mountain during the early 1790s. The first hint that he would not continue to live at Monticello came in a letter Jefferson wrote to Daniel Hylton in November 1792. Unlike that of his sister Mary, who had managed her departure in as smooth a way as possible, Hemings’s eventual separation from the life he had known for almost two decades began in turmoil and ended in mystery.

The last visit referred to in this letter had taken place earlier that year. After an eight-and-a-half-month absence—from the end of October 1791 until the end of July 1792—Jefferson returned to Monticello from Philadelphia.
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He stayed there for a little over two months and then went back to the capital, not to come home again until the following year. One can imagine the difficulty these types of drop-in visits caused, especially for slaves who were expected to snap to attention and deal with the extremely self-absorbed and exacting Jefferson. He was, as we have seen, a man who could not stand to live in a rented house without remodeling its rooms to fit his specifications—even for the short time that he might be living there. Rearranging the lives of the people who served in the house—so long as he was, in his view, nice about it—would have been of no great moment.

Neither the cause nor the substance of his quarrel with Martin Hemings was ever disclosed. It must have been extremely serious for Hemings to have demanded to be sold and for Jefferson to have agreed to it with such alacrity. Hemings had been the butler at Monticello for twenty years, since he was nineteen years old. He was hardly a young man, and here he was opting for a life away from the most obvious sources of emotional support—not to gain freedom itself but just to be free of Jefferson. His departure would represent a momentous break in his own life and a real change in the structure of life at Monticello.

While Jefferson made clear that he wanted Hemings to find a master of his own choice, and that he was willing to take any price in order to help matters along, suggesting solicitousness toward the man, his anger is palpable. There was here no viewing “every human being” for what it was “good for” or “keeping out of the way of the bad” aspects of the person. He was clearly furious at Hemings, and he fulfilled the truth of one of his grandchildren’s observations that he never talked about anything that he did not want to talk about. He and Martin Hemings had gone past the point of return, Hemings having said or done something so serious as to make Jefferson want to sever contact as completely as possible.

Jefferson could have forced Hemings to continue at Monticello and, if required, had him beaten into submission. Certainly, any attempt to bring Hemings around by using the whip would have set off a chain reaction in a household staff made up entirely of Hemings’s relatives. Whether they would have protested aloud or not, even a slight negative change in the atmosphere would have damaged the willed harmony that Jefferson sought to maintain everywhere he went. Then there was the matter of Hemings’s younger half sister Sally. What would brutal treatment of her brother make her think of him? There was no need for a naked display of his power over Martin Hemings if the matter could be handled in a different way and keep some semblance of peace, and perhaps even make himself look good. The way Jefferson handled this, casting himself as the accommodating master, minimized the scope of the complaints that Martin Hemings’s relatives could raise about what was happening. The substance of the dispute would never be detailed in print, but Jefferson’s procedural “fairness” would be duly noted.

Unlike Robert and James Hemings, Martin did not, as far as we know, suggest that Jefferson free him or come up with a plan to buy his freedom as did his younger brother Robert within two years after this conflict with Jefferson. On the other hand, we should guard against assuming that because Jefferson never wrote down that something happened that means it did not happen. What the Jeffersons wrote about life at Monticello was only a tiny fraction of what actually occurred there over the years.

As it turned out, Hemings was not sold immediately. When Jefferson began to keep his Farm Book again in 1794 after twelve years away from permanent residence at Monticello, Hemings was listed as living there, but that was the last time he appeared in any of Jefferson’s records regarding his slaves.
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The only written trace of him after this time was a cryptic reference in one of Jefferson’s letters to his daughter Martha in January of 1795. He spoke to her about some business that her husband was attending to for him in language that says all that needs to be said about what slavery was and meant to the people who lived under it:

Martin Hemings and a “chariot”: both to be “disposed of” by sale. It appears that Hemings was not able to find his own buyer among the people for whom he had worked during Jefferson’s absences, if indeed he had wanted to work for them. There is no record that he was ever sold. He may have died during this period, or it is possible that he was simply let go at some point without a formal emancipation, to live as he had before, hiring himself to employers. The entirety of his life suggests that Hemings would never have been satisfied with any master. His aggressive attitude disqualified him from the status of the kind of faithful and loyal servant that Jefferson would reward by legally emancipating him. He was neither a woman going away to be taken care of by a white man nor a son of John Wayles. Lucia Stanton wrote of him as “the fierce son of Betty Hemings,” and that description seems most appropriate.
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James Hemings

After Mary and Martin came James. About a year after Martin Hemings asked to be sold, Jefferson wrote a fascinating document that reveals how determined some members of the second generation of Hemingses were to press whatever advantages they had. It had most likely been a topic of conversation since before they left France, but it was at the end of their tenure in Philadelphia that the deal, reconciling Hemings’s desire for freedom and Jefferson’s wish to realize a return on his investment in having paid to have Hemings train as a chef, was put in writing. As fate would have it, Petit, Hemings’s friend and co-worker from France, was involved in this and will be forever memorialized for it. Petit was the witness to the document that formalized Hemings’s agreement with Jefferson to free him.

This document, signed and sent to Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, a promise by a master to his slave, had no legal force. Although enslaved people filed suit to uphold these types of documents, courts generally held them unenforceable either at law or in equity.
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Hemings, literate and conversant in two languages and by that time a worldly man, knew the rules of slavery and almost certainly understood that what Jefferson had done was strictly personal. While this was not a legal document, one should not underestimate what it meant to Hemings to know that it had been prepared in response to his discussions with Jefferson.

Promises do not have to have legal force to be important to the people who make them. This was a piece of paper with Jefferson’s signature on it that put him on his honor, which was why it made sense to send a copy of it to his son-in-law, who handled his business on many occasions. It marked the seriousness of the venture and assured that if Jefferson broke the promise, someone whose esteem he valued (and that Hemings knew he valued) would have knowledge and proof that he had done so. Also, if something were to happen to Jefferson as the process unfolded, the paper would be evidence in the hands of his family of his intent on the matter. That Jefferson kept a copy of it in his records shows that he wanted posterity to know that he had done this as well. He could just as easily have written up a piece of paper, given it to Hemings, and left it at that. There was no need for a witness to this extralegal document, either. That Petit was chosen, instead of others in the household, seems especially fitting since this deal was apparently put in motion when the three men were still in Paris.

Jefferson did not likely draw up this agreement out of his own desire. From his perspective, his word alone should have been enough, especially since he knew the document had no legal validity. This was more likely something he did to please Hemings. It has been suggested that he must have been acting in response to a threat by the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS) to file a freedom suit on Hemings’s behalf.
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There is no indication that Jefferson ever felt threatened by the PAS or that credit for bringing him to this point belongs to benevolent, unknown whites and not to Hemings and his courage and personal initiative. The PAS did have a record of helping enslaved people bargain with masters about freedom, especially in the nineteenth century after Hemings’s time in the city. But bargaining with masters about freedom was not a singular event in the world of slavery. Other enslaved people, in Pennsylvania, in Hemings’s Virginia, and elsewhere, entered into bargains with their masters for their future emancipations, even when no white people were around to tell them what to do.

Given his residence in Philadelphia, Hemings did have the option of seeking the aid of the PAS or other abolitionists, black and white. If enslaved people from the South seeking liberation could make it to Bishop Allen’s church, he could have, too. One of the society’s most prominent members, Benjamin Rush, a frequent guest at Jefferson’s home and consumer of Hemings’s fare, gave him direct access to the organization. He did not choose a legal confrontation. His situation in Philadelphia actually paralleled that of his and his sister’s circumstances in France and raises the same questions: Why would a young woman come back to slavery at Jefferson’s request, and why would a young man go along with Jefferson’s proposal if it meant another two years as a slave instead of immediately filing suit against him to obtain his freedom as soon as possible? One should resist the temptation to say that when a person does not make the choice one would have made, that person must have been forced or tricked into it or deny that he had any choice at all.

His sister’s possible motivations have been discussed at length in previous chapters. While it might seem clear enough from our perspective that almost two and a half more years as a slave would be a worse resolution than a possibly successful freedom suit, James Hemings’s calculations evidently brought him to a different conclusion. It is not at all certain that a lawsuit could have been wrapped up more quickly than the time he ultimately spent at Monticello, or that he would have won. And while we do not have Hemings’s words, we know enough about his life with Jefferson to that date—and enough experience with the meaning and fallout from litigation—to know that he would have had to weigh this matter very carefully.

Embarrassing Jefferson in Philadelphia, the site of his greatest achievement in life until that point, was to burn a serious bridge irrevocably, for he did not easily forgive those who wounded him personally. Hemings knew Jefferson extremely well—his strengths, vulnerabilities, and vanities. Taking the route he took allowed him to extricate himself from slavery with minimal rancor from a hugely influential man who, in a hostile world, could continue to be helpful to him in the future—but from a distance that Hemings could choose.