The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (72 page)

We get a glimpse of how Jefferson really felt about this in a letter he wrote to his son-in-law the day after Christmas.

In some ways this document is more intriguing than Jefferson’s earlier writing in which he promised to free James Hemings. The man who had the ultimate control in this situation placed himself in the position of one forced to do something that he clearly did not have to do; “Bob’s business” “hastened” to the point that it would be “difficult” for him “to reject it,” as if
he
were a victim of Hemings and Stras. Neither man could have forced Jefferson’s hand on this matter. And then there was the characterization of Hemings’s wish to be with his wife. The notion that the young man had been “debauched” from him by the woman’s owner makes Hemings’s very natural desire to be with his spouse and children sound an unsavory choice when compared with being Jefferson’s manservant.

The most interesting language of all is the bitter lament about Hemings’s valuation. Jefferson could not seriously have thought that it should have occurred to whoever valued Hemings to include as an item of value the fact that he had chosen to let Hemings work for other people over the previous “11. or 12 years.” “Pay me for all the ways I chose not to use my property in years past,” with no showing of how his “non-use” contributed to the property’s value, was an extremely peculiar expectation on his part. He was counting all the way back to 1782, when he embarked on his odyssey away from Monticello after his wife’s death, and he had allowed Hemings to hire himself out to others.

Jefferson did not mention what it had cost him to have Hemings apprenticed to a barber. This may well already have been included in the price. He cannot have been anticipating the loss of Hemings’s services in that regard, for their time in New York shows he had not been using them; he paid someone else to shave him and dress his hair all the while Hemings was in the city. As to what he specifically referred to, unless he could show how Hemings’s acting as a valet for other men over that time made him more valuable than he would have been had he acted as Jefferson’s valet, the twelve years he decided to forgo personal use of Hemings’s services were merely his lost opportunity. As for the wages Hemings made, and Jefferson did not collect, he had chosen to order things that way over the years, no doubt congratulating himself on giving the equivalent of a “gift” to the young man. He thought he was building emotional capital that would strengthen Hemings’s loyalty to, and affection for, him. Allowing Hemings to have his own time away from Monticello and keep his money was Jefferson’s own show of affection, and Hemings was supposed to see it that way and act accordingly: be content to remain in lifelong service to him on those “generous” terms. When Hemings failed to follow this plan, the now angry Jefferson wanted to monetize the emotional benefit he had gotten over the years so that he could take back the “gift” he had given Hemings, suggesting that Stras should have to pay for a thing he had never shown the slightest interest in having before: Robert Hemings’s money.

Jefferson was, in truth, in a precarious position to begin with in terms of Robert Hemings’s value. An enslaved person’s history of having been hired out was often a liability upon an attempted sale. Two years after this episode, St. George Tucker, of the famed Virginia emancipation plan of 1796, sought to sell four highly skilled slaves who had been hired out to the city. He was stunned to find no takers. The man handling the sale, experienced in these matters, explained to Tucker that, having “so long hired their own time, and lived without controul,” they were unattractive to potential buyers. Tucker eventually sold the slaves at a much lower price than he thought fair.
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Had Hemings been on an open market, Jefferson might have ended up with a price not far from the one he accepted from Stras had the extent of Hemings’s freedom over the past decade been revealed to prospective buyers. Why would owners want to deal with a literate black man who had for twelve years been choosing his own employers, traveling at will, working where he wanted, and keeping his wages? Moreover, it was not true that what Hemings had been doing over the years amounted to a “total abandonment of his services.” Hemings could not have abandoned anything without Jefferson’s assent. He could have brought Hemings to France with him to be his manservant while his brother learned to cook, or he could have sent him to the fields if he had wanted to.

While on the surface Jefferson appears to be reasoning, his complaint makes sense only as an emotional outburst, rather than a well thought-out analytic dissection of the economic fairness of this transaction. He was not talking about the monetary value he had lost, nor was he really addressing the arbitrators who had valued Hemings. This was a complaint that grew out of his sentiment-driven pique that
Hemings
did not seem to value all the years he had let him essentially do whatever he wanted to do. Property often has a sentimental value, but the owner seeking to sell the property usually must say that outright or set a minimum price to reflect any non-economic, personal feelings that transcend more obvious economic considerations. The arbitrators did not know what it meant to Jefferson to have taken up his wife’s twelve-year-old enslaved half brother, traveled and lived with him as part of a pair, and treated him, by the standards of the day, with great leniency. They also did not know that Jefferson had assumed there was some reciprocity of feeling from Hemings and that he experienced the purported mutuality of sentiment between them as a “value.” Who but Jefferson had “kept” what all this meant to him “out of view”?

The arbitrators did not know any of this, but Jefferson surely expected Robert Hemings to know it, and he was deeply hurt that the younger man’s knowledge seemed to make no difference to him. Despite everything, he wanted to go somewhere else. Money, which Jefferson could sometimes spend like the proverbial drunken sailor, was not the real issue. He simply did not want Hemings to want to go. Compare his attitude in this situation, carping about the price, with his attitude about the sale of Martin Hemings, an event unfolding at the same time. Martin and Robert Hemings had both occupied positions of trust in Jefferson’s household, and both men had been allowed to work and keep their money. Jefferson pronounced himself willing to accept any price—to perhaps take a loss—in order to facilitate the sale to whomever Martin Hemings picked. There was no suggestion of trying to recoup the money that Hemings had made while out of his service for the same length of time as his younger brother.

Robert Hemings knew that Jefferson was angry and that his anger was not just about his dissatisfaction with the price. This transaction, proposed after Jefferson made the agreement to free James Hemings, raises an interesting question. Did Robert Hemings ever approach Jefferson on a one-on-one basis about working out a deal for his freedom? If he had let Hemings work for wages and keep them for himself, he could have let him work for wages to pay him with no middleman involved. Perhaps Hemings did raise the possibility with Jefferson, was rebuffed, and went to Stras as an alternative. Whether the possibility was previously raised or not, Hemings sought to effectuate his emancipation working with a third party’s involvement that automatically put the third party, Stras, on a par with Jefferson. He had been talking with someone besides Jefferson about his future. Glimpses of the tension this created are offered in the correspondence between Jefferson and his daughter Martha. Several weeks after Jefferson drew up the manumission deed, Martha wrote to him about Hemings:

This report of Hemings’s feelings comes from an interested third party, and it is a great loss to history that all the letters Hemings wrote to Jefferson are no longer extant, for they might have allowed us to see exactly how he approached his former owner in the aftermath of their difficult disengagement. Hemings understood that Jefferson perceived his dealings with Stras to be a form of disloyalty, and he correctly divined what his former owner wanted to hear: an expression of devotion so wide that only his love of his wife and child could get around it. Whether he actually felt that or not, we will never know. Wearing “the mask” was often a necessary part of life for relatively powerless people in those days. Whatever his feelings for Jefferson, Hemings was interested in freedom for himself and his family. He did not want to live in slavery with Dolly and their child (either Elizabeth or Martin at the time) at Monticello, which very likely could have been arranged. It is almost inconceivable that Jefferson, who bought and sold men and women who were not Hemingses to unite their families, would have balked at buying Hemings’s small family. He would have kept his manservant at Monticello and provided yet one more reason, in his eyes, for the young man to have been grateful to him.

Jefferson’s fertile and creative mind wandered everywhere and saw the world not just as it was but how it could be, but for the conventions and rules of society—some of which he approved, others of which he did not. He knew that Robert and James Hemings were the sons of the man who had given him his fortune, though we will never know if he ever for the briefest moment allowed himself to ponder the ramifications of this. In a world with any degree of morality, or even in another type of slave society, these young men would never have been his slaves and might have had a share of that fortune. Jefferson had spent at least five years in a society where the mixed-raced children of slave owners sometimes shared the property of their fathers, and he knew there was such a thing under the sun. If he never talked to any of them, he almost certainly saw such people. They often came to Paris to conduct business and were visible evidence that not every person of color occupied the same status. The laws of slavery, and the Anglo-American culture in which he and the Hemings-Wayles brothers lived, allowed—mandated—that John Wayles’s wealth be transferred to his free white daughters and ultimately to his white son-in-laws, and not to his enslaved mixed-race sons and daughters. No “gift” or “privilege” Jefferson ever gave the Hemingses was in any way commensurate to what the law and cultural mores had taken away from them and transferred to him and his white family.

The brothers’ course of dealing with Jefferson after their emancipations suggests that they had genuine affection for him at some level, but that was beside the point. They did not want to give their very lives to him any more than he would have wanted to give his life to them. Both men, very reasonably, were unwilling to make a show of love and devotion to Jefferson if it meant they had to remain slaves. Jefferson was like a planet whose gravitational pull holds some bodies in its orbit and constantly threatens to haul in other smaller bodies that happen to be passing by. His tendency toward possessiveness and controlling behavior undoubtedly had its own impact on the lives of Robert and James Hemings in ways we cannot recover, though his handling of their departure from Monticello gives important clues. Who knows how many lessons, admonishments, offers of advice, and stubborn opinions were offered to these two young men on their long journeys with Jefferson or during the many hours and times when they were completely alone with him? They were young boys when this began, and now they were men in a relationship that was to a great degree emasculating. Resistance, in the best way available to them, was the natural course.

When Robert and James Hemings broke away from Jefferson, they changed not just a lifestyle but their very statuses in life. No evidence of Mary Hemings’s formal manumission, or that of her children with Bell, has been found. The official records of deeds in Albemarle County in the 1790s, which do record Robert’s and James’s emancipations, are intact. So there was no formal change in Mary Hemings’s status when she went to live with Bell, who trusted his legal white relatives not to challenge his wishes regarding how she and his children with her were to be treated. No one knows Martin Hemings’s ultimate fate, but he, too, wanted to break away. As for their sister Sally, none of the means her siblings used to leave the mountain were available to her if she ever thought of trying. She could never have said to Jefferson, “Sell me to another white man” or “Let me go out on my own and find a job.” She could have said those things, but he would not have done what she asked. Her decision not to take freedom in France and to return to Virginia with Jefferson permanently fixed her in his orbit until he or she died.