The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (73 page)

How Robert and James Hemings engineered their freedom certainly became known to others on the mountain. Yet, over the years, no one else, not even other Hemingses, were able to replicate what these two brothers did in the 1790s. Not until just before his death did Jefferson prepare documents to free other slaves. When he freed five slaves in his will, two were his sons. His two older children—who chose to live as white people and would not have wanted formal and recorded documents proving that they were part black and had been born slaves—quietly left Monticello as soon as they became adults. Their uncles Robert and James Hemings were the only other enslaved people at Monticello who did not have to give their entire adult lives to Jefferson in order to obtain their freedom.

T
WENTY YEARS HAD
passed. Girls had grown into women, boys into men; and a new generation of Hemingses was coming of age to participate in what would become a revised story of life on the mountain. The man who had controlled their lives for all those years had plans to alter the look of the place as he prepared to settle there for good. The new story began with an ostensibly normal routine. In the middle of January 1794, Robert Hemings met his brother James and Jefferson in Fredericksburg, Virginia, with fresh horses for the last leg of the trip home from Philadelphia.
¹
The brothers had performed this type of operation many times, and the rituals of deep acquaintance played out over the trio’s three-day journey to Monticello. And yet, this time things were different. Both of the young men riding on horseback those winter days were on their way out of slavery at Monticello. It is not known precisely when Robert Hemings first thought of the idea of having his wife’s owner, Dr. Frederick Stras, lend him money to purchase his freedom, but it was probably a plan that unfolded over time. On the coming Christmas Eve, Jefferson would sign a “deed of manumission” for Robert, who would then go to join his family in Richmond to work off his debt to Stras.

James Hemings carried the promise of freedom, knowing that he had one final task to perform to make sure that promise was fulfilled. The agreement with Jefferson, now four months old, was undoubtedly known to all the Hemingses, communicated the preceding September when James had last been home, giving the family ample time to ponder his future. The agreement was important for another reason: James was going to train his younger brother Peter Hemings to take his place, ensuring that the legacy of his time in France would pass to another family member. While the terms of the pact expressly left it to Jefferson to choose James’s successor, James himself may well have lobbied for his brother, for no one was better suited. At eighteen, John, the family’s youngest, was the right age, but Jefferson had already marked the young man out for the profession that would make his name: that of carpenter, like his father before him. There had probably been little or no consideration of turning any of the Hemings females into cooks. Even though James had been away during the years Peter had grown to manhood, a natural affinity between the brothers might well have made the whole process go more smoothly. Whether they grew close because of this association or whether the affection was there all along, Peter Hemings named one of his sons after James.

No time was wasted. Just eleven days after James arrived at Monticello, Peter Hemings came home to begin his apprenticeship, having been away from the plantation, working for a local man named William Chapman.
²
Peter’s arrival brought all five Hemings brothers together; it was the first time since 1782 that they could expect to be in one another’s presence when Jefferson was not poised to take one of them off somewhere. Martin, at age thirty-nine, and John formed generational and genetic bookends to the three brothers in the middle—Robert, thirty-two, James, twenty-nine, and Peter, twenty-four. They were half siblings to one another and to the three Hemings-Wayles sons. Martin was nearing the end of his time on the mountain, and John would live there for another thirty-two years. While they could have been fond of one another, the twenty-one-year age difference between them and Martin’s absence from Monticello between 1782 and 1790 would not have allowed for steady camaraderie between the two. But Martin knew his youngest brother, for he almost certainly returned to visit his mother and siblings, bringing money or other goods bought with his wages.

Jefferson had come home to Monticello in defeat, bested in the struggles over policy in Washington’s cabinet. When his rivals Hamilton and Adams questioned the finality of his retirement, they did so at a distance, measuring what his presence on or absence from the scene might mean to their own political fortunes. The Hemingses knew Jefferson better than either Hamilton or Adams knew him, and had their own senses of whether he was really ready to leave the arena forever. The political battles in Philadelphia played out in newspapers that at least Robert and James Hemings, if not all the siblings, were able to read. The family had a personal stake in them because the courses of their lives depended upon where Jefferson wanted to be at any given moment. In fact, they were not at Monticello long—just nine months—before he was presented with a chance to return to public life. President Washington asked whether he would be willing to go to Spain as a special envoy, a significant overture, given that their final parting had been less than amicable. Though he was likely gratified by Washington’s show of confidence, Jefferson, in the midst of a prolonged illness, declined the offer, citing what he thought was his totally broken health along with the “inflexibility” of his decision to leave public life.
³
Had he accepted, James Hemings would have accompanied him to serve as the chef in his Spanish household. It was perhaps this fleeting opportunity that prompted Hemings’s determination to travel to Spain just a few years later.

Whatever the Hemingses’ views on the question, Jefferson had styled himself in retirement, and for the moment everyone had to act as if he truly were. As he prepared for his new role, Peter Hemings could have had no expectation that it might take him to the kinds of places it had taken his older brother. On the other hand, who knew where this might lead? Peter could not help noticing that his two brothers who had been trained in a trade, and were the sons of John Wayles, were the two whom Jefferson decided to free. Perhaps this new job was a stepping stone. Although the thought would have been reasonable, timing in life is everything, and the timing was against Peter Hemings.

The youngest son of Elizabeth Hemings and John Wayles was simply born too late—in 1770—to take full advantage of his family status and gender. Robert and James Hemings came of age at just the right time to have the kind of close relationship with Jefferson that put them on the path to freedom in the 1790s. All the enslaved people in Jefferson’s inner world were people he had helped mold, either by early and long association with them or by virtue of their youth—Jupiter Evans, Robert and James Hemings, Sally Hemings, and Burwell Colbert. These people would have viewed him differently (and he them) if they had had the chance to form personalities independent of him, before he brought them into his most intimate circle. Separated from his older brothers by eight and five years, respectively, and by two sisters, Thenia and Critta, Peter was a small child during the early period of the family’s time at Monticello and did not have the occasion to be too closely connected to Jefferson. He was five years old when he came to the mountain, six in 1776 when his brother Robert traveled to Philadelphia with Jefferson, and thirteen when Jefferson left Monticello for seven years. When he returned, there was neither time nor reason for young Peter to develop an association with him, and by the time of Jefferson’s first retirement, he was a grown man.

Hemings did share his family’s easy association with his half sister Martha’s husband and appears intermittently in Jefferson’s documents, mainly in notations detailing various economic transactions. The first appeared in 1780, when he was only ten years old and Jefferson wrote that he had “Repd. Peter for shoe thread £9.”—indicating that money, most probably from his older brothers, circulated among the Hemings siblings. Despite his relatively few references to him over the years, Jefferson thought highly of Hemings, proclaimed him extremely intelligent, and extolled his capabilities to others.
⁴
None of this would be enough, however, to make Jefferson free him.

With James Hemings acting as teacher, what had been the almost daily notations about him in Jefferson’s records disappear. There is then no way to trace his day-to-day life after the beginning of 1794—either at Monticello or when he left Virginia as a free man. It is not even known where he lived on the mountain. Did he return from the Hôtel de Langeac and the house on Market Street to live in a slave cabin, or did he have a room in the house? Architectural evidence indicates that some enslaved people did live in the Monticello mansion. Thomas Jefferson Randolph said that during Jefferson’s presidency his “confidential servant Burwell Colbert” lived there, and the source for the
Frederick Town Herald
, who knew enough to pinpoint Sally Hemings’s role as a seamstress at Monticello, said she had a “room to her own” within the house.
⁵

The Monticello of the 1790s was nothing like the place known to the throngs of modern-day visitors who come and see a house and grounds brought to a level of perfection that Jefferson himself never saw. James Hemings did not even live to see Monticello with a completed dome. The first house, never finished, was in bad condition after Jefferson returned from France, and his long absences during his days as secretary of state had left him no opportunity to begin to put things in order. Living standards for those in and around the house were severely compromised throughout the 1790s. Near the end of his first year home from Philadelphia, he told his friend and mentor George Wythe that he and his family were “living in a brick kiln,” as he had started the process of tearing down the old to make way for the new.
⁶
It was not a safe environment, with bricks flying into the middle of a domestic routine that kept going no matter what. As work continued over the years, the house would be without even a roof for a time.

Although the kitchen where the Hemings brothers worked cannot have resembled what James had grown used to, he did have all his old cooking utensils, which had been sent over from France. They were far more advanced, varied, and costly than those typically found in Virginia. Jefferson had made the rounds of specialty shops in Paris, almost certainly with Hemings, seeking out and buying large amounts of French copper cook-ware. Much lighter and a better conductor of heat than ironware, it was designed for the French fare that was Hemings’s specialty.
⁷
So the enslaved brothers set to work in a serviceable kitchen with state-of-the-art European equipment as the walls of Monticello began to come down around them.

Their first year together was difficult for every one on the mountain, being rainy most of the time and extremely cold in the winter. A smallpox epidemic in nearby Richmond, the state’s commercial nerve center, brought travel in the area almost to a standstill, even interrupting the delivery of mail.
⁸
Jefferson’s own prolonged illness confined him to bed at points. His poor health cannot have comforted members of the enslaved community, who well understood what might happen if he died. His daughters or, really, his sons-in-law, and whatever creditors swooped down for their share of property, would take his place and separate the enslaved people according to their respective needs. They already understood how changes in his fortunes and family structure could affect the lives of people enslaved on his plantations. Between 1784 and 1794, he had either sold or given away as part of marriage settlements to his daughters and sister over one hundred people.
⁹
While some of the sales were to unite family members, and Martha’s settlement changed legal title but left most of the people in place, these transactions required many individuals to leave their homes. His death would have been even more disruptive. But he recovered near the end of the year; and life, work, and “pulling down” and “putting up” continued on the mountain.

The demolition and construction activities on the house were not the only distractions with which James and Peter had to contend, for Jefferson started several major projects at once. He transformed the landscape of the mountain by having enslaved people plant hundreds of peach trees to fence in his fields. Following the trend in Virginia, Jefferson was also making the switch from tobacco as a cash crop to growing grains like wheat, and he needed another source of income while he took his land out of production to replenish the soil and to prepare for this new type of agriculture. He wanted to find a new venture that would combine what he perceived to be his “interest and duty,” which involved, he said, “watch[ing] for the happiness of those who labored for [his] own.”
¹⁰
He settled on the nail-making business as the way to do this.

The historian Lucia Stanton has noted that, while in Philadelphia, Jefferson took an interest in the work of Caleb Lownes, a Quaker who argued for the reform of the city’s penal system. Lownes criticized the operators of traditional prisons for failing to take into account that prisoners were human beings with “feelings and passions.” They were, he said, too geared to “perpetually” tormenting the incarcerated. He had a different idea. Prisons should attempt to reform inmates by instituting a strict regime to train them to useful services. Corporal punishment would be eliminated, and replaced with character building through the incentive of paid work and other rewards. Lownes’s prisons were to be a combination “school and manufactory.”
¹¹

Lownes’s theories were part of a larger movement of penal reform that Jefferson was well aware of, and he decided to work “out new humanitarian ideas about exercising power on his mountaintop.” Stanton persuasively shows that Jefferson’s nailery “was not just an adventure of industrial entrepreneurship. It was also an experimental laboratory for the management of enslaved labor in harmony with current ideas of humanitarian reform.” Staffed, in Jefferson’s words, by “a dozen little boys 10. to 16. years of age,” the operations drew enough profit to allow him to get along until his farms made more money.
¹²