The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (83 page)

When he found out that his blacksmith was gone, Jefferson wrote to Joseph Dougherty, his coachman at the President’s House, alerting him to the possibility that Fossett might be on the way there and telling him that he had “sent Mr. Perry in pursuit of a young mulattoe man named Joe, 27. years of age, who ran away from here the night of the 29th inst[ant] without the least word of difference with anybody, and indeed never in his life recieved a blow from anyone.” He went on to say that Fossett might “possibly trump up some story to be taken care of at the President’s house till he can make up his mind which way to go” and noted that Fossett might “make himself known to Edy only, as he was formerly connected with her.”
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The pair’s connection was “former” only to the extent that Jefferson had pulled them apart by bringing Edith to Washington.

This episode is intriguing on a number of levels. First, there is Jefferson’s incredulity that Fossett would run away when in his view his blacksmith had had a good life at Monticello to date. There was some dim awareness that Fossett might be going to see his wife, but that did not appear to register as a reason important enough to make him leave. Jefferson was a very cagey correspondent, and there was almost certainly more to this episode than appears in his letter. Did Fossett simply leave after asking Jefferson for permission to visit his wife and being refused? If Jefferson did refuse the request, why? Abroad marriages were common at Monticello and on other plantations, and enslaved people were given permission to visit spouses who lived apart from them. Washington was farther away than a neighboring plantation, but enslaved people at Monticello traveled back and forth from the capital with no supervision.

Jefferson knew that no matter how loyal enslaved persons appeared, no matter what “benefits” they received under slavery, there was always the underlying reality that they were not really happy to be enslaved. We see this in Jefferson’s instant and serious response—quickly employing a slave catcher to apprehend Fossett, instead of saying, “Oh, he’s just going to see his wife. He’ll be back.” He clearly thought Fossett was gone for good, the stop at the President’s House to see his wife just a way station on his flight to freedom, perhaps taking her with him.

Fossett got to spend little time with Edith, for he was apprehended while leaving the grounds of the President’s House not long after he arrived. He spent the night in jail, and then Perry brought him back to Monticello. Etienne Lemaire was sympathetic to the “poor unhappy mulatto,” saying that he deserved “a pardon” for running away or, rather, running to see his wife, but we do not know how Jefferson received Fossett upon his return to the mountain.
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Madison Hemings described Jefferson as one who did not allow himself to be made unhappy for any great length of time. If anger and disquiet created a quotient of unhappiness in him, he apparently forgave those rather quickly who made him angry. The surest evidence that Jefferson bore no long-term rancor against Fossett is that less than a year later—when he could take his brilliant, but drunken, blacksmith William Stewart no longer, and fired him—he made Joseph Fossett the head of Monticello’s blacksmith shop.
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From 1807 on, Fossett was at the very center of activity on the plantation, and he was a pivotal figure for many. He made things that were indispensable to life on a farm in the early nineteenth century—shoes for horses, tools for tilling the earth. When these items had to be repaired or needed sharpening, people returned to him, and not just members of his immediate community. Fossett’s shop on Mulberry Row served farmers and other residents in the area, bringing the Monticello community, enslaved and free, into contact with the world outside the plantation, countering the isolation that might otherwise have attended life on top of the mountain.

When Jefferson was in residence, he spent a good deal of his time holed up in his bedroom/office writing, engaging the world through the republic of letters. Fossett’s blacksmith shop, strategically located on Mulberry Row and directly adjacent to Jefferson’s wing at Monticello and the homes of his relatives who worked in the house, was the exact counterpart to Jefferson’s more cloistered world. This was the republic of face-to-face communication, with all the glories and hazards of unguarded talk and revealing facial expressions and gestures. People of different statuses and races met to solve the problem at hand—a too dull plow, a broken horseshoe—even as all the mores and tensions of that slave society shaped their interactions. Here was a venue in which to discuss the latest serious news of the area and to gossip. Whether Fossett would have volunteered information about his aunt Sally is unclear. That depended upon how he felt about her and Jefferson. It is inconceivable, however, that during his years as the head of the blacksmith shop dealing directly with Jefferson’s white neighbors the subject never arose. Until he left public life in 1809, Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings was fodder for the political fights of the day. Even after he returned home, his neighbors continued to talk, and it is very likely that many who made the trip up the mountain hoped to catch a glimpse of the woman who was, at the time, the most well-known enslaved person in America.

The Monticello blacksmith shop was more than just a social center: it was a business that turned a modest profit for Jefferson. It made money for Fossett, too. Following the practice begun with his nail factory, Jefferson wanted to create incentives for his artisans to work harder and better. So Fossett received one-sixth of the profits of the shop, in the same way that the Grangers had before. He was also allowed to do work on what was considered his own time and keep whatever money he made. He gave good value. Jefferson’s overseer Edmund Bacon, who began work at Monticello in 1805, said that Fossett “could do anything it was necessary to do with steel or iron,”
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combining his own natural talent with the teachings of William Stewart. One sees in Fossett and his uncle John Hemings, the carpenter and joiner, the way slavery exploited one of the noblest aspects of the human character: the desire and capacity to be creative. Talented artisans like Fossett and Hemings took pride in their capabilities and their work, and each had the artist’s will to perfection. They went beyond what they had to do, having fallen in love with their creations. Yet their creativity, which necessarily required some inner freedom from the restraint of convention, flowered in an atmosphere of coercion. This was the nature of the society they lived in, and Fossett and Hemings were better rewarded for their talent than many others, but the cruel reality at the heart of their lives remained.

Woodworking was in John Hemings’s blood, his father, Joseph Neilson, having plied the trade at Monticello during the 1770s. He learned to be a professional joiner, however, from two white workmen whom Jefferson brought to the mountain, David (Davy) Watson and James Dinsmore. Watson had deserted the British army to remain in Virginia, and he was in the mold of William Stewart. Isaac Jefferson remembered him as a heroic drinker, who would “get drunk & sing,” sometimes wasting a week at a time when he was on a bender, leaving Hemings to pick up the slack.
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His first stint at Monticello came in the early 1780s and lasted for two years, before Jefferson embarked on the journeys that took him to Paris. Watson returned to Monticello in 1793 and stayed another four years. It was during this time that Jefferson gave the first inkling of his plans for the then seventeen-year-old Johnny Hemings, as he was wont to call him. In the midst of a set of elaborate instructions sent to his son-in-law Tom Randolph from Philadelphia, the secretary of state wrote, “As to the house joiner, I mean Johnny (Betty Heming’s son) to work with him.” Then, later in the year, “Johnny is to work with him [Watson] for the purpose of learning to make wheels and all sorts of work.”
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His free white laborers might stay or go, depending upon their whim and opportunities. As a result, Jefferson had to tolerate a good deal more bad behavior from them. Having skilled—and captive—enslaved artisans saved money and held out the promise of greater stability.

After Watson came James Dinsmore, a native of Ireland, who gave Hemings another close association with a person from a foreign culture. Dinsmore was William Stewart minus the alcoholism, a man of exceptional talent in whom Jefferson reposed a great deal of confidence. Another Irish-born joiner, John Neilson (whose relationship to Joseph Neilson is unknown), joined Dinsmore and Hemings in 1805, and he also came without any raging personal problems. James Oldham rounded out the trio of Jefferson’s white master joiners for several years at the beginning of the 1800s. Jefferson respected him, too, but was particularly pleased with the collaboration between Dinsmore and Neilson and wrote with characteristic hyperbole, but nevertheless genuine enthusiasm: “They have done the whole of that work in my house, to which I can affirm there is nothing superior in the U.S.”
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John Hemings honed his skills in the company of these men, making furniture in the plantation joinery that had every kind of tool and device a carpenter or joiner could ever need, for no one was more serious about building than Jefferson. Because Jefferson always had projects in mind, Hemings had almost endless opportunities to learn on the job.

In this place where work and personal lives fused, Oldham played a critical role in the lives of John Hemings and his family that had nothing to do with woodworking. In 1804 Critta Hemings’s son James (Jamey) was a seventeen-year-old worker in Jefferson’s nail factory, having started there at the age of ten when operations at the nailery first began. After George Granger Sr. died and George Jr. came down with the lingering illness that would kill him, Gabriel Lilly was hired as the overseer at Monticello and took charge of the nail factory for a time. Lilly was as brutal as he was uneducated. He, too, drank excessively, making liberal use of Monticello’s well-stocked wine cellar when Jefferson was away in Washington. He could neither read nor write, and violated all of Jefferson’s precepts about using incentives, rather than violence, in the nail factory. James fell ill one day and could not work, enraging Lilly, who resorted to the whip to try to beat work out of the youth. Oldham wrote to Jefferson about what happened: “The barbarity that he maid use of with Little Jimmy Was the moost cruel, to my noledge Jimmy was sick for thre nights and the moast part of the time I raly thot he would not of Livd he at this time slepd in the room with me.”
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In addition to the information about James Hemings, this missive reveals much about Oldham’s level of education and the physical closeness of whites and blacks during slavery. James was sleeping in the same space with Oldham. Through this intimacy Oldham was well aware of James’s condition, and he attempted to intervene on James’s behalf, explaining that the young man was too ill to work, and “Begd. [Lilly] not to punish him.” Lilly did not listen and took his anger out on James and “whipd. him three times in one day, and the boy was rely not able to raise his hand to his Head.”
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This was too much for young James Hemings, who had probably never been whipped by anyone, besides his mother or grandmother, in his life. He decided to escape. As far as the record shows, it was about six months before Jefferson heard anything of him. Oldham, who hated Lilly and felt the overseer had abused him, too, left Monticello not long after this episode and moved to Richmond, where he encountered the young escapee.
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Hemings had almost certainly thought first of seeking out family when he left Monticello, and his uncle Robert was a natural contact there. His mother, her siblings, and other relatives may have helped him leave, since this was, quite possibly, the first time anyone in their family had been treated this way. Being hit repeatedly with a whip was not only painful and scar inducing; it could even kill. It was not unheard of for slaves to die during “correction,” and the sociopath Lilly appears to have been so unable to govern himself that they would have been justified in fearing that he might inflict a serious, if not fatal, injury upon this young man.

As far as the record shows, Jefferson’s chief communication about Hemings in Richmond came from Oldham, not from his uncle Robert. James may have contacted his uncle upon his arrival in Richmond, but chosen not live with him. Robert Hemings’s home would have been the first natural place to look for James or to inquire into his whereabouts, as the young man well knew. He evidently had no intention of returning to Monticello. Rather than staying at his uncle’s home, he lived instead with a man named James Right, who surely knew, but evidently did not care, that he was harboring an escaped slave. Hemings obtained money for rent and food by working on a boat that traveled between Richmond and Norfolk.
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A man named John Taylor had originally told Oldham that Hemings was in Richmond, and the two discussed whether to put the young man in jail. Oldham, who had been sympathetic to Hemings from the time this matter started, decided that it would be better to take Hemings to live with him until he heard word from Jefferson about how to proceed. Knowing how all this started, Oldham apparently did not really believe that Hemings’s actions amounted to a criminal offense that merited spending any time in jail. He quickly became the mediator between Hemings and Jefferson, who pronounced that he could “readily excuse the follies of a boy.”
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Hemings had told Oldham that he was willing to continue “to serve” Jefferson, but that he had left because of the way Lilly had treated him. He would return, he said, only if Jefferson would never again put him under Lilly’s direction. Jefferson quickly agreed to these terms and promised that Hemings would no longer be under Lilly’s supervision and that he could work with “Johnny Hemings and Lewis [another enslaved joiner] at house-joiner’s-work.”
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