The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  While it is true that the lives of the vast majority of people who lived during the time of American slavery are lost to history, the anonymity of American slaves is even more pronounced. The business of shipping slaves required no gathering and recording of information about the captives as individuals, and the business of keeping slaves was similarly minimalist. And few slaves had the chance to supplement the record by setting down their “stories” in either diaries, letters to family, or official records—marriage banns, birth announcements, wills proved—the kinds of documents that allow many white Americans to reconstruct at least some part of their family stories, or the story as they would like to tell it. The medium of biography, so effective in conveying information about times gone by, and perhaps the most accessible and popular form of historical writing, is problematic in the context of slavery.

  Remaining for those who seek to “know” American slaves (and the institution of slavery) are the memories of those enslaved, the records of white owners who in taking care of business kept track of their human property, and information about the larger historical context in which all these individuals operated. Getting at this last source, the historical context, is by necessity a huge interdisciplinary enterprise—a matter of law, anthropology, psychology, archaeology, and economics—all the universe of influences that shaped lives under slavery. In gathering information, we must cast the net as widely as possible if we want to see slavery through the eyes of the enslaved.

  The Hemings family of Monticello escaped the enforced anonymity of slavery for a number of reasons: first, because multiple generations of this large clan were owned by one of history’s most well-known figures, Thomas Jefferson, an inveterate record keeper and writer of letters. Jefferson’s papers have been grist for the scholarly mill for many years, and members of the Hemings family have long figured in Jefferson scholarship, but only as side characters in the saga of Jefferson and his white family. Only recently have the Hemingses and other members of Monticello’s enslaved community become the focus of scholarly attention. It is a sad paradox, in a story overrun with paradox and irony, that their being the “property” of a famous man ensured that, as the Jefferson scholar James A. Bear has pointed out, more would be known about this family of slaves than is known about the vast majority of freeborn white Virginians of the time.

  And then there is the place itself. Monticello, one of the best-known residences in the United States during Jefferson’s time and today, is rich with the history of the Hemings family. Hemingses helped build and maintain the house, crafted furniture for it, and laid its floors. They worked as servants within the household, tended the gardens, and performed other essential tasks throughout the plantation. They lived there as husbands and wives, raising their children in slavery as best they could. Some died and were buried there. It is, quite simply, impossible to tell an adequate history of the mountain without including Hemingses.

  Of course, the main reason that people all over the world have known about this particular enslaved family, during and after the era of slavery, is Jefferson’s relationship with Sarah Hemings, known most famously by her nickname Sally. Hemings and Jefferson were talked about in their immediate community during the 1790s, and their story, or a version of it, burst upon the national scene in the early 1800s when Jefferson’s enemies sought to use their relationship as a weapon to destroy his presidency and to prevent his election to a second term. The tactic did not work. Jefferson won in a landslide, bringing to office with him a large Republican majority in Congress. “The people,” whose wisdom Jefferson trusted (sometimes almost too implicitly), either did not believe the Hemings story or thought it trivial when compared with what they felt Jefferson and his administration had to offer them.

  These events were not just about the life and fortunes of Thomas Jefferson. Other people were involved. Sally Hemings, her children, her mother, and other members of her family were dragged into the national spotlight in a way unprecedented for individual American slaves. During the early part of the nineteenth century, Sally Hemings appeared in newspapers as “Dusky Sally,” “Yellow Sally,” and even “Mrs. Sarah Jefferson.” She was depicted in cartoons and lampooned in bawdy ballads—all alongside Thomas Jefferson. The story crossed the Atlantic, with foreign commentators weighing in with their own perspectives.

  Sally Hemings is often treated as a figure of no historical significance—a mere object of malicious personal gossip. That shouldn’t surprise. Aside from forays into “history from the bottom up”—a perspective that has been given increased emphasis over the past forty years—historical writing tends to favor the lives of individuals who spoke, acted, and had a direct hand in shaping whatever particular “moment” they lived in. Hemings does not fit the bill on any of these accounts. She neither spoke publicly about her life nor engaged in any public acts that have been recorded. Others—journalists, Jefferson’s enemies—determined how she entered the spotlight; and they put her there with no real interest in her as a person.

  Even though she was not in control of her life, Hemings must be seen as a figure of historical importance for a multiplicity of reasons, not the least of which is that her name and her life entered the public record during the run-up to a presidential election. Much has been written about Jefferson’s daughters and grandchildren, and they are treated as historically important simply because of their legal relationship to him, even though none of them ever figured in the politics and public life of his day. On the other hand, politically ambitious men with power used Hemings and her children as weapons against Jefferson while he was alive and in the decades immediately following his death. Her connection to him inspired the first novel published by an African American. It had resonance within black communities as ministers and black journalists in the early American Republic preached on and referred to Hemings’s family situation, one that would have seemed quite familiar to their predominately mixed-race audiences, most of whom were free precisely because their fathers or immediate forefathers had been white men. Finally, Hemings’s story affected members of Jefferson’s white family, notably his grandchildren who, for the benefit of the historians who they knew would one day come calling, fashioned an image of life at Monticello designed in part to obscure her relevance. Even without direct agency in these matters, Sally Hemings has had an impact on the shaping of history.

  More important for our purposes, we must also see the public spectacle surrounding Hemings and Jefferson as a defining episode in the lives of all the Hemingses. No contemporaneous evidence of what members of the family were thinking as the talk of the pair made its way through the country’s newspapers and communities has come to light. They surely knew that people were talking because others at Monticello—members of Jefferson’s white family, his friends, and at least one white Jefferson employee—are on record stating that the relationship was much talked about in Jefferson’s neighborhood. In every community, throughout history, slaves and servants have been privy to the innermost secrets, anxieties, strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures of the people they served. The Hemingses were no different.

  There is much evidence that the Hemings-Jefferson connection meant a great deal to some members of her family. Madison Hemings, who at age sixty-eight spoke of his life as the second son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, told part of his family’s story to an interviewer in 1873, setting down valuable information about the family’s origins, life at Monticello, and the lives of one branch of the family after emancipation. The historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright have noted the other ways in which the Hemings-Jefferson liaison helped keep the Hemingses’ story at Monticello alive for successive generations of the family. Apparently, the relationship and its notoriety were critical reference points, not only for the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but for collateral branches of the family as well, serving as a guidepost that helped them remember who they were and where their family had been. Even the descendants of slaves at M
onticello who were not members of the Hemings family carried the story of Hemings and Jefferson as an important truth about life on the mountain. When other things were forgotten, that understanding remained.

  Sally Hemings and her children have overshadowed the lives of other members of her family. How could they not, given their relationship to Thomas Jefferson, who himself looms like a colossus over the lives of all those who will be discussed in these pages. In recognition of the importance of the topic, chapters 14 through 17 veer slightly from the narrative to provide an in-depth analysis of the pair’s beginnings in Paris. There is, however, far more to the Hemingses than “Sally and Tom,” and although that pair must be a critical part of our consideration, this book is not designed to tell just their story. There are many others who complete the picture of the family’s time in slavery and whose lives deserve to be woven into the tapestry of American history.

  No look at Monticello and slavery would be complete without a portrait of Sally Hemings’s brother James Hemings, who lived in France with Jefferson for five years along with his sister Sally. These two members of the Hemings family traveled the farthest distance from slavery at Monticello, experiencing life in what was, at the time, perhaps the most cultivated city on earth and even witnessing the start of the French Revolution. Their time in France forever altered the course of their lives. For Sally Hemings it marked the beginning of her time with Jefferson. For James Hemings it marked the beginning of the end. In his life we see the tragedy of talent thwarted by the limitations of slavery and white supremacy.

  Then there is the story of John Hemings, the extremely talented carpenter and joiner whose work is still on display at Monticello. In John Hemings’s life we see the blend of slavery as a work system and as a system of personal relationships. Hemings, who helped Jefferson realize his vision for the look of Monticello, was also a surrogate father to Jefferson’s sons Beverley, Madison, and Eston.

  It was not just the males in the family who were prime movers, as much as enslaved people could be. Mary Hemings, the eldest of the first generation of Hemings siblings, exerted a remarkable influence upon the family. She was the first to maneuver her way out of slavery on the mountain. She was able to be a source of refuge, stability, and monetary support for her relatives who remained in bondage at Monticello—up to and beyond the time of the family’s dispersal in 1827, when Jefferson’s human property was sold after his death to pay his enormous debts.

  Every story has a beginning, and we will start there. One could argue strenuously that the central (and most compelling) figure in the family’s history was not Sally Hemings but her mother, Elizabeth, whose experiences in life helped project her influence down the family line. Elizabeth Hemings, known as Betty, was the matriarch of a family that over four generations numbered in the dozens. She was well suited to that role for many reasons, not the least of which is that she lived a very long time—seventy-two years, well beyond the average life span of Virginians of her day, black or white. Also, she had many children—by one count, fourteen of them, although only twelve have been positively identified as hers. Half of her children had a black father, half had a white father. Her grandchildren, some of whom were born while she was still bearing children, had black fathers and white fathers. The mixing continued into succeeding generations until some of her descendants decided to move totally away from their African origins, while others resolutely clung to it.

  Behind all of this stands Elizabeth Hemings, the person of origin for the family and their story. The unnamed African woman who was her mother, John Wayles (who fathered six of her children, including Sally Hemings), Martha Wayles Jefferson (Wayles’s eldest daughter, Jefferson’s wife, and Sally’s half sister), Thomas Jefferson, and Sally Hemings—all of them lived for a time under her knowing gaze. If one person could be brought forward to help tell this story of slavery, intertwined families, pain, loss, silence, denial, and endurance, hers would be the most valuable voice.

  Like all enslaved parents, Elizabeth Hemings lived with the possibility that her family would be broken up by sale or gift. In fact, two of her adult children were sold—one to be united with her enslaved husband, who lived on a nearby plantation, the other to cohabit with a white merchant in Charlottesville. Jefferson freed two of her sons during her lifetime, and they left Monticello to live on their own. Another daughter was given as a wedding present to one of Jefferson’s sisters. For the most part, however, the Hemings family remained intact, or within close proximity to one another, for their entire lives. As a result each member had, in the person of Elizabeth Hemings, a mother/grandmother to be the repository of family lore and center of family attention.

  The women of the family were house servants who worked alongside one another for years. Their brothers, sons, and nephews were butlers or valets to Jefferson. The Hemings men who were not in the house were artisans who worked just outside of it on Mulberry Row, which abuts and runs parallel to the main house at Monticello. One of Hemings’s many grandchildren set the scene recalling a childhood spent running errands in and out of the big house surrounded entirely by (and this to him was extraordinary and important) members of his family. In this compact area, the Hemingses would have seen and interacted with one another every single day.

  In sum, this family was at least as much “together” as many other families who lived on farms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Moreover, in the Hemingses’ confined world on the mountain, the entire enslaved community in which they lived was basically stable over the years. With few exceptions—births, deaths, temporary moves from one household to another—the rolls of Jefferson’s Monticello slaves do not change much over the decades. That the Hemingses were enslaved thus did not automatically render them incapable of knowing who they were, of knowing their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. Slavery did not destroy their ability to observe, remember, and reason. It did not prevent them from forming enduring and meaningful attachments. It did not make them untrustworthy—certainly not when compared with the people who held them in bondage. In short, nothing about their enslaved status makes them undeserving of our considered and unprejudiced attention.

  We do not have, in the Hemingses, an enslaved family with loose ties, little knowledge of family history, and no family cohesion. That Virginia law did not protect their family does not end the inquiry, for legal regimes are not omnipotent. Powerful as they may be, they never have (and never will, because they cannot) control all human feelings and arrangements. While it is certainly important to be aware of what could have happened to this enslaved family because its members were not ultimately in control of their destiny, that knowledge should not overshadow what can be gleaned by considering what actually happened to them. Under the circumstances of their lives, the Hemingses were able to achieve and maintain a coherent family identity that existed within slavery and survived it.

  Central to the Hemingses’ identity was their being of mixed race. Basing American slavery on race created a world where, put simply, it was better to be white than black. Being “in between” was meaningful as well, and the Hemingses’ interracial origins helped determine the course of the family’s history. The conventional wisdom that white slave owners sometimes valued more highly those slaves who most resembled white people was very much a part of life at Monticello, and the Hemingses benefited from it. Although, as we will see, at least one other enslaved family, the Grangers, who appear to have been of completely African origin, rivaled, if not exceeded, the Hemingses in the amount of trust Jefferson reposed in them.

  Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s eldest grandson, extolled the virtues of the Hemingses specifically. He said that while slaves on the plantation had their own theories for why the Hemingses were favored, the true reasons were their “superior intelligence, capacity and fidelity to trust.” There is no cause to doubt that the Hemingses were indeed intelligent, but we should also consider what role their appearance and the knowledge of their genetic makeup
may have played in his assessment of them. Randolph was likely influenced by the common view among whites that intermixture with white people eugenically improved black people, making the children from these unions smarter and more attractive than those of full African heritage. Under the circumstances, Randolph, and his grandfather, would have been inclined to see, credit, and encourage the talent they saw in men and women who looked more like themselves. That is one way prejudice works.

  Like architecture, which can convey meaning as eloquently through the spaces left empty as the areas built over, Randolph’s statement about the Hemingses is illuminating for what it says (he gives a view of the family’s overall talent) and intriguing for what it does not say. Just what were those other unnamed reasons the slaves gave for the Hemings family’s ascendancy? Was it just that they were fair-skinned? Or was there something else? Although Randolph chose not to elaborate on this point, it is not too hard to figure out what he had in mind. The Hemingses were not only part white; their white “parts” came from the master’s family. Naturally, the other slaves at Monticello might have assumed that this counted for something, influencing the way they and others saw the Hemingses, and the way the family saw itself. It would be hard to look at a household filled with members of the same family and not come to the conclusion that their shared blood was why they were all there.

  How did others enslaved at Monticello see the Hemingses? Thomas Jefferson Randolph provided one perspective. Among “the other slaves,” he said, the Hemingses’ role at Monticello was “a source of bitter jealousy.” The enslaved people down the mountain were watching and, evidently, weighing the Hemingses. Jeff Randolph may well have been right that the source of friction between Hemingses and non-Hemingses was jealousy. But couldn’t the “other slaves” have had concerns that Randolph would not likely have perceived? What about the fact that some Hemingses clearly identified with Jefferson and his family, sometimes displaying extreme loyalty to them? Did the other slaves find that grating? The Jefferson-Randolphs, after all, were keeping all members of the enslaved community—Hemingses and non-Hemingses alike—in bondage. Their “superior intelligence, capacity, and fidelity to trusts” were not saving the overwhelming majority of them from that fate. At least some of those enslaved at Monticello might view the Hemingses’ way of accommodating to their circumstances as problematic.