The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  In the beginning, when the numbers of Africans were few, there was some ambiguity about their status in Virginia. The scant evidence that exists on this question suggests several alternative scenarios. While most Africans may have been treated as slaves for life from the very start, others became free in the years immediately following the arrival of the first group. Were these freed slaves treated as indentured servants, or had they been seen as slaves but emancipated for some reason by their owners—as happened occasionally all throughout the time of slavery in America? We may never know for certain. As the number of Africans increased—slowly at first—their labor was mixed with the indentured labor of Englishmen, and a smaller number of Englishwomen. For a good part of the seventeenth century, these two groups (along with a smaller number of Native Americans) worked side by side. In the words of the historian Philip D. Morgan, “they ate, smoked, ran away, stole, and made love together.” But Morgan also wisely cautions against seeing their situations as the same. Enslaved Africans were distinguished from their white counterparts by the “sheer nakedness of the exploitation to which they were subject.”6

  Although the peoples of Africa and Europe were not unknown to one another, it is safe to say that the majority of seventeenth-century Africans and English people would not have been in extensive contact. There had been an African presence in Great Britain since ancient times, but not a substantial one until the beginning of the slave trade. Englishmen and their predecessors in the trade from other parts of Europe created outposts along the African coast in order to conduct the traffic in human beings, forming alliances with the leaders of those societies and having children with African women, who often became involved in the trade themselves.7 It was in the New World that the lives of these people with different skin colors became most closely entwined. They greeted one another in this land as strangers across a divide that was both physical and cultural, and each had views about the other that centered on notions of difference and inferiority.

  Negative views about the color black existed within English culture long before Englishmen actually encountered people with “black” skin. Black was evil. Black was dirty. Although other evidence suggests that people of African origin were not universally reviled in England, the tendency to see black negatively was definitely a part of English culture. Naturally, its view of whiteness carried all the opposite meanings. Color, then, became an expression of a person’s essence.8

  This was a two-way street, with the Africans thinking along the same lines about their white counterparts, but in the process reversing the conclusions. They saw themselves as different from whites and often imbued whiteness with negative characteristics. Whites were physically ugly—one “African ruler thought ‘all Europeans looked like ugly sea monsters’”—cannibalistic, and disfavored by God. A seventeenth-century European traveler reported that some “local blacks” he had met said that “‘while God created Blacks as well as White Men,’ the Lord preferred the blacks.” Others referred to a Danish man as being “‘as white as the devil.’”9 Once blacks and whites were together in the new world of Virginia, where Anglo-American colonists controlled society, only the whites’ perception of the meaning of differences between the races counted. They could, and did, codify their understanding of what it meant to be black and what it meant to be white, with devastating consequences for people of African origin.

  Matters were complicated further because the “Africans” were anything but monolithic in their cultures. “Black men and women were transported to America as members of specific tribes—as Ibos, Yorubas, or Ashantis but not simply as Africans.”10 Africa is the most linguistically, culturally, and genetically diverse of the continents, and though no one at that time could have dreamed it, the enslaved Africans, under the skin, at the genetic level, were more “different” from one another than the English were from their fellow Europeans.

  White Virginians, particularly members of the slave-owning class, did recognize that Africans were not all alike. Over the course of time in the early days of slavery, some planters even came to prefer workers who were brought from one region over those from others.11 But respecting and preserving the culture of these very diverse people was never the point for the white colonists. Developing and maintaining a work force were the real issues, and as these goals were realized, all the various African ethnic groups were gradually subsumed under the category of enslaved black people. In that more literally minded age, surface appearances were what counted, and the various shades of black told Anglo-Virginians everything they thought they needed to know about who could be a slave and who could not.

  In the end the physical differences—skin color, facial features, and hair type—between Africans and English people in Virginia helped create and maintain a critical dividing line. What the Africans “did” became less important than what they “were” as signaled by their physical appearance. Even if Africans chose to adopt the mores of the English, they could never overcome the powerful view that the differences between the groups were elemental and largely insurmountable. As a result, the lowliest indentured white servants could be, and were, encouraged to identify with their white masters while distancing themselves from the blacks with whom they worked.

  Some historians have seen early examples of cooperation between Africans and white indentured servants in the seventeenth century as evidence that racial prejudice was a creature of slavery and argue that the institution taught white colonists to look down upon black people. They also suggest that the colonists’ willingness to allow some of the early Africans to be freemen while others were enslaved for life reveals a degree of flexibility in race relations, and that flexibility suggests racial attitudes had not been firmly set.12 Highlighting the variable experiences of the earliest blacks in Virginia is much less useful than keying in on the one constant in the lives of whites from Jamestown to Appomattox: they were never to be designated as chattel who passed their condition down to their children, and their children’s children, in perpetuity. Significantly, this distinction between black and white was drawn well before Virginia became bound to slavery as the economic foundation of its society.

  And why wouldn’t it have been? The Virginia colonists did not exist in a vacuum. They were travelers in the Atlantic world of which slavery was so much a part. Who Africans were, and how they had been used in that world for centuries, was well known to them. Long before the English got involved, the Portuguese had enslaved Africans, as had the Spanish. Englishmen certainly heard tales of the Arabs’ enslavement of Africans that began centuries before Europeans even thought of the notion. The ease and swiftness with which blacks were written out of the social compact indicates that notions of essential difference and inferiority took hold very early on in the Virginia experiment. As more Africans arrived and the commitment to the economic system of slavery grew deeper, the perceived differences between whites and blacks provided a workable excuse for widening the social gap between indentured white servants and blacks, until that gap became a yawning chasm.

  Religion played a role in the process as well. The English colonists, of course, were Christians. Some Africans had converted to Christianity even before their arrival in the New World, but the overwhelming majority of them had not. They had their own religious traditions, and whether those traditions were animist or Islamic, those who adhered to them were, in the eyes of the English, “heathens.” At first, this difference was offered to explain why Africans alone were eligible for chattel slavery. Christianity is an evangelical religion of faith, not blood, and carries in its very heart the expectation that multitudes will become Christian through the ritual of baptism. The question arose, “What happens when an African heathen becomes a Christian?” Shouldn’t that wipe away the stain of slavery? Some masters who wanted to free their slaves thought so, and for a time their actions appeared to threaten—albeit in a minor way—the stability of the institution. The Church of England shut down that avenue of emancipation when it confir
med that baptism of a slave into the Christian faith did not require the emancipation of that slave, an understanding that Virginia codified in law. Christians could, in good conscience, hold other Christians in bondage.13

  In the end, the Anglo-Virginians introduced a form of chattel slavery unknown in their home country—a system of bondage based upon race. This was indeed a brave new world. Proceeding on an ad hoc basis, the colonists put together rules and customs to accommodate the new society taking shape. There was no direct precedent from their home country for doing what they did; in fact, it required them to break rather quickly with one important long-held tradition and understanding that they had carried with them across the Atlantic Ocean. That fateful deviation from English tradition—one that would set the course of Elizabeth Hemings’s life and the lives of her descendants—was the Virginia colonists’ decision to abandon the English tradition that determined a person’s status by the status of the father. In England you “were” what your father “was.” A person could be born free or as a member of a group of “unfree” people who existed during various points in English history—for example, a villein (serf) attached to the land of a lord or to the lord himself. Inventing the rules of slavery, in 1662, Virginians decided to adopt the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, which says that you were what your mother was.14 This important departure from tradition had enormous consequences for the progress of slavery and the mapping of Virginia’s racial landscape. Why take this route? Although the preamble to the legislation states the impetus for the law—“doubts have arisen whether children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or ffree”—there is no language explaining exactly why, in the context of Virginian colonial society, the ways of ancient Rome should emerge as superior to the more readily available and familiar English tradition. There are some reasonable speculations.

  One way to think about it is to imagine what might have been the course of slavery in Virginia had the colonists followed their English tradition. White men, particularly the ones who made up the House of Burgesses, the legislature in colonial Virginia, were the masters of growing numbers of African women, owning not only their labor but their very bodies. That these women sometimes would be used for sex as well as work must have occurred to the burgesses. Inevitably offspring would arise from some of these unions. Even white males who owned no slaves could contribute to the problem by producing, with enslaved black women, children who would be born free, thus destroying a critical component of the master’s property right: the ability to capture the value of the “increase” when female slaves gave birth.

  That exact situation was at issue in 1655, when a mulatto woman, Elizabeth Key, who later married her lawyer, successfully sued for her freedom on the basis of the fact that her father was English. This case, and probably others that never made it to court but would have been part of the social knowledge of the community, caught the burgesses’ attention, and they acted to close this possible escape route out of slavery for one potentially large category of people of African origin: the children of white fathers and enslaved mothers. The law passed in the wake of Key’s case actually had two components—the new rule determining status through the mother and a provision for doubling the fine for mixed-race couples who engaged in sex over those levied against unmarried same-race couples. The historian Warren M. Billings, who was the first to do extensive work on the case, saw the law as a strong anti-race-mixing measure. “Writing a seldom used civil law doctrine, partus sequitur ventrem, into the statute indicates the depth of the lawmakers’ desire to prevent miscegenation.” While the double fine reflects a wish to discourage mixed-race sex, the same cannot be said for partus sequitur ventrem. The doctrine assured that white men—particularly the privileged ones who passed the law, who would not likely have been haled into court for fornication even with white women—could have sex with enslaved women, produce children who were items of capital, and never have to worry about losing their property rights in them.15

  Partus sequitur ventrem, then, was an important first principle in this nascent slave-owning society based upon race. Like all efficient legal rules, it achieved its aim—here, the maximum protection of property rights—with little or no intervention by the state or other third parties. The private conduct of men would have no serious impact on the emerging slave society as a whole. White men could engage in sex with black women without creating a class of freeborn mixed-race people to complicate matters. Men, who can produce many more children than women, and who throughout history have been less subject to social stricture for their sexuality, constituted the greater potential threat for bringing this class into being. Following the dictates of their English heritage would have required some white men to tell other white men what women they could and could not have sex with, knowing full well the day might come when others would have the opportunity to return the favor. Under the rules of the game the burgesses constructed, there was no need to interfere with other men’s conduct, even as the efforts to control white women’s sexual activity grew ever more strenuous. Whatever the social tensions and confusion created by the presence of people who were neither black nor white, Virginia’s law on inheriting status through the mother effectively ended threats to slave masters’ property rights when interracial sex produced children who confounded the supposedly fixed categories of race.

  The “Full-blooded African” Woman and the “Englishman”

  As the daughter of an enslaved African woman and an Englishman, Elizabeth Hemings physically embodied the strange and devastating encounter between black and white in colonial Virginia. As we will see, Hemings’s father indeed cared that his daughter might be in perpetual bondage. There was nothing he could do. His whiteness and free status could not save her from the fate ordained by seventeenth-century legislators. What loomed before her, at Bermuda Hundred, the Forest, Guinea, Elk Hill, and, finally, Monticello grew out of their very particular construction of slavery, status, and race.

  The law did not solve everything. The colonists could not simply ignore the fact that people like Hemings were neither “purely” African nor “purely” English—their physical appearance showed the melding of two different “types.” This could never have been totally ignored in a world that put great stock in surface appearances. When Isaac Jefferson, who would meet Hemings many years later at Monticello, described her as a “bright mulatto woman,” he was using a term adopted early on in America to categorize racially mixed people. Calling such people “mulattoes,” from the Spanish word meaning “mule,” insinuated that blacks and whites, though related, were close to being separate species, as a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey. Using this term in letters, legislative enactments, court opinions, and other documents seems to have been more wishful thinking than anything remotely descriptive. The English colonists, and their predecessors, knew that the analogy did not work. Mules, evidently as a consequence of their mixed parentage, are sterile. Children born to one black parent and one white parent are not, barring some personal physical impairment. This was not the first, nor would it be the last, time that pseudo-biological notions would be employed to degrade people possessing any degree of African heritage.16

  Naturally, mixed-race people could and did reproduce themselves, though there is no way to know how many people like Elizabeth Hemings existed at the time of her birth. We do know that sensitivities about the differences between blacks and whites were particularly heightened during her early childhood as large numbers of Africans were arriving daily into the colony. In contrast to previous generations who had undergone “seasoning” in various West Indian ports before arriving in Virginia, this new generation of enslaved Africans came directly from the continent with their languages, religions, and cultural practices intact. Language was a barrier to cooperation in some cases. But very often slave ships brought cargoes of people from the same region who disembarked together and were sold as a group. In addition, there was always the possibility of making con
tact with earlier captives from one’s region.

  The shock, misery, and anxiety of being forcibly brought to a strange world by people who seemed equally strange, and who by their actions showed their willingness to impose their will through violence, was enormous. After the terror and uncertainty of the Middle Passage, many of the new arrivals clung to one another determined to face together whatever they were going to confront. From the Anglo-Virginians’ perspective, these new arrivals seemed more “outlandish” and threatening, their greater numbers literally changing the face of Virginia. A child like Elizabeth Hemings, a mixture of the familiar and the increasingly frightening unknown, excited a whole host of reactions, from fascination to confusion and repulsion.

  Although mixed-race people like Hemings were a recognized category in early Anglo-American statutes, they enjoyed no advantages at law. The statutory listings of “negroes” and “mulattoes” were really a way to emphasize that mixed-race people had the same status as blacks. The defining fissure lay between those born slaves and those born free. Law in the books, of course, often operates very differently (and sometimes hardly at all) out in society at large. While being mixed race did not stop people from being slaves, it could affect the course of an individual slave’s life, helping determine the type of work one performed and the likelihood that one might someday go free. During most of the time of slavery in Virginia, emancipated slaves tended to be of mixed race. That should not surprise. Some fathers wanted to free their children. It also makes perfect sense in a world fueled by white supremacy. Whites could reject equality for those who were not all white, but distinguish people who were partly white from the masses of blacks. There was a marked tendency to cast mixed-race people as superior to their black fellows, for no partly white person could be all bad. In the end, although the overwhelming majority of mixed-race slaves endured lives every bit as harsh as those of slaves who were not mixed, being mixed race mattered, and Hemings and others like her complicated in ways large and small whites’ determination to create a slave society based upon race.