Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  But in his grandfather’s case, Jeff Randolph and the partisans who followed him put on the iron mask of denial, knowing the immense symbolic importance of keeping the Founder pure. That image of purity has been a potent talisman, a charm against knowledge of a past in which virtue was assailed on all sides, a talisman against everything that cannot bear telling.

  15

  “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee”

  Madison Hemings bequeathed a narrative that changed American history when he stated bluntly, in an 1873 newspaper interview, that Thomas Jefferson was “my father.” When his recollections came to wide attention in 1974 thanks to Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, they collided with the modern imperative to find redemption almost everywhere we look.1

  In an extraordinary cultural transformation, the memoir that Merrill Peterson had disparaged in the 1960s as “the Negroes’ pathetic wish for a little pride” has been refashioned into a comforting myth of a secret cross-racial romance. Brodie washed Jefferson clean of any stain when she wrote, “If the story of the Sally Hemings liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery…but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.”2 She suggested that Jefferson was neither a “brooding celibate” nor, “as some blacks today believe,” a monstrous “debaucher.” In Brodie’s view Jefferson himself was a victim who endured as much travail as anyone over the affair: “It also brought suffering, shame, and even political paralysis in regard to Jefferson’s agitation for emancipation.” Turning to Sally Hemings, Brodie stressed the romantic, saying that Hemings “was certainly lonely in Paris, as well as supremely ready for the first great love of her life.”3

  This is a story that deeply appeals to modern sensibilities; looking into Jefferson’s inner life will lead us to a redemptive vision: “His ambivalences seem less baffling; the heroic image remains untarnished and his genius undiminished. And the semi-transparent shadows do tend to disappear.” 4 Brodie averted her gaze from some of the truths her work had uncovered, and she also fell victim to an impulse she had detected in other Jefferson biographers who “protect by nuance, by omission, by subtle repudiation, without being in the least aware of the strength of their internal commitment to canonization.”5 Determined to prove not just that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children but that he was in love with Hemings, Brodie took what she wanted from Madison’s recollections and ignored evidence that contradicted her thesis.

  In Brodie’s wake came the novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose Sally Hemings: A Novel of 1979 enchanted millions of readers, seduced the press, and created an utterly fantastic image of Sally Hemings in the popular mind, perhaps indelibly. Chase-Riboud said, “I ended up admiring their love, their fierce defense of their children, how they were allowed to run away…. Plus she might have influenced him on his politics.”6 But Chase-Riboud was correct when she said that the Hemings story possesses “symbolic, almost mythic dimensions. Tragedy and secrecy, ambiguity and hypocrisy—all these elements combine in the story. It is truly an allegory of the social and psychic dramas of the races in America.”7

  Madison Hemings’s recollections are much more than an item of evidence in the Hemings-Jefferson controversy. They take us deep into the psychology of slavery at Monticello. In telling his life story, Madison did not begin with his famous father, as one might expect. Instead, he went back to the remote past, unfolding a narrative as it had been told and retold in the Hemings family. It is a story of origins, of beginnings, and of the archetypes of the New World in distant times. It is a story of the first father and the beginning of amalgamation, the amazement of whites and blacks at the first mixed-race people, and the overthrow of the father. In just a few lines, it evokes the feel of myth.

  A British mariner known only as Captain Hemings came to Virginia’s shores in the 1730s and fathered a child by a slave. When he learned of the existence of this child, a daughter, the captain tried to purchase her from her owner, John Wayles (Jefferson’s father-in-law), but Wayles “would not part with the child, though he was offered an extraordinarily large price for her.” It is notable that Madison begins his story with the white ancestor who acknowledged paternity of his daughter, which Jefferson never did.

  The captain persisted: “Being thwarted in the purchase, and determined to own his own flesh and blood he resolved to take the child by force or stealth.” Captain Hemings laid a plan to kidnap the child and her mother, but “leaky fellow servants” revealed the plot to Wayles, who locked the mother and child away in his house.* The captain sailed away from Virginia, never to see his daughter again. That daughter was Elizabeth Hemings, Madison’s grandmother, the matriarch of Monticello’s Hemingses.

  These events had taken place more than a century and a quarter before Madison’s telling of them. The story must have been repeated many times in the Hemings family. It points to a deep, abiding sense of dislocation and loss and to the struggle of the slaves to comprehend people who regarded children as cash and severed blood ties with “no compunctions of conscience”:

  I have been informed that it was not the extra value of that child over other slave children that induced Mr. Wales to refuse to sell it, for slave masters then, as in later days, had no compunctions of conscience which restrained them from parting mother and child of however tender age, but he was restrained by the fact that just about that time amalgamation began, and the child was so great a curiosity that its owner desired to raise it himself that he might see its outcome.

  In the contest between the father and the master, the master wins and keeps the mixed-race child out of base curiosity, to observe it as if it were a joke of nature. The first master defeats the first father, makes him disappear, and sets himself in the father’s place. That is the dark heart of this foundation story. The master’s ultimate prize is to take the girl as his concubine and establish, perversely, a perpetual lineage in slavery. He fathers children with her and passes them to the next master: Wayles had six children by Elizabeth Hemings, and they went into Jefferson’s inheritance. Mastery inverted the strongest bond of humanity—with the enslaver becoming the father—a vision alien to whites but part of the historical DNA of African-Americans.

  Our human yearning for immortality expresses itself in children, but fathering children by a slave condemned the offspring to slavery, perpetuating not just the master’s lineage but the master’s power. It is the ultimate expression of mastery to hold power after death, because for the master life is power and power is life. Faulkner made this demented species of power a central theme in Absalom, Absalom!, which tells in kaleidoscopic episodes the story of a determined plantation master who exiles his son and depicts mastery not as a peculiarly Southern phenomenon but as the American enterprise gone mad.8

  In Madison’s account, his mother broke the power of the masters when she broke the lineage of enslavement established by John Wayles. When his mother went to France as the companion of Jefferson’s daughter, she

  became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enciente [pregnant] by him.* He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him.

  So Jefferson offered her a deal to get her to return: “To induce her to do so, he promised her extraordinary privileges [emphasis added].” Furthermore, he “made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years.” So she returned “in consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied.”9

  “Extraordinary privileges” echoes the “extraordinarily large price” Captain Hemings had offered Wayles. Sally Hemings succeeds where Captain Hemings had failed. She lays hold of the future, but only by consenting to become the master’s concubine: she sacrifices herself for her ch
ildren. What is missing from Madison’s account is a declaration of love. A transaction has taken place, not a love affair.

  Madison was a forthright speaker; he did not shrink from saying that his grandmother had children by four different men. He reported bluntly that his mother became Jefferson’s “concubine,” a harsh word to use of one’s mother, and he used the same word of his grandmother’s relationship with John Wayles. Elsewhere in his recollections Madison describes in warm terms the emotional bond between Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha: “intimacy sprang up between them which ripened into love.” This is vastly different from “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.”

  Madison’s wife, Mary McCoy, was the granddaughter of a slave and a slave master. Madison described her lineage this way: “Her grandmother was a slave, and lived with her master, Stephen Hughes, near Charlottesville, as his wife. She was manumitted by him, which made their children free born.” He pointedly did not use the word “wife” in his account of his mother’s relationship with Jefferson. Madison said that Jefferson was “affectionate” toward his grandchildren, but he did not say that about Jefferson’s relationship with his mother.

  Jefferson maintained tight emotional control over his family on the summit. A descriptive letter to his daughter Martha has a commanding tone:

  I now see our fireside formed into a groupe, no member of which has a fibre in their composition which can ever produce any jarring or jealousies among us. No irregular passions, no dangerous bias, which may render problematical the future fortunes and happiness of our descendants.10

  In contrast to that group clustered around the fireside, every time the Hemings children gazed up at the mansion, they confronted an existential either-or: I am / am not a Jefferson. I am / am not white / black. Madison’s account suggests that they endured a peculiarly deep estrangement from Jefferson: “he was affectionate toward his white grandchildren,” but toward his black offspring “he was very undemonstrative…. He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children.” Madison did not offer a single anecdote about Jefferson. His impressions of him were vague and general—distant glimpses of the master on his terrace and in the shops—and one wonders whether he ever saw Jefferson up close or ever heard him say a word. In their accounts the former slaves Israel Jefferson and Isaac Granger, especially the latter, tell more about Jefferson than his son does. Madison’s recollections, aside from making his lineage known, “do not suggest that he identified with Jefferson in any way,” as the Monticello historian Lucia Stanton puts it.11

  In place of affection the Hemings children received their promised privileges. When they were very young, they were exempted from labor. Madison and his siblings “were permitted to stay about the ‘great house,’ and only required to do such light work as going on errands. Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the home plantation…. We were always permitted to be with our mother, who was well used.” Her only tasks were “to take care of his chamber and wardrobe, look after us children and do such light work as sewing.” Madison regarded this as the fulfillment of the promise Jefferson made in Paris that Sally would receive extraordinary privileges. It also speaks to the harshness of life for Monticello’s ordinary slaves. Apparently, it was extraordinary for children to be with their mothers.

  Another of Madison’s remarks leaps out. The Hemings children knew that eventually they would be released, so they felt “free from the dread” of knowing they would be slaves all their lives “and were measurably happy.” But the certainty of eventual freedom came with a price. All the Hemings siblings reached their twenties without marrying or having children, which was unusual. But because they all knew that one day they would be leaving the mountain, they had to be free from encumbrances. Jefferson might not manumit a spouse; he might keep children, as he had kept some of Mary Hemings’s children.

  Sally Hemings talked about her French trip all the time. “I have often heard her tell about it,” Edmund Bacon recalled. To him and other white listeners she is likely to have given a sanitized travelogue of the wonders of an ocean voyage, of the great city of London, where she stayed with John and Abigail Adams, of the great city of Paris, where she was free because there was no slavery. Her family would have known what choices Sally Hemings made in Paris and what she had given up.

  Hemings brought back from Paris a mysterious token of her time there. It is hard to say exactly what it means. Excavating the site of Sally Hemings’s cabin on Mulberry Row, archaeologists found a French ointment jar in household trash behind the cabin and estimated that it had been thrown away there in 1809. It is not so surprising that she would have held on to this little keepsake, but the puzzle is, why did she throw it away after holding on to it for twenty years? The year 1809 was when Hemings moved from that cabin to her room in the Monticello dependency; it was the year Jefferson retired from the presidency and the year when his extended white family settled in with him permanently at Monticello. To Hemings, somehow the events of that year must have broken off something she associated with Paris, or represented an end, or a dashing of hopes that she finally realized were unrealistic. As the Randolphs gathered around the fireside with the paterfamilias, she grasped Jefferson’s feelings about his family ties. Her treaty would be fulfilled, but there would never be a recognition of her, only silence and denial.

  Madison learned to read and write when he “induced” the white children to teach him. There is a clue in his recollections to a book they used in their lessons. A great deal of attention has focused on Madison’s use of the French word enceinte (pregnant), which Jefferson’s defenders have pounced on as evidence that his statement was written by the newspaper editor S. F. Wetmore. Madison might have learned the word from his mother, but a more intriguing possibility is that when Jefferson’s grandchildren taught him, they used Jefferson’s favorite novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the word enceinte appears on an early page.12 The novel opens with a ribald joke about the moment of conception, but the joke would have carried a special double entendre in the mind of a child of Sally Hemings:

  I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;…—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world.

  As Madison read those lines, he would only have to lift his eyes to his young Randolph tutor to get an idea of what a different figure he might have made—someone known openly and honestly to the world as a sprig of Jefferson’s tree.

  Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that when he gazed into the faces of dark-skinned slaves, he saw nothing but “eternal monotony…that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions.” But the light-skinned faces of his Hemings children—his own face barely veiled—would have unsettled him, so he kept them at a physical and emotional distance.

  When Harriet Hemings left Monticello to head north forever in 1822, Jefferson had his overseer Bacon give her the traveling money.* He did not share a final, intimate moment with his daughter to hand her the money himself. Perhaps he had never acknowledged her existence and did not want to start then. He wrote “run” (for “runaway”) next to Harriet’s name in the Farm Book, so his daughter appeared in his records as a fugitive.

  Madison did not mention that his father talked to him about going free, but Jefferson did talk about manumission with at least two other slaves who were freed in his will: his butler, Burwell Colbert, and the blacksmith Joseph Fossett.

  After Jefferson’s death Madison and Eston Hemings took their mother to live in Charlottesville, where their racial identity oscillated along the either-or axis according to the eyes and intentions of whites. The 1830 census taker listed all of them as white, but when a special census of free blacks was taken
three years later, they were classified as mulatto.13 Their racial identity may have shifted because the special 1833 census, ordered by Virginia’s government after the Nat Turner uprising in 1831, enumerated free blacks for the purpose of determining how many of them were willing to immigrate to Africa. The census taker may have pushed them to leave by making them officially mulattoes.†

  In providing some background to Madison’s memoir, Dumas Malone noted the fierce “anti-Negro sentiment” that Hemings confronted in his new home in Ohio: “The county seat was so hostile to black settlement that as late as 1888…a Negro had never been allowed to live within the town limits.” This extreme hostility Madison endured in Ohio may explain the element of family tension in his memoir. He was the only surviving Hemings child willing to make a public statement about their origins, and he was the only Hemings-Jefferson offspring who still regarded himself as black.* Madison’s siblings had entered the realm of denial. Eston and his family had decided to cross over into the white world; Beverly and Harriet had long since crossed over, as Madison described in surprising detail:

  Beverly left Monticello and went to Washington as a white man. He married a white woman in Maryland, and their only child, a daughter, was not known by the white folks to have any colored blood coursing in her veins. Beverly’s wife’s family were people in good circumstances.