Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give, but will not, for prudential reasons. She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives…. She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.14

  Eston married a colored woman in Virginia, and moved from there to Ohio, and lived in Chillicothe several years. In the fall of 1852 he removed to Wisconsin, where he died a year or two afterwards. He left three children.

  Proud of his African blood, Madison seemed disappointed and even bitter that his siblings passed into the white world, notably in his remark that Harriet “thought it to her interest…to assume the role of a white woman.” Because his siblings had all crossed the color line into whiteness and silence, this story and others like it were buried and denied, even by the offspring of the hidden unions. The slave era was over, and the truth of that era would be lost if Madison did not speak up, as if to say, as Ishmael does in Moby-Dick: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

  After Jefferson’s death Sally Hemings moved into a house in Charlottesville with her sons Madison and Eston, then in their early twenties. They had been freed in Jefferson’s will, but she had not been; the will didn’t even mention her. In the appraisement of slaves after Jefferson’s death, Hemings, then just over fifty, had been adjudged an old woman of no value. Sally was “given her time” by Jefferson’s daughter, an informal, quasi-manumission by which Sally could legally remain in Virginia but was not required to provide any further service. In his will Jefferson asked his executors to petition the Virginia legislature to grant permission to Madison and Eston to remain in the state, which was done. Without this special permission, they would have been required to leave the commonwealth under the provisions of the 1806 removal law.

  A year after Sally Hemings’s death in 1835, the brothers left Charlottesville for Ohio with their wives and children. The Cleveland American reported the presence of an unnamed mixed-race child of Thomas Jefferson’s in 1845, stating, “Notwithstanding all the services and sacrifices of Jefferson in the establishment of the freedom of this country, his own son, now living in Ohio, is not allowed a vote, or an oath in a court of justice!”15 Though Eston won esteem by his skill as a musician and his sterling character, his race irredeemably condemned him. According to a newspaper article published after his death: “notwithstanding all his accomplishments and deserts, a great gulf, an impassable gulf” separated Eston Hemings and white people, “even the lowest of them.” Another newspaper account was blunt: “a nigger was a nigger in those days and that settled it.”16

  Eston crossed the line into whiteness around 1850. He moved his family from Ohio, where they were well known, to Madison, Wisconsin, where they were not, dropped the name Hemings for Jefferson, and passed as a white person, as did his wife and three children. Eston was remembered in one newspaper account as “Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent.” The account continued, “he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody’s attention to him.”

  He could not conceal his remarkable resemblance to Thomas Jefferson. “It was rumored,” said one newspaper in 1902, “that he was a natural son of President Thomas Jefferson, a good many people accepted the story as truth, from the intrinsic evidence of his striking resemblance to Jefferson.”17 One of Eston’s acquaintances, on a trip to Washington with several other men from Ohio, was stunned when the group came to a statue of the third president: “‘Gentlemen, who in Chillicothe looks the most like that statue?’ I asked. Instantly came the unanimous answer, ‘Why, Eston Hemings!’” The man who noticed Eston’s “striking” likeness to the statue pointedly asked Eston about it, and Eston responded that his mother “belonged to Mr. Jefferson…and she never was married.”

  A friend of Eston’s son Beverly either guessed a Thomas Jefferson connection or was told about it. When Beverly Jefferson died in 1908, the Chicago Tribune’s obituary did not mention descent from Jefferson, but shortly afterward it printed the following letter: “His death deserves more than a passing notice, as he was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson, father of the doctrines of the democratic party, hence one of the FFV [First Families of Virginia]. Beverly Jefferson was one of God’s noblemen—gentle, kindly, courteous, charitable. He was friendly to everybody in his home city, and he will be missed there quite as much or more, perhaps, than any other citizen.”18

  Choosing the surname Jefferson might seem an odd way to hide one’s identity, but Eston’s features made it impossible to deny that he had some blood tie to the third president. His twentieth-century descendants believed they were descended from an unnamed Jefferson “uncle,” most likely a cover story devised in the late nineteenth century to hide the family’s descent not so much from Thomas Jefferson as from Sally Hemings. If it became known they were descended from Hemings, they would no longer be white people, but colored.

  The secrets buried in slavery time formed a minefield; the borderland of the parallel worlds was literally deadly, as I discovered from an article dating to World War I from The Washington Post, “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp.” The article reported an incident involving one Alfred Lord, a white twenty-seven-year-old Ohio man drafted to serve in the army in the fall of 1917. “I’m ready,” he told a reporter as he climbed aboard a train in his hometown of Mineral City with 105 other young men, their departure hailed by a large, flag-waving crowd of well-wishers. When the army physician examined him at the induction camp in Chillicothe, something did not seem quite right: “the surgeon did not pass him. Instead he called in other surgeons. They, too, examined Lord. There were whispered conferences. ‘We are sorry to tell you this,’ one of the surgeons said, finally, ‘but there is evidence that there is negro blood in your veins. You will have to go into a negro regiment.’ Lord…although of dark complexion, always had thought himself white, and…had associated with white men all his life…. That night he committed suicide.”19 The article did not say what sign revealed his Negro blood. In any case, Lord changed in a blink from being one thing to being another, an instantaneous and fatal metamorphosis.

  Eston’s son John Wayles Jefferson, white enough to attain the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Eighth Wisconsin Infantry, lived through such an instant of icy terror when he encountered a childhood friend who knew his carefully hidden background as a colored man in another state, another time. The acquaintance recalled that the colonel “begged me not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command.”20

  When Monticello’s historians went to interview Hemings descendants, they found photographs from the early twentieth century of Eston’s grandson and a friend dressed as pickaninnies, wearing blackface and striking comical “colored” poses, including ogling white girls with the sort of leer that would get a real black man lynched. The grandson had been raised by his grandmother, Eston’s wife, who was born in Virginia under slavery. Either the photographs were savagely ironic—the make-believe pickaninny had no idea he was descended from slaves—or the young man did know and the little joke bespoke a savage self-hatred.21

  The brutal racial order split the Hemings family apart and drove some of them underground. The Monticello historians found that Madison’s son “disappeared and may be the source of stories among his sisters’ descendants of a mysterious and silent visitor who looked like a white man, with white beard and blue, staring eyes. He slipped in and out of town to visit older family members but never formed ties with the younger generations.”22 The family said that two of Madison’s sons never married “perhaps because of concerns about revealing skin color” in their offspring. Some of the gr
andsons passed for white; their sisters remained black, and though they all lived in southern Ohio they dared not meet—“we never heard from them,” one descendant told the historians. A great-grandson of Madison Hemings’s passed as a swarthy European, “adopting a variety of European accents along with his fictitious identities.” In need of help and care in his final days, he sought out his sister, who took him in, to the bafflement of her children: “We didn’t understand who [he] was because [he] had an Italian accent…. And then we found out actually he was our uncle. And that [he] had crossed over, he had been white.”

  Another descendant of Madison Hemings’s related a bitter moment in his grandmother’s life, when she was not notified of the death of her brother, who had passed for white and married a white woman years before. He had remained in touch, however, through cards and phone calls on certain meaningful occasions. His new family did not send word across the color line until months after he died, perhaps to ensure that no part of the black family appeared at the funeral. One descendant told the historians, “The blacks don’t like it because you’re light-skinned and the whites know you’re black so you’re just stuck there.” Another added, “They used to call us white niggers.”23

  The distant figure of Jefferson hovers over this world like the god of a Deist universe, the supreme being who set events in motion and then departed, with his offspring “left to the guidance of a blind fatality,” struggling in the world their own father had created.

  16

  “The Effect on Them Was Electrical”

  At its extreme edge American idealism, with its relentless pursuit of justice, induces a kind of giddiness. A petition that a group of abolitionists submitted to Congress during Jefferson’s presidency noted that while “cruelties and horrors” beset Europe, “a beneficent and overruling Providence has been pleased to preserve for our country the blessings of peace, to grant us new proofs of his goodness, and to place us in a condition of prosperity, unrivalled in the records of history.” Surely, they went on, a reciprocal obligation is imposed: a “nation so crowned with the blessings of peace, and plenty, and happiness” must “manifest its gratitude…by acts of justice and virtue.”1 One such act unfolded in the following manner.

  On the first day of April in 1819 a group of seventeen slaves left a plantation in the mountains south of Charlottesville, not far from Monticello, bound for a distant destination. They had been forbidden to carry much baggage and been told they could only take items they would need on a journey. A black man, a fellow slave, was in charge of them. It was not at all unusual for slave drivers to be black men, and this caravan would not have excited much notice at a time when the roads of Virginia were full of “gangs of Negroes, some in irons,” on their various melancholy ways to slave markets. This group of five adults and twelve children had not been told where they were going.2

  Riding in wagons, the slaves headed west across the Blue Ridge, then turned north to follow the Great Wagon Road up the Valley of Virginia. Along the way, a white man galloped up to check on the party’s progress. He was their master, a wealthy, politically prominent Virginian. Several of the slaves were ill, which delayed the party, so the owner rode ahead. In Maryland the wagons turned west along the National Road (today’s Route 40), reaching the Monongahela River after a trek of some 280 miles.

  The master had arrived at the Monongahela ahead of his slaves, and there he purchased two flat-bottomed boats, sixty feet long and twelve feet wide, on which the party embarked. Because his slaves were all mountain people who knew nothing of boats, the owner hired a river pilot but had to put him off at Pittsburgh because the man was constantly drunk. At Pittsburgh the Monongahela joins the Ohio River, the great water route to the West and a dividing line between slavery and freedom. On its left bank lay Virginia and then Kentucky, slave states, while on the right stretched the shores of Ohio, which was free.

  As the master later remembered, the landscape seemed extraordinarily beautiful that April under a bright sun and cloudless sky, with the pale green foliage of spring emerging on the banks as they floated gently past. Altogether, it was “a scene…in harmony with the finest feelings of our nature,” as he later wrote in a memoir.

  The master deliberately chose this stunning panorama as the backdrop to reveal their destination. He ordered the boats lashed together, assembled the people, and “made them a short address”: “I proclaimed in the shortest & fullest manner possible, that they were no longer Slaves, but free—free as I was, & were at liberty to proceed with me, or to go ashore at their pleasure.”

  The master later wrote that “the effect on them was electrical.” The people stared at him and then at each other, “as if doubting the accuracy or reality of what they heard.” A profound silence settled upon them. Then, as they slowly grasped the truth of what they had heard, they began to laugh—“a kind of hysterical, giggling laugh”—and then to cry, and then fell again into silence. “After a pause of intense and unutterable emotion, bathed in tears, and with tremulous voices, they gave vent to their gratitude and implored the blessing of God.”

  The owner had a further announcement. He said that in recompense for their past services to him, upon their arrival at their destination, the free state of Illinois, he would give each head of a family 160 acres of land. He would settle near them. To the gift of land, “all objected, saying I had done enough for them in giving them their freedom,” insisting they would happily delay their emancipation and remain his slaves until they had comfortably established him in his new home. But the master refused the offer. He said that he had “thought much of my duty & of their rights” and “had made up my mind to restore to them their immediate & unconditional freedom; that I had long been anxious to do it.” Indeed, when the party reached Illinois, “I executed & delivered to them Deeds to the land promised them.”

  Along with their freedom and the gift of land, a heavy burden was about to descend on the freed people, the master remarked, and so he availed himself “of the deck scene to give the Negroes some advice.” He expressed

  a great anxiety that they should behave themselves and do well, not only for their own sakes, but for the sake of the black race held in bondage; many of whom were thus held, because their masters believed they were incompetent to take care of themselves, & that liberty would be to them a curse rather than a blessing. My anxious wish was that they would so conduct themselves, as to show by their example, that the descendants of Africa were competent to take care of & govern themselves, & enjoy all the blessings of liberty, & all the other birthrights of man; & thus promote the universal emancipation of that unfortunate & outraged race of the human family.

  The emancipator was Edward Coles, a thirty-two-year-old member of a very prominent Virginia family. Dolley Madison was his cousin, and among the Virginians whom the Coles family counted as friends and patrons were Patrick Henry, James Monroe, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson.

  In the massive landscape of slavery, the emancipation of seventeen people may not seem like a significant event. But its symbolism was and is enormous. Coles’s emancipation of these slaves was regarded as a cornerstone of the foundation of Illinois. A painting of the event on the river hangs in the capitol rotunda in Springfield, titled Future Governor Edward Coles Freeing His Slaves While Enroute to Illinois 1819. In 1822, Coles ran for governor of the state (it was only the second gubernatorial election there) specifically to beat back attempts to make Illinois a slave state, and he narrowly won.

  The event is also significant because it was preceded by a debate between Coles and Thomas Jefferson about freeing the enslaved people. Jefferson told Coles not to do it, but Coles was determined to give up slave-owning “whatever might be the sacrifices of pecuniary interest, or personal convenience.” The difficulties and sacrifices it required were, he declared, nothing but “dust in the balance when weighing the consolation and happiness of doing what you believe right.”3 In the twilit Jeffersonian moral universe, Coles’s act blazes and re
minds us what American idealism looks like.

  Coles had concluded that slavery had to be eradicated when he was a student at the College of William and Mary, Jefferson’s alma mater. One of his professors was the Episcopal bishop James Madison (second cousin of the future president). As Coles wrote in a memoir:

  I can never forget [Bishop Madison’s] peculiarly embarrassed manner, when lecturing & explaining the rights of man, I asked him, in the simplicity of youth, & under the influence of the new light just shed on me—if this be true how can you hold a slave—how can man be made the property of man? He frankly admitted it could not be rightfully done, & that Slavery was a state of things that could not be justified on principle, & could only be tolerated in our Country, by…the difficulty of getting rid of it.

  These arguments failed to impress Coles, who had imbibed what Jefferson called “the gas of liberty.” Coles said, “I do not believe that man can have a right of property in his fellow man, but on the contrary, that all mankind are endowed by nature with equal rights.” 4 At every opportunity he peppered the bishop with ethical queries worthy of the Stoa of the Athenians, or the dining room of Monticello:

  Was it right to do what we believed to be wrong, because our forefathers did it? They may have thought they were doing right, & their conduct may have been consistent with their ideas of propriety. Far different is the character of our conduct, if we believe we do wrong to do what our forefathers did. As to the difficulty of getting rid of our slaves, we could get rid of them with much less difficulty than we did the King of our forefathers. Such inconsistency on our part, & such injustice to our fellow-man, should not be tolerated because it would be inconvenient or difficult to terminate. We should not be deterred by such considerations, & continue to do wrong because wrong had been done in times past; nor ought a man to attempt to excuse himself for doing what he believed wrong, because other men thought it right.