Annette Gordon-Reed: "The Hemingses of Monticello"

History involves a good deal of detective and guess work, particularly when reconstructing the history of people with limited access to power and literacy. In The Hemings of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed "seek[s] to know" the enslaved Hemings family of Virginia.

What we know thanks to history heretofore. We know that the Hemings were enslaved. Or perhaps more accurately, the Hemings family members covered by this book were born and most died as slaves: legally speaking (at least according to the perverse legal structure of the antebellum South), the Hemings were the property of Thomas Jefferson. He inherited them from his wife's family. Also, thanks to history, most of us know with a great deal of certainty that Jefferson and Hemings had a long term and intimate relationship leading to the birth of seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood.

Gordon-Reed's book is ambitious. It seeks to know more. Gordon-Reed gives Sally and Thomas's relationship and story it's rightful due, but also wants to see that story within the story of the families that surround these individuals. She "seeks to know" Heming's family in all its particularity and breadth. And, although it occupies a distinctly secondary position in her story, Gordon-Reed also places Sally and Jefferson by offering insight into Jefferson's relationship with his far more documented and written about family. Most daringly, she seeks to guess at the psychologies of slavery, owners and enslaved. What could it possibly feel like to live in a family where certain members were known but not acknowledged as family. How did one justify owning, selling, and controlling a slave who was also your half-sister, your son?

Gordon-Reed's chronicle of the Hemings begins with Sally's mother Elizabeth Hemings, who was born enslaved on the holdings of the wealthy and socially prominent Virgina planter Francis Eppes IV in "abt 1735"(50). Elizabeth was a mulatto according to a contemporary witness(47)and the memoir of her grandson Madison Hemings(49). She had twelve, possibly fourteen, children altogether, six with Wayles. As with the precise number of Elizabeth's children, many facts surrounding the lives of enslaved people remain murky and hard to get at other than by inference and indirect conjecture.

Elizabeth Heming's family was not a "typical" enslaved family by any means. They were inter-racial. This doesn't make them super-unusual. In the 18th and 19th century South, miscegenation was a fact of life, a winked-at, looked-away-from byproduct of the slave system under-girding the economy. The Hemings's true distinction was their two-fold biological connections to a famous and powerful man, Thomas Jefferson. They were connected first via Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, who was father to Sally Hemings and several of her siblings. Jefferson inherited the Hemings from his father-in-law, who was literally a rag-to-riches story. At an even more intimate level, the Hemings were connected to Jefferson via his children with Sally Hemings.

Long before he took up with Sally, Jefferson, like his father-in-law before him, subtly and unintentionally indicated the connection in a number of ways. The Hemings routinely received special treatment. Sally, her mother, and many of her siblings, nieces and nephews were given unusual amounts of freedom. Jefferson excepted the Hemings women from field work. Many of the Hemings men received training in marketable crafts and skills. The often times emotionally vulnerable Jefferson definitely wanted the family to love him and see him as kind.

Jefferson early on took a special interest in the training of Elizabeth's sons and grandsons. Evidence exists that James and Robert were literate, although it is not clear that Jefferson was directly responsible for this. Jefferson arranged for many of her sons and grandsons to pursue trades, albeit often within the orbit of his holdings. The eldest, Martin, served for many years as Jefferson's chief butler at Monticello. Elizabeth's two oldest sons by Wayles, James and Robert, were groomed from an early age to be his carriage driver and manservant. Her youngest son, John was apprenticed to several white carpenters at Monticello; Jefferson placed an especially high value on trades that "made" things like carpentry. Grandson Burwell Colbert was trained as a manservant and his cousin Wormley served as the gardener at Monticello. Eventually, he apprenticed his own sons by Sally to their uncle John.

The book spends a great deal of time detailing the particularly close and peculiar relationships that existed between Jefferson and Robert and James Hemings. These two lived very close to him from a young age and all established affectionate if limited and peculiar bonds with him. Later, when Jefferson served as U.S. Minister to France, James accompanied him and was trained at some expense as a French chef in the hopes that he would eventually serve as such at Monticello. When he was not making use of their services, Jefferson gave both men a large measure of freedom, allowing them to work for themselves and keep their wages. Both could move about with considerable freedom for their time and legal status.

As to the Hemings women, Gordon-Reed offers a lot less in the way of detail. Whenever he left Monticello (and he left for long periods), he would lease out many of his slaves or give directions as to how they were to be employed while he was away. He never left many such explicit directions for the Hemings women. Apparently, they were left to themselves pretty much during these down times (237).

In 1787, at the age of fourteen, Sally accompanied Jefferson's youngest daughter, Polly, to Paris. Jefferson had originally left Polly and his youngest daughter Lucy with their Aunt when he took up a temporary mission to France. Lucy died while he was in France. When his return was postponed by his being appointed Ambassador to France, he sent for his daughter. Originally, Jefferson had requested that an older woman accompany Polly. With nobody fitting that bill available, Jefferson's in-laws sent Polly over with Sally. Landing in London for a way-stop stay, their host, Abigail Adams suggested that Jefferson send Hemings back now that Polly was ashore. For whatever reason, Jefferson did not act on her suggestion.

Polly and her older sister, Martha (Patsy), attended a convent school in France. James was busy learning to chef. That left Sally apparently by herself with little to do. Hemings is convinced that the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson occurred while Jefferson was serving as Ambassador. This paints Jefferson in a less than flattering light. Beyond the power inequity necessarily existing between a master and slave, the difference in their ages adds to modern eyes a second layer of inequality. In addition, Hemings was basically alone, unchaperoned and unsupervised, without recourse to any other adult who might truly protect her.

Gordon-Reed's construction of the events surrounding the relationship that ensued and Heming's possible role in it is fascinating. Of course, her construction is dependent in part on the relationship orginating in France. She traces the origins of the relationship to France based upon her contention that Hemings had her first child in 1790, shortly after she, Jefferson, and her brother James, returned from France. Apparently that child died in delivery or shortly after and their is little documentary evidence for its existence.

The bulk of Gordon-Reed's contention that Jefferson and Hemings began their affair in France in the late 1780's, rests on Jefferson and Sally's son Madison Heming's account of his life which he offered in 1873 when he was 68 years old. He claimed that "'when [Jefferson] was called back home [Sally] was enciente by him'"(326). In this same memoir, he also recalls the child died. Other than this account, there is no direct evidence that Sally and Thomas had a relationship this far back. Gordon-Reed finds testimony backing Madison's account by noting a one-sided exchange of letters between Jefferson and his daughter and her aunt as to Martha's need for a maid. Gordon-Reed believes that Sally would quite naturally been Martha's lady's maid, and without any exchange of letters, but for the fact that she was pregnant at the time and Jefferson intended her as his own afterward. The creative manner in which she reads and assemble evidence in this instance is characterstic and one is left both admiring the skill of her arguments while the depth of her conviction in her conclusions.

I also admire and applaud her willingness to take on questions that many would avoid as impossible to answer. Gordon-Reed wonders whether the Jefferson-Hemings affair may have begun in violence or coercion? Perhaps more provocatively, given the inherently coercive nature of all master-slave relationships, she asks if the two harbored some kind of genuine love, affection and passion for each other. She presents evidence in the affirmative on this latter question while humbly admitting we will never ultimately know. Gordon-Reed is intent on walking a tight-rope of sorts. In limning the possible affective dimensions of their affair, she never discounts the brutal and coercive aspects of even the best possible master-slave relationship; for Gordon-Reed, slavery always involved a simmering battle. Yet, she insists if we don't allow for exceptions and anamolies within that war, if we insist that all slaves acted and reacted to a uniform manner to a uniform condition, we are distorting history and denying the marginal figures in history, like slaves, an essential element of their humanity.

The crux of Sally Hemings story occurs in the late summer of 1789 when ambassador Jefferson begins to make plans to return to America. At this time in France, Sally and her brother James could have sued the French Admiralty court for their freedom and likely won it. Plenty of evidence suggests the two Hemings siblings would have been aware of this. Madison Jefferson's 1873 account of his mother's life indicates that Sally approached Jefferson seeking her freedom and that the two came to a "bargain" or treaty. According to her son Madison's much later account, his mother Sally Hemings "'promised...extraordinary privileges'"(326) secured the eventual freedom of her children if she agreed to return to Jefferson. Although the timing of the bargaining in relation to Jefferson's plans for leaving France are unclear, Sally may have been bargaining with him while cognizant that she was pregnant.

Gordon-Reed reads deeply into Madison's account of his mother's treaty-making with her master. In it, she sees a woman who must have had good reason to trust a man. She sees a man who must have loved a woman; Jefferson apparently bargained with her hoping she would return with him. By Gordon-Reed's lights, if he didn't care, he could have just as easily left her behind. More intriguingly, Gordon-Reed's construction presents a woman who truly loved the man she bargained with; Sally returning with Jefferson basically brought her back to a world of second-hand citizenship and insecurity. At any time prior to her actually attaining her children's freedom, Jefferson could have died suddenly and thrown Sally and her children's fate into the far less friendly hands of his daughter Martha.

In framing Sally's decision to return, Gordon-Reed acknowledges again the difficulty of interpreting a relationship between a man and a woman who also happen to be master and slave. With great eloquence, Gordon-Reed writes, "[Sally Hemings] is ineligible for the mantles of respectable womanhood, conqueror, or rebel, there is no ready vocabulary to describe the young Hemings in Paris who decided to return to America with Jefferson beyond that of presumptive rape victim-so traumatized beyond the power of reason that she did not know better than to negotiate with and trust her rapist-or collaborating whore"(331).

Rectifying this lack, Sally Hemings is reinscribed with this book as a woman who pursued an avenue of resistance by forwarding her interests as a mother. And not only reinscribed as such. Gordon-Reed still insists on Sally as the lover; acknowledging that "the idea of their love has no power to change the basic reality of slavery's essential inhumanity"(365), Gordon-Reed rightfully maintains that to ignore the evidence of their love guided by an assumption of its impossiblity seems an equally dehumanizing interpretive turn.

Slavery certainly dehumanized Jefferson. Jefferson was a man who wanted people to love him and confrontation and coercion were anathema to him. As a slave-owner, he seemed continually torn between his desire to control and his desire to be loved. We really know little about the everyday, intimate give-and-take that characterized his and Sally's relationship over the years. Gordon-Reed surmises "One might say that the lack of information about her was a function of American slavery, an institution that forced most enslaved people into anonymity. Even with that there is something strange about [Sally's] near-invisibility in Jefferson family exchanges"(242). Seconding Fawn Brodies contention that the Jefferson family censored his letters to create a flattering portrait of Jefferson for posterity, she seems convinced that letters with reference to Sally were largely destroyed (243).

Sally's siblings figure more often in Jefferson's documents. One can only hope Sally was treated better than her brothers and sisters. While Jefferson treated her brothers Robert, James and Martin well in many respects, there was ultimately a great deal of strain in the relationship. He often treated him with what almost seems a calculated dose of disrespect. Jefferson let the brothers pursue their own economic agendas but on the condition that they were to come back to him as soon as he needed them. Although at least both James and Robert could read, Jefferson never sent them letters directly but instead directed all his messages to them orally, via third parties. Even after he had granted James his freedom, he attempted to summon him orally when he sought his services to fill the White House chef position. James was apparently quite offended.

The Hemings who were not Wayles (not related to Martha, Jefferson's wife) were often treated in an even more inhumane manner. Sally's half-sister Nancy and her children were given away as a wedding present to Jefferson's sister Anna and her husband Hastings Marks. When Marks decided to sell the family later, Jefferson bought Nancy back and arranged for his son-in-law to buy Nancy's daughter Critta. However, he refused to purchase or arrange a family purchase for Nancy's fifteen year old son who was sold to persons outside the family (519-520).

Sometimes, Jefferson would act humanely but express sentiments that spoke far differently. After Jefferson and Sally's half-brother Martin had a terrible falling out over something that remains a mystery to this day, Martin asked Jefferson to sell him. Jefferson readily agreed. After twenty years of service to him as a butler, Jefferson directed a son-in-law to sell James quickly, to a buyer that would be agreeable to him, regardless of price. Writing to his daughter of various matters Jefferson placed in the hands of her husband, he reminds "'There remains on his hands Martin and the Chariot'"(489), equating Martin with a chariot with a telling swoop of a phrase. What possible affective bond could survive what must have been the recurrent surfacing of such thoughts, assumptions and conceptions.

Yet, Jefferson felt some kind of tangled bond. These tangles were most involved in his relations with Sally and her children. Her two oldest children, William Beverly and Harriet, left Monticello to live as whites, never to return. With great poignancy and condemnation, Gordon-Reed deadpans, (597)"Jefferson arranged to have Harriet put on a stagecoach with fifty dollars when her time came to depart"(643). He legally freed his youngest sons, Madison and Eston. Gordon-Reed alludes to Madison's memories of a father was was "'not in the habit..;[of] partiality or fatherly affection'"(595). As Gordon-Reed wisely points out, Martha Jefferson and children had moved back to Monticello while Madison was young, effectively precluding Jefferson from fathering him or his younger brother Eston in an open and affectionate manner.

We have perhaps no better indication of Jefferson's conflicted feelings about the Hemings than the names he gave his Hemings children. Evidence clearly points to the fact that Jefferson named these children. He wanted to claim them at a certain level. Hemings claims, [the Hemings-Jefferson children] certainly knew they carried the names of people important to their father and had some thoughts on what this meant"(595).

Slavery debases and distorts its practitioners. Jefferson could not put it aside, even when it caused him and those close to him tremendous pain. And, it must have. Gordon-Reed makes this clear when she discusses the names of the Jefferson-Hemings children. She writes, "Names signify identity. Jefferson did not mind that the Hemings children bore names that signaled their identity to anyone knowledgeable about his family and associations. He evidently wanted that. Neither he nor his family, however, wanted to carry that signal of identity into posterity by indiscriminately putting the Hemings children's names into their letters"(620-621). The hurt can never be assuaged. Gordon-Reed's book begins to right the wrong.