Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (26 page)

When Jeff Randolph took Henry Randall around Monticello in the 1850s and told him that two Hemings women had children who resembled Jefferson, he also said that he knew the identities of the real fathers of the mixed-race Hemings children. Randall wrote down what Jeff told him:

Samuel Carr was a convenient scapegoat because, in fact, he did have a black family. He fathered several children with a free woman of color, Judath Barnett, and this black family lived in a settlement of free blacks north of Charlottesville that came to be known as Free State. Its very existence was a rebuke and a repudiation of Thomas Jefferson's insistence that free blacks could not live side by side with whites. By the time Jeff pinned the blame for the Hemings children on his Carr cousin, Samuel was in his grave, and his mixed-race family had decamped for more secure freedom in Ohio.

Possibly, Jeff Randolph knew the truth about his grandfather's “proceedings” and kept it hidden from the women in the family. Jeff told his sister Ellen that Samuel and Peter Carr had admitted their guilt to him in a tearful confession sometime in the second decade of the nineteenth century. But if that were so, why didn't Jeff tell his mother on her deathbed and relieve her torment?

Before we pass judgment on Jeff Randolph, there are additional factors to consider. Like his father, Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph, Jeff was forced into the role of buffer and middleman, handling the dirty business. Like his father, he was caught between Jefferson and the women in the family, who were blind in their devotion to Jefferson. He always had to consider the feelings of his mother and sisters while bowing to his grandfather, and simultaneously he had to make everything run.

Jeff's account hints at a sympathy for his enslaved relatives—a dangerous sentiment for a slave master—and hints also at a divide in the family. His sister Ellen called these people—unquestionably her own blood kin—the “yellow children” and spoke of them with disdain as “a race of half-breeds…. The thing will not bear telling.”
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We sense feelings of astonishing intensity and relentlessness. At Monticello the “yellow children” lived in the glare of those hostile feelings every day. No act of loyalty or devotion could mitigate those feelings, because for Ellen the mere existence of these children defiled the reputation of her grandfather. This is strikingly different from Jeff, who spoke of the Hemingses neutrally, even sympathetically.

Jeff had connections to the African-American community his sister might not have known about, and at almost the same time he was making his revelations to the biographer about the mixed-race children of Monticello, he offered crucial help to a Charlottesville “black” family trying to cross the legal line into whiteness. Around 1835 a free mulatto woman named Ann Foster, a property owner who lived near the University of Virginia, gave birth to a son she named Clayton Randolph Foster. Her bestowing the name Randolph proves nothing by itself, but an obscure court record from the 1850s is intriguing: “Upon evidence of Thomas J. Randolph…Susan Catharine Foster and Clayton Randolph Foster, children of Ann Foster, are [declared by the court to be] not negroes in the meaning of the act of assembly.”
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To give such evidence, Jeff had to prove to the court's satisfaction that he had authoritative knowledge of sufficient white blood in the Foster lineage to have them declared “not negroes.” At the very least, Jeff knew this mixed-race family very well. He was less inclined than his sister to revile such people as “a race of half-breeds,” knowing as he did the peculiar geography of the parallel world that Jefferson's ideology compelled them to deny.

Jeff offered the same help to the grandchildren of Mary Hemings Bell, doing what he could to rescue a few people from the system. These rescues present themselves as psychological mini-dramas, with hints of secret blood ties, hidden identities, and a redemptive climax; they suggest hidden grief endured by the masters, consciences we cannot perceive until we learn to read the secret signs.

The insanity of this world is apparent in the story of the Fosters, who walked into the Albemarle County courthouse as black people and left as whites, their true genealogy abolished. And the brutality of this world is apparent in the nature of the evidence Jefferson's partisans offered for his innocence of the charges James Callender had made against him. One of Jefferson's supporters blithely admitted that rape was common at Monticello: “In gentlemen's houses everywhere, we know that the virtue of unfortunate slaves is assailed with impunity…. Is it strange, therefore, that a servant of Mr. Jefferson's, at a home where so many strangers resort…should have a mulatto child? Certainly not.”
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Ellen Randolph made a similar admission. She wrote that young white men in the vicinity of Monticello regarded the slave quarter as their bordello: “There were dissipated young men in the neighborhood who sought the society of the mulatresses and they…were not anxious to establish any claim of paternity in the results of such associations.” Ellen may have been referring to her brother Jeff's school friends, who were “intimate with the Negro women,” according to Edmund Bacon.
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The silent implication was that the black women were immoral, but Jeff Randolph defended the character of slaves: “There was as much decency of deportment and as few illegitimates [among the slaves] as among the laboring whites elsewhere; as many lived in wedlock from youth to age without reproach.”
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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.

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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”:

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.
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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

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.”
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“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 children. 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:

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.
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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.