The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (6 page)

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.

Madison Hemings, one of Elizabeth’s many grandsons, said one such complication arose early on in young Elizabeth’s life. Hemings, speaking about his grandmother’s origins, said that the disjuncture between having an enslaved black mother and a free white father was the source of conflict in Elizabeth’s early childhood. Her father, “the captain of an English trading vessel,” met Elizabeth’s mother, described as a “full-blooded African, and possibly a native of that country,” at or near Williamsburg. Captain Hemings wanted to buy his daughter, whom he had acknowledged as his “own flesh.” Even though he offered “an extraordinarily large price for her,” Hemings’s owner, identified as “John Wales,” refused to sell the child. When this happened, Captain Hemings plotted to “take the child by force or stealth.” His plans were thwarted when “leaky fellow servants” of Elizabeth’s mother alerted “Mr. Wales,” who then brought mother and child into the “great house,” where he could keep an eye on them. Hemings explained that his grandfather refused to sell his grandmother because he was interested in how this mixed-race child would turn out. After a while Captain Hemings gave up and left Virginia and his child.
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Exactly where in Africa Elizabeth Hemings’s mother was supposed to have come from is unknown. That she was African fits extremely well with the demographic profile of Virginia at the time of her daughter’s birth. The 1730s marked the high tide for importation of Africans into the colony. More were brought into the Old Dominion during this period than in any other decade in which the slave trade was legal. Newly imported Africans made up 34 to 44 percent of the colony’s total slave population. The largest numbers were from Angola, followed by the Bight of Biafra (off the coast of Nigeria) and the region of Senegambia (Senegal and Gambia). The Williamsburg area had particularly high concentrations of people who had been born in Africa, making it a place full of Africans of diverse ethnic origins, native-born blacks, Anglo-American colonists, and English seamen—a multicultural, multilingual province, where an English ship captain would likely encounter a “full-blooded African” woman.
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Under law Elizabeth Hemings’s father had no right to her, and if he wanted his child, unless her owner in the spirit of generosity wanted to give her away, he would have had to buy her. If the owner refused, there was no recourse. But just who owned Elizabeth when she was born? Although John Wayles did live near Williamsburg, in Charles City County, he apparently did not own Elizabeth Hemings at her birth. Rather, he came into ownership of her when she was about eleven years old upon his marriage to Martha Eppes in 1746. The couple’s marriage settlement (essentially a contract that, among other things, allowed the wife to retain control over property brought to the marriage, which in slaveholding areas very often meant slaves) included Elizabeth Hemings and, presumably, her mother because whoever owned the mother owned the child.
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This confusion over ownership, and the tangle that emerges in sorting it out, reveals with great clarity what happened when human beings were treated as “things.”

Martha Eppes Wayles’s father, Francis Eppes IV, died in 1734. In a 1794 listing, Jefferson’s Farm Book recorded Elizabeth Hemings’s year of birth as “abt” 1735, but dropped the equivocation in other listings. So it cannot be said with certainty whether she was born just before Eppes died or just after. By his will drafted in 1733, Eppes set out with great specificity what property he wanted to leave to each of his children. When speaking of his daughter Martha, he wrote that he gave “unto my my daughter Martha Eppes Several negroes following, the negro woman Jenny, my negro girl Agge, my negro girl Judy, my negro girl Sarah, my negro girl Dinah….” At the end of the section devoted to Martha, Eppes also gave her a share with her sister Anne in two male slaves, Argulas and Will, and a female slave named Parthena, stating, “[M]y will and desire is that the increase if any from ye said Parthena may be equally divided between them when they, or either of them shall come of age or mary [
sic
].”
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Was one of these six the “full-blooded African” woman?

Not one of those names is African, but we would not expect them to be, since most slave owners called their African captives by the names they wanted when they arrived in the New World, instead of what their names actually were. Two names in that group, however, are very closely associated with later generations of the Hemings family. “Sarah” was the name of Elizabeth’s youngest daughter, more famously known by her nickname, Sally. In turn Sally Hemings would have nieces and a granddaughter named Sarah, and the name would continue in the family. As we will see, however, Sally Hemings more likely got her name from her father’s family. “Parthena” was an alternate spelling of the name Parthenia, which stands out among the usual run of Marthas, Marys, Elizabeths, and Annes. Elizabeth Hemings would have a daughter and several granddaughters called Thenia in Jefferson’s records, a diminutive of Parthenia. In the marriage settlement between John Wayles and Martha Eppes, the five female slaves given to Martha by her father are mentioned in the same order in which they appeared in Francis Eppes’s will—Jenny, Aggie (now spelled with an
ie
), Sarah, and Dinah. The slave Judy, whose name appears between Aggie and Sarah, is rendered as Judah. Several other names were added in the next line of the will, “Kate, Parthenia [now spelled with an
i
], Betty and Ben, a boy.”
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Just which of these women was Elizabeth’s mother? When preparing his will giving Elizabeth Hemings to his own daughter Martha, John Wayles makes clear that Elizabeth was the “Betty” referred to in the property settlement when he married Martha Eppes. Elizabeth must have been the daughter of one of the Eppes slaves given to Martha, as she had evidently not been born yet when the will was written. That the Eppes-Wayles marriage settlement lists these new names along with the five enslaved women given to Martha in her father’s will suggests that in the years between 1733, when Francis Eppes willed the slave women to his daughter, and 1746, when the settlement was drawn, these women had given birth. Some, if not all, of the added names may represent their children who by law would automatically have belonged to Martha as well.

Given the uniqueness of the name, and the prevalence of its diminutive in Elizabeth Hemings’s family, it seems very likely that Parthenia, whose “increase” Francis Eppes said should be divided between his two daughters, was related to Elizabeth. She may, in fact, have been her mother. The provisions of his will indicate that Francis Eppes IV was a hard man. He clearly had no compunction about separating mothers from children to achieve some sort of parity between his own offspring, as sections of his will make clear. He wanted to be fair to each child (but with a tilt toward his sons), down to the number of “silver spoons” and “feather beds.”
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Indeed, that was apparently the reason for having Martha and Anne Eppes share Parthenia and two other male slaves. They appear at the end of the section of the will as if Eppes had been rounding up a sum of money. He knew that to give Parthenia to one daughter would be giving that daughter a bonus. Parthenia would have children who would always belong to her owner, while Will’s and Argulas’s children might not, if the males were to have children with a woman owned by another. Eppes’s resolution—sharing Parthenia and her increase—contained a built-in cruelty, for while Parthenia could not be in two places at one time, she could have children who could be divided between two sisters, thus separating mother from children and siblings from one another. This outcome was avoided by means of partition, with Parthenia going to Martha, and the other two slaves to her sister Anne. Whatever her mother’s name, any tussle over young Elizabeth Hemings occurred between Captain Hemings and some member of the Eppes family, not John Wayles. The Eppeses resided at Bermuda Hundred, in the immediate vicinity of Williamsburg. It was there that Elizabeth Hemings was most likely born.

The Eppeses

Elizabeth’s owners, the Eppeses, were among the earliest arrivals to Virginia from their native England. The founding settler, Francis, served on the Council of Virginia in the 1630s. The family took up residence along the James and Appomattox Rivers in Henrico County, which would later be divided in two, creating a new county called Chesterfield. Like other arriving families of the day, the Eppeses achieved large landholdings through the headright system, a scheme designed to stimulate immigration to Virginia.
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In the beginning years of the colony, when the experiment seemed in danger of failure—with immigrant indentured servants dying of disease at alarming rates, starving, or being killed by Native Americans who resented the encroachment on their land—the owners of the Virginia Company decided to take drastic measures to get bodies into the colony to do productive work. Throughout the seventeenth century and into the beginning of the eighteenth, anyone who paid his way or for passage of other immigrants to Virginia received fifty acres of land for each person, hence the term “headright.” For a time, people received headrights for bringing in African slaves.
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Francis Eppes obtained seventeen hundred acres of land under this system, giving his family a valuable head start in the emerging colony.
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As the years passed, members of the clan followed the standard practice of elites the world over, marrying into other families of similar “rank,” or sometimes even their own cousins. These unions further concentrated landownership within the small planter elite, although by the middle of the eighteenth century the Eppeses were no longer at the forefront of Virginia power and society. With the greater amount of land came the greater need for hands to work the fields of tobacco that quickly emerged as the colony’s lifeblood. Until a population bust and improved economic prospects in England dried up immigration, white indentured servants provided the bulk of the work. The expansion of the slave trade provided a new labor source. In this way those who would later be called the first families of Virginia became enthusiastic promoters and beneficiaries of African slavery.

Because there was no grant of land at the end of the indentured servant’s tenure, the Virginia system led to huge inequities between families like the Eppeses and the average Englishmen and Englishwomen who came to the colony. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Virginia elites had taken the best land for themselves, leaving the former indentured servants land poor and resentful. Inequalities of class proved the source of great tension in the colony, fostering instances of rebellion great and small. These tensions were buried when race entered the picture as the prime dividing line for status within the colony. There would be no alliance between blacks and lower-class whites, who each in their own way had legitimate grievances against their overlords. Instead, poor whites, encouraged by the policies of the elites, took refuge in their whiteness and the dream that one day they, too, could become slave owners, though only a relative handful could ever hope to amass the land, wealth, and social position of the most prominent members of the Virginia gentry, who gained their place early on and would keep it for decades to come.

By the time Elizabeth’s owner, Francis Eppes IV, took his place at the family seat in Bermuda Hundred, this group had firmly established an identity and way of life. Determined to smooth out the rough edges of their origins, they aspired to gentility. They built fashionably large houses, spent their leisure time visiting other members of their social set, and attended hunting parties and horse races. Members of the Eppes family, in particular, were known for their fondness for horse racing. In sum, the Eppeses and their cohort sought to reproduce the accoutrements of upper-class life in England—to the extent that could be done in the still feral wilderness of Virgina.
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