The Hemingses of Monticello

Annette Gordon-Reed's The Heminges of Monticello won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. It's an exhaustive yet at times emotionally keen look at the family that served as the slaves of Thomas Jefferson during his lifetime at his home, Monticello. That he had a complicated relationship with them is an understatement, as one of them, Sally, was his mistress for thirty-six years, bearing him seven children.

Gordon-Reed has written about Jefferson and Sally before. In a previous book she outlined the case for his paternity of her children. If you are still suspicious of this fact (sort of the American history equivalent of doubting evolution) this book is not for you, as there is no equivocation about it--Jefferson and Hemings were lovers and parents. Instead, Gordon-Reed gives us a family biography, starting with Sally's grandmother, an unknown African woman who bore the children of a sea captain, named Hemings. One of the offspring was Elizabeth, who would become the matriarch of Monticello.

The complicated social fabric of slavery is the subtext of this family history. Captain Hemings did not want to see his children sold into slavery, but that was the law, and they were. Elizabeth was purchased by a John Wayles, who had three wives that all predeceased him. He then took Elizabeth as a lover, and she bore him several children, including Sally. Wayles was also the father of Martha Wayles Skelton, who would later go on to marry a certain Thomas Jefferson. When Wayles died, Jefferson, through his wife, inherited all his land and slaves. Martha struggled through several pregnancies, and finally died at a very young age. Jefferson vowed to her that he would never remarry. He kept that promise, but he didn't remain alone. Instead, he took as a concubine his wife's half-sister, Sally.

This is a difficult narrative to follow, and I can only imagine how difficult it was to write. The Jefferson-Hemings family tree has several interlocking branches. Every so often Gordon-Reed stops to remind us that the slaveholders and their slaves were related. She tells us how common mixing of the races was, particularly among masters and slaves, as well as the social conditions that were alive in the day. At times I forgot who was who (Gordon-Reed frequently referred to a person as "Hemings" and I forgot who she was talking about) and how they related to each other, but the overall effect was not diminished.

Jefferson and Sally Hemings first took up during his stay in Paris as a diplomat. In France, American slaves could leave their masters (Jefferson never bothered to register those he took with him, defying the law). At a critical moment in about 1790, Sally threatened to leave, but he made a deal with her: if she returned with him, he would free her children. Their first child was conceived in France, and she returned with him (as did her older brothers, Robert and James, the latter having been trained as a French chef).

Jefferson has been written about many times as a complicated figure, a man who preached liberty but kept human beings in bondage. Gordon-Reed has another go in this book, and she comes close to hitting the mark. He was a man who avoided conflict. He was not forward-thinking enough to advocate abolition, but he was kinder to his slaves than most, paying them wages. Of course they were still slaves, and if one of them ran away he had them tracked down. He thought of the black race as perpetual children, capable of having trades, but if they showed too much intelligence it was chalked up to their white blood. But toward the end of his life he was completely reliant on them. His daughters and other family members had to be completely aware of his relationship with Sally, and they tolerated it (Gordon-Reed points out that because he could not marry Sally, this was a godsend for Jefferson's daughters, because they need not fear a step-mother taking everything).

As to the nature of Jefferson and Hemings' relationship, Gordon-Reed does some nice tightrope walking. Was it love? Was it rape? She points out that even white women had little rights when it came to the marriage bed--there was no such thing as rape in marriage, as there was no such thing as rape in slavery. When Jefferson took up with Sally she was seventeen, he was forty-seven, and he was her owner, so it's difficult to rationalize it as a mutual relationship. But Gordon-Reed points out eloquently: "It takes a huge liberty with her life, however, to assume that she was raped, and that she knew she could escape from her rapist forever, and for a time actually asserted her right to be free of him, but nevertheless decided to return with him to Virginia to live out the rest of her life having more forced sex. That construction too easily uses the fact that she was born a slave (and a black person) to presume an irreparably damaged, completely cowed, and irrational personality over one who had the capacity to know her circumstances and to intelligently use her knowledge to assess the risks and possible rewards of taking a particular action--in other words, to think."

In addition to the Jefferson-Sally relationship, Gordon-Reed offers other interesting facets of the family's life. James, her older brother, is particularly interesting. He was trained as a chef, and Jefferson freed him (along with his brother Robert). But he ended up committing suicide, and Gordon-Reed's telling of it is heartbreaking. She also discusses how it was pretty much common knowledge that Jefferson had children with a slave (a rabid racist muckraker named James Callender wrote about it during Jefferson's presidency) and John Quincy Adams, a pillar of the abolition movement, wrote anonymous doggerel satirizing it. It seems that being against slavery did not mean one wasn't a racist.

The story ends bittersweetly. Jefferson did free his children (two of them, who were seven-eighths Caucasian, simply left Monticello and slipped into the white world). But Jefferson lived such a profligate lifestyle that he died deep in debt, and thus his estate had to be sold. His surviving legitimate daughter was left with nothing, and many of his slaves had to be sold, though friends and relatives did their best to keep families together. Sally was quietly freed, and outlived Jefferson by only nine years, in a rented house in Charlottesville.