'Thomas Jefferson'

When Thomas Jefferson began visiting The Forest at the beginning of the 1770s, he could scarcely have imagined that the names Jefferson and Hemings would be forever linked in the pages of history. Elizabeth Hemings herself would have found such a possibility unimaginable. Although she knew the role that slaves played in the lives of whites, she would have had no reason to believe that the world might someday pay attention to that. And even if the young man who came courting John Wayles's daughter, Martha, had any inkling that succeeding generations might know his name, the idea that the names of enslaved people would live on as well ran counter to every tenet of the world he knew. Lower-status people were not seen as wielding the kind of influence that would make their lives worthy of notice. Certainly few white slave owners would have acknowledged that those whom they enslaved shaped their lives. Society gave Elizabeth Hemings and her children no power to direct the course of John Wayles's life or that of his white wives and children. Yet their very presence influenced the lives of those around them, and a household that included the master's mixed-race children had issues that were not present in households without them.

Consider Martha Wayles Jefferson's life. She remains something of a cipher, a person whose face can exist only in the imagination for, unlike many other women of her class, she did not sit for a formal portrait that remains extant. Even if there were more written material by or about her, there is virtually no chance that any of it would have ever referred to her mixed-race half brothers and sisters and their mother. We are left to infer her feelings about her early family life from what we know of the choices she did and did not make, as well as the actions of the man who became her husband. By every indication, Elizabeth Hemings and her children remained close to Martha until her death. She chose to have them around when she could have chosen not to, installing in her own household her father's slave mistress and the children they had together. Jefferson kept faith with his wife's choice and continued the connection with the Hemingses until his death.

Martha Wayles Skelton married Thomas Jefferson on January 1, 1772, at the Forest. Jefferson's memorandum book entries reveal the festive nature of the event—money paid to the minister, for the marriage license, and to a fiddler. It also marks the first appearance of Elizabeth Hemings in Jefferson's records—listed as "Betty Hemmins." Jefferson tipped the household slave of his hosts. Hemings received a gratuity that day, most likely for services rendered in connection with the wedding ceremony. There was also a payment to Hemings's seventeen-year-old son, Martin, the second such reference to him in the memorandum books. In the year before the wedding, Martin received a gratuity during Jefferson's visit to the Forest to court Martha. This first mention of the Hemings family foreshadows the ties that bound Jefferson to them for decades to come.

Elizabeth Hemings was thirty-seven years old the day Martha married. Her older children—Mary, Martin, Betty, and Nancy—were nineteen, seventeen, thirteen, and eleven years old, respectively. Her children with the father of the bride—Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Peter—were ten, seven, five, three, and two. Over the course of the next five years, three more children arrived—her last child with John Wayles, a daughter Sarah, called Sally, and the two children she bore after age forty, John and Lucy. Of these final three, only Sally and John lived to adulthood, and they, of all members of the family, became most closely associated with the man Martha married on that winter day. The laws of marriage united the Wayleses and Jeffersons. The laws of property and slavery brought Elizabeth Hemings and all of her children, present and future, into that union.

The Dawn of Revolution

At the dawn of the 1770s Elizabeth Hemings was one of half a million people of African descent in what was still British North America. Although they represented 20 percent of the entire population of the thirteen colonies, the vast majority of black people were enslaved in the South—most of them concentrated in Hemings's Virginia and in South Carolina. In the preceding decade, tensions between London and the American colonists had risen to the surface as colonial authorities began to alter the nature of their relationship to the American colonies, issuing proclamations that limited westward expansion in deference to Native American tribes, instituting various tax provisions designed to pay for the French and Indian War and the administrative costs of maintaining the colonies, and enacting and enforcing trade policies that benefited British merchants at the expense of American producers.

As that conflict unfolded and many white colonists sought ways to express their unhappiness with England, they began to fashion themselves ever more urgently as a people under the threat of enslavement by the mother country's colonial authorities. Although they had extensive, firsthand knowledge of what slavery actually meant, and knew that they were not experiencing its full force, they defined their freedom in relation to the nonfreedom of the Africans whom they were enslaving. The irony of their posture, was noted during the time and has been analyzed almost endlessly ever since, although for its brevity and absolute dead-on insight Samuel Johnson's justly famous query in Taxation No Tyranny remains unmatched: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?"

Very early on, enslaved blacks in Hemings's Virginia saw their struggle as linked to what was going on between their white Virginia masters and the English, and they looked for ways to use the simmering dispute to their advantage. Although held in legal bondage, blacks made up nearly half of Virginia's population and were always a potential threat to their masters. They knew it, and so did white slave owners. White Virginians were quite nervous about the prospect that the English might encourage an uprising among blacks and, perhaps, Native Americans, who could still seriously threaten from Virginia's western frontier.

Even before Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, issued his proclamation in November 1775 promising freedom to blacks belonging to rebels who joined the Royalist cause, some enslaved Virginians expressed their willingness to take up arms against their masters. They approached British officials and directly offered to help. If antebellum slave owners and their post–Civil War neo-Confederate descendants constructed an idyllic, fairy-tale version of slavery depicting benevolent patriarchs ruling over loyal and completely contented slaves, pre-Revolutionary white Virginians harbored no such fantasies. Rebellions and rumors of rebellion during the 1750s and 1760s shaped their attitudes about the enslaved work force within their colony. Enslaved Afro-Virginians were an alien group that had to be subdued and from whom labor had to be coerced.

Elizabeth Hemings was neither a political actor nor a potential soldier, although she had thoughts about the events breaking around her. The enslaved community was generally nonliterate, but nonliterate does not equal nonobservant and nonknowledgeable. Because they could not easily send each other letters, slaves developed a much remarked-upon ability to pass information from community to community while running errands for their masters, visiting spouses on other plantations, or on trips with masters as they visited their friends and family. The Virginia colonists talked of revolution in their homes, committee meetings, and other venues, but there was not much that whites knew that the blacks around them did not know as well.

Whatever Hemings perceived of these events, more directly personal concerns would have overwhelmed any consideration of the white colonists' complaints about their circumstances. The really pivotal year in Hemings's personal life during the decade came before the Revolution started in earnest. Seventeen seventy-three was the year she gave birth to her last child with John Wayles, a daughter called Sally, and it was also the year that he died. Wayles's death put Hemings, her children, and other Wayles slaves on an uncertain path. The death of a master was often a calamitous event for enslaved people, but not chiefly for the reason given by apologists for slavery—the slaves' extreme love for and sorrow at the death of Ole Massa. Enslaved people had a completely practical, eminently personal reason for sorrow. When the master died, the chances of being sold and separated from family members increased enormously. In fact, slaves were most often separated when executors had to settle decedents' estates. Creditors had to be paid and property divided among the legally recognized children of the owner. Under either scenario slave families frequently ended up separated forever. If any weeping and wailing occurred when slave owners died, the most serious reason for tears was the fear of what might lie ahead.

As things turned out, Elizabeth Hemings and her children were not separated from one another forever, although there was no way for her to have known with certainty what would happen. We are left to ponder the strangeness of her situation. What did Hemings feel after having borne six children by Wayles? There is every indication that she loved her children and that they loved her. The closeness of the family over the years supports this. But what did she think of him? Hemings had lived in Wayles's household from the time she was eleven years old, and she had a marriage with another man that produced several of her first four children. Wayles seems to have turned to her only after his third wife's death. He was forty-five at the time, with three wives behind him, and four daughters. He lived for twelve years after his last wife's death and evidently did not think it necessary to marry a fourth time.

Slave owners only rarely acknowledged their sexual activity with slave women, and the women themselves effectively had no voice. So getting at the nature of the relationships between masters and their slave families is a delicate business. First and foremost is the issue of whether one can call sexual activity between a slave master and a slave—even over a long stretch of years—a "relationship" in the sense we know it. Enslaved women practically and legally could not refuse consent. Certainly the testimony from former slaves and the memory of slavery among black American women makes clear the prevalence of rape during slavery.

While the true-life experience of large numbers of African American women settles the matter for the overwhelming majority of cases, it cannot realistically settle it for every single one. There can be no denying that law and the cultural attitudes that at once inform and arise out of it exert immense control over the lives of individuals. It is also true enough that people do not always see themselves according to what the law and their neighbors say they are. At various points slaves were considered real estate for purposes of property law. At other times they were likened to personal property, like furniture and jewelry—things that could be bought and sold more easily than real estate. It is doubtful that many slaves thought of themselves as anything other than people—people who were oppressed and enslaved, but people nonetheless. Slaves, male and female, constantly tested the boundaries of their existences and had their own personal sense of themselves as individuals within the context of slavery. Without getting too far ahead in our story, the experiences of Elizabeth Hemings's daughters Mary and Sally offer examples of enslaved women who were amenable to unions with white men who were their legal masters—relationships that worked very much to their advantages and to the advantages of their children and later descendants.

Madison Hemings described his grandfather as having taken his grandmother "as a concubine." Later he described his mother as having become "Mr. Jefferson's concubine." To modern readers the term "concubine" conjures up images of the exotic and decadent—oversexed males with multiple females, usually kept in harems, to satisfy their merely carnal urges. In America, before the usage became archaic sometime in the twentieth century, the law defined a concubine as a woman who lived with a man without being married to him. That straightforward definition carried no implication of unbridled sexual license. Nor did it automatically signal how a man and a woman felt about each other, except insofar as people believed that if a man truly loved a woman he would marry her and that not marrying her proved a lack of love. In Virginia, of course, any black woman who lived with a white man could only have been his concubine. It was legally impossible to be anything else.

Examples of case law from Madison Hemings's Virginia give a good sense of the term's usage. In an 1857 suit involving a dispute over property in a white family, the judge referred to the decedent as having left part of his estate "to his six acknowledged illegitimate children, and to his concubine one tenth." In another, a judge observed that "a man was allowed to do for his concubine what he could not do had she been his lawful wife." In that case, the woman and man had lived together without marriage for a time, and then married, and the dispute involved what this meant for the couple's creditors. The opinion referred to the woman in question as the man's "concubine" before marriage and then his "wife" afterwards.

In other words, "concubine" was a part of the language and terminology of Madison Hemings's nineteenth-century world. To have called his grandmother a "common law wife" would have been inapposite, because Hemings knew his grandmother was a slave, and thus not "in law." The phrase "common law" is used to distinguish male-female unions made outside the statutory law of a state or jurisdiction, and defines the range of legal obligations and privileges a state might choose to confer upon a couple living under that arrangement. John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings could never have had a statutory marriage, nor could any legal obligations have arisen between them on the basis of their having lived together. "Mistress" would not have seemed appropriate either, because that term was often associated with women who were "kept" by married men. Hemings's reference to his grandmother's situation fits exactly with John Hartwell Cocke's statement about Jefferson and other widowed Virginia planters and bachelors. They often took slave women as a "substitute for a wife," the classic definition of the term "concubine" and the one that was used in both Hemings's and Cocke's time.

We cannot know, given the present state of information, exactly what went on between Hemings and Wayles beyond the facts that he was her master, she was his slave, and they had six children. Unlike her daughters Mary and Sally, Elizabeth Hemings took no known actions that telegraph what she thought about John Wayles, what she told her children about him, and what he thought of her. It may be instructive that at least two of Hemings's grandchildren gave some version of John Wayles's name to their own children, keeping the Wayles connection alive beyond whatever was the story of Elizabeth and John. Not every mixed-race family followed that practice. Many wanted absolutely nothing to do with the white males who were their biological fathers or grandfathers, feeling no desire to memorialize these men by naming their children after them. These men, and the connection to whiteness, were to be buried along with the institution of slavery. At least some of the Hemingses chose a different path.

One admittedly imperfect way to approach the possible nature of a slave owner's relationship to his enslaved biological family is to look at how the men treated the children from these unions. Their actions must be viewed along a continuum. At one end were men, a rare few, who acknowledged their children, freed them and their mothers, and made provisions for their futures. The vast majority of white men who had children with enslaved women did not do any of these things. They neither freed nor acknowledged their children, and by their actions—or inaction—showed that they could not have cared less about the mother or their offspring. One thing about the Wayles children is of note in this regard. We know definitely that two of his children with Hemings, if not all of them, knew how to read and write. Robert Hemings's letters to Jefferson are no longer extant, but James Hemings's writings show great proficiency. One wonders who taught them.

It is not impossible, but would seem improbable, that Jefferson had any direct hand in this, that he taught them to read and write once they came into his life. It seems more likely that Hemings' children learned to read when they were still in their father's household. Either John Wayles himself or their sister, Martha Wayles Jefferson, was the possible source of their literacy. John Wayles had been able to rise in the world because his illiterate grandfather had made sure that his sons and daughter received at least a basic education. He was also an apparently religious man, or at least he took the trappings of religion seriously, attending services regularly and involving himself in the affairs of the congregation. A number of slave owners, under the influence of religious beliefs, taught "favored" slaves to read so that they could study the Bible. This might explain why Wayles remained an important figure to the family, even though he did not free his children. His grandson Eston Hemings named his first son John Wayles Hemings.

It is impossible to know Wayles's thoughts about freeing his children. On the one hand, he may have had no consideration of freeing Elizabeth Hemings and his children at all. There is little reason to believe that a man who could involve himself so directly in the African slave trade, knowing the deaths he was purchasing in the process, would necessarily feel sentimental about his enslaved children or their mother. On the other hand, Wayles died before Virginia's post–Revolutionary War liberalization of its emancipation laws. The statute of 1723 was still in effect when he died: "no negro, mullatto or indian slaves shall be set free upon any pretence whatsoever, except for some meritorious services, to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council." The statute went on to say that if a master tried to free a slave, "the churchwardens of the parish" could "take up, and sell the said, negro, mulatto, or indians, as slaves" and keep the proceeds for the benefit of the parish.

To free Hemings and their children, Wayles would have had to convince the governor of Virginia and the Virginia council that they had performed some "meritorious services" to him. That would have been a tough sell, and the man who started in the colony as a servant and had been raised to a point where he could marry the daughters of the upper classes may not have wanted to press his luck much further. Moreover, what Elizabeth Hemings had "done"—save Wayles from a lonely existence as a widower—was more his doing than hers, and it probably was not what the burgesses had in mind when they required "meritorious services." Wayles's small children could not have fit the bill either. Instead of being emancipated, all the Hemingses ended up as the property of Wayles's son-in-law Thomas Jefferson, and it was through him that the Wayles-Hemings children reaped the benefits of their paternity.

It took until January of 1774 to settle John Wayles's estate, dividing property among his legitimate heirs. The Forest was now occupied by Wayles's daughter Elizabeth and her husband, Francis Eppes. As the division proceeded, and the Wayles heirs sorted out what was theirs, human and nonhuman, Elizabeth Hemings and her children—Nancy, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally—and her grandchild, Daniel Farley, the son of Mary Hemings, were sent to live at "Guinea," a Wayles farm in Amelia County. They stayed there until Jefferson moved them to another farm, Elk Hill, in Goochland County. He took several of her older children to live at Monticello. Mary, the eldest, served as a seamstress and pastry cook for Jefferson's family. Martin became Jefferson's butler and would remain in that position for twenty, somewhat tempestuous years. Betty (whose last name was Brown) became a house maid—she was actually the first to go. Two of Elizabeth's Wayles children came along, too: Robert and James. Not long after this period of transition, the entire Hemings family was reunited when Elizabeth and the rest of her children were brought to Monticello, which became their principal home for the next five decades.

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed

Read yesterday's excerpt, "Young Elizabeth Hemings's World."

Tomorrow on The Root: In the next excerpt from "The First Monticello" author Annette Gordon-Reed explores the ways that Thomas Jefferson's Virginia estate, Monticello, became both his private sanctuary and embodiment of his conflicted feelings about slavery. Jefferson and his wife Martha inherited the Hemings family, many of whom were related to Martha Wayles Jefferson by blood. Here is a glimpse of their lives at Monticello.