Adapted from THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO by Annette Gordon-Reed. Copyright © 2008 by Annette Gordon-Reed. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

When the Hemingses assembled at Monticello, they entered the somewhat quixotic dream world of their new owner. Jefferson was already five years into his determined effort to build and constantly improve his home in the sky, an effort that would continue almost unabated for the next five decades. In the early years, Jefferson referred to his emerging homestead as the "Hermitage," but soon settled on the name Monticello, "little mountain," to describe the place where he would make his home. Living there was a reverie of long standing for him. But the space on the mountain and the structures he built there (two different versions of the main house at Monticello would emerge) represented much more than a mere residence. In ways both intended and unintended, Monticello became an almost perfect projection of Jefferson's personality—his vaulting ambition, his respect for and adherence to aspects of a classical past, his faith in innovation and optimism about the future, his extreme self-indulgence, and his genius.

There was something else. The historian Rhys Isaac has written eloquently about the "possible meanings" of Jefferson's choice to build his home where he did, atop a mountain separated "from the corn and tobacco culture that paid for its buildings." He also set himself apart from "the African-American communities" that populated his estates, from the "women who nurtured him in his infancy, and whose youngsters had been his companions." Monticello, the "home" plantation, towered above Jefferson's immediately surrounding quarter farms, Shadwell, Lego, and Tufton. Isaac astutely raised the core predicament of Jefferson's existence. His love of his country, Virginia, and his ambivalence about the institution central to the life of that colony, and then state, emerged as a constant theme throughout his life. This man who wanted desperately to be seen by his contemporaries and posterity as a progressive had a way of life that depended upon what ultimately was—and he took to be—a retrogressive labor system. Certainly Jefferson's years in Paris were among the happiest in his life in part because he could live there as an enlightened aristocratic gentleman without depending upon the labor of enslaved people. In Dumas Malone's words, in Paris, Jefferson "was able to be the sort of man he wanted to be."

Having absolutely no will to divest himself of his human property, Jefferson was in a bind. There were, however, examples of very prosperous Virginian slave owners of his class who did relinquish their property rights in human beings and freed their slaves. But religion strongly influenced these men, and Jefferson, a creature of ethics, was not like them. Throughout history, religion has been the source of many an "irrational" act, for both good and evil. The ethical sense has never been so good at exciting passionate, caution-thrown-to-the-wind actions. And certainly by the standard of any age, the act of voluntarily giving up the entire basis of one's wealth that could be passed on to one's children would be considered irrational. That slaves were human property is an issue that naturally concerns us in the twenty-first century very much. It did not, to any great degree, concern members of Jefferson's generation in Virginia, or else they would not have held slaves.

Operating under the constraints of his personality, Jefferson opted for a different course: one that allowed him to continue to espouse the progressive belief in emancipation, thus holding on to his very deep need to be seen as an intelligent man of the future, while maintaining the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed. Though he understood viscerally that slavery was wrong, he resigned himself to the institution and rationalized that the project of emancipation was best left to future generations, his revolutionary generation having done its part by creating the United States of America. The debate about the best course of action regarding slavery would remain for him largely a political abstraction, carried on in the republic of letters. But what was to be done about the problem on a day-to-day basis? With the help of architecture and landscaping, Jefferson arranged his personal life to minimize the reminders of his entanglement with African slavery. He took to the mountain with his wife, surrounded himself with enslaved people—some of whom, his wife's blood relatives, he could treat as something other than slaves—and set about creating his own world with them.

The first Hemingses who came to Monticello with Martha Wayles Jefferson in 1772 saw a dwelling that was still in a very rudimentary state. Martha and Thomas Jefferson began their married life in the South Pavilion at Monticello, the one-room building—the first at the site—that Jefferson built while still a bachelor. They ate and slept in the room that housed his books, the furniture, and their clothing. Fifteen-year-old Betty Brown, who served as Martha's maid, was apparently the very first Hemings to arrive; as fate would have it, she would be the last one to leave the mountain. Indeed, she likely accompanied the couple on their much written-about winter journey to the mountain, though no mention is ever made of her. Members of Jefferson's class did not generally travel by themselves, and certainly a bride going to her new home would not have left her personal maid behind, for there was much to do to create a new household. We have no indication where young Betty or the other later-arriving Hemingses stayed. Nor do we know where the rest of the family members lived when they were all brought together in 1775. It would not have been a difficult task to build cabins to house them, although one wonders how a couple living in such small quarters could have made use of a butler, two maids, and two other personal attendants. The only plausible explanation is that the Jeffersons set out right from the start of their life together to live as if they were in normal circumstances—entertaining family and friends in their small quarters—since it was a given that it would be some time before their family home was finished.

This marked a dramatic change for the Hemingses. Elizabeth Hemings had grown up serving in two well-established households, the Eppes home at Bermuda Hundred and the Forest. Her children's experiences had been the same. They probably did not know it, but they were now beginning a way of life that would feature constant physical upheaval and change—living and working in what was to become a perpetual construction site. While this may have been exciting to Jefferson, who as the owner and conceiver of the projects would have had a strong incentive to put up with any of the adverse consequences of his choices, those who had to live and work amid the chaos may have felt differently.

Elizabeth Hemings was no stranger to Jefferson's personality and quirks, and one yearns to know what she thought of this bookish and eccentric young man with the gadgets in his pockets and a tendency to sing as he went about his business. Even before Wayles died and Jefferson came into formal ownership of her family, there were signs that her children's destinies would be shaped by his demands and desires. We can trace the beginnings of this process in Jefferson's memorandum books in the early 1770s. In those years Hemings's eldest son, Martin, then a teenager, appears several times receiving gratuities and payments for catching and selling to Jefferson his beloved mockingbirds. From those early days Hemings's sons began to learn to do things Jefferson wanted to have done. Once he took ownership of them, the process of shaping all the Hemingses to suit his aims only intensified.

Almost as soon as he became their owner, Jefferson singled out the older generation of Hemings males—Martin, Robert, and, as he matured, James—for special treatment. Each man had some degree of freedom within his enslaved status. All were allowed to travel around by themselves, to learn trades, to hire themselves out to employers of their own choice, and to keep all their wages. Despite their status on the law books, Jefferson treated them, to a degree, as if they were lower-class white males. That Robert and James Hemings were his new wife's half brothers was reason enough to make him see them as different from other slaves. They would have been his in-laws, had slaves been "in law."

Not all slave owners who shared family ties with enslaved people responded this way, but it should not come as a surprise that some of them might have felt sentimental about blood relationships. Blood mattered a great deal in Virginia society. Race and caste complicated this further, but there are enough instances of fathers who emancipated their children to show that race and status did not always obliterate attentions to family connections. Although Martin Hemings, Elizabeth's eldest son, had no blood tie to Martha Jefferson, Jefferson's response to him evidently derived from the fact that he shared a mother with the Hemings-Wayles children. As things turned out, Jefferson freed two of these men—Robert and James—the only slaves he legally emancipated during his lifetime. They, along with Jefferson's children Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings, were set free as young people when they had their lives ahead of them. The other slaves Jefferson emancipated, all Hemingses—John Hemings, Joseph Fossett, and Burwell Colbert—were, by the standards of the time, old men who had given their lives to Jefferson; they were the "trusted," "worthy" slaves, freed on the basis of "merit." Put another way, Robert, James, Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings gained freedom because of who they were—Wayles's sons, Martha's brothers, and Jefferson's children, respectively—while the other men were freed because of what they had done.

In keeping with gender roles of the day, Elizabeth Hemings's sons had more opportunities than their sisters to broaden their lives by going outside of the home. Enslaved males were generally employed at a much greater variety of jobs than female slaves. If they were not agricultural workers, they were carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, or barbers, engaged in the types of jobs deemed unsuitable for women. Sex segregation became even more pronounced when Virginia's economy diversified after the Revolutionary War. The shift from tobacco to wheat as a cash crop opened up a host of subsidiary jobs for slaves to fill. More and more enslaved men were taken out of the fields to perform tasks associated with the processing of this new crop, working in mills and granaries, turning wheat into flour. As men were shifted into these and other types of jobs—working in mines, iron works, and other industries—fieldwork became even more the province of women and children. The Hemings men were not agricultural workers. They spent their time in the house or traveling with and attending to Jefferson, and were transformed by the kind of work they did and experiences they had, whether it was being trained to become a barber or chef, traveling alone to places near and far from their home, or living by themselves in various Virginia towns.

The Hemings women were not eligible for the transformative experiences that shaped the lives of their male relatives, but they were not treated like other enslaved women at Monticello. Although they, like the male Hemingses, were attached by blood and affinity to Jefferson's wife, he viewed them differently because they were females. His response to Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters over the years was a gender-appropriate—that is, by eighteenth-century standards—mirror image of his response to the male Hemingses. He constructed the Hemings women along more traditional European feminine lines. The women were exempted from work in the fields, even when everyone else had to go there at harvest time; they instead performed chores not unlike those that many white women were doing—sewing, mending clothes, looking after children, and baking cakes.

Jefferson took the Hemings women out of the pattern that had been well established in his home territory. From the very beginning, Virginia's slave society situated black women outside the scope of European notions of femininity. A notion grew up very early that black women were an "exception to the gender division of labor" and could be sent into the fields to work, while wealthy white women were seen as too delicate for that. White Virginians codified this idea in 1643 when free black women were made "tithables." This meant that a tax could be placed on their labor, just like that of free white men and enslaved men and women. White women were not tithables, because they worked in the home. In other words, black women who were out of slavery were treated like white men instead of like white women. As the years passed, the connection between black women and hard physical labor became so firmly entrenched in the minds of white masters that the women "were as one with their farming tools and called, simply, 'hoes.'"

Jefferson's special treatment of the Hemings women allowed him to think of himself as a "good" and "kind" master. By exempting them from labor in the fields, he set them apart from the other black women who tended and harvested his tobacco and wheat, putting them in a social and, no doubt, psychological limbo—for the women themselves and the white males around them. The great irony is that, in doing this, he also cut the women off from the traditions of their African foremothers. Wherever she was from, the chances were great that Elizabeth Hemings's mother would have grown up to work in the fields, as would her daughters and their daughters. In the vast majority of the West African communities from which most slaves in North America were brought, agricultural work was women's work to a substantial degree. To the African mind, there was nothing unfeminine about this.

Not having an African mind, Jefferson defined the Hemings women, just one generation separated from Africa, along European lines. Accordingly, he dressed them differently from other enslaved women on the plantation. When he was away from Monticello during his political life, he bought the Hemings sisters Irish linen, muslin, and calico, making sure they were not all in the same pattern to avoid monotony in their dress. He purchased fitted cotton stockings for them, taking note of the sizes. Other enslaved women at Monticello "received a uniform allotment of osnaburg, the coarse brownish linen issued to slaves all over the south . . . and baggy stockings of woven cloth." At one point, when she was ill, Elizabeth Hemings's daughter Critta was sent to "the Springs" to take the cure. The Hemings women were not free white women, but they were not hard-laboring black women either. They were something else. Just what that "else" was is difficult for us with our well-developed sense of racial identities and meanings to gauge precisely. That the Hemings women's existence in this "middle category" did not lead to their immediate freedom did not make their life in that state meaningless to them. Even though enslaved, these women had inner lives that were shaped by what did and did not happen to them on a daily basis—and by what they saw happening to others.

Jefferson's attitude toward the male Hemingses has long been commented upon and, generally, portrayed in a positive light, as an example of his innate humanity breaking through a slave owner's persona that many find troubling today. As we will see in the coming chapters, Jefferson acknowledged their masculinity (particularly that of Robert and James Hemings) and refused to take all of it—letting them do some of the things that men of the day would be expected to do, allowing them to have a measure of control over the course of their lives. All this raises an obvious question avoided for many years: If Jefferson responded to the masculinity of certain Hemings males, how did he respond to the femininity of their sisters?

By all accounts of them, in contemporary writings and the family histories of Jeffersons and Hemingses, the Hemings women were seen as beautiful and desirable. The white males on the mountain, Jefferson family members and his employees, responded to them in that way.  Practically every adult Jefferson male associated with Monticello was said, either by his own family members, the families of those enslaved, or nonfamily members (white and black), to have had sexual relations with Hemings women: Jefferson, Peter Carr, Samuel Carr, and John Wayles Eppes. In a way that seems at once astounding and unsurprising, Monticello seems to have resembled a mini-version of the stereotypical view of New Orleans—a place where white males pursued and attached themselves to light-skinned black women.

Throughout their time at Monticello, none of the Hemings women married men from "down the mountain" who worked in the fields. They were either in long-term liaisons with high-status white males or white workers at the plantation, or they married household servants from other plantations who were also mixed race or, in the case of Critta Hemings, a free black man. One could say that these women had no choice regarding the white men, even the men who did not own them. It is also possible, of course, that given a choice they would have preferred white mates. That might be a disturbing thought from a modern perspective, with our knowledge of slavery and views about the value of solidarity in the face of oppression. This possibility, however, must not be discounted outright, especially in light of the behavior of some of the Hemings children and grandchildren.

Tempting and romantic as it may be to construct a monolithic population of slaves who acted cohesively across color and genetic lines because of their common enslaved status, it is more realistic to accept that different individuals and families had different understandings about where they stood in relation to other slaves, within the slave system and, indeed, within America's racial hierarchy. People's individual experiences shaped their way of seeing the world. The Hemingses did not, any more than other human beings, always live with reference to the "big picture" of their society. They lived, instead, in the day-to-day interactions with the people around them, the values they formed in the context of their surrounding society, and their sense of the best way to make the most of their lives before they died.

For the women in the Hemings family, being treated as a caste apart and having their femininity reinforced rather than forcefully denied—circumstances that may seem trivial to present-day observers viewing the enormity of slavery—may have had deep meaning. Elizabeth Hemings, her daughters, and granddaughters knew that their enslavement limited their horizons. But their everyday existence encouraged them to think of themselves as different from others who shared the same legal status. They could, as women of all races and classes have often done, use their femininity to seek better lives through their association with men who had some degree of status—white males, mixed-race house servants, or free black men. Jefferson would not take any Hemings woman completely out of slavery until 1822, when he freed his daughter Harriet to go live as a white woman and escape partus sequitur ventrem. Instead, the Hemings women served as seamstresses, maids, and, in Sally Hemings's case, Jefferson's "substitute for a wife." But these events, which will be discussed more fully in later chapters, unfolded over decades. It took years to build the Hemingses' story at Monticello.

Adapted from THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO by Annette Gordon-Reed. Copyright © 2008 by Annette Gordon-Reed. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed

Read yesterday's excerpt, "Thomas Jefferson." Read Gordon-Reed's essay on writing this book, "Sally Hemings and Me."

Tomorrow on The Root: The next and final book excerpt, "Dr. Sutton," examines Sally Hemings's first days in Paris, where she lived with Thomas Jefferson from 1787 to 1789 during his post as the American ambassador to France. Hemings, under the care of Dr. Robert Sutton who had treated King Louis XV for small pox, undergoes the ordeal of  inoculation against the disease for forty days in isolation on the outskirts of Paris.