The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (63 page)

All this proceeded, apparently, without regard to the turmoil that a life configured in this way would naturally create in any person who had to live under those rules. If Robert and James Hemings did not accept the rightness of their enslavement, and they clearly did not, any gratitude they felt about being given part of what should have been theirs by right—to come and go as they pleased, to make a living, and to have a family like all other human beings—would quickly dissipate as they grew used to being self-sufficient men. Again, we may let Frederick Douglass express the complicated emotions at play when enslaved people were treated “benevolently.” Of his owner he wrote,

The lives of Robert and James Hemings were even more complicated than Douglass’s on this score, for there were many more ways in which Jefferson raised their expectations about what they had a right to have in life. It would have been a far simpler matter for Jefferson, and forestalled the conflicts that later arose, if he had given Robert and James Hemings fewer or no opportunities to develop identities apart from him. Their heritage almost surely affected the way they viewed their circumstances. The Hemings brothers knew that the man who controlled their lives had inherited a fortune that would have been theirs if they, the sons of John Wayles, had been born free white men. Robert was an eldest son in a world where that position meant something. There was nothing the brothers could do about it, but that did not prevent them—as Douglass would do years later—from considering the obvious.

For whatever this meant to Jefferson, the Hemings men could never have afforded to be sentimental about him in the way he wanted without giving up a great deal of themselves. They had to remain in slavery for this to work in the manner that best suited his emotional needs—living as the objects of his benevolence, protection, and grants of autonomy under the overlay of his will to control. Neither wanted to do that. They wanted their freedom. One wonders whether it ever crossed Jefferson’s mind that they would want to be free, that these young men’s experiences had created expectations that could never be fulfilled so long as they remained enslaved to him. After years of existing in this hybrid state, they would express the desire to leave him, or at least cut the legally created cord he used to bring them back at his discretion.

It happened many years later, but the example of James Hubbard, who was not a member of the Hemings family, is useful for considering how matters between the Hemings brothers and Jefferson unfolded in the early 1790s. Hubbard was a chronic runaway from Monticello, who in the first decade of the 1800s managed to string together fairly long periods when he was absent from the plantation. Jefferson dealt with runaways by selling them—a response perfectly in keeping with his preference for making conflict, or potential sources of it, disappear. He sold Hubbard while he was off on one of his escape attempts. The contract gave Jefferson extra money if he recovered him, so he had Hubbard recaptured, brought back to Monticello, “severely flogged” to set an example, and put in jail. He then suggested to Reuben Perry, the man who had bought Hubbard, that he immediately sell him because “the course he has been in, and all the circumstances convince me he will never serve any man as a slave.”
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What slaves did, the things that happened to them, Jefferson was saying, affected the way they looked at life and their circumstances. This ran counter to the popular view, which Jefferson expressed later in his life, that slaves were perpetual children—people who never learned and grew. When in the midst of quotidian business, instead of when making pronouncements for public consumption, Jefferson revealed his true feelings and beliefs: experiences mattered to slaves. White society had to take active measures to keep them from engaging life in ways that would make them unfit for their condition. So there would be no school, no marriage, no unfettered ability to testify against white people, nothing coming from the white community that would make enslaved people see the world differently and be changed in the process. Enslaved people were left to build their own inner identities in opposition to the dominant society’s assaults upon their humanity.

Hubbard had grown used to thinking he had a right to be free. He did not just think it; he acted upon the thought with some success. Even if he never ran away again, his mind-set had been forever altered because he had lived, very effectively for a time, in direct challenge to his enslavement. The Hemings brothers were not runaways in the same sense as Hubbard, but their time in the world away from Jefferson, and successes at independent living and decision making, also posed deep challenge to their enslavement. They met and embraced the challenge. Not long after their time in New York, both men took successful steps to disentangle themselves from Jefferson so that they could come back to him only when, and if, they wanted to. That was all to come; they still had to get through their time with him in New York.

New York

James Hemings and Jefferson arrived in New York on March 21, 1790. His older brother had secured lodging for the party at the City Tavern, where they remained for a brief period until moving to Mrs. Dunscomb’s boardinghouse at 22 King Street, in lower Manhattan. There they would stay until they moved at the beginning of June to a house on Maiden Lane. The men immediately went about setting up their lives in this place, which was so different from Albemarle County and the Paris that James Hemings and Jefferson had left only recently. One of the first orders of business was settling accounts. Robert Hemings gave Jefferson the residue of the amount he had been given as expenses for his trip to the city. Jefferson repaid Hemings money he had borrowed at some earlier point on the journey.
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New York had already taken its place as the largest city in the United States; its multitudes crowded, for the most part, into the bottom of Manhattan Island.
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The brothers had to adjust to this teeming environment while attending to a man who was decidedly—and probably very vocally to the Hemings brothers—out of his element. Jefferson did not care much for the place. It featured everything he hated about cities—cramped living conditions, noise, and citizens seemingly in perpetual contention with one another. It was not a place for the conflict averse. “I view great cities,” he wrote to Benjamin Rush in 1800, “as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.” Though he conceded that they “nourish some of the elegant arts,” the most “useful” among the arts could exist in other places with fewer downsides. Then there was the weather. There were only two seasons, he claimed. During the months he and the Hemingses were in New York, March until September, the weather went from cold to hot with no temperate springtime.
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New York was almost certainly disappointing to James Hemings after Paris. It offered little in the way of architecture, no beautiful parks to walk in, no stunning churches or cathedrals to admire and take refuge in. Most important of all for him and his brother, New York was a full-fledged slave society. The 1790 census counted 3,092 black people there—1,036 of them free, the other 2,056 enslaved. As it is for all poor and relatively powerless people, life was still a very difficult proposition for freed blacks because they were relegated to doing “most of the inferior labor of the town.” There was indeed a great deal of all types of work to be done, for New York had already begun its ascent to its position as the financial capital of the United States. It was clear even by then that money, and those who made it, would rule the metropolis.
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New York’s economy was growing rapidly, and though the critique of slavery was growing louder, the number of slaves continued to grow during the years of economic expansion. Slave ownership became more diversified as the newly rich and upper middle class bought slaves as status symbols and to enhance their lifestyles, relieving housewives of drudgery and husbands of physically arduous tasks. Though slavery was an important part of the fabric of social life in New York, the numbers suggest that the Hemings brothers would have encountered many free black people as well. Although largely consigned to doing the dirtiest and most demanding jobs in the city, some became “shopkeepers, fruiterers, bakers, boardinghouse keepers or hawkers selling buttermilk or hot corn in the city’s streets and markets.” They mixed and jostled with newly arriving immigrants, fueling the political and social tensions that became a permanent feature of life in the urban North.
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Robert and James Hemings experienced the great diversity of black life in the city. African Americans were especially visible in the downtown area where they lived. From the time of the Revolution, when many of the city’s blacks very rationally cast their fortunes with the English in the hope of achieving freedom, most free blacks lived in “Negro Barracks” on downtown streets like Church and Broadway. Both were very close to the Hemingses’ first home on King Street and their second one on Maiden Lane. Just immediately north, the vast Negro (African) Burial Ground served as the final resting place for thousands of blacks (some estimates say almost twenty thousand) enslaved and free.
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Although the end of the twentieth century is often cast as a defining period of globalization, ideas, people, and goods moved across the Atlantic with great frequency (and with great impact) in the Hemingses’ time as well. The shock waves from the French Revolution followed James Hemings from Paris to New York as blacks and their supporters in the city linked the struggle to end slavery in America to what was going on in the streets of Paris. Just a few months before he and his brother arrived in the city, “a crowd at the John Street Theater gave a thunderous ovation to an epilogue that linked the liberation of ‘Afric’s sable Sons’ to the cause of international republicanism.”
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For myriad reasons, at the end of 1789 and the beginning of 1790, a number of New Yorkers made the abolition of slavery a major goal. Many were moved by their moral outrage against slavery’s inhumanity, while others, especially European immigrants, simply did not want to have to compete with slave labor. New arrivals in the country often displayed their concern about this by adopting an actively hostile attitude toward the blacks who lived among them.
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Whatever the motives for it, once again, James Hemings was in a city where the nature of liberty and freedom was the topic of ardent and very public discourse. This time, however, the discussion was specifically about the future of members of his race.

The brothers surely talked about the time James had spent in France, what he had done, and whether he expected to return to that country. One longs to know what they thought about Jefferson, for there could not have been any two people in the world at that point who knew him better. Their sister’s relationship with him was a new and very important piece of knowledge, a circumstance to be considered from very different perspectives. James had, of course, been at the Hôtel de Langeac. He had either known about his sister and Jefferson all along, or it was something he found out near the end of their stay when the issue of remaining in France arose. Did he feel a useless pang of guilt for not having been able to intervene, and did Robert feel a useless negative judgment of James for the same reason? It is most likely that both men, the sons of a white man, simply viewed their sister’s connection to Jefferson as a predicatable event in life as they knew it. While the word was that Jefferson would never marry again, and both men may have believed that word, there was no reason for them to think that he was going to forgo female companionship for the rest of his life. They knew that southern slavery gave white slave owners who lost their wives several alternatives: never have sex again as long as they lived, take a new wife, take up with an enslaved woman on their plantation as a substitute wife in a steady relationship, frequent prostitutes in bawdyhouses, or spend the rest of their days rampaging through the slave quarters with multiple women—or some combination of all but the first choice. As for their little sister, the probabilities were always very high that she would end up with
some
white man. Jefferson may have appeared to the Hemings brothers to be at least as good as any other—with the added advantage of being the metaphorical devil they knew. And if they had any degree of trust in his word—that he was going to stick by his bargain with their sister—she was already better off than their mother, who had not obtained freedom for any of her children.

History had repeated itself, but only the future would tell if the replication was going to be exact. There was now a chance that a coming generation of Hemingses might escape living their entire lives enslaved to their close white relatives, because their sister had insisted upon that. Whether this made them feel more positive or negative toward Jefferson because he went along with this plan is unknown, but they surely had some opinions about it. If they expressed them to one another, what, if anything, did they say to Jefferson about their thoughts?

As with so many other aspects of slavery, it is difficult to fathom what conversations between these three men were like. One’s first inclination is to think they never acknowledged to one another the complex nature of their relationships. That too comfortably—and strategically—limits the range of things one has to consider when imagining, as historians must, the lives of the Hemingses and Jeffersons. This may explain why, in a related vein, some have posited, even insisted, that Jefferson’s wife did not know that Robert and James were her brothers, though Jefferson and people in their community knew. A Martha Jefferson ignorant of her father’s relations is a less complicated personality—easier to fit into a perhaps preferred image of the innocent upper-class white woman who remained naïve about the ways of the world. That construction relieves us of the responsibility to
see
her knowing about her enslaved siblings, and then contemplate the persona that encompassed that knowledge. One sidesteps a deeply troubling aspect of the infinitely strange, but still in some ways familiar, world of slavery.