Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves by Henry Wiencek

Author:Henry Wiencek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

12

The Double Aspect

Mary Hemings Bell had the good fortune, and the misfortune, to be a Hemings. As a Hemings, she had autonomy, which allowed her to leave Monticello in Jefferson’s absence and marry a respected Charlottesville businessman. But she lost four of her children to Jefferson precisely because they were Hemingses, members of the family Jefferson valued highly for their “superior intelligence, capacity and fidelity to trusts,” as Jefferson’s grandson recalled.1 Jefferson wanted those children as servants, as artisans, and as gifts, but they were also his relatives, so they occupied a hazy no-man’s-land that the grandson, Jeff Randolph, struggled to describe: “Having the double aspect of persons and property the feelings for the person was always impairing its value as property.”

There can be no doubt that “feelings for the person” ran deep. A touching story captures the special relationship between the Hemings family and Jefferson. When Jefferson’s wife, Martha, was dying in 1782 from complications of a difficult childbirth, she was tended through her long, agonizing decline by a small group of Hemings women. According to Edmund Bacon’s account, Betty Hemings and her daughters Sally, Critta, Betty Brown, and Nance “were in the room when Mrs. Jefferson died” and witnessed a poignant scene: “They have often told my wife that when Mrs. Jefferson died they stood around the bed. Mr. Jefferson sat by her, and she gave him directions about a good many things that she wanted done…. she wept and could not speak for some time.”2 Betty Hemings had been the mistress of Martha’s father, and her daughters were Martha’s half sisters. Martha might have resented Betty for being her father’s mistress, but evidently not: she took Betty into her household at Monticello when she could easily have put the whole family out of sight on some distant farm, or sold them.

The kinship tie enfolded and protected the extended Hemings family. For them, Jefferson devised a quasi-slavery: he put them in responsible, highly skilled positions; he paid some of them; the Hemings men even traveled on their own (Jefferson sometimes did not know where they were). While most of the slaves at Monticello toiled “in the ground,” living and working at sites scattered over the slopes of the mountain, the Hemingses lived and worked on the summit and in the house itself. Jeff Randolph said that their status “was a source of bitter jealousy to the other slaves.” They wore better clothes, ate better food, and were not at the overseers’ beck and call. Edmund Bacon remembered the directive he got from Jefferson regarding the Hemings women: “I was instructed to take no control of them.” Unlike the other slave women at Monticello, Betty Hemings and her daughters never worked in the field, even at harvest when all hands were called out to get in the crops on a crash basis. Some of the Hemingses scarcely mingled with the people who worked in the ground. Young Hemings boys served time in Jefferson’s nailery, but they were on their way up to responsible positions as artisans or in the mansion.

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