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Up until now, the slaves I have covered have been, if not exactly household names, at least more famous than their owners. Not so today. Thomas Jefferson is the blockbuster name.

Thomas Jefferson, Hero or Villain?

I wade into this one with some trepidation. Jefferson has had a contentious few decades. One set of champions basically says Jefferson was such a great man, he couldn’t possibly have done anything reprehensible like have a fling with a slave woman. And on the other side there’s the detractors who basically say Jefferson was a sexual predator, so any greatness or accomplishments are just a cheat and a lie and we should either erase him out of history or alternatively, keep him around just to vilify him.

I myself am a dedicated moderate, which might mean that everyone is mad at me, but hopefully some of you will keep listening for a viewpoint somewhere in between those two extremes.

If you are in the first camp (the champions of Jefferson), I’m sorry to tell you that the evidence is against you. That evidence includes published reports that circulated in his own lifetime, the recollections of multiple people after his death, Jefferson’s own behavior towards the Hemings children, the physical appearance of the Hemings children, the very well documented culture of the time, and finally the DNA tests of Hemings descendants. It all points to the truth of his relationship with Sally Hemings.

The fact that Jefferson never admitted it and his legitimate daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph denied it means very little. The culture of the day permitted masters to sexually exploit their slave women as long as they didn’t bring it out into the light of day where their legitimate families would be forced to take notice. My thesis adviser in college studied white Southern women of this period. She told us that it was generally accepted that white women knew the origin of all the mixed race children on every plantation except their own. On their own plantation, it was just an utter mystery how these dark-skinned women kept having such fair-skinned babies. Where could they possibly come from? Jefferson’s silence and Martha’s denials fit right into this picture. They were doing exactly what their culture told them they should do.

If you are in the second camp (Jefferson’s detractors), then I would say that historians generally try to judge historical figures by the standards of their own time, not ours. If you use modern standards, then everybody fails. When you consider how many modern people also fail modern standards, it’s hardly surprising that people who never heard or were taught a standard don’t live up to it. And if we are going to erase or vilify people on that account, then we have to give up everything good that comes out of our history as well as the bad because nothing will be left. In Jefferson’s time and place, slaves were owned, and masters expected sex from their slave women, and that was considered acceptable behavior. As you’ll see in this episode, he really did behave much better than many owners, and thus he lived well according to the standards of his time. What’s really sad and infuriating is not his behavior in particular so much as it is that those standards were so abysmally low.

Okay, enough moderating between extreme views. Hopefully not all of you have gotten mad and left as we actually get into the story.

The Hemings Family

To understand Harriet Hemings, we don’t start with her or even with her mother Sally, but with her grandmother, Elizabeth Hemings. The Hemings family had been owned by the Eppes family. When one Martha Eppes married John Wayles in 1746, she brought with her an 11-year-old girl named Elizabeth Hemings. Martha gave birth to a daughter, also named Martha. Martha Sr died soon afterwards, as did a subsequent wife, and yet another subsequent wife. After such a succession of dying wives, John Wayles chose not to remarry. But his slave Elizabeth Hemings was now 26. He did not marry her, of course not, but she bore him 6 children including a girl named Sally Hemings. (i3)

Elizabeth Hemings was a mulatto herself, meaning she had some European ancestry. Sally Hemings, daughter of John Wayles, had yet more European ancestry and she is described as fair-skinned. That didn’t matter as far as her status was concerned. She was born to a slave mother and therefore a slave. Skin color was irrelevant. But it will matter for Harriet’s story.

Sally was also thus a half-sister to Martha, Jr. And when Martha Wayles, married a prominent citizen named Thomas Jefferson, she brought with her the Hemings family (her half-family, though I doubt she thought of it like that.)

Sally was very young then. But years pass. I will fast forward to a time when Jefferson is living in Paris. His wife Martha is dead. He has sent for his daughters, and Sally was sent along too to look after them.

Now from here on out historians must do a little reconstructive work. The original claims of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings surfaced in his lifetime. He neither confirmed nor denied them. But all available evidence suggests that their relationship began in Paris.

The appeal for Jefferson is obvious. He wasn’t betraying a wife because his wife was already dead. Remarriage was complicated: he had teenage daughters who may well not have wanted a stepmother. And new heirs would make inheritance complicated. Moreover, Sally almost certainly reminded him of home. She may even have looked like her half-sister. And finally, as I said before, it was not in any way unusual for masters to expect sexual relations with their slaves. It was, sadly, more normal than not.

If they had been at home, that would have been the end of discussion. He was master. She was slave. Saying no was not an option.

But they were not at home, and here is where this gets interesting.

French law did not recognize slavery within the borders of the home country. (Colonies were different. Slavery was just fine there, because we like enormous profits, we just don’t want to look at the human cost.) If Sally had run, Jefferson could not legally have compelled her back. You may ask whether she knew this, and it seems likely that she did. She spoke French. She went around town with the Jefferson girls and was called Mademoiselle Sally, a title not even given to servants, much less slaves. (113). She was trained as a femme de chambre, which was a valuable, marketable skill. Her brother was there training as a French chef, also a valuable, marketable skill. They could have made it on their own.

The point is she was no where near as helpless as most slaves. And this does seem to have counted for something.

We do not know what Sally said to Jefferson at the beginning of their relationship, but we can piece it together when in 1789 it was time to return home to the United States. Sally point-blank refused to come with him.

He tried to persuade her and he succeeded, but she did drive a bargain that was extraordinary when you compare it with the stories of other slave women.

Sally agreed to come, on condition that her children would not be slaves for life. They would be free at age 21. Neither she nor her children would ever work in the fields. Her children would not work at all until age 14. They would get better clothing than other slaves. And neither she nor her children would ever serve Jefferson’s legitimate daughters. (6)

So if we apply modern standards, this is still appalling. Even without slavery, you are not supposed to sexually harass your employees. And she was underage. In the modern world, Jefferson would be in jail. But this wasn’t the modern world. Age discrepancies, underage women, harassing employees was all in the normal course of things, and hardly worth mentioning. By that standard, these promises look almost like loving devotion.

You may well ask (and perhaps Sally did ask it) whether any court would enforce these promises and the answer is absolutely not. Once back in Virginia, she was legally a slave and her children were legally slaves and she was going entirely on trust that Jefferson would keep any promise whatsoever. So why did she do it? Well, Sally left no secret diaries, so we don’t know. Perhaps she really loved him. Perhaps she missed the family she would never see again if she stayed in France. Perhaps she was scared about striking out on her own. Perhaps she thought the life of Jefferson’s favorite concubine would be easier than being domestic help to an unknown master. Perhaps she knew that going into service in France was no guarantee that she would remain unmolested (quite the opposite actually). Perhaps she had heard so much pro-slavery rhetoric that she really believed she couldn’t or shouldn’t be free.

All we know is that a pregnant 16-year-old Sally came back to Virginia. Last week I quoted Elizabeth Freeman saying that she would have chosen freedom even if she knew she’d die after one minute of it. It was that important to her. Well, that was not Sally’s choice. It may seem a little baffling to modern ears, mine included, but as they say, the past is a foreign country. People are different there.

Life Back in Slave Country

Eventually Sally had 6 children, 3 of whom survived, including a girl named Harriet. The actual record on Harriet is scanty. Of the 10 women I am covering in this series, she is the most elusive. But there is enough to piece things together. She was born about 1801 at Monticello, but no one recorded her existence until 1810, when Jefferson noted in his Farm Book Roll of Negroes that he owned one named Harriet, born in May. He forgot the exact day. Below Harriet in the list is Madison, born in 1805 and Eston born in 1808. Her older brother Beverly is listed as a tradesman.

Jefferson’s book contains all his calculations on turning his property into a well-oiled, profitable business operation, with everything from schedules on when to sharpen the scythes to how much fabric yardage would be required for blankets, hats, shoes, and stockings. Such calculations would be a model of modern business efficiency until you read far enough to see that human beings are tallied up just like the horses, mules, and pigs. And also that he had to decide just how young enslaved children would begin their life of labor.

In some ways Jefferson comes off better than many slaveholders. He believed in financial rewards for slaves who exceeded their requirements. He sometimes, but not always, interceded to end degrading punishments. He sometimes, but not always, agreed not to sell family members away from each other. He made lots of pronouncements about how his slaves should be well-fed, well-clothed, and not overworked.

But however grand that may sound, the fact is that his overseers did not necessarily agree, and they were the ones who were there, day in and day out. Hard work, punishment, and going up for sale were all part of the routine.

In the list the Hemings’ are just names among many. But that belies their true position. The Hemings extended family have been described as a caste apart from the other slaves. They were not field hands. They were butlers, valets, chambermaids, nurses, cooks, carpenters, and artisans. In the Farm Book, Sally and her children receive their allotment of food and clothing, just like everyone else.

But in Jefferson’s instructions to his overseer Edmund Bacon, all is different. Bacon was to provide the house servants (which is to say, the extended Hemings family) their food allotments. But not their clothing allotments, as his daughter Martha, would see to that. And they were considerably better dressed. Other is received coarse wool cloth. The Hemmings’ got Irish linen, flannel, and knitted cotton.

Bacon was not to take any control over these house women, either, which came as a surprise to him. During the earliest years of Harriet’s life, Jefferson was not there to be in control either because these were his presidential years. He was in Washington except for visits twice a year.

Harriet Hemings, Enslaved by Her Father

So Harriet grew up with a mother who was hardly typical of a slave mother. She was exempt from field labor, and for the most part she had neither master nor overseer to fear. Furthermore, Sally was able to keep her children close to her in the house, just as a free and reasonably prosperous woman would have done. For many slave women, this would have been a dream come true.

Sally would have overseen Harriet’ education, but unfortunately we do not know what that entailed. She could have learned to read and write. Certainly some in the Hemings family were literate, so they could have taught her. We also know that Martha’s children taught some of the slaves to read and write (210).

But sadly, literacy was not the most important skill for a girl, whether black or white. No, how to cook, how to sew, how to clean were all far, far more important. By Jefferson’s records Harriet was never assigned kitchen duty (212), but it is inconceivable that Sally could have or would have kept her in ignorance of this valuable skill. Probably she helped with the gardens too. But all the details of her childhood are lost or never recorded.

All we know is that age 14, her childhood was over. It was time to work, and her assignment was the textile factory (214). Her half-sisters Martha and Maria had received a prestigious education, which Jefferson oversaw. They were considerably older than Harriet, and now Martha schooled her own children at Monticello, and she would insist on an even more rigorous schedule of study for her girls. They might have been reciting Latin their schoolroom every morning as Harriet made her way from the house to the textile factory.

The factory was a little cottage which had once been where Sally lived, but now held three spinning jennies, a carding machine, and a loom.

Harriet was not alone in there. Other slave women worked there too, and we can only speculate on the relations between them because Harriet knew that she would only be here until age 21. They would be here for life. I can imagine that being a source of comfort, but also possibly a source of tension when it comes to interpersonal relationships. Also she was 14 before anyone expected her there. Other women started their life of work earlier.

It is possible that Jefferson did not consider this work, so much as education. Spinning was a skill and if Harriett learned it, it might be a help to her in her future life. But that does not mean that your average 14-year-old would see it that way. Among other things, there’s always a possibility that she would have preferred reciting Latin.

Or maybe not, it’s really impossible to know. Within the textile factory, she still held a privileged position. She worked exclusively in wool, which is easier a softer on the hands than flax or hemp. The overseer Edmund Bacon claimed that Harriet “never did any hard work,” but it’s unclear whether he meant she never worked in the fields or whether she really didn’t have to produce as much in the textile factory as the other women.

What may well have been harder was the attitude of Martha and her children. They scarcely ever mention the Hemings in their own writings and when they do, it is clearly dismissive “Dusky Sally” they called her, though they knew she was fair-skinned, and the “yellow children.” I did not run across any stories of them being deliberately cruel and violent to Harriet, but then again I didn’t run across any stories of kindness either, and she was after all, a close relative.

Even so, Madison claimed that he and Harriet grew up “measurably happy.” And she had one further protection not granted to her fellow slave women. Most of them were perpetually at the mercy of the men around them, including overseers, free laborers, fellow slaves, and even guests and neighbors. Most enslaved women gave birth by age 19, and that was a good thing in the owners’ view because that meant presto, the net worth of the estate had just gone up. Harriet did not have a child. She appears to have been completely off limits (159). This despite the fact that Edmund Bacon remembered Harriet is “nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful” (190).

In fact she lived in a sort of no man’s land: better than the other slaves, but not as good as the “real” family.

Harriet had always been destined for freedom, but the question was where? If Sally had hoped for her free children to remain nearby, those hopes were dashed in 1806 when the Virginia legislature decreed that any freed slave who didn’t leave the Commonwealth within twelve months would be re-enslaved.

So. To claim the freedom they had been promised, they would have to leave home permanently. This would be hard enough for the boys. For a girl, it was far worse. She knew how to spin, but no female career paid as well as the skills her brothers had been trained in. She would be poor and without the protection of a father or husband, life would be very difficult.

Much like her mother before her, Harriet had a choice. She undoubtedly could have stayed and accepted a life that, for a slave, was quite good. Or she could leave her home behind her and embrace freedom, with all the uncertainty that it promised.

Harriet chose to go. According to Jefferson’s Farm Book, she and her older brother Beverly “ran away” in 1822. Legally speaking, they were fugitives, at risk for re-enslavement and punishment at any time in the next 43 years until the Emancipation Proclamation.

But practically-speaking, it is quite clear that they ran away with permission. For one thing, Jefferson never pursued them. And in case you’re wondering, yes, he did pursue other runaway slaves: just not Sally Hemings’ children.

For another thing, Edmund Bacon said that he bought Harriet a ticket to Philadelphia and gave her $50, all at Jefferson’s direction. Jefferson had many contacts there, and it is possible that he arranged some kind of landing place for her, maybe even with his friend Dolley Madison (263).

Back at home, rumors abounded. Everyone knew that a young, healthy female slave was the most profitable type of slave, since she will likely have a child every two years, thus adding to the net worth of the total estate. If Jefferson was not pursuing Harriet, they said, it was definitely because she was his daughter. Why else would he let her go?

Having done all this, Jefferson apparently considered his duty done, and the rumors ignorable. He had kept his promises to Sally, and perhaps he congratulated himself on that. From here on out, Harriet was on her own.

Harriet, On Her Own and Vanished

And being on her own, Harriet made her own decisions. And her decision did not include Philadelphia, whatever her father thought.

According to her younger brother Madison, Harriet got off the train when it stopped in Washington and stayed off. The advantage of Philadelphia was that it had a strong free black community. That was a good thing for most ex-slaves, but joining that community would have wrecked her plans. Instead Madison says “She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman.” (267)

Remember her grandmother Elizabeth was already a mulatto, who bore Sally to a white man, and Sally bore Harriet to another white man. Harriet was far more white than she was black. But passing meant she would never be able to reveal her origins. She would not be able to correspond with her family without fear of discovery. She would always be playing a role and depend upon the fairness of her skin, her beauty, her charm, her spinning skills, at 50 to see her through.

Harriet chose this and she carried it through. 50 years later, Madison said “By her dress and conduct as such, I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered” (267).

Harriet’s performance was so good that she remains hidden to this day. She must have chosen a new name. She may have advertised her skills as a spinner or domestic help. But as for any woman of the time period, the only real security was a good marriage. And according to Madison, Harriet was successful in that sphere too. She married a white man of good standing and raised children. Madison refused to name the man or the children, which was a good choice, since legally those children were slaves. They probably didn’t have any idea. It would never have been truly safe to tell them.

The historian Catherine Kerrison decided to find Harriet Hemings in the kind of mind-numbing project that makes my brain turn to mush just thinking about it. She combed the genealogical records of Washington, D.C. We know Harriet did not keep her last name, but she might have kept her first name. And if we make a guess about when she married, we can narrow down the Harriets. And if she had sons and if her husband allowed her to name them, she might have chosen Hemings family names like Beverly and Madison, which are far more distinctive than all the Johns.

Kerrison’s book lays out a dizzying array of possibilities, with arguments both for and against each of them, but still concludes with these words: “I concede defeat. Harriet Hemings will keep her secret” (300).

In the end, Harriet’s life after slavery was probably the most successful of all the women in this series. She earned the status and privileges that should have been hers from the start.

But the price she paid was a heavy one. Silence and a thorough, complete divorce from her childhood and her original family.

Harriet then is still in a no-man’s land—neither stereotypically white nor stereotypically black. Neither fully free, not fully enslaved. In the words of Kerrison, “This is why her story is so important, whether we find her or not. Her invisibility, then as now, is precisely the point. When we can so easily lose the daughter of a president and his slave, it forces us to acknowledge that our racial categories are utterly fallacious and that our racialized systems are built on a science that has been thoroughly discredited” (332).

As for Jefferson, he could most definitely have done better. His detractors are quick to point out that there were precedents for living openly with a slave woman and for freeing the children at birth and for letting them inherit. By this measure Jefferson was cold, heartless, and stingy.

But let’s not forget that there were far more precedents for owners to rape all the slave women and sell the children away. By this measure, Jefferson was kind, generous, and faithful. I am certain that this was how he saw himself. But it is sad that we can’t know whether Sally and Harriet agreed with him.

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Selected Sources

My major source for today is Catherine Kerrison’s excellent book Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America. In addition, you can read the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s report on the evidence both for and against the Jefferson-Hemings relationship on their website here. You’ll see that there are still some who argue that Jefferson was not the father, but most have accepted that he was.

All of Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book is also available on the Internet as images, but sadly, those images appear to not be in the public domain, so I cannot include them directly here. But you can see Harriet’s debut in it on the 1810 roll of Negroes in this image. Harriet is in the first column, between Sally 73 and Madison 05 Jan. And in case you’re wondering (as I initially did), no Sally was not 73 years old. It means she was born in 1873. In this image, written years later, you can see in the middle column that Beverly (born in 98) has “run away” and Harriet (born in 01) has “run.”

Unsurprisingly, there are no images of Harriet. So we’ve got just a silhouette of her up top.