Jefferson's Daughters Read online

  But that nomadic existence was still in her future. By the end of June 1772, the couple had returned to settle in at Monticello. A scant nine months after her wedding, Martha Jefferson gave birth to their first child on September 27. Her formal name was Martha, after Martha’s mother, Martha Eppes Wayles. But throughout her childhood, her parents would adopt the popular nickname of that era and affectionately call her Patsy. Her birth was a harbinger of hope for a new beginning for the young mother, whose only child from her first marriage, John, had died in 1771 at four years of age.

  The infant Martha gave her mother some cause for worry at first, however. She was a sickly, underweight baby, and her life may well have been saved by the “good breast of milk” provided by a newly acquired slave, Ursula Granger. Martha had known Ursula, a slave of a friend, and at Martha’s request (she was “very desirous to get a favorite house woman of the name of Ursula,” Jefferson wrote), Jefferson bought her and her two sons at an estate auction in January 1773. Shortly thereafter, he bought Ursula’s husband, George Granger. The Grangers would take trusted positions in the Jeffersons’ service: Ursula as supervisor of the kitchen and smoke- and washhouses, and George as the only paid black overseer on any of Jefferson’s plantations. Well nourished, little Martha soon grew strong, but Ursula’s own baby, Archy, born in 1773, died the next year.

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  THAT AN ENSLAVED WOMAN, purchased to bring her invaluable housekeeping talents to the work in progress that was Monticello, was then put to work as a wet nurse to her owner’s child was just one of the innumerable ironies of the workings of a slave society. The same system that declared Ursula unfree also relied on her, literally, to nourish and sustain itself. As it had developed in colonial Virginia, slavery became predicated upon a finely striated system of law and custom designed to make clear the separation between free and unfree. It had not always been that way. The arrival of the first Africans in Virginia in 1619 had not, in itself, signaled the beginning of a fully formed slave system. True, the English in Virginia had the example of the Spanish and Portuguese sugar plantations in the Caribbean and South America; and the Dutch would later establish a thriving transatlantic slave trade system that kept those plantations supplied with labor. But not all blacks in early Virginia were enslaved. Some were kept as servants, in temporary bondage. Others bought their freedom and moved to the Eastern Shore, where many purchased land, married, raised families, and hired or bought laborers of their own.

  To meet their insatiable appetite for labor, white Virginians would make the transition gradually from white English servants to black slaves over the course of the seventeenth century. Time and again in these early years, the newly formed assembly in the provincial capital of Jamestown legislated what it meant to have white skin or black, to be free or enslaved. The representatives, called burgesses, debated such questions as: Are all men, black and white, permitted to carry guns? (No, only whites, 1639.) Are African women counted as tithable (that is, taxable) in the same way as all men, white and black, sixteen years of age and older? (Yes, 1643.) To clarify, are free African women taxable, as well as enslaved? (Yes, but white women remain exempt, 1668.) Is the child of an enslaved woman and an Englishman free? (No, the child takes the condition of the mother, 1662.) So then, the child of a free white woman and a free black man is free? (No, not quite; such children will be held in service until their thirtieth birthday. In addition, the mother must pay a fine of £15 sterling or herself be sold into servitude for five years, 1691.) May blacks and whites marry? (No, 1691 and 1705. To prevent such “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” the white person will be jailed for six months and pay a fine of £10 sterling. And clergymen who conduct such ceremonies will be fined ten thousand pounds of tobacco—half of which goes to the informer.)

  Laws can be revealing, and as in the case of Virginia’s racial codes, they cannot always disguise self-interested intentions. So, for example, as the burgesses wrestled with what constituted murder in the colony, they concluded, in their 1669 “act on the casual killing of slaves,” that neither a master nor his agent could be convicted of murder if a slave died from overzealous punishment. It defied common sense, they agreed, to think that any master possessed “that prepensed malice” that would “induce any man to destroy his own estate.” In deciding that even free African women were subject to the tax on laborers (arguably the best measure of wealth in a colony where the cash crop was labor-intensive tobacco), the burgesses were explicit that “negro women…though permitted to enjoy their freedome yet ought not in all respects to be admitted to a full fruition of the exemptions and impunities of the English.” Black women, the burgesses warned, should never think themselves equal to white Englishwomen. But most significantly, what these examples demonstrate is that slavery was more than a labor system. In their increasing reliance on African labor, Virginian slaveholders had to contrive a rigid legal system to govern social, as well as economic, relations between blacks and whites.

  Although Virginia’s evolving racial code made plain the slaveholders’ vision of colonial society, it also revealed the behavior of non-elite whites, servants, and slaves. Laws against miscegenation would not have been necessary if blacks and whites in Virginia had not been having sex. Laws controlling tithable labor would not have been necessary if free African women had not tried to assert the same status as white Englishwomen, who were considered too delicate for hard agricultural work. For all the order the burgesses intended their laws to impose, it was clear from the growing numbers of what they called “mulattoes” that the legal system was failing in its attempt to keep the races apart.

  Of course, many of the lawbreakers were the slaveholding legislators themselves. In 1662 they had reversed centuries of English common law by mandating that children take the condition of their mothers. Not unintentionally, that legislation also benefited masters in two very tangible ways. First, it gave them free access to the bodies of their enslaved women, who had no legal standing to prosecute sexual assault; second, masters quite literally profited from the additions to their slave force that resulted from these assaults. Most insidiously, over time that law would take on the veneer of natural and divine law, as slaveholding whites justified their view of slaves as inferior beings by pointing to their birth into slavery. One’s birth rank, they pontificated, revealed God’s will and judgment. And by rendering any white person immune to prosecution for harming or even accidentally killing a fugitive slave, the slaveholding burgesses enlisted the acquiescence even of non-slaveholders in a system that made them feel superior to a permanent underclass over whom they effectively had the power of life and death.

  By Martha and Thomas Jefferson’s day, this system of racial hierarchy, designed to enforce white supremacy, was firmly in place. With the exception of a handful of radical Quakers, few thought to dispute it; certainly Martha Jefferson, the daughter of a man who dealt in the slave trade, would not have. Unable to pay his passage to America, her father, John Wayles, an English immigrant, had contracted himself to work for a prominent Virginia planter and member of the colonial governor’s council. That business relationship proved especially lucrative, as it threw him into the path of other leading men of the colony. Wayles worked his way toward independence by doing the kind of work others were not especially eager to do. Trained in the law and representing English business firms, Wayles dunned their American debtors for payment. In addition, he became enmeshed in the slave trade as a broker. The daughter of such a scrappy go-getter, willing to do whatever it took to rise in the world, was hardly likely to question a system that was the means of her father’s success and her own comfort.

  So when Martha heard about the estate sale that put Ursula Granger on the auction block, she thought nothing of acquiring a slave who could help bring order to a household under construction. Ursula was even worth the cost of buying her two sons as well. But although Ursula relieved Martha of one anxiety in the spring of 1773 by nourishing the newborn Martha, another arose
to take its place. As Thomas headed east to Williamsburg to take his seat as an elected representative of Albemarle County, Martha packed up her baby and traveled with him, veering off the road just a few miles short of Williamsburg to her father’s home of The Forest, where Wayles lay seriously ill. Her nursing efforts notwithstanding, her father died May 28.

  With his death came the revelation of his entangled finances. Just before he died, Wayles had become involved in a massive investment in the slave trade that had gone very wrong: Disease and death had reduced a shipment of 400 slaves from Africa to Virginia to 280. The entire transaction had rested on the extension of credit, and Wayles had counted on a booming tobacco market to pay for the deal. Instead the market crashed and he died before he had paid a penny for his shipment. Unraveling the whole mess fell to his executors: Thomas Jefferson and his two brothers-in-law. Wayles had taken care to divide his assets equitably. To Martha he left eleven thousand acres of land—much of which he had amassed by taking advantage of foreclosures under the auspices of his elite connections—and about 130 slaves. Martha also inherited her share of his debts. Or, to put it more precisely, because of the law of coverture that rendered a married woman legally invisible, her husband inherited the land, the slaves, and the debt.

  Thomas quickly sold six thousand acres of the inheritance to pay his share of the debt, then for the first time sat down to record all his holdings in his Farm Book. This little book, now housed at the Massachusetts Historical Society, is available in published facsimile to anyone who would care to read Jefferson’s notes on managing his plantations. Here slaves are sorted, births and deaths recorded, dispensation of clothing and blankets organized, harvests tallied, and future ventures planned. Here, in his exactingly neat hand, he listed first “A Roll of the proper Slaves of Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 14, 1774,” followed by “Slaves conveyed by my mother,” and finally, the longest, “A Roll of the slaves of John Wayles which were allotted to T.J. in right of his wife.” Then he merged all three into a fourth list entitled “Location of Slaves,” obliterating their various origins and asserting his ownership of them all (187 souls) by allocating them to his various plantations. He could not know at the time that the Wayles debt would not be so easily expunged. At that moment in mid-January, as he sat totting up his inheritance, he must have felt like a rich man.

  The process of sorting out which slaves would go where would take some time; decisions made on paper that January day would be revised as needed. And, as she had with Ursula, Martha let her husband know her preferences. Elizabeth Hemings and her family were at the top of her list.

  Martha Jefferson had known Elizabeth Hemings all her life. When Martha’s mother, Martha Eppes, married John Wayles in 1746, she brought Elizabeth Hemings, a young slave then about eleven, with her to her new husband’s estate of The Forest. But before her wedding, Martha Eppes protected her property with a marriage settlement. The law permitted a single woman, as feme sole, to enter into contracts without a male signatory. Martha Eppes’s prenuptial agreement specified that her property would remain hers and not be sold away to pay her husband’s debts if she was widowed; if she died first, it would be held in trust for her children. In other words, John Wayles might profit from the use of his wife’s slaves during his lifetime, but he neither owned nor could sell them. Two years into her marriage, Martha Eppes Wayles was dead, after giving birth to her only surviving child, Martha. During the next twelve years, Wayles remarried twice. But after burying his third wife, he apparently decided that he could endure no more such losses. Instead he turned to a slave to serve as his “substitute for a wife” (a phrase later used by one of Jefferson’s neighbors to describe this not uncommon practice). He turned to Elizabeth Hemings.

  Elizabeth Hemings was light-skinned (one of Jefferson’s slaves at Monticello described her as a “bright mulatto woman”) and, judging from later descriptions by her daughter and granddaughter, beautiful. At twenty-six, she was already the mother of four children (by unrecorded fathers, likely slaves). In the relationship that would last the rest of his life, John Wayles fathered six children with her, the last, Sally, in 1773, the year he died. Hence, Elizabeth Hemings had been part of Martha Jefferson’s world from her earliest memory. Hemings may well have served as a nursemaid to the motherless infant, and as a maid to the young girl. A teenager when Elizabeth Hemings gave birth to her children with John Wayles, Martha would certainly have been aware of their relationship. White Virginia women learned to live with such open secrets. In his will, John Wayles rewarded his eldest daughter’s loyalty with his own: He honored the wishes of his first wife and was careful to bequeath the Hemings family to Martha.

  There are a number of reasons why Martha Jefferson could have wanted the Hemings family at Monticello. One should not sentimentalize any of them. She may have been fondly attached to a maid who had cared for her as she was growing up. She may have been relieved that her father did not take a fourth wife, since she apparently did not care for either of her stepmothers. She may have been following the lead of her father, who gave Elizabeth Hemings and her children special privileges. She may have wanted them as a legacy of her father. Whatever the reason, Martha got what she wanted, and the Hemingses came to Monticello in 1775.

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  MARTHA NEEDED HELP. HER life became an almost unrelenting cycle of pregnancy, childbirth, and recovery. Less than a year after her first daughter was born, Martha was pregnant with her second child. Jane Randolph Jefferson was born April 3, 1774. But 1775 brought grief for the young mother: Eighteen-month-old Jane died in September, and Martha may have suffered a miscarriage that year as well. As her husband was laboring in Philadelphia that fall, the ominous silence from Virginia worried him incessantly. “I have never received the scrip of a pen from any mortal in Virginia since I left it,” Jefferson complained to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes in November 1775. “If any thing has happened, for god’s sake, let me know it.”

  Martha almost certainly miscarried in the summer of 1776, when reports of her poor health made Jefferson frantic to return to Virginia from his assignment as delegate to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Martha had been staying with Elizabeth and Francis Eppes, her sister and brother-in-law, at The Forest, near Williamsburg; by July, she was recuperating at her beloved Elk Hill, and Francis could assure the anxious husband that Martha “is perfectly recover’d from her late indisposition and except being a little weak, is as well as she ever was.” Jefferson finally arrived home in September; shortly thereafter, Martha was pregnant again. Her son was born on May 28, 1777. The despairing parents never even named him, so doubtful were they of his survival; he lived but seventeen days. Less than six months later, Martha was carrying the only other child besides Martha who would survive childhood; Mary—called Polly in her childhood, and then later Maria—was born on August 1, 1778. Lucy Elizabeth followed two years later, on November 3, 1780, but died in April the next year. Four months later, at almost thirty-three, Martha became pregnant for the last time. Lucy Elizabeth, named for her dead sister, was born in May 1782. Martha endured far worse than the 10–30 percent average mortality rates of the era.

  This saga of birth and death exacted a predictable cost on Martha’s health. Although she left no letters describing her ordeals, the account book in which she recorded the seasonal cycles of hog slaughtering and candle- and soap-making yields important clues about her energy and faltering stamina. She began her married life with vigor, recording the winter butchering of hogs and sheep, salting and smoking them to keep through Virginia summers. She brewed beer; she made soap. She kept track of when she “opened a barrel of flower” or broke into a loaf of sugar, and of which hams fed her own family and which the construction crew. But her final pregnancy took its toll; from that point on, Martha recorded no spending, slaughtering, or production.

  Of course, Martha had not wielded the knife herself, nor did she stir the vats or churn the butter. Her slaves did that for her. Jefferson’s account
book records money doled out to his wife to tip slaves, to pay for the chickens and vegetables she bought from them, and for other miscellaneous household expenses. But it is unclear who at Monticello took care of paying the household bills during the nine months of silence in 1779, when Jefferson did not record giving his wife a penny for household accounts. The September 1781 entry, when Martha returned the unused £120 of the £165 her husband had given her, is the last record in his memorandum book of money changing hands. Another period of silence follows, signaling that she was no longer supervising the household a full year before her death.

  Illness accounted for some of the lapses in Martha’s account book; so, too, did war. During Jefferson’s absences, she would frequently take refuge with her sister Elizabeth at The Forest, or at her own Elk Hill. When Jefferson was not in residence at Monticello, she could find little relief from anxiety or illness at the grand home he was building for them. She traveled from Albemarle to The Forest to stay with Elizabeth in June 1776, even though she was pregnant, had a three-year-old in tow, and for all she knew was heading straight into the brewing war the closer she drew to Williamsburg. When Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia in 1779, she and her daughters joined him in Williamsburg and then in Richmond, when the state capital was relocated there in April 1780. The move inland did not protect the legislators from British assaults, as had been hoped; Jefferson’s political reputation would sustain a severe blow from his unpreparedness as governor to protect his state.