MARRIAGE AND MOTHERHOOD - THE PRIMARY WOMAN'S CONCERNS

 Excertps; page 104-105

Marriage , of course, was serious business for women, who surrendered their names, legal identity, property, and bodies to their husbands with the pronouncement of their wedding vows. For all the levity of the young girls' letters, the calculations in choosing a husband were a vital part of their conversations  Perhaps remembering her own parent's loving marriage as she learned about matchmaking in aristocratic circles, Martha was incredulous to hear the manner in which some European men searched for wives; "I recollect you would not believe that now and then people advertise for a wife," Bettie Hawkins wrote from London, enclosing just such an ad from The Morning Post and hoping, "you will believe your own eyes"

***

From pages 108-109 My notes:

Unlike her older sister Martha, Maria Jefferson did not like to write letters. This might have been because she aimed to please - was a perfectionist - or because she expected her father or someone else would also read her letters - and thus could not speak her mind.  

When the two Jefferson daughters were withdrawn from Panthemont, the exclusive and expensive Catholic girl's school in Paris that they attended while their father attended to his representation of the new United States in France, Maria was probably the one who was glad, while Martha would miss it terribly and no doubt be influenced by her experience there for the rest of her life.

To ease the transition, the girls were able to have the student friends they had made come to visit them at their home base in Paris....

In April of 1789 Jefferson brought them back into the family circle at the Hotel de Langeac. This "hotel" was a townhome, a three story building with a nice garden and courtyard and was quite comfortable. They had sometimes visited for weekends away from their convent school, and the building was semi public and any Americans who needed the help of the American government could stop by. Perhaps a result of visitors both girls caught typhus which is caught from fleas or body lice.  (I've seen those death records in Catholic church records from Europe in which it is noted that various people died of typhus. The bacteria gets into the blood stream, a high temperature results, lasting a couple weeks and can cause some permanent damage.) Maria's bout with typhus was severe.

Page 175  (After Maria made it though a birth)

Childbed fever, also called then puerperal fever, could kill as infection invaded the uterus after delivery. Long before doctors understood the impotence of cleanliness in avoiding infection, and the invention of antibiotics, expectant mothers prepared as much for their death as for the new life they would bring into the world. Jack (her husband) was relieved that Maria showed no such symptoms.

Their job was short lived. Within two weeks, their little girl was dead and Maria was suffering greatly from abscesses on her skin. It is possible that she had been instructed, as many eighteenth century mothers were, to withhold milk for the infants' first few days. Today's mothers know that colostrum, the first secretions of the breast after childbirth, contain a rich combination of vitamins and anti-allergens that protect newborns. In the eighteenth century, however, colostrum was thought to be toxic, so mothers waited for what they considered a purer milk flow to be established before nursing. But the baby's death suggests that she had difficulty nursing, rendering Maria vulnerable to mastitis and infections. The milk ducts in her right breast became clogged, and, inflamed with infections and pus, sores broke through to her skin in several places....

Notes:  Sometimes I wonder how humanity survived when so many people seem to have been so ignorant about women's health. 

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JACK ALLTRADE

I though this illustration was fun and only too true of our colonial ancestors who had many a "side-hustle."

MARTHA AND MARIA JEFFERSON ATTEND AN ELITE CATHOLIC GIRLS SCHOOL IN PARIS - THE PANTHEMONT - CISTERCIAN SISTERS

Of great interest to me also was that Jefferson's daughter Martha (the oldest), who went to Paris with him when he represented the United States there, was of Protestant heritage, but went to the most elite Catholic private school for girls, run by nuns. To me this means that Jefferson was not only doing in Paris what a wealthy Parisian might, being in that culture, but that he cared that his daughter have a good education. At one point she was tempted to join the nunnery.  There were other Protestant girls who attended there, including some from England,  The school was called Panthemont.  the Convent School was run by The Abbess, Catherine de Bethisy de Mezieres from 1743-1790. These schools often only taught what was considered necessary to turn out a fine young woman, and the students did not often stay for long, so you might think of them as "finishing" schools.  

Page 44 : "Although some had begun to argue that women also possessed intellectual ability and the capacity for rational thought, pragmatic parents had to groom their daughters for the marriage market that still abhorred the femme savante, a disparaging term for the woman who made herself ridiculous by proudly displaying her learning. 

The dismal state of female education in Paris could also be explained by the short amount of time girls actually spent in formal learning: one study of seven Paris convent schools found that 60 percent of the students attended for less than two years. By 1800, only 27% if French brides could sign their names in the marriage registers, as opposed to 40 % of the English ones

(This book has quite a list of the various books Martha Jefferson was required to read in French literature, books that taught the value of work, the dangers of flattery, and the rarity of true friendship. She was also taught to write letters as a n art. Besides embroidery and needlework, drawing and painting flowers, and so on, the girls learned history, some arithmetic, and geography.  While critics said that female students were just given a bit of understanding of these subjects often reserved just for men, the nuns and the students took their education seriously.  I would also like to mention that there seems to have been an influx of girls being readied for the marriage market and that there might not have been an emphasis of a graduation or completion of studies.)

Page 22: (In particular to Martha's daughter Ellen Randolph...) Ellen considered herself a "bluestocking" that is an elite female thinker. But such women were not sought out as wives. Ellen wrote that her experience, north or south, a woman who 'is believed to have received a useful education is really more welcome than a blue stocking Unitarian democrat.' 

Notes: as Martha's husband Tom Randolph went into more debt, unable to sell property, and taking more bank loans, it became clear that the daughters would not have dowries and there was a concern that they would have to marry well. His financial problems made it impossible for him to provide them with dowries large enough to attract the husbands they would need for their own financial stability.

FAMILY HISTORY REGISTER DESIGNED BY CURRIER and IVES 1874

This family register is held by The Library of Congress. 

It is a Currier and Ives design circa 1874

and is a hand-colored lithograph 1870-1880.

LAWS WITH CONSIDERATIONS OF SLAVE STATUS AND COLOR : VIRGINIA

 Excerpt pages 8-9

... 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 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 **** in the same way as all men, white and black, sixteen years of age or 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 take the condition of the mother, 1662) So then, the child of a free white woman and a free black man is free? (Not quite; such children will be held in service until their thirtieth birthday. In addition, the mother must pay a fine of 15 pounds 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 pounds sterling. And clergymen who conduct such ceremonies will be fined ten thousand pounds of tobacco - half of which goes to the informer.).....

Note on word tithable : Explanation here from LIBRARY OF VIRGINIA : TITHABLE LAW EXPLAINED

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MASTERFUL OAK

Image from Graphics Fairy

JEFFERSON'S DAUGHTERS by CATHERINE KERRISON : ANCESTRY WORSHIP - GENEALOGY BOOK REVIEW

This book was outstanding!

It's a biography of three of Jefferson's daughters.  They were Martha and Maria, by his wife Martha Wayles, and Harriet, by Sally Hemings, who was his mistress or common-law wife but also his slave. The man who became 3rd President of the United States (1801 -1809) had a long marriage-like relationship with Sally but could not lawfully marry her if he wanted to because she was also his slave. Martha, his daughter, lived a long life and had thirteen children. Her descendants were the ones to refute that Jefferson had children with Hemings. Maria, his younger daughter, died young also due to pregnancy.  

Early in the book we are presented with a genealogy chart. I always love to reference these charts in books and it is the beginning of surprises.  If you, like me, thought of Sally Hemings as isolated, well, we were wrong.  The Hemings family were all special among slaves, brought into the Jefferson family as "House" slaves, often given special educations that not only helped the family but provided useful skills for them to earn their living should they be free.  Initially they were brought in as belonging to his wife Martha Wayles, who he dearly loved and lost young because of childbirth.

No other book I've encountered does such a good job of showing how Sally Hemings was not sequestered in a secret room adjacent to his or a secret at Monticello.  Though as he retired and entertained fewer visitors his private life could remain fairly private, what the slaves of Monticello knew was that the Hemings family were special.

Sally Hemings was significantly of European DNA (i.e. "White,") and so their daughter Harriet was 7/8ths "White," but still enslaved.  Since relationships of various sorts between European descent and African descent people occurred before and after the American Revolution, the question of who was or was not  ever a slave or a free person or who had bought their freedom from slavery was something up for discussion and legal determinations.  Surprisingly, Sally's sister lived as the known common-law wife of another man not far away - and apparently they were not given grief over this. 

This book also showed that Jefferson himself must have aided Harriet (as well as his sons) in leaving slavery and that Harriet might have had to go through her life as a free White woman, married to a White man who had to keep her secret and might not have ever seen her parents or siblings again.  (There is no evidence to refute this, but my guess is that there was some channel of communication, for her older brother who could have been freed three years earlier, waited until she was 21 and he was 24 before they left together. Testimonials of where she went and so on came down in history from other of her children who were freed.)

Harriet's special skill was to be weaving.  She not only learned the traditional skills but Jefferson also had her trained on the latest more commercial contraption showing foresight that she might have to work to support herself.

Much to my delight - and increasing my respect for author Catherine Kerrison, was to learn the extensive genealogy she did in order to locate Harriet.  She had about 48 possible Harriets (supposing she only changed her surname when she left, or perhaps married soon after leaving estate) in the Washington D.C. area, which is where family history says she went to, at least right after leaving. She eliminated them one by one and came up with two strong candidates, or maybe just one, but this was inconclusive.  (It seems to me that some day some genetic link could be established if Harriet has living descendants.)

As a result, I will be excerpting this book through the next several weeks bringing to you some key points that I think will be of interest to anyone interested in American History, and especially African-American History.

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AFRICAN AMERICAN REGISTRY presents THE HEADRIGHT PROPERTY SYSTEM IN AMERICA

THIS IS A HISTORY - EDUCATIONAL WEBSITE that is searchable by topic including by names.

AFRICAN AMERICAN REGISTRY ORG - SEARCH FOR TOPIC  

I tried the words ATLANTA and ACTIVIST

Excerpt:  Slavery and the headright system

Plantation owners benefited from the headright system when they paid for the Middle Passage. This, and the increased amount of money required to bring indentured servants to the colonies, contributed to the shift toward chattel slavery. Until 1699, an enslaved person was worth a headright of fifty acres. According to records, in the 1670s, over 400 enslaved people were used as headrights in Virginia.

This number increased in the 1680s and 1690s. Many families gained power in the colonies by receiving large tracts of land when they imported enslaved people. For example, George Menefie purchased sixty enslaved people and received 3,000 acres in 1638. In 1699, it was decided that a headright would only be granted to free citizens and that transporting indentured laborers or slaves would no longer be a guarantor of land. 

Issues with land patent records

According to records, there was a large discrepancy between the number of headrights issued and the number of new residents in the colonies. This gap may be explained by the high mortality rates of Blacks and the inhumane conditions they endured crossing the Atlantic Ocean to the colonies. Landowners would receive headrights for the dead; thus, the gap would widen between population growth and the number of headrights issued. Another explanation suggests that the secretary's office that issued the headrights grew laxer. There were few regulations in place to keep the headright system in check. Because of this, several headrights were claimed multiple times, and people took advantage of the lack of governance.

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