With this excerpt, I end my focus on this wonderful book! I hope you'll get a copy to read through.
My notes re pages 262-263 :
Harriet, the daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, was to be freed from the slavery she was born into at the age of 21.Her older brother could have left earlier but he stayed till he was 24. It would seem that they were to leave together, and perhaps they continued to know each other? Any woman who was self supporting in the 19th century was living in poverty. So, despite her skill at weaving, marriage to a man who could provide would be important. Was that possible? Jefferson let them go WITHOUT MANUMISSION PAPERS. In his farmbook he said they had 'run' but though they were fugitives, no one was looking for them either, and he didn't pursue that.
Excerpt:
"To avoid the paper trail that would connect them to him, Jefferson facilitated Beverley's and Harriet's departures without furnishing them manumission papers. In fact, for anyone who might examine his papers after his death, he wrote in his Farm Book "ran" next to their names. So by law they remained fugitive slaves until the Untied States abolished slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Although some states had already abolished slavery or put it on the path to extinction by gradual emancipation before then, the force of the Federal government had always been marshaled in support of slavery, first with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and then its stronger successor in 1850. Not only was it a federal offense to assist fugitive slaves, the 1850 act required the free states to return runaway slaves to their masters so that even in the North they were not safe.
For forty-three yeas then, Harriet risked forcible return to Virginia and slavery if her identity was discovered and reported... And so would her children.
But Jefferson was not as uncaring as one might think.
Jefferson had his man pay her stage fair to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars. Population 64,000 better than Washington City (D.C.) The city had attracted many manumitted slaves from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, as well as from the Pennsylvania hinterlands, between 1790 and 1820.
Basically it seems he covered his daughter's tracks.
Since Jefferson had been in Philadelphia and the Continental Congress he would have been able to arrange for her to make to Philadelphia. But perhaps she got off in Washington City rather than Philadelphia... There also her father had spent 8 years as President of the U.S... Beverly Hemings was in Washington City and went there as a white man....
She was supposedly married to a white man of good standing in Washington City. Her brother Madison said she raised a family of children but he refused to give any surname or names of children and as late at 1863 said her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticelllo had never been discovered...
I wonder:
With so many people doing genealogy, it is always possible that someone will discover they are descended from Harriet.
I suspect that there was some chain of communication between Jefferson and his children with Sally.
