HARRIET HEMINGS - DAUGHTER OF SALLY - ELITE AMONG SLAVES AT MONTICELLO - AND HER ROUTE TO FREEDOM

Page 190 : This excerpt explains how it was that the Hemings came to live at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson and his wife and then remained after her death.  Harriet Hemings was the daughter of Sally Hemings, born a slave, and President Thomas Jefferson.

Harriet Hemings was born into a family that had stood at the apex of the slave community at Monticello ever since Elizabeth Hemings (Sally's mother and Harriet's grandmother) arrived in 1775.  In Virginia slave's society, whites considered it a mark of favor to position slaves in the plantation house at tasks that required skill and artistry, from woodworking to cooking.  With only two exceptions - the positions of service closest to Jefferson's family were filled by Elizabeth Hemming's extended family. Jefferson's grandson even believed that the Hemingses' privileged position incited what he called "bitter jealousy" among the other slaves....  Hemings family members were a caste apart. They experienced a stability of family life uncommon to most slaves, at Monticello or anywhere else; they were employed in positions of trust (as butlers, valets, chambermaids, and nurses) and of skill (as cooks, carpenters, and artisans) and as products of interracial relationships, they were fairer-skinned than most slaves. Harriet, who was seven-eights white (and therefore under Virginia law, legally white), was described by Jefferson's overseer Edmund Bacon as "nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful."

Page 193 : *from my notes  (The slaves sold their own garden produce on Sunday afternoons to the Monticello family. Vegetables as well as eggs from their chickens. To feed their own families they also brewed beer, and made butter and cheese. Jefferson's farm books also mention the distribution of clothing to the slaves twice a year. The Hemings family would have received better clothing.

Page 207 : But as a very young child, Harriet would have been unaware of these nuances of status. She may have played with the Randolph girls (Martha Jefferson's children) on their occasional visits to Monticello....  It was not at all unusual in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for very young children, free and enslaved, to spend their days playing together until they began to learn their respective conditions in life.  Nor would a stranger looking at the three little girls have been able to distinguish among them.... (The Randolphs explained their olive skin and dark hair by claiming to be descended from Pocohontas- I'm not sure she had descendants!)

Notes: According to Madison Hemings, who is the chief informant about the family and connection to Jefferson, Jefferson was not in the habit of being demonstrative or showing partiality to any of the children.

Page 208 : Nor did Jefferson follow the example of many planter-fathers in his own day who lived openly with their slave consorts, or claimed the children of those unions and provided for them.  Bachelor fathers in New Orleans made a point of asserting paternity in baptismal records.  When wealthy white Floridians had large mulatto families, they freed and educated their children, and provided for them in their wills, bestowing on them homes, land, and even slaves. In Jefferson's own state, there were multiple examples of fathers who freed their children who had enslaved mothers, educated them, and willed their own acreage to their progeny at their deaths. Of the several who also r the mothers of their children, one even requested that he be buried beside her...

Page 260 : ... in 1806 the Virginia legislature mandated that hensforth all manumitted slaves must leave the Commonwealth within twelve months or be re-enslaved.  Six years earlier, Richmond and been shaken by the sophisticated organization of rebellious slaves who planned to torch the city, seize its arsenal of weapons and capture the governeror and his officials....

Page 261:  In their newspaper ads, white Virginians used at least sixteen different phrases to describe the varying skin tones of their runaway slaves, This remarkable list itself was proof that, as one historian noted, "The racial order was breaking down." 

But even the law did not stipulate a neat divide between black and white. In 1785 the state legislature changed the boundary between whiteness and mulatto from one-eight African ancestry to one-quarter, but it failed to address the ambiguous racial category of people with less than one quarter African blood.  They remained raceless, the law exempting them from the legal category of color but still unwilling to categorically denote them white....

...when the 1830 census taker knocked on Sally Heming's door, he judged her, Madison and Eston white, an indication of both their skin color and the community understanding of their free status after Jefferson's death.  Three years later, however, another official judged them mulatto.....

I've noticed that the same person can be on a census as W or Mulatto or Black from census  year to another, most notably if that person has moved from their home location and was encountering new community...

I mentioned during the first post in this series about this wonderful book that I respected that author Catherine Kerrison had tracked 58 potential Harriets in Washington city as possibly Harriet Hemings, the daughter of Slave Sally Hemings and President Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States of America.  The many pages she devoted to her candidates and their elimination while not detailed in terms of a research path were still interesting and does move to two best candidates. 

This is a good place to link to MONTICELLO GETTING WORD PROJECT where people who are from from Monticello Slave roots can tell their oral histories. 

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. 

C 2024 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot

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.

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

C 2023 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy

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.

C 2024 Ancestry Worship - Genealogy BlogSpot