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. 

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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.

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