Harriet Hemings was a strong person. To live the first twenty years of her life enslaved, then to leave her family behind in order to experience freedom must have been immeasurably painful. Clear, luminous valor is blown like glass- molded flame by dying flame. Warm eyes crackle into embers as a glistening fever of smoke slips through your fingers. You feel slow heat hide under your skin. You feel yesterday leap from your heart and into the wilderness of eternity.
While I won’t focus entirely on the Jefferson-Hemings controversy, it is impossible to avoid mentioning the disturbing imbalance of power that led to their “relationship.” Sarah “Sally” Hemings (1773-1835) was a 14-year-old slave, and Thomas Jefferson was her wealthy, white master– thirty years her senior. After visiting Jefferson in 1811, educator Elijah Fletcher wrote:
“The story of black Sal is no farce. That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth, and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves– an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts.”
Sally Hemings was also the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, and her parents had a similar troubling relationship. Unfortunately, there is very little information about Harriet, so this might be shorter than I hoped. Despite this obstacle, I will tell her story the best I can.
The only surviving daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Harriet was born May 1801 on her father’s Monticello plantation in Virginia. Of the four Hemings children: William Beverley, Harriet, James Madison, and Eston– three identified as white once they were free as adults. (The exception is Madison.)
Although they were seven-eighths white, all the Hemings children were legally enslaved under Virginia law– a status they inherited from Sally, who was one-quarter Black. Due to being mixed-race, they were at the top of the slave hierarchy, doing artisanal and domestic work. The three boys even learned to play the violin– an instrument Jefferson was known to play. Sally served as a chambermaid, nursemaid, lady’s maid, and seamstress. Harriet assisted her mother with these duties, but at age 14, she began working as a wool spinner in her father’s textile mill. Her brother Madison wrote:
“My brothers, sister Harriet, and myself were used alike. They were put to some mechanical trade at the age of fourteen. Till then they were required to stay about the ‘great house’ and only required to do such light work as going on errands. Harriet learned to spin and weave in a little factory on the home plantation.”
Madison’s account is unusual for a few reasons. First, most of Jefferson’s younger slaves began working in the textile mill at 10 years old, while Harriet was 14. It is also interesting that the Hemings children were allowed to run errands with Sally. Historian Annette Gordon-Reed notes that the Hemingses were the only slave family to all be freed from Monticello– and the only ones freed in their youth. Harriet and her brothers always knew they would be free because her father promised to free them once they turned 21. After Jefferson’s death, his daughter Patsy freed Sally, allowing her to live with her younger sons in Charlottesville. The Hemingses probably received this special treatment because they were his children.
In 1822, Harriet’s oldest brother Beverley “ran away” to Washington D.C. He was 24 years old and passed as white. That same year, when she turned 21, Harriet was freed. This account from overseer Edmund Bacon regards her freedom:
“Mr. Jefferson freed a number of his servants in his will… He freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter….When she was nearly grown, by Mr. Jefferson’s direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars.”
Harriet Hemings was the only female slave her father freed during his life. $50 back then would be around $960 nowadays, so she had quite the sizable travel fare. Once she left Virginia, Harriet eventually settled in Washington D.C., where Beverley lived. Both Beverley and Harriet wrote to Madison for a few years, while he was living in Ohio. At some point, Harriet moved to Maryland, but spent most of her adult life in Washington D.C. In 1873, Madison wrote:
“Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City. … She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives. I have not heard from her for ten years, and do not know whether she is dead or alive. She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.”
It is believed that Harriet stopped writing because she died, but it is strange that she and Beverley vanished into thin air. Not even her letters survive. Somebody must have known her. Someone is unknowingly a descendant. I wonder what she was like a person, what she enjoyed doing, what she held close to her heart. Sadly, her story is hidden deep in the hard endless crevices of time. I’m certain it was painful for her to hide most of her past, but in order to live a good life, it was a sacrifice she had to make.
No matter what Harriet did, I hope she found happiness. I hope it glittered and warmed her like stars that never needed a sky.
Curious History Girl 