The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed Page A
Authors: Annette Gordon-Reed
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extremely valuable part of the society’s collection, a pivotal document within the vast array of the written material that Jefferson produced over the course of his very long lifetime. In it he recorded the names, births, family configurations, rations, and work assignments of all the people enslaved on his plantations. Waiting for books in research libraries was nothing new to me, but this time the anticipation was almost exponentially heightened because I was finally going to get to see and touch an item that I had been reading in facsimile form since high school. The librarian brought the Farm Book out to me, and I was slightly startled by its size. It was much smaller than I had imagined it would be and much more well-preserved, and I knew the society was taking great pains to keep it that way. The librarian left me alone. When I opened the pages to see that very familiar hand and the neatly written entries, many of which I knew by heart, I was completely overwhelmed. For a time I simply could not continue.
There had been other moments before then when I was brought up short while reading through the Farm Book and thinking of the people described in it and of the man who wrote it: Just who do you think you are!? He determined who got fish, and how many; who got cloth, and how much; and the number of blankets that were given out—the course of the lives of grown men, women, and their children set by this one man. I knew everything that was in the book, and understood what it meant long before I sat down to look at it again that day. Still, it was wrenching to hold the original and to know that Jefferson’s actual hand had dipped into the inkwell and touched these pages to create what was to me a record of human oppression. It took my breath away.
Of course, Jefferson did not see the Farm Book as I did. Had he thought it merely a record of oppression (greatly as he craved posterity’s favorable judgment), he would never have kept it. Certainly members of his legal white family would not have preserved it. They, too, were anxious to safeguard and cultivate his legacy because they loved him deeply and because their own sense of self was so firmly tied to that legacy. It is, in fact, highly unlikely that it ever occurred to Jefferson that his record of the lives of his slaves would become the subject of scholarly interest, even a passion among some—that his slaves’ lives would be chronicled and followed in minute detail, the interest in them often unmoored from any interest in him. No, this was a workaday document to tell him what he had to buy from year to year, to keep some sense of what would be needed to continue operations. In Jefferson’s monumentally patriarchal and self-absorbed view, one shared by his fellow slave-owning planters, this was Oh, the responsibilities I have! Here is what I have done and have yet to do for all “my family.”
The word “family” brings us to the subject of this book: the Hemingses of Monticello. No one can know what they, who were his family both biologically and in the figurative sense in which Jefferson meant it, thought about the Farm Book. They are listed there too—his wife’s sisters and brothers, their children, their mother, and his own children. Members of the family almost certainly knew it existed, and if they knew, their other relatives knew as well. Martin, Robert, James, and Sally Hemings—their nephew Burwell Colbert—among others, were close enough to Jefferson to see his books, to come upon him working, to know the important and not so important things, emotional and physical, that were in his life.
However familiar they were with its contents, one thing that all of the enslaved people at Monticello would have known about the Farm Book, not just the Hemingses, is that it described some parts of their lives, but definitely not all, reproducing only a tiny fraction of a snapshot of life at Monticello that provides a very useful baseline for inquiry. What
There had been other moments before then when I was brought up short while reading through the Farm Book and thinking of the people described in it and of the man who wrote it: Just who do you think you are!? He determined who got fish, and how many; who got cloth, and how much; and the number of blankets that were given out—the course of the lives of grown men, women, and their children set by this one man. I knew everything that was in the book, and understood what it meant long before I sat down to look at it again that day. Still, it was wrenching to hold the original and to know that Jefferson’s actual hand had dipped into the inkwell and touched these pages to create what was to me a record of human oppression. It took my breath away.
Of course, Jefferson did not see the Farm Book as I did. Had he thought it merely a record of oppression (greatly as he craved posterity’s favorable judgment), he would never have kept it. Certainly members of his legal white family would not have preserved it. They, too, were anxious to safeguard and cultivate his legacy because they loved him deeply and because their own sense of self was so firmly tied to that legacy. It is, in fact, highly unlikely that it ever occurred to Jefferson that his record of the lives of his slaves would become the subject of scholarly interest, even a passion among some—that his slaves’ lives would be chronicled and followed in minute detail, the interest in them often unmoored from any interest in him. No, this was a workaday document to tell him what he had to buy from year to year, to keep some sense of what would be needed to continue operations. In Jefferson’s monumentally patriarchal and self-absorbed view, one shared by his fellow slave-owning planters, this was Oh, the responsibilities I have! Here is what I have done and have yet to do for all “my family.”
The word “family” brings us to the subject of this book: the Hemingses of Monticello. No one can know what they, who were his family both biologically and in the figurative sense in which Jefferson meant it, thought about the Farm Book. They are listed there too—his wife’s sisters and brothers, their children, their mother, and his own children. Members of the family almost certainly knew it existed, and if they knew, their other relatives knew as well. Martin, Robert, James, and Sally Hemings—their nephew Burwell Colbert—among others, were close enough to Jefferson to see his books, to come upon him working, to know the important and not so important things, emotional and physical, that were in his life.
However familiar they were with its contents, one thing that all of the enslaved people at Monticello would have known about the Farm Book, not just the Hemingses, is that it described some parts of their lives, but definitely not all, reproducing only a tiny fraction of a snapshot of life at Monticello that provides a very useful baseline for inquiry. What
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