Andrew Davenport: Every now and then a document just stops me in my tracks. You mentioned Robert Hemmings's signature, and I thought, wait a minute, we don't have an example of that, we don't have an example of any of his writings, period. It's so unbelievably rare to find a document from the perspective of an enslaved person that has their handwriting on it.

David Thorson: Welcome to In the Course of Human Events, a Monticello podcast. I’m David Thorson, a digital guide at Monticello.

Today we're going to talk about the extraordinary life of Robert Hemmings—and a document with his signature that was hiding in plain sight in an archive for more than 200 years.

To tell this story, we're joined by three people involved with Monticello's Getting Word African American Oral History Project.

Andrew Davenport: I'm Andrew Davenport. I am the director of African American History and the Getting Word Project at Monticello.

Auriana Woods: I'm Auriana Woods. I'm an oral historian for the Getting Word African American Oral History project.

Bernetiae Reed: I'm Bernetiae Reed. I'm a genealogist working with Getting Word.

Who was Robert Hemmings?

David Thorson:

The Getting Word project started more than 30 years ago, when Monticello began to seek out and record the stories and oral histories of the descendants of families who were enslaved on Jefferson’s plantations. These families include the Fossetts, Gillettes, Grangers, and many others, but the most well-documented is the Hemings family. As many as 70 members of the Hemings family lived in slavery at Monticello over five generations--including Robert Hemmings.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Robert Hemmings is born in 1762. He is the eldest child of John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings. John Wayles will become Jefferson's father-in-law, the father of Jefferson's bride, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, and Elizabeth Hemings was an enslaved woman. Robert Hemmings likely had been present for Jefferson's courtship of Martha Wayles Skelton, and he is likely present at his half-sister's wedding to Jefferson in 1772, as a boy of about 10 years old.

 

Aurianna Woods:

And Robert Hemmings and his family become the property of Thomas Jefferson as a part of his inheritance from his father-in-law.  

 

Andrew Davenport:

Yeah, and that's shown in the January 14th, 1774, entries that originate Jefferson's farm book. Robert Hemmings and his family are mentioned there.

 

Aurianna Woods:

The entrance of the Hemmings family to Monticello's plantation community.

 

Andrew Davenport:

That's right. Legal ownership.

 

Narrator:

Tracing family lineage can be confusing, so let me go over this again. Elizabeth Hemings was the matriarch of the Hemings family, and she was the property and concubine of Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles.  Of her 12 children, Wayles fathered six of whom Robert Hemmings was the eldest and his younger siblings were James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally Hemings. Because they shared the same father – John Wayles- all these children were half-siblings of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha Jefferson, After John Wayles died, Jefferson inherited the Hemings family, and they were all brought in bondage to Monticello. died.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Jefferson hand-selected Robert Hemmings to be his enslaved valet, just after Jefferson's marriage, when Hemmings was only 11 or 12 years old, to replace the 31-year-old Jupiter Evans. And that is a pattern that Jefferson establishes. I think Jefferson has this idea that he can manipulate a younger person to suit his own needs, whether that's as a politician or as a planter. In his mind, he can shape this individual, who is privy to every movement of Jefferson's, privy to every physical activity, every person that he's introduced to on his travels, who must be trusted to the extreme.

 

Annette Gordon-Reed speculates that Robert Hemmings, or as Jefferson called him, Bob, may have been literate at this time and that his literacy could have been one of the reasons why Jefferson chose Robert Hemmings to become his enslaved valet. Literacy would separate him from the vast majority of enslaved people during his lifetime.  His brothers, in particular, are literate. James is literate. Peter is very likely to have been literate. Critta Hemings, his sister, is literate. Over time, literacy rates, because they're punishable by extreme punishment, will decline.

 

But most important is Robert Hemmings's connection to Martha Jefferson and John Wayles. He is her half-sibling. This is a dense web of connections in Colonial Virginia, and it's just one of these very surreal, but extremely common features of this slave society-- this interconnectedness of Black and white families, whether recognized or erased.

 

So, Robert Hemmings is a sibling in this world of extremely talented enslaved people. He's a coachman, he is a horseman, he dresses Jefferson, he runs errands for Jefferson.

 

Narrator:

Elizabeth Hemings and her children did seem to have special status at Monticello. They occupied the most important household positions and practiced some of the key trades on the mountaintop.

 

As Jefferson’s valet, Robert Hemmings accompanied him everywhere for almost a decade. Hemmings witnessed the founding of the new nation in Philadelphia in 1776 where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence – he was in Williamsburg and Richmond when Jefferson was Governor of Virginia - he helped Jefferson and his family escape the British Army during the Revolutionary War.

 

This daily association between Jefferson and Hemmings ended in 1784, when Jefferson became Minister to France and moved to Paris. Hemmings, then 22 years old, remained in Virginia, working as an enslaved servant, keeping his wages for himself – which was another sign of his unusual privileges, and he continued to hire himself out, working independently even after Jefferson returned from France in 1789.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Hemmings has extraordinary mobility even during his period of enslavement under Jefferson. Jefferson, for long stretches of time, has no idea where Robert Hemmings is, or for that matter, where his brother James Hemings is, and will write to friends or family and say, "Hey, can you get word to Robert Hemmings because I require his services here or there." In some cases, James Hemmings would actually fill in for Robert Hemmings as a coachman. So there's this one instance where James Hemings actually takes the coach with the Jefferson family to the Shenandoah Valley. That was supposed to have been Robert's role.

 

Robert Hemmings has all of these kind of facets to his character, but he's always striving, thinking about his future and that becomes really clear as he's courting Dolly near Fredericksburg. And that is what seems to propel him to demand freedom.

 

Narrator:

Robert Hemmings met and married Dolly, an enslaved woman owned by Dr. George Frederick Stras, a Frenchman living in Richmond. It seems like Hemmings worked out a deal with Stras to buy their freedom. Stras purchased Hemmings from Jefferson for $200 and Hemmings repaid Stras with his service. Jefferson was not happy about the circumstances by which Hemmings negotiated his freedom but felt obliged to go along with the deal.  

 

Andrew Davenport:

Robert Hemmings is freed beginning in 1794. He'll ultimately pay for his freedom across five years and is officially freed by 1799. And so somewhere in that window between 1794, when Robert Hemmings insists on being freed and Jefferson reluctantly parts with him, he's the first person that Jefferson ever frees, and his actual freedom legally by 1799, we think in that window that his wife is also freed because they're planning a family. They’re planning what the future looks like, and not just their future, but their children's future.

 

In freedom, he owns this livery and stables, or it seems like he does, he's a fruit seller, so he's trying to secure a measure of security for his family that was unavailable to most other African Americans at the time and for many, many years afterward.

 

He's always been written about. He appears in Jefferson's financial accounts dozens and dozens of times. He appears in Jefferson's selected correspondence files as having written to Jefferson, but we don't have those documents. It's his daughter Elizabeth's marriage, that is the one time we have of him entering his own name into history.

 

Marriage License

Narrator:

Now we’re getting to that document you heard about at the beginning of the podcast. Robert and Dolly Hemmings had two children, Elizabeth and Martin. It’s Elizabeth’s marriage certificate. Bernetiae Reed is the researcher who actually found it.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

Robert had a daughter named Elizabeth Hemmings and she married a William Scott. One of the problems though was that what's on Ancestry.cpm is just the information that this person married. So I was pursuing the image that actually showed this document.

 

Andrew Davenport:

This is a marriage license. It's prepared by the Commonwealth, and much as you would sign your name today on a prefilled document, whether analog or digital, there's space for you to add the details of your particular incident, in this case, a forthcoming marriage. William Scott and Robert Hemmings are listed here, it seems by a notary, who has filled out their names, William Scott, the husband, and Robert Hemmings, the father of the bride, Elizabeth Hemmings. And then, of course, the notary will continue with including the name of the current governor, James Barber, and the date, the 28th day of August 1812.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

She has not signed this record. It's between William Scott and Robert Hemmings.

 

Andrew Davenport:

So her husband and her father signed the marriage license.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

That's right.

 

Andrew Davenport:

No one had tracked the original down. And so your intervention here, Bernetiae, was to make a phone call.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

Yeah, I called and spoke to Victoria Garnett at the Library of Virginia and she was very helpful.

 

Andrew Davenport:

I love an archivist.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

Yes. And she found it.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Could you tell us what it was like first seeing the record and were you aware of its significance? How did it hit you?

 

Bernetiae Reed:

It came around Christmastime, which was really special. The other record that I was looking for was in a county that the records had been destroyed by fire. This was really fortunate that it was available.

 

Andrew Davenport:

You're very understated, Bernetiae. Working with Victoria Garnett at Library of Virginia, this isn't just finding an instance where Robert Hemmings's signature appears. This is the only extent evidence of a document in Hemmings's handwriting, and that can't be overstated.

 

We know that he wrote at least five letters to Jefferson during his lifetime. He helps Jefferson purchase lemon juice, while he's free in Richmond. He's a fruit seller near Capitol Square, and he also helps procure oysters for Jefferson in 1809, I think it is. There are these records of this correspondence from Hemmings to Jefferson, but the documents no longer exist.

 

We think that Hemmings's letters to Jefferson were destroyed. Most everything in human history gets destroyed. It gets lost to time. Jefferson says this. He talks about having a genuine morsel of history is so unbelievably precious, it's actually priceless.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

It was just exciting to see that she had discovered the record, first, and then to see the content, to actually say, wow—it's there and it has a signature. I have to admit that I'm really learning the extent of the excitement about it from hearing Andrew talk about it.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Anytime that we can add a copy of that original document to our archives is an important way for us to address the archival imbalance that exists because of slavery. Jefferson has tens and thousands of records, many of them from his own hand. There are very few sources from enslaved people's perspectives.

 

There's just four oral histories from formerly enslaved people from Monticello that exist. There's, maybe, altogether from an African American’s handwriting from Monticello several dozen documents: John Hemmings's correspondence, Martha Fossett's correspondence to her father Joseph Fossett, we just found last year, James Hemmings. These are very, very limited sources, so anytime we can add another source into that corpus is a really important moment for us.

 

Given that it's Robert Hemmings, who was present at the writing and adoption of the Declaration of Independence as a 14-year-old in 1776, here he is in 1812, at the scene of his daughter's marriage. It's really freaking remarkable.

 

Robert Hemmings's signature

Narrator:

The document is an extraordinary find. But the signature itself is also fascinating.

 

Andrew Davenport: I think one of the wrinkles of this document, the signature in particular, it's gargantuan.

 

Aurianna Woods: It spans almost the entire width of the page, and it's definitely vertically taller than one might expect to see in a signature on this kind of document and given the space that's provided as well.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Robert Hemmings had one of his hands shot off by a blunderbuss, basically a small shotgun, circa 1800. We don't know the precise date, but we do know that James Callender will write about Robert Hemmings and he'll say that he was disfigured in one arm by 1802. So the size of the signature, the date of it, 1812, This indicates to me that he's not writing with his dominant hand, that he's writing with his weak hand.

 

Aurianna Woods:

Right. It probably accounts for one part, maybe, of how large it is. This is an example of his penmanship and his literacy, even given the loss of his writing hand, his normal dominant hand.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

And it does look like it slants, like a left-handed writer.

 

Andrew Davenport:

I'm right-handed. It looks when I try to write with my left hand, it's better than that. It seems like years of practice with this. It's certainly the largest signature I've ever seen. It reminds me that Robert Hemmings probably knew John Hancock, certainly had seen the Declaration of Independence, and one-upped him on his daughter's independence record, that she's a free woman entering into this legal marriage, and if William Scott and Elizabeth Hemmings have children together, the children will be free too. So it's this moment of pride, that's how I read it as.

 

Narrator:

Robert Hemmings, and his presence at the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, is being celebrated.

 

Andrew Davenport:

One of the cool things that we're doing now is a collaboration with Monument Lab in Philadelphia and the artist Sonya Clark, who's inspired by the Robert Hemmings story for an upcoming exhibition at The Declaration House in Philadelphia which is the reconstructed site where Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in the summer of 1776. Of course, also living in the Declaration House is the 14-year-old Robert Hemmings.

 

Aurianna Woods:

The Monument Lab exhibit is really trying to incorporate the fact that Robert Hemmings was there. And when we think about that document, of course, we think about those signatures.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Yeah, rather than saying that someone's signature is their John Hancock, I think we should be saying that it's their Bob Hemmings. That's how prominent the signature is.

 

Aurianna Woods: I love that.

 

Bernetiae Reed: I love that too. It's pretty special.

 

Narrator: Declaration House is part of Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia. The exhibition will run from June through September 2024. By moving Hemmings to the center of this moment in history, the project explores the entangled legacies of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation’s founding.

 

Another interesting feature of this signature is how Robert Hemmings spelled his last name.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Our documentary editors at the Thomas Jefferson Paper series attempt to seek out documents in people's hands, and then base the spelling of the names on people's signatures. Jefferson is an easy one, there's thousands of documents of Jefferson spelling his own name.

 

The Hemings family is different. Jefferson most frequently spells Hemings H-E-M-I-N-G-S. John Hemmings, one of Robert Hemmings's brothers, is literate. He spells his name most frequently with two M's, H-E-M-M-I-N-G-S. We have long assigned H-E-M-I-N-G-S Hemings to Robert Hemmings and H-E-M-M-I-N-G-S to John Hemmings. Here's Robert Hemmings spelling his own name H-E-M-M-I-N-G-S, two Ms, and we'll have to edit.

That's what you do here. When new sources emerge, you've gotta go with source.

 

Aurianna Woods:

Particularly the first source of him writing his name, right? We have another family, Peter Hemmings descendant, and the first generation that we have actual examples of spell it Hemans, H-E-M-A-N-S, which is a variation we really hadn't seen before. It speaks to how one is taking that name and putting it through their own literacy process and then how that continues to be passed down and written in the historical record.

 

Tracing Family Histories

Narrator:

The matter of how a person spells their name speaks directly to the idea of agency and spelling Hemmings with two m’s may be a way of Robert Hemmings asserting his agency as a free man and as Jefferson’s equal. Beyond the surprise of finding Robert Hemmings signature, there’s another surprise in the historic record and it’s in Jefferson’s Memorandum Book dated on Christmas Eve, 1794 where he writes “Executed a deed of emancipation for Bob, by the name of Robert Hemmings.” - and -Jefferson- for the first and only time in his known correspondence, spells Hemmings name with two M’s! It makes one wonder if Jefferson, however briefly, sees Robert Hemmings not as his property but as a person. But – the imbalance of power between Jefferson and Hemmings seems to come back to the fore in the manumission document itself, where Jefferson spells Robert Hemings name with a single M, noting he’s the son of Betty Hemmings (who Jefferson still owns as property) with two M’s – for the first and only time in his known correspondence. It’s almost as though Jefferson is taking back that second M as his property, just as Betty Hemmings remains his property.

 

Robert Hemmings died in Richmond in 1819. We don’t know the exact date or the cause of his death and the fate of his family remains a mystery. These are the kinds of facts, details and stories our Getting Word researchers are hoping to discover.

 

In fact, Bernetiae Reed started looking for this document when a possible Hemmings family descendant inquired about someone named Betsy Goff.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

On Ancestry.com, people have taken that as a possibility that Betsy Scott ispossibly Elizabeth Hemmings, who has the same approximate birth date. But this Betsy Scott married Charles Goff, and so my effort was to find out if this was a second marriage.

 

Aurianna Woods:

Elizabeth Hemmings and her brother Martin and her mother, as well, largely disappear from the historical record after 1820. So we know that they're in Richmond, but after that, they do not seem to appear in any census records, at least in the places that we expected them to be.

 

So Elizabeth Hemmings, then Elizabeth Scott, then became this Betsy Goff that was inquired about. So Betsy Goff being in a county, actually, much closer to Albemarle was, okay, maybe she left Richmond, maybe her husband died, and she remarried. So, the fact that we do not know their eventual fates prompted us to look into this further.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

And we still can't prove or disprove that it's the same person. We just don't have the record.

 

Aurianna Woods:

We've not been able to prove or disprove that, unfortunately, but we did, in the process, find this incredible document and shared it with the family in the hopes that they can continue with the research as well and that we'll maintain a communication with them.

 

We also have to remember, whenever we're researching any of these families, names were passed down so consistently. So Elizabeth, there are many Elizabeth Hemings and there are therefore many Betsys, folks that have maiden names that are Hemmings and then they marry other people. There's a whole different Betsy Hemmings family that exists as descendants, and that exists for so many names, Sarahs, Sallys, etc.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

Not to mention Scott.

 

Aurianna Woods:

Right. Scott is an incredibly popular last name, particularly locally when we look back at a lot of these historically enslaved families. Martin Hemmings, when I first started looking into this, I was like, Martin is not as common of a name as Elizabeth. I was like, let me start there. It is sad, but it's a challenge because there are gaps. I believe we will fill them in one day.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

There might be records out there, but we haven't found them yet.

 

Andrew Davenport:

We're always looking and holding out hope. What happened to Robert Hemmings's children is one of the enduring mysteries for our collaborative process. And it's not just the Hemmings family, of course, it's what happened to families who were sold after Monticello, and that's partly what we're trying to address with our work, too.

 

I love that this remains with us and it can change our understanding of Hemmings and add a chapter toward the end of his life that then sets his family off into their first chapter really in freedom together, because whoever Elizabeth Hemmings, William Scott, whatever grandchildren Robert Hemmings have, will be very likely the first freeborn generation of this family.

 

Conclusion

Narrator:

If you're interested in learning more about slavery at Monticello, check out our website and the website for the Getting Word project. Much of our knowledge stems from the research of two scholars. The first is Cinder Stanton a senior historian at Monticello who helped found the Getting Word project and whose book "Those Who Labor for My Happiness:" Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello was groundbreaking in recognizing Monticello’s enslaved community. The second is Harvard Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, a legal scholar and historian whose New York Times bestseller The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won both a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

 

Andrew Davenport:

Bernetiae, we've collaborated together for a couple of years now. I'm just thrilled that you're on our team, that you're pursuing this research. It's just fabulous to be part of this collaborative

 

Bernetiae Reed:

It really is, and it all works hand in hand. The oral histories feed the genealogy work and the knowledge of the families. So it all works together.

 

To mention also Cinder Stanton's role in this research and what she's provided along the way to our knowledge of the Hemings family and all of the enslaved people at Monticello, I had the honor of first working with Cinder, I think, in 2005. She was really excited to see his signature and to learn where it had been found.

 

Aurianna Woods:

  would pay money to see Cinder's reaction, cause it's a story that she's been putting together and working on for over 30 years. I think it speaks to what we're talking about, that we are always learning more because it took 31 years, roughly, to fill in this gap, to find this thing-- the signature that was always there, but just waiting to be found.

 

Andrew Davenport:

There's these moments of excitement of these archival recoverings. I don't like discovery, I always put discovery in quotes. These are resurfacings, these are recoverings, this is about a return. Thank god this record survived.

 

Bernetiae Reed:

Yeah, and it also shows you that there are more morsels to be found that are buried in archives and libraries across the United States. We constantly have to keep digging and keep connecting those dots where we can find them. That's part of the excitement is also finding something after you've been digging fruitlessly. It keeps you going to actually find something that's truly exciting.

 

Andrew Davenport:

And we're in the business of meaning-making here, and this document...

 

Auriana Woods:

Sure does that.

 

Andrew Davenport:

It means something. Our late colleague, Aurelia Crawford, frequently said, Monticello constantly reveals itself. Here it is once again revealing itself.

 

David Thorson:

I want to thank Andrew, Auriana, and Bernetiae for their incredible research and for sharing the story of Robert Hemmings. And thank you for listening.