Episode 22 - She Has Claims Upon Me

Your Most Obedient & Humble Servant
Episode 22 - “She Has Claims Upon Me”
Published on May 25, 2021

Note: This transcript was generated by Otter.ai with light human correction

Kathryn Gehred 

Hello, and welcome to Your Most Obedient and Humble Servant, a Women's History podcast where we feature eighteenth and early nineteenth century women's letters that don't get the attention that we think they should. I'm your host, Katherine Gehred. This week, I have good news, and I also have bad news. The good news is that I figured out why my computer hasn't been actually saving my half of the audio when I've been making recordings with people. The bad news, I didn't figure it out before I lost my half of the audio for this week's recording. So once again, this week's episode is going to be a little bit different from usual, I've got all of my lovely guests audio, so I am going to sort of script and cut my half of the audio around hers. So it's a little bit different, but I still think I'll be able to put together something that is worthwhile. This week's guest is Laura Cooper, the continuing education coordinator at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. And I'll let Laura explain exactly what that entails.

Laura Cooper

As continuing education coordinator, my primary audience is actually teachers. So I coordinate our Monticello Teacher Institute, which is a professional development program for classroom educators that we run every summer, in non pandemic times. And then I also get to work a lot with staff training. So, all of those guides that you see at historic sites are trained professionals who need to constantly brush up their skills and their content knowledge. So, I get to help put together those programs to help them build that knowledge and maintain that knowledge, as well as some research that I get to do related to the teachers. So, we're putting together a handbook of research on what makes for good professional development at a historic site or museum, and now we have three years worth of quantitative research to validate that with, which has been a lot of work and a lot of fun, and now we're working with other museums to pull together their experiences with their expertise from their programs, as well as teacher education professionals and teachers themselves.

Kathryn Gehred 

So Laura, not only assists with training programs for the guides, she also does research and creates materials for teachers and educators who come to Monticello or who use the Monticello resources in their classrooms, and helps to create programs for other historic sites that have similar educational programs. I asked Laura, though, because when we met each other, we were both giving tours, and so her role has changed so much that it actually takes her out of the house and away from actually public interpretation of history. So I asked if there's anything that she missed, or something that she particularly enjoyed about back when she gave tours, and she gave a controversial answer.

Laura Cooper

I love getting to give tours to middle school students, which is, I realize an unusual opinion, but I think if you can build, if you can gain their trust, they ask the best questions, and they give the most honest answers. That's a lot of fun to me. They're not inherently excited to be there. But if you can convince them, that it might be at least interesting to be there, then you can have a great conversation with them.

Kathryn Gehred 

I have a lot of respect for Laura's response to this question. Because I also learned to enjoy middle school groups as a tour guide. The thing is, with middle school groups, you have to convince them that what you're saying is cool. When you get a group full of fourth graders, they're just like, happy to be alive, and they're in a place and they're just thrilled. And they will take literally whatever you say, as the coolest thing ever. But middle schoolers, there's like social vibes going on, there's like people flirting with other people, everybody's trying to be cool trying to figure out if this is a cool thing to be interested in. So, you sort of have to convince them that yes, it actually is. So my strategy was, I would always try to tell them the most shocking version of whatever story I would usually tell in that room. Like on a regular tour. When I was in Thomas Jefferson's library, I talked about the books, how many books he had, how much he loved reading, but with middle school groups, I would just sort of casually mentioned how many of the books in this library came to Jefferson from His Law Professor George Wythe who was most likely murdered by his nephew because George was actually going to leave a chunk of his property to a freed black person, and his nephew didn't agree with that. So, if you just sort of casually mentioned that to a group of middle schoolers, they get very confused, but then suddenly, they're interested in what you have to say, but anyway, slight public history tangent. Laura also had some really good insights about the challenges of public history, which her position gives her a really good perspective on.

Laura Cooper

I think, something that we face sort of field wide is the difference between history and memory and people's understandings of what history is, and those of us in the field often recognize history as this process where we learn new information and conclusions change, and you're looking for themes and significance. But oftentimes, the public's conception of what history is, is very much tied to memory and national identity, or a collection of fun facts and trivia, and so trying to meet people where they are and helping, sometimes the tour guides themselves who love those fun facts and trivia, tie them together into a theme or helping teachers tie things together into a theme that helps students or guests understand something of significance that shaped a historical time period or influences what our world looks like now is the meat of the work. That's the real challenge.

Kathryn Gehred 

I think that finding that balance between fun facts and trivia history, which is perfectly reasonable to expect when you're on a vacation with your family at a historic site, and sort of the more nuanced and deeper implications of history that it's really important to share at a site like this is one of the biggest challenges of public history. So I thought that was a really great point. Now, Laura actually reached out to me with her idea for letter this week. And it is a letter that if you've been to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, and gone in the behind the scenes tour, that's the tour where you go upstairs, you might have heard this before, or if you chose to go on the slavery tour, you might have heard this letter, it's a very popular letter for guides to quote because it is really insightful. The letter is from Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph to her daughter Septimia Randolph, from 29 January 1829.

Laura Cooper

So, I picked this letter because I actually used to talk about it on behind the scenes tours when I used to give tours more regularly. And I had a misconception of what was happening in this letter for a long time. And I think it enlightens a lot of the strange and strange household dynamics of Monticello, but also really, any plantation household at this time.

Kathryn Gehred 

Now, the context for this letter is that Martha Jefferson Randolph is 56 years old when she's writing it. She's writing from Cary's Brooke, the home of her sister in law, Virginia Randolph Cary, who she was visiting with her daughter, Virginia. She addressed the letter to her daughter Septemia, at Edge Hill, where she's staying with her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph septicemia, at this point is fifteen years old, so this is about two and a half years after Thomas Jefferson's death, Jefferson died over $100,000 in debt. And, Martha and her eldest son are very much still trying to sort out the finances of the estate. They've been trying to sell Monticello, but it's taking a long time. Martha's sort of bouncing around visiting the homes of various family members who might be able to support her or one of her many, many children since 1826. Septima had been living in Boston with her older sister, Ellen, and she had only come back to Virginia in the fall of 1828, just a few months earlier than this letter was written that so that's sort of the context of what's going on why people are writing from all of these places, and also a little bit of who's setting up households where our makeup the subject matter of this letter, but most of it has to do with an enslaved couple. In particular, an enslaved woman named Priscilla Hemmings and her husband, John,

Laura Cooper

John and Priscilla Hemings were a married enslaved couple at Monticello. And John Hemings was an older half sibling of Sally Hemings. So he's also a child of Elizabeth Hemings, sort of known as the matriarch of the Hemings family at Monticello, and he's born in roughly 1776 and was the joiner or woodworker at Monticello. So if you've been and seen a lot of the woodwork, even some of the furniture that was his handiwork, the chimney from his joinery shop is one of the only remaining original structures on Mulberry row there, and he's one of the few members of the enslaved community we know to have been literate. So, there's several surviving letters between him and Jefferson, mostly about the construction of Poplar Forest, Jefferson's vacation home, outside of Lynchburg, Virginia. And this is a little odd because we know that Jefferson writes about being skeptical of enslaved people learning to read and write. But as always, with situations like this, this, the exception worked to jump to Jefferson's benefits in being able to communicate his vision for his home through Hemmings, his literacy. And then his wife, Priscilla Hemings, also born about 1776 was actually owned by Jefferson's daughter and son in law. So, Martha Jefferson Randolph and her husband Thomas Mann Randolph, so that division of ownership separated them for most of their marriage. And Priscilla Hemmings lived across the river at edge Hill, Thomas Mann Randolph's plantation until Jefferson retired to Monticello in 1809. And they were reunited there when John Hemmings was there as well. But then, of course, the construction of poplar forest begins and John Hemings is often out there working on that home. So, separation created by the work required by their masters to really defined the time that they spent together. They never had children of their own. And they were very personally known by Jefferson's family. So, Priscilla Hemings was one of the principal nursemaids for Jefferson's grandchildren. So, all of Martha Jefferson Randolph's children, and so they called they knew her as mammy. They called John Hemmings, daddy, there's, this letter is to September and we actually have a couple of letters of John Hemmings is to septicemia that they wrote back and forth from while he was at Poplar forest. So they're very integral from the perspective of Jefferson's grandchildren to their upbringing, and they're growing up. Wow, John and Priscilla Hemings were simultaneously integral to the mulberry row community, as religious leaders as family members, living their own distinct and separate lives from how the Jefferson's in Randolph conceived them.

Kathryn Gehred 

You'll notice as we begin reading this letter that Martha Jefferson Randolph refers to Priscilla as mammy, and the concept of the mammy figure is obviously really loaded, and I can see clearly some sort of bad faith actors out there using the fact that Jefferson's grandkids referred to this woman as Manny, as evidence sort of backing up the kind of lost cause, Gone With the Wind narrative of the American South, but the mammy as a character as an archetype, which is to say, like the mammy character, and Gone With the Wind. This is a well meaning sassy black woman, mother figure, usually overweight, who cared for her white master's children as though they were her own children. This archetype never existed because it's an archetype. There's no complexity to a mammy character. Priscilla Hemings was a human being with her own goals, her own relationships, her own position, as Laura mentioned, within the black community at Monticello that had nothing to do with the white family of Monticello, and you shouldn't erase that just because of that particular very loaded word. Now, her relationship with the children that she raised, is always going to be interesting, because obviously, human beings interacting with other human beings, there are going to be relationships, you... kids are cute. And if you're raising kids, you're going to probably have feelings about them, but the fact of the matter is the hard baseline fact is that these kids essentially own this woman Priscilla having said the same legal rights as livestock that they owned. So, she was both a mother figure and very literally property, which is part of that complicated relationship that Laura mentioned, in this letter actually, demonstrates that complexity in a really interesting way. I mentioned earlier that the letter has to do with the settlement of Thomas Jefferson's estate. So I'll let Laura tell you a little bit about that.

Laura Cooper

So, Jefferson died in July of 1826, and there's an auction held probably on the west lawn up at Monticello the following January, so 1827, where about 100 members of the enslaved community were sold, most of the contents of the house, a lot of personal belongings, livestock, equipment, things like that. And then over time, parcels of land are sold off. It's Thomas Jefferson Randolph, that oldest grandson who's in charge of the estate and selling it off. All of this was happening because Jefferson had collected over $100,000 in debt, which is a few million in today's dollars. The family is still living as members of wealthy society, but they're doing so at the mercy of their other wealthy family members, at this juncture. The house has not yet been sold, because while we understand it as a national icon now, and Jefferson loved it, it was truly a neighborhood oddity at the time, on the top of a mountain, outside of a very small town. So, it was not top of the retail real estate listings. So, the house has not yet been sold, and there's still some personal effects to be sold at this point to. A couple of years ago, I learned about how Jefferson tried to hold a lottery to pay down his debts, and the house was the prize. And it didn't work because no one wanted the house. That's a very rudimentary explanation of the lottery that I'm sure is a butchery of legal details I don't understand. But, it didn't work.

Kathryn Gehred 

So with that, I'd say that's probably enough context to dig into the letter. And here it is. Laura was good enough to read the letter this week.

Laura Cooper

"Dear Septemia, I am very sorry that there should have been any difficulty about your Mammy going to live with James. I had promised Priscilla that she might go with her husband when I broke up housekeeping. Before I knew what James' arrangements would be, and have once pledged my word I do not feel at liberty to retract. Of course, when I mentioned the plan to him, it was understood, on my part, and I thought also by him that it was conditional, but if she is unwilling, I do not wish to force her. And as nurse to my children, she has claims upon me that I must always acknowledge, I hope James will be able to make some other arrangement. In a letter which Virginia received from Nicholas a few days ago, he begs Jefferson to enclose the catalog to Mr. Madison to be forwarded to him for immediate publication, and that the books had better be packed and sent off as soon as possible. The beginning or the end of the session makes a great difference in the capability of purchasing with the members who lay out their money much more freely early in the session than late. You must not be surprised if we overstay our time a week or so. Your Aunt Carrie and the girls are very urgent that we should and as Hannah may not have arrived, it is of little importance, except that good weather and dry roads will very much determine us. Do dear daughter, the next letter will be to your sisters. I believe you love me if you do show it by gentleness of deportment and industry. Remember me most affectionately to your sisters, Jane included, your brothers and the children, and believe me your most affectionate mother M. Randolph."

Kathryn Gehred 

So as you can tell from the first paragraph of that letter, there was some confusion over whether or not Priscilla Hemmings was going to go live with Martha Jefferson Randolph son, James Madison Randolph. Apparently James wanted Priscilla to go with him. He was moving away and starting his own household, but Priscilla would not go. She refused to go. It seems to me from the letter that Martha Jefferson Randolph had promised Priscilla Hemings that she would be freed after Jefferson died and would be able to live with her husband, and then kind of forgot about it, and at some point suggested to James Madison Randolph, that he take her with him when he left the house, and then when he brought that up to Priscilla, she said no way. So this is an interesting situation where Priscilla's wishes on which she wanted to go won out over a white family member.

Laura Cooper

I had just assumed that because Priscilla Hemmings had raised these grandchildren that when James Madison Randolph asks his mother to have Priscilla that he's sort of planning for Priscilla Hemings to come raise his children. And, then I remembered that James Madison Randolph never gets married or has children, and actually died rather young. So, it's like, wait a minute, what's happening here, reached out to Lisa Francavilla, at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson in the retirement series, who's an expert on these family letters, and at this point, James is, as we mentioned, twenty-three and has just taken over one of the farms at his father's plantation Edgehill, and so this sort of brand new understanding of where James Madison Randolph was at in his life struck me, right, he's not looking ahead to the next generation, he's actually just still looking to continue being cared for by someone he knows and trusts. He's a young man out on his own for the first time, and doesn't know how to take care of himself. And what's someone familiar and comforting to come take care of him, which felt familiar. We don't have the letter from James Madison right off to his mother, we don't have the letter that Septimius sends to Martha Jefferson Randolph that precipitates this one. So that's very much an inference of what's going on here, but the considering the work that Priscilla Hemmings, considering the work she's trained for, right, that's the role that she would play in whatever household he was setting up.

Kathryn Gehred 

The line in this letter that you've probably heard quoted before, if you have heard it, and the line that I certainly quoted when I gave tours was "As nurse to my children, she has claims on me that I must always acknowledge." I think that this is one of those lines that tells you a little a bit about the relationship between Martha and Priscilla, as master and slave, but also two women who are raising 11 children. Because as much as slavery was built on the principle that black people were not human beings, black people stubbornly continue and remain human beings. She did actually have sort of social claims on Martha that she could call upon. It's not a political power. It's not a financial power, but there's a little bit of authority that she can draw on as 'I was the nurse to children. Let me live with my husband.' And Martha was willing to let Priscilla do as she wanted, instead of what maybe James Madison might have wanted her to do. There's no doubt in my mind that there was a genuine human connection between these people, but the institution of slavery and the necessary imbalance of power made any sort of real friendship and camaraderie impossible. And as I mentioned earlier, Martha Jefferson Randolph just views Priscilla, as always available to take care of her children to the extent that she had forgotten that she even promised that Priscilla would be able to be freed. So it shows you just the completely different universes that these two people are inhabiting.

Laura Cooper

There were only a handful of people freed. At the end of Jefferson's life, we know of many families that were separated because of the sales that we mentioned earlier. But Martha Jefferson, Randolph's words here are so interesting, and so insightful as to what these dynamics were. And there's, it's a little confusing the way she talks about how she thought it was conditional. If I'm reading this correctly, she told James that he could take Priscilla if Priscilla agreed to go. And Priscilla says no, which is amazing. Her husband had been freed by Jefferson, and Martha Jefferson Randolph said that she'd previously promised that Priscilla Hemmings could stay with her husband, which isn't quite the same as of being formally freed, but would let her live out the rest of her life. And on probably on Manitoba mountain, and with her husband, and so with her immediate family, and let's see, she would be well into her 50s, at this point, and we actually know that she died the following year. So really, she's just looking for a little bit of peace and quiet at the end of what it would have been a very difficult life. It also speaks to what we were talking about earlier of the sort of strange, get sometimes genuine relationships that forms between these people. And when you sort of pause and think about the incredible vulnerability of Martha, that Priscilla would have witnessed, literal, physical bodily vulnerability, as she had at least twelve pregnancies and eleven children live to adulthood, she's what she would have seen Martha and her children at their very best and worst and most private of moments, and taught Martha's children all of the things that Martha by societal norms wouldn't have taught her own children is an incredibly personal space within which to exist, and yet to be treated as lesser and invisible in called "mammy," again, easy to romanticize and has been romanticized for centuries, and is in one way personal. But it's also teaching these children that Priscilla was raising power structure of the adults that they have to respect and the adults that they will one day have the option of asking to own and control. So this is very messy.

Kathryn Gehred 

So after that very interesting first paragraph, Martha goes into a little bit of discussion of a sale of books. Now, some of you early American nerd listeners might be wondering, Wait, didn't Jefferson sell his books to the Library of Congress while he was still alive to pay off some of his debt? You're correct. But that is only a part of the story.

Laura Cooper

You've ever seen did in fact, sell his enormous library of almost 7000 volumes to restart the Library of Congress, after the British burned Washington in the word 1812. But this was Thomas Jefferson, and it was only 1816. I think that the sale went through. He wasn't going to live the last ten years of his life with a handful of books in the house. And it's after the sale that he famously writes, "I cannot live without books," in a letter to John Adams and you can almost imagine Thomas Jefferson sort of for Lauren, in his merely bear library, deciding that this cannot stand despite the fact that he sold the books because he needed the money. So he collected another about 1800 volumes over the The last 10 years of his life. And that's what is finally up for sale in this paragraph. He was not going to make it, which is a feeling I understand.

Kathryn Gehred 

I do think it's kind of funny that James Madison, not James Madison Randolph, the actual James Madison, warned Martha that congressmen were more likely to spend their money at the beginning of the session than at the end of the session. I'm just imagining all of these early 1800s Congressman showing up to Washington, DC, and just like gambling and wasting all of it and spending it at all sorts of things. That sort of the way I imagined these things work. If you read George Washington's diaries during his visits to Williamsburg, that's very much how these things worked. But hey, I could be wrong. Also, I want to point out that this book sale and the sale of Jefferson's letters that they, the family published into volumes to try to make some money did not make as much money as they hoped, in part because really exciting, new political events kept happening, things like the election of Andrew Jackson, would happen at just about the time that they were trying to get people excited about Thomas Jefferson's letters, and it really made it difficult to stir up any sort of enthusiasm,

Laura Cooper

That's gonna still get caught up in the politics of the day in how, what kind of credibility, the name Thomas Jefferson is gonna get you in that moment. And Jefferson and Jackson were both Democratic Republicans, but they're very different styles of Democratic Republicans. So the intellectualism of Jefferson was not going to be as popular in that moment, which was true when Jefferson sold his first slide, or his biggest library to the Library of Congress. He didn't they did not sell for as much as he thought they should.

Kathryn Gehred 

And it's a short letter, but I couldn't let that final paragraph pass without commenting on it. "I believe you love me, if you do show it by gentleness of deportment and industry."

Laura Cooper

It is classic Jeffersonian parenting. It's gentler than what her father would write. It's gentler than what she wrote earlier on as the parents, because she wrote some letters when her oldest children were very young, where she was very worried that they were going to be stupid. The one I'm thinking of is a letter to Jefferson, and sort of an update on the children. And her saying, 'I don't know. I'm not sure how that turned out.'

Kathryn Gehred 

Laura brought up a quote from another Martha Jefferson Randolph letter, and of course, I had to look it up, because it is one of my favorites of Martha Jefferson Randolph's quotes. So this is a letter that Martha wrote to her father in 1801, when her children were still quite young. People who've been listening to the podcast for a while will probably recognize these names. Ellen is wonderfully apt, I shall have no trouble with her. But the two others excite serious anxiety with regard to their intellect of Jefferson, my hopes were so little sanguine that I discovered with some surprise and pleasure, that he was quicker than I had ever thought it possible for him to be. But he has lost so much time and will necessarily lose so much more before he can be placed in a good school, that I am very unhappy about him and does not want memory, but she does not improve, she appears to me to learn absolutely without profit. So not not mean that she's not like calling her kids blockheads, but that's a little rough. There's that eighteenth century parenting and education style again. But of course, as ever, there's things that are relatable and things that are not relatable.

Laura Cooper

You know, Jefferson had daughters, who were quite a distance from him, and that he's riding back and forth with and Martha Jefferson Randolph is a woman with with some notoriety, whose fifteen-year-old daughter is staying with family members. I don't think there are a lot of parents who wouldn't say to their fifteen-year-old, make sure you behave while you're with our family members so that I don't hear about it. We we don't phrase it like this now. Hopefully, with a little less manipulation, coercion, hopefully, with a little less coercion. It's, it's the sentiment is understandable.

Kathryn Gehred 

So to sum up, this is a letter that tells you a lot about Monticello as it actually functioned. To me, it's a challenging letter, because there's so much in it specifically regarding slavery, and eighteenth century education and even just the complexities of trying to settle an 18th century estate that makes it a little bit hard to relate to, while at the same time having these sort of poignant moments in it. That tells you a lot about Martha. So just because it's a little bit difficult to wrap a twenty-first century brain around that doesn't mean it's not valuable,

Laura Cooper

both of us once upon a time we'll talk about this on the behind the scenes tours at Monticello, in spaces that were very much women's spaces. And were defined by these interactions between the owning family and the enslaved. And so it's really the first paragraph of this letter that caught my attention. And I think it's these nuances and intricacies of legitimate interpersonal relationships that were always defined by the power structures of race based slavery. That's at the end of the day, that's what decides the dynamics, even in this moment, where Priscilla Hemings was given an informal freedom for the last couple of years of her life. Martha Jefferson, Randolph's sort of sounds reluctant and apologetic, that she's allowed that to be true, and that it's inconveniencing her children.

Kathryn Gehred 

I promise I thanked her when I was on the line with her, but I'd like to thank Laura Cooper again for being such an excellent, articulate guest. It was a pleasure to have her on the podcast listeners, thank you very much for listening, feel free to check out the letters that we've worked with in the show notes. And as ever, I am your most obedient and humble servant. Thank you very much.

Hello, again, this is Kathryn just checking in with a couple of updates. I'd like to thank all of my lovely and wonderful listeners. I recently had my very first submission of a letter to the podcast via the website. So Kimberly, thank you for your submission. I've got that letter lined up for a future episode, it was a great pick. If anybody else listening has an idea of a cool eighteenth or early nineteenth century letter, or woman or correspondence or diary in mind. If you work at an archive, and you're sitting on some of these documents that you just think are so cool that you want to share, get in contact with me, I would love to feature them. I'm not an expert on everything, but I'd be happy to talk to you about what you know more about. You can contact me on Twitter @humservt. There's a Facebook group, which is Facebook/Humservt, or the website www.humservt.com has a contact page. So you can send that to me, and I will get in contact with you if it seems like something that's a good fit for the podcast. Thank you so much. In other news, I have begun the very slow process of creating transcripts for episodes. That's something that is always useful, and I really like having providing transcripts, it just takes a very long time, and I don't have a lot of that. But when I do I've been working on it. So the first couple episodes have been fully transcribed and are available on our website. So, keep your eyes peeled for more of those going up. I'm also thrilled to announce that we have now received enough donations through Ko-fi that the web and SoundCloud hosting for the podcast for the first year is paid off. Thank you so much. You are incredible. I am just really thankful for all the support we get in any way. If you feel like tossing a few bucks to the podcast, it's a big help. Feel free to donate through kofi.com/humservt. You can find the links on all of the previously mentioned social media as well, and if you can't afford to support the podcast with money, that's totally fine. You can still support it by telling your friends about it, following us on Twitter, rating and reviewing on iTunes is a weird but very helpful thing to do, and honestly just listening and downloading is enough. Thank you so much for your support. I will see you again in a couple of weeks. Thanks