The part I took out of yesterday's column, "Notes on the state of whiteness."

Dining room entablature, made by John Hemings and his nephews at Poplar Forest, Jefferson’s summer home. (Washington Post photo.)

These paragraphs comprised the original ending of yesterday’s column:

Jefferson wrote “Notes on the State of Virginia” in 1781.  In 1785, he was posted to Paris as United States Minister to France.  He took with him to Paris one of his slaves, James Hemings. John Wayles, the mother of Jefferson’s wife Martha, had a total of 11 Black children with Betty Hemings during the time she was enslaved by him. James was one of the sons of Betty and Wayles. Six of Betty’s children were with Wayles, including Sally and several of her brothers. You can believe what you will about Jefferson having children with Sally Hemings, but all Jefferson descendants from his two white daughters, Martha and Maria, are cousins with Sally’s children through the fact that Martha Jefferson was the half-sister of the children John Wayles had with Betty Hemings. 

While in Paris, Jefferson sent for his teenage slave Sally Hemings.  By the time Jefferson – along with James and Sally, who were free people while on French soil, and chose to return to the United States with their master – returned to Virginia in 1789, Sally would be pregnant with her first child by Thomas Jefferson, a son called Tom.  She would have five more children with him.  Jefferson would educate them all, teaching them to read and write.  He sent Peter to the Cordon Bleu Culinary Academy in Paris, where he learned French cooking, of which Jefferson was terribly fond. 

Back at Monticello, Jefferson employed Sally’s and James’s brother John Hemings as a carpenter.  John was the son of Betty Hemings and Joseph Nielson, a white joiner who worked for Wayles. If you go to Monticello, you will be shown John Hemings’ handiwork in wall paneling and pediments in the home, and in furniture he built to Jefferson’s designs.  From 1815 to 1826 when Jefferson died, he often dispatched John Hemings to work on his summer home, Poplar Forest.  According to a recent article in the Washington Post, “He also brought with him his apprentice nephews — Madison, Beverly and Eston Hemings — all Jefferson’s sons by Sally Hemings,” to help with work on the 5,000 square foot summer retreat.  “Hemings’s literacy — in Palladian architecture, in fine woodworking, and in reading and writing — meant his work at Poplar Forest could be documented on paper for his enslaver.”

There are dozens of letters between Jefferson and John Hemings – Jefferson giving his instructions as to what he wanted done at Poplar Forest, Hemings replying with reports of the work that had been done on the place.  In 1821, Hemings wrote to Jefferson: “I am at worck in the morning by the time I can see and the very same at night. I have got the cornice nearly don. I am bout the tow last members dentil and quarter round. I should put an architrave on the skie light frame befour I take the Scaffold down.”  (Spellings from the original)  There are also letters between the two men arguing over the design of furniture Hemings made for Jefferson.  Hemings would tell Jefferson that a measurement was impossible because of a hitch in the design.  Jefferson would write back, ordering that his design be followed no matter what.  Hemings would reply that the resulting work would reflect the change he had made.  Jefferson paid John Hemings $20 a month to work as a carpenter.

Quite a change from what Jefferson wrote in 1781 about Black people being largely uneducable.

The Washington Post story about Poplar Forest ends with this: “Jefferson died at Monticello on July 4, 1826, and was buried in a coffin made by Hemings. In his will, he freed his master craftsman, gave him ‘the tools of his shop’ as well as the service of Eston and Madison Hemings. John Hemings lived at Monticello until the house was sold in 1831. He died in 1833.” Jefferson lived up to his promise that he would free all of Sally’s children and her brothers upon his death.  In fact, out of more than 200 slaves he owned at the time of his death, the only slaves he freed in his will were named Hemings.

One wonders what Jefferson thought about what he had written in “Notes on the State of Virginia” on the day he died.  The two people at his bedside at Monticello on July 4, 1826, were his white daughter Martha and her aunt and mother of Jefferson’s six Black children, Sally Hemings.