Of Founders, Enslaved Chefs, Kitchens, and Electronic Resources

By:
Eric Wolf
James Hemings Manumission
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My colleague Tienya Smith's fascinating recent blog entry on Hercules Posey, George Washington's enslaved chef (Hercules Posey, Chef to the Elite, published July 16, 2024), introduced me to a historical figure I was previously unfamiliar with. However, I was familiar with the story of another highly esteemed chef enslaved by another president and founder: James Hemings (having read Annette Gordon-Reed's extraordinary book The Hemingses of Monticello last year). Hemings ran Thomas Jefferson's kitchen at Monticello.

Knowing the difficulty of finding information on enslaved people, but wanting to learn more about these two men, I thought I would explore some of the great electronic resources we have available to members here at the Society Library. Much of the primary source material for the story of Hercules Posey's self-emancipation outlined in Tienya's previous blog entry can be found in our subscription to the Digital Edition of the Papers of George Washington. Note that his name often uses the alternate spelling of Herculas, so be sure to use this form in searches. 

For primary source documents on James Hemings, consult the Digital Edition of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Here can be found Jefferson's Agreement with James Hemings of September 15, 1793 where Thomas Jefferson commits to emancipating James Hemings, who he had trained as a chef in Paris when he served as ambassador to France, on the condition that Hemings would first train a replacement as chef de cuisine at Monticello (see image below). This promise would eventually be honored with the Deed of Manumission (see image above) signed by Jefferson on February 5, 1796. While, unfortunately, we do not have any of James Hemings's recipes, we do have his Inventory of Kitchen Utensils at Monticello from February 20, 1796.

While neither Posey nor Hemings yet have entries in Oxford's American National Biography, the standard reference for American biography, James is mentioned in the entry on his sister, Sally Hemings, who was Jefferson's mistress and mother of some of his children while being enslaved to Jefferson and workings as a lady's maid and seamstress.

Jefferson Letter promising James Hemings emancipation
Thomas Jefferson's promise of freedom for James Hemings, dated 15 September 1793. The promise was fulfilled on 5 February 1796. Among his hundreds of slaves, Jefferson manumitted only about ten—all members of the Hemings family. Library of Congress. Image from Oxford Reference Online

Oxford Reference Online brings together two million digitized entries across Oxford University Press’s Dictionaries, Companions and Encyclopedias. Searching for James Hemings here brings you to two entries on his sister Sally Hemings, one in the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass and one from The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. The former includes an illustration of the document in Jefferson's hand promising James's emancipation on the condition of his training a successor as chef de cuisine at Monticello.

Searching in JSTOR, I found various citations for both Posey and Hemings, but most interesting were the reviews of recent scholarly books on the topic of the founders and their enslaved chefs. This process of research led me to request two recent books for the collection: Thomas Jefferson's Creme Brulee: How a Founding Father and His Slave James Hemings Introduced French Cuisine to America by Thomas J. Craughwell (2012) and Bound to the Fire: How Virginia's Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine by Kelley Fanto Deetz (2017). 

If "an army marches on its stomach" (which we learn from The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 2nd edition, and part of our Oxford Reference Online is attributed to both Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick the Great), then our nation's founders clearly governed on theirs. If all of this is leaving you hungry for more knowledge about African American chefs in the Colonial and Federal eras, and a few actual recipes to try, I suggest looking at The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty.

Image at top of page: James Hemings's manumission document, Thomas Jefferson, 1796. Courtesy Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.