James Hemings

James Hemings was born in 1765 in Virginia, son of Elizabeth Hemings and, by the standard account, John Wayles — which made him half-brother to Martha Jefferson and full brother to Sally. The Hemings family came to Monticello through inheritance in 1774-75, and in 1784, at nineteen, Thomas Jefferson took him to Paris to learn French cooking: first under the caterer Combeaux, then in pastry with chefs including one of the Prince de Condé's household, until in 1787 he stood chef de cuisine of the Hôtel de Langeac — paid wages, in a country whose Free Soil law would have freed him had he petitioned; he chose the promise of home instead.

Through Jefferson's years as Secretary of State he ran the Philadelphia kitchen, and on the fifteenth of September 1793 Jefferson set their agreement on paper: freedom, once James returned to Monticello and trained his successor. He taught his brother Peter the kitchen, inventoried Monticello's utensils in his own hand — the list survives at the Library of Congress — and on the fifth of February 1796 the deed of manumission was executed. He was thirty.

What he carried from Paris seasoned the young republic's table: the macaroni dishes that became America's macaroni and cheese trace to his kitchen through Jefferson's household, with French ice cream, meringues, and snow eggs beside them — among the first American-born chefs formally trained in France, and the bridge by which that training entered elite American cooking. As a free man he cooked in Philadelphia and Baltimore; in the summer of 1801 he returned to cook at Monticello for wages, and when the new President sounded him out for the White House kitchen through an intermediary, Hemings answered that he would come when Jefferson wrote to him directly — as one writes to a free man. The letter never came.

He died in Baltimore that October, at thirty-six — reported as suicide by a Jefferson correspondent, who wrote of days of delirium; Jefferson called it "the tragical end of James Hemings." The record carries the report gently and the achievement whole; Monticello now tells his life by name, and a society of chefs keeps it. Honored be James Hemings, who cooked his way to freedom and signed the proof.