The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (24 page)

Although the law was designed with French colonials in mind, its first article said that its provisions applied “meme à tous étrangers.” Jefferson was not supposed to bring Hemings into France. His status as a foreign diplomat gave him no immunity from this, as one of the principal shapers of the declaration made clear. The law was supposed to be the definitive word on the subject, its last article stating emphatically that its provisions replaced all previous declarations and superseded any law that contradicted its provisions.
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If things had proceeded according to the
Police des Noirs
, Hemings would have been detained at La Havre, placed in the
dépôt
there, and then sent back to Virginia. Jefferson, like all other masters, was also supposed to register Hemings’s name with local authorities so that they could keep track of which blacks were in the country, where they were, and, if they came into the country after 1777, when they had been deported. Noncompliance with the law brought a fine of 3,000 livres or more. One section provided that masters holding slaves at the time of the law’s declaration would lose their right to keep their slaves in bondage if they did not register them within one month after the law took effect, a serious penalty designed to encourage the simple act of registration.
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Jefferson never registered James Hemings. Nor did he register Sally Hemings when she arrived in France a little over two years after her brother.
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That neither sibling was arrested and held in custody is not surprising. The system of policing blacks had broken down considerably by the time the two arrived. The captains of ships who were supposed to keep track of people of color often did not bother to do that. Many masters did not register their slaves and generally suffered no penalty for it. Blacks sometimes defied the registration requirements and were not sent out of the country. Compliance with the law was especially lax in Paris.
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During every incarnation of the laws designed to control the black population in the country, the Parisian courts, as opposed to their counterparts in other jurisdictions, zealously upheld the Freedom Principle. By tradition, the parlements in France had the duty to review each law the king proposed to see whether it accorded with legal tradition. One of the ways they could signal their displeasure with a law was to refuse to register it, which is exactly what the Parlement of Paris, the oldest parlement and the one with the largest jurisdiction in the country, did with respect to most of the edicts and declarations that weakened the Freedom Principle. The king could override the effect of a parlement’s nonregistration by holding a
lit de justice
, at which the king could force a registration, though the powerful Parlement of Paris sometimes refused to recognize forced registrations.
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No French kings took this route in defense of their edicts designed to help French colonial slave masters. There was a question whether the Parlement of Paris would register the king’s declaration of 1777, given its position on slavery. In a way that anticipated the early American states’ struggles with how to portray slavery in its Constitution, the commission that drafted the
Police des Noirs
found a way to get around the Parlement of Paris’ likely refusal to register the new rules: it took out the word
esclave
. After “slaves” were turned into “servants,” the parlement agreed to register the declaration.
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Although registering it, the parlement had no intention of seriously implementing it. The Parisian Admiralty Court, under the Parlement of Paris’ jurisdiction, simply ignored its provisions, in keeping with what had been both bodies’ long-standing commitment to the Freedom Principle. Slaves in the city who wanted their freedom could make the request to their master, and the master would grant it if so inclined. If the master refused, the slave could go to the Admiralty Court and file a petition for freedom, and many did, sometimes asking for back wages. Over the entire course of the eighteenth century, the Parisian Admiralty Court granted every such petition filed, almost two hundred, and it continued to do so even after the
Police des Noirs
had been declared and registered.
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The Admiralty Court’s position was well known among slave owners and slaves, and the tribunal’s view of the law affected the balance of power between them, giving slaves greater leverage in their dealings with their masters. During the decade before the French Revolution, the Admiralty Court, for the first time, received more filings from slave owners to voluntarily manumit their slaves than petitions from enslaved people to obtain their freedom.
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These records do not show, of course, how many masters simply freed their slaves without following the formalities. The historian Sue Peabody has suggested that slave owners often thought it better to come to their own private arrangements with their slaves, freeing them and turning them into their paid servants if they were willing.
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The history of the
Police des Noirs
presents a clear example of just how dangerous it is to look at laws on the books of a society and assume they precisely reflect its day-to-day life. Some laws gain widespread acceptance and become part of the bedrock basis of a community’s view of itself. Others fall by the wayside. Laws can be passed and declared, but it is up to the people at every level below the lawgivers—bureaucrats, judges, police, and the ordinary members of the community—to decide when and how they will abide by them unless whatever government in power is willing to use force to make them fall into line. Apparently the French government did not think the
Police des Noirs
worth that effort. It was willing to have the law declared, as a statement of principle, but not to expend too much effort to enforce it. There were many other, more important things to worry about during the 1780s than chasing down the few blacks in their midst. With few aggrieved parties to bring claims against violators of the rules, the draconian law remained on the books until the Revolution, invoked on a number of occasions, but widely flouted in James Hemings’s Paris, the most populous and powerful jurisdiction in the country.

We do not know when or how Hemings learned about the Freedom Principle, but there were many ways for him to have found out, and by the end of his five-year stay in the country he knew that he could become a free man. The most likely sources were members of the black community in Paris who made and kept contact with one another. They were well situated to do this. Although prosperous
gens de couleur
from the colonies visited and lived in France, many of the one thousand or so blacks in Paris were the servants (the majority of them free) of whites and were generally concentrated in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.
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The progress of freedom suits during the eighteenth century shows that some form of a network existed among them. Newly arrived blacks from the colonies learned from black veterans of Parisian society what French law had to say about the rules governing their lives. Their white masters certainly had no interest in telling them about the law, unless they were prepared to set them free. The neighborhoods where Hemings first lived with Jefferson in Paris had among the highest concentrations of blacks. It was not the “deluge” that Poncet de la Grave spoke of, but their visibility—their physical difference—heightened the power of their presence in the predominately white environment. Fewer blacks were living in the relatively new neighborhood of the Hôtel de Langeac, where Hemings and Jefferson eventually settled, but it still bordered neighborhoods with larger numbers of blacks.
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By the time they moved to the Hôtel de Langeac, Hemings had undoubtedly encountered other people of color in his first neighborhood, and in adjacent ones, as he went about his business. In time his increasing familiarity with the French language made it easier for him to speak with them.

Slaves in America effectively communicated information between and among slave communities as they moved about doing the work of their masters. People of color in Paris saw one another on the streets or while attending their masters and mistresses as they visited the homes of their friends, and they conversed with and supported one another. Indeed, the historians Pierre Boulle and Sue Peabody have both suggested that it was the concentration of blacks in the more affluent areas that led Poncet de la Grave and other French officials to form a distorted view of the number of people of color in Paris.
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They saw black servants walking along the streets of their own fashionable neighborhoods, saw them in the homes of their friends, and wrongly assumed that these numbers could be extrapolated out to the whole of the city. That they suspected (with good reason) widespread noncompliance with the registration requirements only fueled their paranoia.

It made perfect sense for black people to be in the best neighborhoods. Most were in France primarily because wealthy French colonials had brought them there. It would have done upper-class French men and women no good to have their slaves or servants living in some other distant part of the city. It might seem intuitively obvious that not many impoverished or even middle-class French people, struggling to stay afloat themselves, could really have been buying and keeping large numbers of slaves in the less fashionable parts of Paris. But then, when one is in the grips of a deep irrationality as the commission members were—in their case, racism—one is by definition unable to think straight and see and accept things as they are. In fairness, the commission members did have an additional concern that seems more in touch with reality: fear of the mobility of the rising merchant class. Servants were status symbols. The elites within French society saw “ordinary” people who possessed them as challenging aristocratic privilege. This is especially true when they had black and mixed-race servants, who in late eighteenth-century France were more highly prized than white servants. They, as the highest type of status symbol, were to be reserved for aristocrats and courtiers. James Hemings and, later, his sister Sally would have been much sought after in upper-class households, had they decided to leave Jefferson and seek employment in Paris or some other part of France.
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The servants at the Hôtel de Langeac were also important sources of information about French law and customs, as they exchanged with Hemings stories about their respective societies and lives. One cannot assume that because Jefferson’s French servants were, as far as we know, white like him, they would have taken his “side” on the questions of slavery and of blacks. As the coming Revolution would make clear, Parisian workers took the notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity seriously. Hemings worked alongside them, drawing wages just as they did, and dealing with the trials of life in service. His was no longer the world of Virginia slavery. There was also life outside of the Hôtel de Langeac. Within the last two years of his stay in Paris, Hemings hired a tutor, Perrault, to help him learn more formal French.
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Before their falling out, these two men had ample opportunity to discuss the differences between Hemings’s life in Virginia and his life in Paris.

We can compare Hemings’s situation with that of Abby, a girl whom John Jay enslaved. During his early diplomatic career, Jay, the future chief justice of the Supreme Court and one of the shapers of
The Federalist Papers
, brought Abby to France. While he was in London in 1783, and she was still in Paris, evidently under the watch of William Temple Franklin, Abby ran away. Jay expressed surprise that she had done so, given that he had promised to free her upon their return to the United States. He blamed her escape on too much “Indulgence & improper company,” which had led her into bad ways. Jay, with the aid of Franklin, sought help from the authorities to apprehend Abby. It is not known what the authorities were told about her, or whether she had taken any property that belonged to the Jays when she left, but she was apparently held in custody for a time. Benjamin Franklin suggested that she be left in jail for about twenty days, and John Jay agreed, both men saying this would teach her a lesson. What happened instead was that as a result of the terrible conditions in prison, Abby grew ill and died just three weeks after the authorities let her go home to the Jays.
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This story also reminds us that enslaved people in Paris like Abby and James and Sally Hemings made contacts in the world outside of their one-on-one relationship with their masters. In Jay’s view, these contacts had been bad for Abby because they encouraged her to think she had a right to freedom on her own terms. It appears, however, that Abby was willing to go only so far or did not fully apprehend how firmly the law was on her side. Had she filed a freedom petition, she would almost certainly have prevailed. But, then as now, personality and circumstances—as much as knowledge—influence whether an individual decides to engage the legal system. We do not know what Jay meant by “indulgence,” but it is unlikely that Abby was receiving a monthly salary like James Hemings or even Sally Hemings—certainly not at the rate these two were being paid. She may not have had the confidence, if she had no family members with her, to stand against Jay, particularly if he renewed his promise of emancipation when she returned to America.

There were still more ways for the enslaved to find out about French law and custom. A small, but vibrant, legal practice had grown up around freedom suits, which helped ensure that word would spread about the possibility of filing petitions, the availability of help, and the processes to be followed. By Hemings’s time in Paris there was a long tradition of success among members of the bar in the city who developed an expertise in bringing such suits, including men like Henrion de Pansey, a critic of royal despotism who voiced his challenges to the monarchy through the metaphor of slavery. While Pansey and other lawyers were motivated to take on freedom suits pro bono, there are indications that some lawyers represented slaves primarily for financial reasons.
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