The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (35 page)

That Jefferson did not want to put down on paper the nature and extent of Polly’s illness may explain why there is no written reason why Hemings had gone to Dupré’s. What is most important about the notation about her time away from the Hôtel de Langeac is that it reemphasizes the veiled nature of her existence, which in the final analysis is the most important theme in her life. Even years before stories about their relationship appeared in newspapers, and Jefferson had more obvious reason to be careful about his references to Hemings, a mystery always surrounds her (a person who was at the very heart of his nuclear family circle from her and his daughters’ earliest lives) that seems wholly unnecessary, while references to her relatives, male and female, are much more straightforward.
I sent James to Rouen to make our hotel arrangements, and I got this amount of money back from him. Martin and I have quarreled. Have Bet knit some stockings for me, if she knows how. I need Critta to help with my child. Burwell is only one who is able to keep the house clean and in order.
With Sally Hemings, one is constantly forced to try to decipher what is happening with her.

There was in Jefferson’s white family, understandable reticence about saying outright just what role Hemings played in the Jefferson household. Clarity sometimes peeked through the clouds. While making her ill-fated claim that one of her relatives, Samuel Carr, had fathered all of Sally Hemings’s children, Ellen Coolidge, a Jefferson granddaughter, gave indirect confirmation that Hemings was Jefferson’s chambermaid. In a letter written to her husband in the 1850s, Coolidge claimed, “No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.”
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What she wanted to assert, but could not do so explicitly, was,
The woman everyone is talking about, Sally Hemings, was my grandfather’s chambermaid, but she never went into his room when he was there, and if she did everyone would have seen her.
She could not have said that without giving too much away about the daily routine at Monticello and risk letting people know just how intimate Hemings’s association with Jefferson was. Instead, she spoke in generalities about what unnamed female domestics never did. Coolidge focused on an enslaved woman going into Jefferson’s rooms precisely because that was what Hemings, the “female domestic” in question, actually did every day Jefferson was in residence at Monticello until the day he died.

In lieu of being frank about Hemings’s role at Monticello, Coolidge, describing Hemings for posterity in this same letter, reached all the way back to France to give Hemings an identity. Even though Coolidge was born in 1796, had known Hemings all her life, and actually lived at Monticello with her for over fifteen years, when she ventured to say who Hemings was, she chose to identify her as the slave girl who accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to Europe and served as both daughters’ lady’s maid while there, as if Hemings had been in suspended animation between 1790 and 1826.
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Being generally absent from Jefferson family records is not the same thing as being unimportant. In truth, Hemings’s situation presents a clear case where a person was not talked about because she was indeed so important. It is quite telling that the major narratives of life at Monticello, written by people not in the Jefferson family, talk about her, seemingly out of nowhere. Although little discussed in Jefferson family letters and the subject of relatively few statements of other people who knew her directly, the young woman feeling her way through a new life on foreign, but more hospitable, soil was not destined for anonymity. Her life in Paris, where she took on a role that would last through the next four decades, set the stage for the national and, no doubt, completely unwanted attention that she would receive twelve years after she left the city that changed her life.

A
S
J
AMES AND
Sally Hemings went about their business, enjoyed each other’s company, learned French language and culture, and moved about Paris, the ancien régime was crumbling around them. Historians can point to various signs along the way that foreshadowed things to come, and even fix upon different pivotal moments that marked the time when the country was put firmly on the road to revolution, past the point of any return. To those living in France at the time, however, the happenings of the day—noteworthy and serious as they often were—did not foretell any particular momentous destination for their society. They were merely events punctuating their own progress through life, certainly not harbingers of a cataclysmic reordering of the whole world. No one could have seen in the crises of the 1780s the fall of the aristocracy, the beheading of the king and queen, the Reign of Terror, and the rise of Napoleon.

There was no question that France was in trouble, and that its troubles were a long time in the making. Years of borrowing money to finance costly wars and lavish spending at home had taken its toll on a country already weakened by feckless political leadership and structural changes in society. By the early 1780s it was clear that the practice of attempting to put out a fire by pouring oil over it—borrowing heavily, rather than raising taxes or forgoing costly military adventures and profligate domestic spending—had bankrupted the treasury.
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The Americans at the Hôtel de Langeac had a connection to all of this that perhaps only Jefferson fully understood.

In lieu of raising taxes, Jacques Necker, France’s once and future comptroller-general, took out a large number of loans at the end of the 1770s, with extremely favorable rates for lenders, in order to finance France’s struggles against its perennial rival, Great Britain.
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When a government borrows, it has to repay, lest its investors, foreign and domestic, lose confidence and withdraw their capital. Necker’s loans came due near the end of the 1780s, and there was no money to repay them. It fell to his successor, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (Necker had fallen out of favor for other reasons), to inform King Louis XVI that France was essentially bankrupt. They were in this situation, in part, because many of the loans had been taken out to allow France to help the American colonists in their own efforts against England. The successful American Revolution laid part of the groundwork for the destruction of the monarchy and the transformation of French society.
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Jefferson followed the events leading up to the French Revolution with considerable interest, and even advised Lafayette and other French liberals who favored change in the French political system. Initially skeptical of the prospects for real reform, he became, very famously, a great supporter of the Revolution when it arrived. Although his position allowed him to know far more about the inner workings of French politics than either James or Sally Hemings, the looming crisis was such that all but the smallest children knew that something very serious was going on in Paris between 1786 and 1789.
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The country had known crises before. The grave problems that now beset France had far greater effect because the country was very different from what it was when it faced earlier economic and social upheavals. The public was more literate than it had ever been before, and there existed, really for the first time, such a thing as public opinion to which French participants in the political battles of this era appealed in new ways and to an unprecedented degree. These very public battles attracted attention at all levels of society.
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Jefferson, somewhat lightly—he was talking to Anne Bingham—described Paris in 1788 as a “furnace of politics” where “[m]en, women, children talk[ed] nothing else.”
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And servants talked as well. Ordinary people felt that they had a stake in, and a right to make pronouncements about, all matters that concerned them. The creeping despotism in French society emerged as a particular concern. Rule by arbitrary edict, whether in public or private settings, surfaced as an intolerable insult to people who were now familiar with Enlightenment concepts about the rights of man. The individual, his or her thoughts and feelings, mattered. Talk of liberty and justice filled the air. An uneven grain harvest and problematic economic reforms drove up the price of bread and emboldened people to act. They rioted in Paris and participated in large demonstrations protesting the actions of a government that seemed to flail about as it tried to avert catastrophe.
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None of the public aspects of this struggle remained hidden from either Hemings sibling, who moved about the city and had contact with their fellow servants, black and white, in their residence and in other households. Black Parisians had legitimate reasons to see that the logical conclusion of all the talk about liberty and progress might bring changes in their circumstances, even if they could not predict what those changes might be. Enslaved people, or anyone at the bottom of the social hierarchy, had little reason automatically to fear chaos among the ruling class. Social disorder presented them with an opportunity to wrest a better deal for themselves, and some of African origin took an active role in the political agitation of the day for that very reason.
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James and Sally Hemings also had opinions about the upheavals that brought the notion of liberty and equality to the lips of those French men and women who took to the street in support of those ideals, sometimes in noisy demonstrations in the neighborhood of the Hôtel de Langeac. During their last year in the country, the Société des Amis des Noirs engaged in a very public, contentious, and unsuccessful struggle to include free, tax-paying blacks in the deliberations of the newly constituted National Assembly. The issue arose when white colonists demanded representation in the body. One delegate, Count Mirabeau, one of the famous architects of the Tennis Court Oath, in which the Third Estate pronounced itself France’s National Assembly, chided the colonists with words that echoed the debate among the delegates to the American Constitution:

Jefferson attended the proceedings of that body daily and was there for the opening of the debate about representation begun in May of 1789. He was, therefore, very likely aware of this battle and familiar with Mirabeau’s statement, offered in June. He did not, however, comment upon it, at least not in any writing that is extant. Had he stayed in France just a few months more, he would have seen something unimaginable in his own Virginia legislature: wealthy mixed-race taxpayers and white supporters confronting the National Assembly, arguing for admission to that body.
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Within four years after the Hemingses left Paris, a
gen de couleur
sat in the revolutionary National Convention, and the country abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794. The
Police des Noirs
and all the royal declarations were wiped away. These events were not simply the results of what had taken place in France; blacks in the French colonies had a major hand in directing the course of change. In the early 1790s they revolted against their French masters in Saint Domingue, fusing ideas from the French Revolution with their own already long-simmering critique of the way they were treated in their homeland. At least some of the groundwork for these changes was laid during the final years that James and Sally Hemings spent in the country. As these two enslaved people served the Jeffersons, an old order was being challenged, and the challenge was both bold and open for all to see.

New Identities

With the world outside poised to be turned upside down, the Americans gathered at the Hôtel de Langeac between 1784 and 1789 were experiencing their own forms of personal revolution. Each of them was doing things—significant things—that they would not have been doing had they been in their native Virginia. Because they were living abroad, from the oldest to the youngest, the most powerful to the least powerful, black and white alike had their normal patterns, places, and expectations in life disrupted significantly. Foreign countries are well-known venues for trying on new identities and discovering things about oneself that one may never have known. The residents in Jefferson’s household seemed to have been doing a bit of both.

For his part, the forty-three-year-old Jefferson embarked in 1786 on a dalliance with a married woman, the twenty-seven-year-old Maria Cosway, a beautiful and talented artist married to a more famous and somewhat unstable man, Richard. Though of English extraction, Cosway had lived a very cosmopolitan existence in Europe, growing up in Italy and traveling much on the Continent. It was to her that Jefferson wrote his famous “Head and Heart” letter that has been analyzed almost endlessly since it came into the hands of scholars, who debate whether the Head or Heart comes out on top in the dialogue.
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Historians have also debated whether the Jefferson-Cosway relationship was sexual or merely flirtatious in nature. Neither he nor she ever said that they had sex. If they did, and just did not write about it, no children were produced. We have no word from anyone who would know with any degree of certainty. On the other hand, to go looking for documentary evidence on the question, given the mores of the time and Jefferson’s extremely private nature, would seem an obvious fool’s errand. Whether or not the relationship was sexually consummated, Jefferson actually fell in love with Cosway, an act that marks his recovery from the body blow of his wife’s death. His reaction upon meeting her—he seems to have come completely undone—is the clearest evidence of his emotional reawakening in those days in Paris. The two spent time alone together and wrote each other the kind of letters that affirm that the attraction was mutual. Jefferson could not so easily have accomplished that in Virginia. Writing transparent love letters to the wife of another Virginia gentleman (even if he added polite salutations to her husband) would carry the serious risk of being “called out” and shot, as Jefferson learned firsthand in the years to come when a youthful indiscretion came back to haunt him during his first term as president.
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A Virginian version of “Jefferson and Cosway” would have come complete with an extended and overlapping kinship network that would not have taken kindly to the pair’s insouciant treatment of Cosway’s marriage. Paris was just the place for this sort of thing. Deeply unhappy with her circumstances when she met Jefferson, Cosway was eager to find a way out, a reason that probably impelled her to become involved with him in the first place. She eventually found her way out in the person of Luigi Marchesi, the Italian opera singer with whom she ran off in 1790, leaving her husband and the child she bore that year. Marchesi, a castrati, had the status of a present-day rock star. Women threw themselves at him wherever he went. Castrati were not always impotent, but they were all sterile. Indeed, some upper-class women, notoriously in Italy, favored them for sexual affairs precisely for those attributes: they could have sex with the men and avoid pregnancy. Cosway traveled the Continent with Marchesi, apparently becoming, for a time, a late eighteenth-century equivalent of a groupie.
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Unless it remains extremely quiet, desperation is fairly easy to spot; and Cosway’s dissatisfaction with her marriage was likely evident (perhaps even frightening) to the highly intuitive Jefferson—as well it should have been. For most of 1788 and 1789, she was by far the more insistent partner, reduced to writing him reproachful letters for having failed to write to her. Jefferson apparently realized, at some point, that he was dealing with a woman who was actually willing to pull the trigger and destroy her marriage, with his reputation in the line of fire. Much as he may have cared for her, he was never going to become involved with anything like that on her behalf. He got the message about Cosway fairly early on, for his famous “Head and Heart” letter, written in 1786, is by its very terms (“
I’m in love with you, but I’m thinking hard about that
”) far from an unalloyed declaration of devotion. The letter confused Cosway, and his hot and cold attitude after writing it shows a man saying politely, firmly, and very carefully, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Jefferson’s young protégé William Short was also taking advantage of being in a foreign venue. Short’s affair with Rosalie, the very young wife of the duc le la Rochefoucauld, is well noted in major biographies of Jefferson.
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What has received no attention in these biographies, or other writings about Short himself, is a prior affair that he engaged in from roughly 1786 to 1790, before he became involved with Rosalie, one whose origin closely parallels the situation between Jefferson and Hemings. Short, newly arrived in France, wanted to achieve better fluency in French and was greatly disappointed that Jefferson was not proficient enough in speaking the language to give him the practice he desired. The only solution, he thought, was to separate himself from other English-speaking people. He moved to a town fifteen miles outside of Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and lodged with a local family there, hoping that if he buried “himself among French people…he would hear no word of his native tongue and have no opportunity to speak it.” He settled with the Royers, “a genteel family of modest means.” While living there, the twenty-six-year-old Short fell desperately in love with the family’s fifteen-year-old daughter.
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