The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (43 page)

Jefferson as a husband could have forced his wife, Martha, to have sex—there was no such thing as marital rape—he took over her legal personhood and had the primary legal right to the labor of her children. He could not sell Martha or her children, as he could Sally Hemings, their children, or any of his other slaves. That difference was crucial; but for Jefferson it was not equally enduring. He actually foresaw a day when white men would lose the more extensive power they held over slaves, and thought that it would be right if they lost it. He probably
did not
foresee a day when men would or should, cease to be the rulers of the women and children in their lives, for Jefferson believed that slavery violated natural law while male dominance, tempered by restraint, was a tenet of natural law.

As her time in France passed, Hemings was at once slave, child, and woman—during the days of the week when Jefferson’s daughters were away, a singular figure as the lone Virginia female in his household. There is no reason to suppose that she, the woman/child living under this patriarchal cover, would not have responded to any displays of male protectiveness and any truly positive attention from Jefferson in the same way that most females of her day, in the American context and others, were trained to respond to them—as welcome and positive things. The political, legal, and social meaning of slavery and the distortions of human relations that it worked, though mitigated in the French setting, were present. The very basic human requirement of finding a way to live daily life with the people in one’s immediate surroundings—taking in and processing the meaning of the good and bad gestures they sent one’s way—was no less so.

Jefferson’s construction of his relationship with Sally Hemings naturally had a very different meaning for her brothers. Patriarchy involves more than just males dominating females; it is also about competition between males, a struggle in which some win and some lose, creating a hierarchy based on relative degrees of power. Like those of other enslaved men, the Hemings brothers’ statuses signaled to white men that they had lost that struggle and were to be placed on the lowest end of the scale—stuck in perpetual boyhood or animalized as “bucks.” Jefferson’s acting the role of benevolent patriarch at the Hôtel de Langeac did not speak to James Hemings’s masculinity in the way it spoke to his sister’s femininity. Instead, Jefferson’s actions toward him emphasized Hemings’s diminished status within the male hierarchy. Even a legal father who supported his son long after the son reached adulthood would be seen as diminishing his offspring’s manhood.

That was certainly true of Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, whose dire financial straits and emotional problems required Jefferson to step in and support his family. Martha (Patsy) Randolph received, and receives, no penalty for being cared for by her father. Her husband, however, was, and is still, perceived differently. His inability to provide for his own family, and dependence upon his father-in-law, is a tacit statement about his worth as a man. Even his eldest son seems to have held his weakness against him.
¹⁵
In a world that valued male supremacy, and identified superior males as those who were self-sufficient and able to see to the needs of their dependents, in every way, Jefferson’s “care” of the adult James Hemings was infantilizing.

Much as Jefferson’s gestures tracked the workings of traditional male-female relations, Sally Hemings knew that they could take her only so far. She was different from white girls her age: marriage and social respectability could never be the end result of whatever developed with Jefferson at the Hôtel de Langeac. Even armed with this very obvious bit of knowledge, Hemings was a human being, and that was as important to her response to Jefferson as her being, by American law, a slave. A full-fledged person lived underneath that heavy legal status, one who was subject to a wide variety of often conflicting emotions and influences. What might make sense for her to think or feel about him from an ideological standpoint could be overcome, or even made irrelevant, by the promptings of her inner life that grew out of her own experiences. Her age, fatherless state, time in France, knowledge of her family’s relations with Jefferson, and the way he treated her specifically contributed to the way she viewed him and evidently gave her ideas about how she thought she might be able to handle him. French law, a check on his Virginia-based power over her, also helped shape her view of Jefferson in this setting. What type of man did she see?

Over the years Jefferson’s pattern of dealing with the enslaved people closest to him was very much like his way of dealing with his white family, friends, political allies, and even some of his adversaries. He appealed to their emotions as a way of extracting the behavior he wanted, doing things to make them feel bound and grateful to him, rather than being directly coercive. While some persons are quite comfortable with open conflict—in actual war and its simulations in daily life—and may even enjoy sparring and the sensation of making others uncomfortable, Jefferson never wanted to be the too obvious source of a person’s distress—even when he was. In both his public and his private lives, “peace” was indeed his “passion,” though that imposed peace sometimes came at an enormous price for himself and others around him; it often amounted to postponing or submerging and hiding conflict rather than truly ending it.

Jefferson’s preference for stratagems over direct confrontation led Henry Adams to label him “feminine”—associating his elliptical style with females whose subordinate position made it necessary, even endearing, for them to adopt an indirect way of dealing deemed unworthy of “manly” straightforwardness. Women’s indirection acknowledged and flattered male power. Jefferson used indirection not to flatter power but to obtain it in the way that was, for whatever reason, most comfortable for him. Machiavelli’s “wise prince” preferred to be feared than loved because men love “according to their own will” and fear “according to that of the prince.”
¹⁶
In his private and public lives, Jefferson much preferred to be loved than feared, and he moved in a way (“operated,” his detractors would say) designed to achieve that outcome.

“It is charming,” he once wrote to his grandchildren, “to be loved by everybody.”
¹⁷
Charming, perhaps, but exceedingly problematic unless one adopts a very cramped definition of “everybody.” Jefferson did not. He assiduously collected people and sought to bind them to himself in any way he could. He often told people what he knew they wanted to hear, instead of being frank, so that he could stay in their favor. He involved himself deeply in sorting out others’ personal problems and tolerated, often to his extreme disadvantage, those who imposed themselves upon him—all so that he would be “loved” by “everybody” whom he could personally persuade to do that. Jefferson was simply unable to follow Machiavelli’s advice about the wise prince and love and fear, for he had greater confidence in his ability to inspire the one rather than the other, even though he was in his public and private lives a “prince” and longed to be an effective one. In both realms he determined that people would, in fact, love him according to his will; all he had to do was find the right formula. This was the personality that Sally Hemings confronted at the Hôtel de Langeac.

A
DELICATE ISSUE
remains. There is the fascinating and important, but ultimately unanswerable, question of when Jefferson first began to look at Hemings as something more than just a teenage girl living in his house. What happened to them near the end of their stay, and the length of their relationship, suggests that he was serious about creating a long-term bond with her from the beginning. How did he go about doing that with her? We are not totally in the dark on this question and do not have to resort to generalizations about master and slave relationships, for there are relevant comparisons to look to from their specific lives.

Sally Hemings was the female counterpart to those of her male relatives who were most intimately connected to Jefferson—her brothers Robert and James and her nephew Burwell Colbert, the son of Betty Brown. The way Jefferson treated these three offers some clues about how he approached her. Of the three, his handling of Colbert is, perhaps, the most instructive. Jefferson emancipated Robert and James Hemings in the 1790s. After they were gone, he had no interest in replacing them with a man who would become as close to him as they had been. The age of the austere, plain, and republican Jefferson had arrived, and such an obvious trapping of aristocracy, moving among “the people” with an enslaved body servant from his plantation, was no longer useful. Instead, he leased John Freeman to serve as a footman at the White House and accompany him to and from Monticello during his presidency.
¹⁸
Jefferson did, however, want a personal servant to attend him at Monticello.

Colbert spent his early childhood as a house servant, until at age ten he became one of the “nail boys” (teens and preteens most of them) who worked in the nail factory Jefferson built on the mountain during his first retirement in the 1790s. Some of the boys who originally worked there grew up to become his most trusted artisans and workers: Joseph Fossett served as head of the blacksmith shop, Isaac Jefferson went into the “tinning business,” and Wormley Hughes became the head gardener at Monticello. Just as he determined early on that the teenage John Hemings would be a carpenter, Jefferson evidently decided, perhaps because of his appearance and personality, that Colbert might eventually take up where Robert and James left off, as his trusted personal manservant, at least while they were at Monticello.

Colbert’s version of personal loyalty to and affection for Jefferson, which, as we will see, was reciprocated, is well known in Jefferson scholarship. Most of the descriptions of their relationship come from Jefferson’s retirement years, when the men were older, with little attention given to the origins of their connection. Colbert’s apparent attachment to Jefferson was not born in those later years. Nor did it necessarily come naturally. Jefferson specifically cultivated it, making efforts to win Colbert over well before he became an adult. While Colbert was still quite young, Jefferson let everyone who mattered to him know that Colbert was especially important. He instructed his overseer to be lenient with all the nail boys and to avoid whipping them, though his overseers did not always follow that rule. Jefferson made it clear—not only to his overseer but to others on the plantation—that Colbert was
never
to be whipped, no matter what.
¹⁹
That strict order was probably not a license for the teenager to do as he pleased. It was a show of faith designed to shape Colbert’s character. The young man would avoid doing things precisely because Jefferson had singled him out as a favorite. When he grew older, and became a painter and glazer at Monticello during Jefferson’s presidency, serving as the butler/attendant when Jefferson was at home, he remained out of the control of the overseer. In fact, Jefferson directed his overseer Edmund Bacon to give Colbert spending money whenever he asked for it.

This was not just about Jefferson’s affection for Colbert, though he certainly cared for him—after all, why him and not someone else? This was also in part calculation. Colbert’s identity as an enslaved man was not enough to achieve what Jefferson wanted from him. He had to create another level of identity for the young man, one that would make Colbert the kind of person he wanted to have in his intimate circle. Such a person had to have enough affection for him to make him want to be loyal, know to keep his private affairs private, and never make him ill at ease. It was probably easier to arrive at this point more quickly and naturally with Robert and James Hemings because they were his wife’s half brothers, and he could use that connection as a basis for bonding. Jefferson could have made any man on his plantation act as his manservant. He could not, with force or induced fear, make that person genuinely like or love him. His protective and indulgent actions told Colbert, while still young and impressionable, that he was special in Jefferson’s eyes. He had saved him from the pain and humiliation that other men on the plantation might have to endure, and he even forced a white man to answer to Colbert’s whims. Colbert, from boyhood, knew that this was all Jefferson’s doing, and that shaped the way he viewed Jefferson all his life. The strategy apparently worked.

To call this “strategy” or “calculation” is not to say it was cold. It was the opposite. Jefferson did not want—could not have endured—having a person in his innermost circle who obviously did not like him. Many men would not have cared one way or the other, so long as the person did as he or she was told. He preferred to idealize his relationship to Colbert, and shielding him from the “normal” vicissitudes of slavery allowed him to do this. The male servant closest to him would not know the “worst” of slavery, and Jefferson would show himself to Colbert at his “best” when he took him away from all that. He styled Colbert as his “friend.”
²⁰
As utterly preposterous a notion as that seems, it is nevertheless instructive that Jefferson felt the need to characterize his relationship with Colbert in this way in order to be comfortable around him.

Close as Colbert and Jefferson would become over the years, Jefferson and Sally Hemings were, from the very start, at another level of intimacy: skin-to-skin, sexual and emotional vulnerability–bearing, closeness. If he worked years to cultivate a favored manservant, to gain his loyalty and affection, there is every reason to believe that when he first determined he wanted Sally Hemings in his life in an even more intimate way, he followed the same pattern. The point could never have been for Jefferson to do things to make Hemings hate him, to fix her identity so that she would recoil every time she saw him or cringe at his touch. He wanted a domestic life that was as comfortable as it could be, and having a young mistress who despised him was not the way to do that. What must always be kept in mind when considering Jefferson’s actions toward the Hemingses in Paris is that they were in a place where a serious misstep on his part could have prompted these two young people to leave him for good, under circumstances that would have caused him great embarrassment—and he would have had no recourse. The far easier and more pleasing thing for him in the long run was to try to win her over. That may not have been hard to do.