The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (50 page)

Whatever one thinks of Sally Hemings’s decision to trust Jefferson on this critical point, she had an opportunity, entirely lost to historians, to have seen him face-to-face when no one else was around and to make a judgment, on the basis not only of his words but of his demeanor, about the seriousness of his sentiments. Hemings and all her relatives knew a private Jefferson that we do not know. We know a Jefferson of the
Notes on the State of Virginia
, talking about the need to remove blacks “beyond the reach of mixture” and a late in life letter in which he disparages the very kind of relationship that he was so intent upon entering into in France and lived in for almost four decades.
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We know something else just as well, or should by now: one must take with a grain of salt an individual’s public pronouncements criticizing certain sexual behavior, particularly when offered gratuitously. For such statements can be as much about that person’s inner struggle with socially forbidden private preferences as about their desire to voice a heartfelt sentiment for the benefit of mankind. They can also be about an attempt to deflect attention from an area where he or she is vulnerable. Even genuinely stated beliefs do not define the scope of private activities. People do things in private, have thoughts and feelings, that they do not want others to know about, and may honestly feel should not be replicated by members of society at large. “Do as I say, not as I do” is a well-known prescription in life, and Jefferson, like many human beings, was sometimes prone to offering it.
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Unlike other important men in history whose personal lives yield a great amount of information about their dealings with the opposite sex, Jefferson is a relative cipher. The woman with whom he spent the largest number of years simply could not be written about at all. Their son Madison, a very private man, gave limited details about the nature of his parents’ relationship. Through some unknown months of courtship and ten years of marriage, Jefferson’s wife left no letters that would reveal her assessment of him as a suitor or lover, or if she did, he destroyed them. He emerges as a father in his letters to and from his white daughters that, unsurprisingly, do not mention any romantic relations at all. The people who drew what has become the most familiar portrait of the private Thomas Jefferson were his grandchildren, who knew him best when he was an elderly man. Like most grandchildren, they could not easily, and probably would not even have wanted to, construct an image of their grandfather as a younger man in the grips of an attraction to a young woman who was not their grandmother. Because of their recollections and correspondence, the domestic Jefferson—as opposed to the public political figure—who comes most immediately to mind is a kindly, doting grandfather, living at a Monticello permanently suspended between 1809 and 1826, the years his grandchildren came of age and formed their most vibrant childhood memories of him and the place. Kindly, doting grandfathers can be sexual beings, too, but that is not their usual presentation to their grandchildren.

The closest we get to seeing Jefferson as a man in pursuit of a woman is in his correspondence with Maria Cosway. The letters that passed between them, always in danger of being read by her husband, give us some information about how he maneuvered in that realm, though not enough. Even if more explicitly revealing, they would not be a reliable guide to how Jefferson acted when he was serious about a union with a woman, because he could never really have been serious about Maria Cosway as a lifetime partner. That we have their letters at all supports this.

Compare his treatment of Cosway with that of his wife. As far as we know today, Jefferson kept no cache of letters to and from Martha Jefferson for posterity to pore over, interpret, and misinterpret. He wanted what happened between them to stay irretrievably private precisely because she was so important to him. The things that he valued most, that affected him most deeply and revealed his greatest points of vulnerability, he kept closely to himself. Jefferson wanted his relationship with Cosway to be a known part of his story in France; to appear before the world as a gallant and courtly lover in a vignette conveniently set far from home, community, and responsibility. Though Jefferson cared deeply for Cosway, it is highly probable that with every positive response to his attentions she confirmed her basic unsuitability as a woman he could take seriously on a long-term basis.

True to the conventions of his time, Jefferson believed that a wife, in contrast to the all too cosmopolitan Cosway, should be in the home, a place where a man’s exclusive right to his wife’s sexuality could be better protected. With Maria Cosway, Jefferson was caught in the conundrum faced by adulterous partners the world over: if Cosway could not be faithful to her present husband, as her affair with Jefferson indicated, how could Jefferson ever be sure that she would be faithful to him? That rather obvious question would have occurred to a man who called sex “the strongest of all the human passions”
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and tended to view women as temptresses. Fidelity, so important to Jefferson, was a virtue that he could demand and expect from the virginal sixteen-year-old half sister of his deceased wife. If he could persuade her to come home, he could continue to own her—not in the metaphorical sense that one speaks of couples “owning” one another, but own her legally for the rest of his life. He did not have to rely on a marriage license or social shame to monopolize her sexuality, for she had much more to lose than a married white woman, like Cosway or one in Virginia who decided to stray. If she went outside of her relationship with him and put herself at risk of bearing another man’s child, he could easily rationalize reneging on any promise he had made to her.

In the end, the word “husband” is the real key to the Cosway and Jefferson affair. Maria Cosway already had one. And unless Jefferson was prepared to take her away from her husband and live openly with her in adultery at Monticello—or become a very famous corespondent in a divorce action initiated because of an affair he started when he was in France on the business of the United States of America—Maria Cosway could only have amounted to an intense but fleeting diversion for Jefferson. The situation with Sally Hemings was far more serious for him than the Cosway interlude. He had two daughters whom he loved dearly. Yet, while speaking with Hemings of these matters, Jefferson knew that he was about to embark on a course of action that might hurt his daughters emotionally and, at the very least, perhaps even change the way they thought about him. Hemings was between sixteen and seventeen years old. Jefferson had fathered with his wife, Martha, at least six children, and Hemings’s pregnancy showed that fertility was not a problem for him. It would not have been at all impossible for Hemings to have given birth to fourteen children as her mother did. As things turned out, she gave birth to seven.

J
EFFERSON’S VISION FOR
his life at Monticello with Hemings was far too weighty a matter to have been motivated by trivial, fleeting concerns. If Hemings accepted his vision, their relationship could not be kept secret. Everyone who lived there and interacted with them would know the realities. Many years later, Israel Gillette, who had been enslaved at Monticello, said that he knew of Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson from his “intimacy with both parties.”
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His recollections suggested that it was not just the presence of children who looked just like Jefferson—as his white relatives described them—but the way Hemings and Jefferson treated each other, Hemings’s access to Jefferson, that told him what they were to each other.

One might say that Jefferson could expect his daughters to become inured to this type of relationship because their mother had experienced a similar one. Though this arrangement was a feature of life in his country, and families developed ways of dealing with it, it was not clear in 1789 that Patsy and Polly would be as sanguine about his connection to Hemings as their mother apparently was about John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings. Not all white women reacted calmly upon learning that the men in their lives were involved with enslaved women. Indeed, a household in which a husband or father had taken a slave mistress could become the site of internecine domestic warfare conducted on levels low and high. Some women—wives and daughters—exacted reprisals against the women themselves—arguing for their sale and the sale of any children they bore. They, and other family members, fought the bequests their male relatives gave to the children they had with enslaved women. Sometimes silent acquiescence was the tack. “Unable to do anything about it, many a Southern white woman feigned ignorance of illicit, interracial relationships, at least those that occurred under their own roof.”
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It is inconceivable, however, that on the self-contained and isolated farms and plantations throughout the South that any but the most dense white mistresses of households did not know when their fathers, husbands, or sons were having children with women on the plantation. Women have often felt obliged to play dumb for men’s benefit; that has never meant that they were actually dumb—particularly not about sorting out situations and relationships affecting their own personal lives in the domestic sphere that was their domain. The nineteenth-century southern diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut’s much quoted observation captures the spirit of denial required in a racially based slave society as slave owners dealt with one of the chief hazards of their business: “any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.”
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This was a delicate matter for Jefferson as well as Hemings. Once she gave in and came home, the power she had in France would dissipate. He, on the other hand, had to tread lightly while that power existed. Throughout his public career the people whom Jefferson enslaved knew who he was, particularly the ones in the closest physical proximity to him and the guests he entertained and the friends with whom he traveled. They made up at least part of his domestic staffs in every incarnation of his public career, from Williamsburg to Washington. The Hemingses and other slaves understood that he was a leader among the men of his society and was honored as a great man not only in his home state of Virginia but throughout the new country. His reputation as a champion of freedom and liberty and, in France, his antislavery writings were integral parts of his public persona. In the end, after he had lost everything, and they had been auctioned off to pay his debts, some who had been enslaved at Monticello still made excuses for Jefferson’s failure to live up to his image, saying that the money and effort he spent founding the University of Virginia left him unable to free all of his slaves, turning what they normally may have thought of as fault into an exaggerated, if somewhat misplaced, virtue.
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Visitors to the Hôtel de Langeac toasted Jefferson as the “apostle of liberty” and made much of his progressivism in the face of those who wanted to maintain the status quo in society. Imagine the stir if a slave of the “apostle” had shown up at the Admiralty Court in Paris, forced there because he had refused her request for freedom. Jefferson’s image, which he so assiduously cultivated throughout his entire public career, would have been left in tatters. Not only would it have damaged him in the eyes of abolitionist friends (what would Lafayette think?); much more importantly, it would have embarrassed the United States at a very critical moment. The American revolutionaries had taken huge sums of money from the French to fight their battle for freedom. As Jefferson noted, by the end of the 1780s those loans had become a source of tension between the French and Americans because the new nation could not repay the money in a timely fashion, money that the French treasury, already in bankruptcy but unwilling to say so formally, sorely needed.
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To have Jefferson, of all people, act in direct opposition to France’s Freedom Principle so that he could keep control over a sixteen-year-old enslaved girl would have been a spectacle for the ages. The word “irony” does not even begin to approach doing the situation justice. If the court had gotten the chance to see her, all would have been revealed instantly. It would not have taken a Voltaire to figure out what was going on. That was an outcome to be avoided at all costs. His years-long failure to register both Hemings and her brother, as French law required, would only have added to the debacle. Aside from whatever he felt for her, the Parisian Admiralty Court and Jefferson’s special position and reputation in France gave Sally Hemings latitude to say, “I will go home with you, but only on certain conditions.” The irony of Jefferson’s predicament with Hemings was even deeper, for he was intimately involved with freedom suits, having represented a number of individuals seeking freedom during his days as a young lawyer. He lost his most well-known suit,
Howell v. Netherland
, but he knew that whoever represented Hemings would have prevailed where he had not been able to for Samuel Howell.
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Jefferson may have pointed out to Hemings and her brother the potential problems they might face by remaining in Paris. But this was middle age confronting the well-known optimism and sense of immortality of youth that produces that thin line between recklessness and bravery. Sally was particularly young in comparison with James, but her age is not the only thing to consider. Some people are more easily frightened than others at every stage of life. We cannot assume that because Sally Hemings was born enslaved and female she had a fear-driven personality. Her initial determination to defy Jefferson indicates she did not. By this time, whatever sense of entitlement she had as a Hemings had been added to all her experiences to date—traveling across an ocean, living away from the Hôtel de Langeac on her own (twice), learning a new language, accompanying Patsy to social events, and being a handsomely paid employee. The last experience was probably the most important. She worked alongside other French servants at the Hôtel de Langeac and knew she could work elsewhere. The fashion of having African and mixed-race servants gave her an advantage if she sought work as a
femme de chambre
. Failing that, she might have worked as a seamstress, though that would have given her substantially less money for rent, food, and clothing for herself and her child. Thousands of slaves—male, female, young, and old—ran away from slavery with nothing but the clothes on their backs and the hope that something, anything, would turn up and be better than their lives under slavery. Even enslaved people in America filed freedom suits knowing that, if they lost, they would have to return to the homes of their victorious and potentially spiteful owners.
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Human beings, especially the young, take chances when much is at stake for them.