The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (55 page)

Distortion of human feelings is not the same thing as the total destruction of them. Sally Hemings, though enslaved, was a human being. Working backward to 1789 from either her death in 1835 or Jefferson’s death in 1826, one can say that sixteen-year-old-old Hemings’s instincts about how she might best shape her future in the context of her particular circumstances and needs were as sound as her older sister Mary’s instincts about Thomas Bell, developing at the same time on another continent. Hemings could not have known this as she treated with Jefferson at the Hôtel de Langeac, but at the end of her life she would be able to say that she got the important things that she most wanted.

P
ARIS HAD NOT
seen anything like it for decades. The chill winds assaulting the city seemed a harbinger of terrible things to come. The temperature dropped so low that the Seine froze solid enough to support both the carriages that slid boldly across it and the ice skaters who came out daily and nightly to take advantage of the unprecedented weather.
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James and Sally Hemings had not seen anything like it either, having grown up in a warmer climate, where freezing temperatures were not abnormal, but never so cold as what they experienced in the winter of 1788–89. This may have disconcerted them. Or the two young people could well have considered the spectacular arctic display a form of adventure, like the ice skaters gliding out onto the Seine. They were, apparently, able to do that. We know something of their health statuses from Jefferson’s records. When the Hemingses needed medical attention, he put them under the care of doctors or nurses and recorded his payments for those services in his memorandum books. The lack of such notations during this period suggests that brother and sister made it through their last winter in Paris with no serious bouts of sickness. As noted in chapter 11, Patsy and Polly were not so fortunate. They were ill with typhus for parts of the winter.
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Whatever the Hemingses felt about that winter, Jefferson, the Parisian for a time, ever enamored of the sun and warm weather, was deeply distressed. Despite his close affinity for Paris, its customs, architecture, cultural life, and the people he met there, he could hardly abide its weather, a part of nature he watched with obsessive farmerlike zeal in every place he lived for any stretch of time. Almost from the moment he arrived, he had been issuing periodic complaints to family and friends back home about just how cold and how gray was the climate and atmosphere in the city. Although he hated the cold, the insistent meteorologist in him was, nonetheless, excited about the extreme winter as a weather occurrence. He ordered a new pair of thermometers that could be placed outside and observed without “opening the window” and would show the temperature to twenty degrees Farenheit “below naught.” He wrote to his brother-in-law about the “Siberian degree of cold” the city was experiencing and noted that as early as November the temperature had plummeted to eight degrees.
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If Jefferson was anxious before to get himself, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings back to America, the hard winter probably deepened his resolve.

The aberrant weather was about more than these temporary immigrants’ personal and physical inconvenience. Distress was everywhere, the hard winter having come upon the heels of a disappointing harvest and the institution of questionable economic policies that drove up the price of bread, the staple of life for the country’s poor. Thousands of people who had been living in Paris and its countryside were barely able to hold on. Social life began to break down under the weight of the unremitting deep freeze, starvation, poor housing, and a political system that was ill equipped to handle the crisis. Beggars, always a part of the city’s life, filled public spaces in even greater numbers, giving evidence of social deterioration to all who traveled the city’s streets. The “people,” however, were not merely helpless supplicants. They were angry. The desperately poor, along with the faltering working and small middle classes, came out in great numbers to protest the government’s failures to deal effectively with the shortages, developing a political critique along the way that would escalate into a full-fledged revolution by midsummer.
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One wonders whether the brutal winter, and the hardship it provoked in the general society, gave the Hemings siblings any pause about staying in a place where such things were even possible. That they contemplated staying in France at all suggests that they were an optimistic pair, not necessarily prone to thinking that because other people failed, they were destined to fail, too. Life was looking up for them at the time, with a steady salary in both of their hands, five years’ worth of contacts and experience in Paris, and an open avenue of freedom.

Volatile as the world outside their door must have seemed, the Hemingses were really just witnessing the start of the revolutionary era in France during that first half of the year. The violence in the country—the storming of the Bastille in July, bread riots, and the uprising of the peasantry in the villages surrounding the city—was a mere prelude to the more serious turn of events in the months immediately following their departure from France. Nine days after they left the city thousands of Parisian women marched to Versailles to protest the lack of bread, shouting within earshot of the royal family, “
du pain, du pain!
” The marchers, who had an extra measure of power because of the French military’s reluctance to fire on women, were promised bread. Only mildly appeased, they insisted that King Louis and Queen Marie Antoinette return to Paris with them to ensure the fulfillment of the promise. The justifiably frightened couple had no choice but to go, and they left under the escort of the then still highly regarded marquis de Lafayette, a man known to both Hemingses as a frequent visitor to the Hôtel de Langeac, taking meals that James Hemings prepared.
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The Hemingses were in a country on the precipice of truly earth-shattering changes, but the person closest to them, who knew the most about what was going on both in the streets and in the government—Jefferson—apparently did not really believe that. After viewing the political response to the fall of the Bastille, he pronounced with his usual implacable optimism, three days after the event, that the “power of the States is now I think out of all danger.” He seemed to believe that up until the time he left the country. “Tranquillity,” he wrote to Lucy Paradise as late as September 10, “is pretty generally restored in this country,” and then to Thomas Paine three days later,

Nothing could hinder this outcome except the hovering whirlwind that would descend soon after he left Paris. William Short, who knew him well, said that “Jefferson’s greatest illusions in politics…proceeded from a most amiable error on his part; having too favorable opinion of the animal called Man.”
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Jefferson enthusiastically supported the French Revolution, believing that changes were much needed in the country, and as with so many other things he deeply wanted to be true, he let his heart’s desire influence what should have been a more dispassionate analysis of how matters might settle themselves in that conflict. This natural politician and statesman followed the activities of the political elite as well as the ordinary people, who he instinctively understood would be the elite’s powerful counterpart, riding out into the streets to see the faces of the impoverished and enraged crowds that gathered to protest the government’s fecklessness. Even amid what looked like impending chaos, he assumed that the people’s wisdom would prevail and that all would be well in the end.

One of the more fascinating things to contemplate is what the enslaved people in Jefferson’s world, particularly those close to him like James and Sally Hemings, made of the strange blend of aristocrat and egalitarian in him. Whatever the limits of Jefferson’s personal egalitarianism, his ideas could not be, and ultimately have not been, contained within those limits. It is very likely that both Hemingses, like many during their time and afterward, understood that all who heard “all men are created equal” could make of those words what they wanted. We do not know what specific opinions he offered to the pair about the political and social turmoil in Paris, but he surely spoke to them, or commented within earshot, about the extraordinary events that were taking place around them. As the head of the household he could do no less, if only to give assurances about their personal well-being. Though they were not the likely objects of political hostility, during the same month that the Bastille was overtaken, burglars broke into the Hôtel de Langeac three times. Jefferson asked for additional police protection and then had bars and bells put on the windows to keep out intruders and to alert the people in the house if anyone tried to get inside. Even if the burglaries were not overtly political acts, they were another sign to the Americans that they were in the midst of difficult times and were, to some degree, vulnerable.
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The public turmoil aside, the Americans had their own business to attend to, some of which offered its own brand of trouble. It is more usual to think of Sally Hemings in conflict with Jefferson over leaving France. She was not the only cause of concern. Jefferson’s own daughters were evidently giving him some moments of anxiety. While there is no question that he longed for home, and saw his leave as an occasion to put his financial affairs in order, his correspondence in 1788–89 clearly indicates that what worried him the most was that his daughters were coming of age in this foreign setting. Patsy was almost certainly the catalyst for his decision to seek a leave of absence. He was desperate to get her back home.

Although Patsy was still in her teens, she was, in Jefferson’s view, of marriageable age. Much as he loved the French, he wanted her to make a match in her own country. His daughter was enjoying the gilded life in Paris perhaps a bit too much for his tastes, going out to balls where she danced with eligible bachelors, socializing with other young women who were doing the same, no doubt exchanging notes about the new world they had entered and the people, that is to say, young men, they encountered in that world. He had left America with no idea he would be gone for so long. Before he knew it, five of his daughter’s formative years had been spent abroad, and she had been thoroughly acculturated. When Polly arrived in 1787, all the people who were the most important to Patsy were in France. Her mother was gone. While she probably longed to see her other relatives and Virginia, she could do that without having to remain there. Jefferson, however, meant to take her to Virginia for good and come back to France without her. Despite what he was saying to people back home, she was not ready to go and spoke of remaining in Paris and renting rooms at the abbey. That she was willing to stay in France without him shows just how far away from Virginia and his values she had grown.

With the young people in the house making noises about staying, Jefferson was the beleaguered patriarch confronted with various mini-rebellions breaking out in his domestic realm. He was, if anything, extremely effective when it came to tamping down dissension within the ranks, personal and political. He managed to sail through the difficult last months with the household intact, and the gathering of belongings at the Hôtel de Langeac accelerated after August 23 when he received word (“tho’ not officially”) from John Jay that he had permission to take his leave of absence and that his secretary, William Short, was to serve in his stead for the duration of his leave.
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Once it was clear that the return home was imminent, the first order of business after packing was to find a suitable ship bound for Virginia. Jefferson immediately set out to do this, but the process turned out to be something of an ordeal itself—one that would not be over until the day in late October that he, James and Sally Hemings, and his daughters set foot on the
Clermont
bound for Norfolk, Virginia.

With a revolution breaking out and Jefferson feverish to find a ship to take them all back to Virginia, the Hemingses faced squarely the stark reality that if they were to go with him they would be leaving the chance for legal freedom and returning to legal slavery. There had been a long time to think this over during the course of Jefferson’s preparations for going home. But Jay’s letter put matters on a do-or-die footing for the siblings, and it was evidently during the roughly one-month interval between receiving the letter and leaving Paris that Sally Hemings, in the very early stages of pregnancy, and Jefferson had their most direct confrontation.

Fawn Brodie tied Jefferson’s sudden illness in the days immediately after he got word that he could come home to his conflict with Hemings. About a week after receiving Jay’s letter, he suffered a migraine attack that lasted for six days and confined him to bed.
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For a man who hated confrontation and, as he confided to his friend James Madison, particularly hated face-to-face bargaining, being in conflict with Hemings over her decision to stay in France would have indeed distressed him greatly, particularly because he knew that he could not legally make her come home. If he were desperate enough (and lost all sense of himself), he could try to physically take hold of her and her brother, an absurd plan on its face. He could not enlist the police to help him force them out of the country. What basis could he cite? They knew the status of blacks in the country, and he knew he had not followed the law and registered the Hemingses. There is no reason to think the servants at the Hôtel de Langeac would have stood idly by while Jefferson played kidnapper if the Hemingses had asked for their help. It is quite clear that workers in Paris in 1789 tended to support one another and were not exactly in a deferential mood toward their “superiors.”

A Jefferson attempt at force would have been as ironic and problematic as showing up in the Admiralty Court to argue against the Hemingses’ freedom. As a twenty-eight-year-old, he had copied in his commonplace book “An Inscription for an African Slave.” It is not known why, or for whom, he prepared the inscription—whether it was to be used for a specific individual or as an all-purpose one for the burial ground for enslaved people at Monticello—but it appeared just below one written for the headstone of his favorite sister, Jane. The inscription contained lines from William Shenstone’s poem attacking the African slave trade. The stanzas express the longing of an African captured from the “bless’d” shores of his homeland and taken by “stern tyrant[s]” to toil for others.
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He would not be “trading” slaves, but trying to impress James and Sally Hemings and put them on a ship to take them across the Atlantic to Virginia would have put Jefferson in the position of the Barbary pirates he would fight a decade later as president.