The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (68 page)

Petit, still in a tizzy about all this, evidently got the message from Jefferson’s letter and knew his employer was on his side, for when Taylor talked to him about Seche he upped the ante and insisted that both the wife
and
the coachman had to go. Taylor thought this unfair. “I told him that as he alleged nothing against him [the coachman], it would not only be cruel but unjustifiable in me to discharge him. He declared that unless both were removed he would go to france.”
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This was a volatile situation that could easily have erupted into violence, a dispute between a man and a married woman whose husband would naturally take his wife’s part.

Taylor instructed Seche not to go into the house or even speak to Petit, if that was possible. He was also directed to find another place for his wife and children to live. In the end, Petit would not budge from his position that the whole family had to go, and Jefferson’s agent, with understandable nervousness, given that he was putting a man who had a family to support out of work, fired him. When he told Jefferson what had happened, Jefferson assured him, “What you have done…is exactly what I would have wished.”
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There is little question whose side Hemings took once he returned to the city. This conflict had been brewing over the months before the final confrontation, and he probably already had chosen a side. His connection to Petit was far stronger and more long-standing than his connection to Seche and his wife. Petit referenced this shared history in the last line of his letter detailing his problem with the Seches when he told Jefferson that he wanted him to pass along his greetings to “Gimme” and “Salait” (Jimmy and Sally), the brother and sister serving as touchstones, reinforcing his own association with Jefferson.
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Whether true or not, Mrs. Seche’s statement would in her and Petit’s time, though not in ours, have been characterized as a “charge” or “allegation” or “accusation,” as if Petit had engaged in sodomy, or really did love men, and had actually done something wrong. Sodomy was a crime, although no criminal prosecutions were brought for it in Philadelphia during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and no trials at all during the entire century. There was a fairly extensive subculture of men who engaged in same-sex activity in the city, who met in taverns and other establishments, but Philadelphians adopted a look-the-other-way attitude about the matter. Loving men, short of any kind of physical display of it, was not a crime, and it is fascinating that Mrs. Seche separated the two, suggesting that there was as early as the 1790s, as some scholars have posited and others have actively disputed, a consciousness in the general public of men who loved other men, not just men who engaged in same-sex activity.
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That Mrs. Seche thought to deploy homosexuality as a weapon in her conflict with Petit is also intriguing, given that there were other things she could have said. Was this a common taunt by women to men? Very little is known about Petit, and it is impossible at this juncture to know whether Mrs. Seche really believed that what she said was true, somehow knew it was true, or simply reached for what she thought might be a hurtful thing to say. Servants who worked closely with one another knew the backgrounds and activities of their co-workers. Indeed, Petit’s reputation probably preceded him, as his arrival had been greatly anticipated for many months. Members of the household knew at least that Petit was a bachelor with no obvious sign of wife or children. They may well have heard that when Jefferson contacted him he had retired to the countryside to live with his mother and thought he was not living the life of a “normal” man, without understanding the nature of French society. As noted earlier, many French masters refused to hire, or fired, personal servants who married. Petit may well have loved men just as she said, or he may have been the victim of the excessive power that French masters exercised over their servants, a power that came back to haunt them during the 1790s when the “lower orders” exacted revenge upon those who had taken unimaginable liberties with their lives.

Petit’s strong response conveys how serious a matter it was to him in the context of the world in which he lived. Still, to insist not only that Mrs. Seche be removed from the household but that her husband, who had not figured at all in his angry letter to Jefferson, also be put out of work for his wife’s invectives seems an overreaction. Mr. Seche had a family to support, one who had suffered a grievous loss in the year before this, which Jefferson revealed when he noted that he paid the funeral expenses for one of the Seches children.
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Was Petit incensed at Mrs. Seche for lying about him, or angry at her for bringing the truth of his life into the open? One wonders whether he would have repeated in a letter to Jefferson what she had said if her statement was true, unless the couple had threatened to say something to Jefferson themselves and this was Petit’s preemptive move.

Jefferson showed no sign that he was bothered by what Mrs. Seche had said about Petit, beside the discomfort it caused his longtime employee. There is no indication he made any effort to investigate the truth or falsity of her statement, no show of concern that it posed any threat to his household. Either he did not believe Petit loved other men, already knew he did, or simply did not care one way or the other. His chief concern was to make sure that his maître d’hôtel, who had come all the way from France at his request, did not leave the country hurt. Above all, Jefferson could not abide domestic discord. One sees echoes of his response to the Petit-Seche battle in his handling of a later power struggle in the President’s House. When one of his white servants, Edward Maher, complained about having to wear the same livery that Jefferson’s black servant John Freeman wore, Jefferson’s response was acid. He said that he had known and valued Freeman longer and better than Maher, suggesting that the disgruntled man should simply put the livery on and fall into line.
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The complaining Maher did not survive long in Jefferson’s employ, and the master of Monticello was sanguine about his departure: “I like servants who will do everything they are wanted to do.”
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In the end, the Seches, or at least his wife, badly misjudged how far they could go in baiting Petit and suffered for their miscalculation. They probably did not understand that Jefferson was not a prude and did not abandon friends or family easily. When his son-in-law’s sister Nancy Randolph got into her famous trouble with her brother-in-law at Bizarre and became a social pariah, he continued to host her at Monticello—even when his daughter Martha refused to have Nancy in her home.
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Jefferson’s presence evidently had been sufficient to keep matters in the household from coming to the point of exactly the kind of poisonous domestic turmoil that he feared and loathed. Away at Monticello, he had had no way to keep the peace. Three days after he returned to Philadelphia with James Hemings, Jefferson closed the book on his time with his coachman from New York: “Pd Francis Seche for wages & board from Sep 1. to this day 19.D. He now leaves my service & John Riddle comes.”
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I
N
P
HILADELPHIA,
James Hemings was at once at the center and periphery of momentous events in the life of the nation—at the center because of his physical proximity to some of the men who were making history, at the periphery because his race and status did not allow him to have a direct and personal hand in shaping those events. His impact on society came from being a member of the group whose past, present, and future in the country loomed over all serious discussions of where the nation would head in the coming years. In August of 1791 Jefferson received a letter from an African American who put the matter to him directly, not raising James Hemings’s name specifically, of course, but seeking some clarification of what the future would hold for men like Hemings and his brothers and women like his sisters.

Benjamin Banneker, a free black man from Maryland was both a mathematician and astronomer. He prepared a scientific almanac that he sent to Jefferson, thinking that he would understand the spirit in which it was presented. He said that he was writing

Banneker went on to appeal to Jefferson on the basis of his words in the Declaration of Independence about the equality of mankind, suggesting that it served as a basis for him and other whites to “wean” themselves “from those narrow prejudices” which they had “imbibed with respect to” blacks and to work toward ending slavery. Banneker’s approach to Jefferson can be seen as the formal start of black Americans’ conflicted political engagement with him. Even before this time, and certainly long after it, blacks used the words of Jefferson’s declaration as a promise, or as a tool of irony, to express the gap between American ideals and the reality of blacks’ lives.
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Jefferson responded quickly and politely to Banneker, indicating that he was impressed with his work and that he hoped the conditions of blacks could be raised. He also promised to send the almanac to his friend Condorcet, the “Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris,” which he did on the very same day he replied to Banneker. He had already heard about Banneker before the letter arrived, having been approached by Andrew Ellicot, the cousin of George and Elias Ellicot, the mathematician’s chief benefactors, about allowing Banneker to become an assistant in surveying the land for the Federal District. Jefferson approved of the assignment, and Banneker began work during the first part of 1791.
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Eighteen years later, however, Jefferson sounded a different note about Banneker in letters to Joel Barlow and Henri-Baptiste Gregoire, the “Abbé Gregoire,” questioning whether Banneker had had help in preparing the almanac he had sent to him.
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Much had happened in the country, and to Jefferson, during those nearly two decades. Whether he had believed all along that Banneker’s mentors had helped him is unknown. The astronomer was mixed race and could easily have fit Jefferson’s profile of the African American “improved” by white blood. What is known is that the charge that Banneker may have received help in preparing his almanac did not originate with Jefferson. It appeared in print years before he hinted at it in his letters to Barlow and Gregoire, and it was conceived as a weapon to attack him. Thomas Green Fessenden, a prominent Federalist from New Hampshire, chided Jefferson mercilessly in a newspaper column as gullible, saying that he had been taken in by Banneker and abandoned his suppositions about blacks’ inferiority after having encountered the “wonderful phenomenon of a Negro Almanac, (probably enough made by a white man).” William Cobbett, a rabidly racist expatriate Englishman who wrote under the pseudonym “Peter Porcupine,” was even more sarcastic in his description of Jefferson’s support of Banneker.
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Jefferson closely followed the writings of his enemies in the Federalist press, and it is not possible that he did not know the tack they were taking on his dealings with Banneker. Being seen as one who supported black aspirations was not the kind of thing any American politician of Jefferson’s day, or long thereafter, for that matter, wanted. There was no future in it. Voicing a generalized antislavery sentiment was one thing—it fit with the still resonant natural rights formulations that helped set aloft the Spirit of ’76—but championing blacks as individuals was another matter. It did not help that for most of the first decade of the nineteenth century—from 1802 until his retirement in 1809—he and Sally Hemings had been the subject of newspaper articles, cartoons, and ballads from one end of the country to the next, even reaching across the Atlantic.

It may be difficult from this remove, when current-day fashion often casts Jefferson as
the
extreme racist and political conservative of his age, to accept that this was not his general reputation during most of his political career. Without getting too far ahead of the story of how his political ambitions and hopes for the future of the United States affected the Hemingses and his other slaves, one can say at this point that the fallout from his dealings with Banneker was an early and clear signal to one of the shrewdest and most self-protective politicians of his era about how he could and should express himself on the issue of slavery and race in public and in private.

At the time, Banneker and his supporters were thrilled to receive a letter from Jefferson that from a modern-day perspective seems unremarkable—even meaningless. Still, the letter was like tonic to blacks and whites who opposed slavery. They very quickly arranged to have both letters printed together in pamphlet form and distributed to advance the nascent cause of abolitionism. There is no evidence that they approached Jefferson about using his letter. However, one of Banneker’s staunchest allies, Andrew Ellicot, the commissioner in charge of building the Federal City, regularly communicated with Jefferson. With his permission or not, after the pamphlets circulated, Jefferson became a target for those who put this exchange together with his well-known support for the French Revolution and his antislavery sentiments written in the
Notes on the State of Virginia
and cast him as a dangerous political extremist.
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