by John Ferling
It may have been that Jefferson, like many another, could conduct an epistolary romance but could not make a face-to-face commitment. Perhaps, despite all the things he had written, he never wished for more than occasional trysts with Maria. It was possible that his feelings changed—that head triumphed over heart—during the long year that he and Maria had been separated. Or, it may have been that Jefferson would have married Maria had she been divorced but was unwilling to live with her in an adulterous relationship—which would have been scandalous and put an end to the political ambitions he still harbored.
They never saw each other again. They corresponded, but where Maria was anxious to keep alive the relationship—years later she confessed to still keeping his picture beside her bed—Jefferson’s interest flagged.29 More and more time passed between his letters, and he no longer inquired about her feelings toward him. His earlier expressions of love were replaced by banalities: “Adieu! God bless you!”; “Be our affections unchangeable”; “think of me often and warmly, as I do of you.”30 Not until 1790, when he was back in America to stay, was he able to tell Maria what he had never ceased to feel: “I will always love you.”31
Sometime within eighteen months of his final night with Maria Cosway, another woman entered Jefferson’s life, with even more fateful consequences. During Jefferson’s lifetime, the public never knew of his romance with Maria Cosway. But a dozen years after he last saw Maria, and while he still held public office, charges would be broadcast that Jefferson had long had a sexual liaison with one of his female slaves, and that he had fathered children by her. Her name was Sarah (Sally) Hemings.
Born in 1773, Sally was the child of John Wayles—Jefferson’s father-in-law—and Betty Hemings, one of the slaves at the Forest. Sometime around 1776, roughly three years after Wayles’s death, Jefferson brought Betty and her six children to Monticello. The Hemings family remained chattel and lived in the slave quarters, but they enjoyed a special status. The males were trained as skilled artisans, and no one in the family was ever put to work as a field hand.
Sally was three when she came to Monticello, nine when Martha died, and eleven when Jefferson, accompanied by her brother James Hemings, sailed for France. Following the death in 1785 of his infant child, the second Lucy Elizabeth, Jefferson decided that Polly, his seven-year-old daughter in Virginia, be sent to France. Planning to enroll her in the same convent school that Patsy attended, he requested that Elizabeth Eppes and her husband, with whom Polly was living, book passage for her Atlantic crossing on a vessel making for France. Jefferson also instructed them to send her in the company of a “careful negro woman,” but added that Polly’s attendant was to “return to Virginia directly,” that is, to make a round-trip voyage. Nearly two years passed before Polly finally sailed, and when she did, the Eppeses put her aboard a vessel bound for London. What is more, they did not choose a mature woman to look after Polly, but sent fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings as her companion.32
Late in June 1787, Polly, now nine, and Sally arrived in London, and the ship’s captain arranged to have the two girls taken to the residence of the American minister, John Adams. Abigail Adams immediately sent word to Jefferson. She added that the slave girl who had accompanied Maria was the “Sister of the Servant you have with you.” She described Sally as “good naturd,” but “quite like a child,” and requiring “more care” than Polly, who was five years younger. She asked Jefferson to come for his daughter when it was convenient, and also inquired about sending Sally back to Virginia.33
One of the many mysteries of Jefferson’s behavior is why he did not cross to London to retrieve the daughter he had not seen for four years. It has been suggested that Jefferson did not go to London to get Polly because “he was afraid to be in the same room with Sally and Abigail Adams,” who abhorred slavery. However, Jefferson had never hidden his slaves when traveling, and in all likelihood Abigail Adams had already seen him dealing with James Hemings. Jefferson attributed his decision to the pressing business he faced in Paris, as he had only just returned from his extended trip to Italy. There is yet another explanation for his decision to remain in Paris. Maria Cosway was expected to arrive any day for her second stay in the city, and he likely wanted to be there to welcome her. Whatever the reason, Jefferson remained in Paris and dispatched his valet to fetch both his daughter and Sally Hemings to Paris. Jefferson had originally planned to send the slave who accompanied Polly back to Virginia. But the thought of sending this young girl alone on an Atlantic crossing aboard a ship filled with seamen likely gave him pause. It is also conceivable that his decision may have arisen from how her brother had blossomed during his three years in Paris. Jefferson had paid handsomely to have James Hemings trained as a French chef. Having nearly completed his apprenticeship by mid-1787, Hemings had grown so accomplished in his trade that he was about to become the chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Langeac, a position that would give him responsibility for running the kitchen and supervising its staff. As Jefferson must have suspected that he would never again marry, and that public life would keep him from Monticello for long stretches, he may have thought that Sally could be trained to manage a household, a responsibility usually borne on southern plantations by the wife of the planter.34
During her two years in France, Sally Hemings grew from a callow adolescent who knew only country life into a young woman on the cusp of her seventeenth birthday who spoke French and had some familiarity with one of the world’s largest cities. There is abundant evidence that Sally was an attractive young woman, with long, flowing black hair. Both she and her mother had white fathers, so that an acquaintance’s description of her as a “bright mulatto” who was “mighty near white” rings true. Some thought she bore a distinct resemblance to Jefferson’s late wife, which would not have been surprising, as they were half-sisters.
Little is known of Sally’s life in Paris, and even less of her relationship with Jefferson. Initially, she probably ran errands and served as a chambermaid. In time, she may have become a seamstress. She must have accompanied Patsy and Polly to dances and dinners. It is known that Jefferson spent a considerable sum in 1789 on clothing for Sally, and she alone among his servants was lodged the previous year in a French home during a five-week period when Jefferson was away from Paris on a journey.
Otherwise, nothing conclusive is known of James and Sally Hemings’s years abroad, save that slavery was illegal in France and Jefferson continued to hold both as his slaves. French law required that slave owners entering the country immediately register their chattel, after which the bondsmen were to be rapidly deported. As he clearly planned from the beginning to take both James and Sally Hemings back to Virginia, Jefferson never registered his two slaves. He was breaking the law, and he knew it. The year before Sally arrived, he had advised a fellow slave owner who was coming to France that he could probably escape notice by simply “saying nothing.” Should he “attempt to procure a dispensation from the law,” Jefferson added, it would likely “produce orders which otherwise would not be thought of.”35
Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings would eventually be a major factor in his life. So too would his five years in Europe, which dramatically influenced his thinking. He found much that he liked about Europe. He quickly discovered that Europeans were superior to Americans in matters of art, music, architecture, science, technology, and cuisine. He even concluded that Europeans were more polite than his countrymen, and Jefferson was amazed to “have never yet seen a man drunk in France, even among the lowest of the people.” While admitting that he viewed things through the prism of his American “prejudices,” Jefferson proudly boasted that the most enlightened Europeans applauded the American Revolution, and when the French Revolution erupted during his final months in Paris, he was convinced that the French had been inspired by the American example.36
But for all Jefferson relished of European culture, he found much that he disliked, and the negatives had a profound impact on his thinking
. Through his residence in France, Jefferson was able to see what absolutist rule had done to the French people and nation. What he saw further radicalized him.
Jefferson came away convinced that the freedom and opportunities enjoyed by Americans outweighed the best that Europe could offer. The “wretchedness” that he observed among France’s “labouring poor” and peasants made him more appreciative than ever of what was available to America’s free inhabitants. This “savage of the mountains of America,” as he referred to himself, had sailed for France expecting to be swept up by the “vaunted scene of Europe.” Instead, he quickly saw the “truth of Voltaire’s observation that every man here must be either the hammer or the anvil.” The “general fate of humanity here [is] most deplorable,” he wrote, and it was due to the rigid class system and the resulting maldistribution of wealth. Not only was the “property of this country absolutely concentrated in a very few hands,” but also “a very considerable proportion” of the countryside consisted of “uncultivated lands” that were deliberately “kept idle mostly for game.” The consequence of this “enormous inequality” of wealth was the “misery [of] the bulk of mankind.” While commoners suffered “under physical and moral oppression,” lived in “hovels,” and were denied the least control of their destiny, aristocrats enjoyed a splendid opulence and were attended by scores, sometimes hundreds, of servants.37
Jefferson was convinced that the root cause of the deplorable conditions was “a bad form of government.” Monarchy, he said, was the millstone that caused the “people [to be] ground to powder.” Thirty months after departing America, he was hearing that some of his countrymen had concluded that republicanism was unworkable. His response: “Send those gentry here to count the blessings of monarchy.” They would find that every European monarchy was undergirded by “force.”38
Throughout Europe, he concluded, monarchs “keep up a great standing army” and allied with an archconservative nobility and church to maintain their privileges, authority, and luxury. Force, or its threat, was reinforced by shackling “the minds of [the] subjects” with “ignorance and prejudices,” through which they are induced to adore “wealth” and “pomp.” Once again, Jefferson had a message for the most conservative Americans. “If any body thinks that kings, nobles, or priests are good conservators of the public happiness, send them here…. They will see here with their own eyes” that those who rule are a “confederacy against the happiness of the mass of people.”39
Jefferson said that his outlook had been changed only by degrees through his experience of living abroad. “I was much an enemy to monarchy before I came to Europe. I am ten thousand times more so since I have seen what they are.” While he saw that there was “scarcely an evil known in these countries which may not be traced to their king,” he concluded that the “horror of evils” that surpassed all others was that the “dignity of man is lost” through the classification of “arbitrary distinctions” from the king and nobility downward. Most of humankind fell into one of “several stages of degradation,” so that “the many are crouched under the weight of the few.” Europe groaned beneath a system whereby the powerful had “divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep.” Convinced that monarchy could exist under no alternative form of arrangement, Jefferson came to believe that the “evils of monarchical government are beyond remedy.”40
He found nothing redeeming in monarchies. No king evinced the slightest degree of progressivism. None could act in a particularly enlightened manner within the system that sustained them. All kings were driven to perpetuate the exploitation of commoners. Perhaps one monarch in twenty exhibited above-average common sense, but none displayed extraordinary qualities. There “is not a crowned head in Europe whose talents or merit would entitle him to be elected a vestryman by the people of any parish in America,” Jefferson claimed. Louis XVI, France’s monarch, “hunts one half the day, is drunk the other, and signs whatever he is bid,” much of it thrust on him by the queen, Marie Antoinette, who “is detested” by nearly all, he reported.41
Jefferson advised many of his American correspondents that if they came to Europe, “they will go back good republicans.” In his case, it was not only his commitment to republicanism that was strengthened but also his sense of the goodness of America. “America blesses most of its inhabitants,” he rejoiced. Ninety-five percent of the French lived a “more wretched, more accursed … existence” than that suffered by the “most conspicuously wretched individual of the United States,” he said hyperbolically. In America, government was small and unobtrusive, leaving its inhabitants to a “tranquil … felicity” and the opportunity to chase after happiness through whatever “pursuits … health and reason approve.” Over and again, he exhorted friends at home to cross the Atlantic and see for themselves. “It will make you adore your country, it’s soil, it’s climate, it’s equality, liberty, laws, people and manners. My god! How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of, and which no other people on earth enjoy. I confess,” he added, “I had no idea of it myself.”42
A decade earlier, just after independence was declared, Jefferson had pushed for reforms in Virginia to lessen the likelihood that the great mass of citizens might in time be downtrodden by a gentry that monopolized land, wealth, and power. The hopelessness that he beheld in Europe quickened Jefferson’s radical impulses. Furthermore, appalled by the squalor and destitution that he thought endemic to cities, Jefferson became an even more fervent advocate of the agrarian way of life. Though it would be more clear in time, Jefferson lived in a Europe that was in the early throes of the Industrial Revolution. While intrigued by the possibilities offered by some of the new technology, he blanched at Europe’s commercial avarice and its handmaidens, including stock markets, great banks, and monopolistic companies. He was not convinced that the captains of finance and industry were ushering in a better world. Europe’s landless farmers and workers, already “loaded with misery by kings, nobles, and priests,” would only become more hapless under the sway of these new, impersonal masters. Already in England, Jefferson discovered, the emerging manufacturing order had imposed land taxes that redistributed wealth in its favor while threatening ruin for many gentry and property-owning farmers.43
Jefferson showed no concern that the modernizing changes afoot in England, and to a lesser degree in France, posed an imminent threat to America. His worry remained what it had always been. He feared that the tyranny of the few—the force behind the “enormous inequality producing such misery to the bulk of mankind” in Europe—would in time take hold in his country, eradicating the sparkling promise of America. During his first full year abroad, Jefferson spoke of the “earth … as a common stock for man to labour and live on,” and he reiterated that the “small landholders are the most precious part of a state.” Shaken by what he was seeing, he proposed to Madison that Virginia adopt a system of graduated property taxes, including exemptions from taxation for those “below a certain point.” Not only would this lead to a redistribution of wealth, but through a more equitable “division of property” it would also preserve widespread property ownership.44
A measure of Jefferson’s persistent, even growing, radicalism was apparent in his response to Shays’ Rebellion, a protest by farmers in western Massachusetts against heavy taxation and foreclosures against their property. When the creditor-dominated state legislature refused to enact stay laws or permit an inflated currency, the farmers—most of whom had soldiered for American independence—took up arms to prevent county courts from sitting and authorizing foreclosures. The state crushed the insurgency in the autumn of 1786 by dispatching an army of 4,400 troops, raised mostly in Boston and other eastern towns.45
George Washington was apoplectic when he learned of the disorder in Massachusetts. “Good God,” he exclaimed, and immediately expressed his fear that “combustibles” elsewhere “may set fire[s]” that could not be extinguished. John Jay denounced the “Spirit of licentiou
sness” that had “infected” the Yankee farmers. Madison wrote Jefferson of the “insolence” and “treason” of the insurgents. The alarm expressed by these three was shared by Abigail Adams, who in a letter to Jefferson called the farmers “a deluded multitude” of “Ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principals,” and, for that matter, without real grievances.46
Jefferson’s response was strikingly different. Although he did not defend the cause of the Shaysites—they had acted “in ignorance, not wickedness,” he said—Jefferson remarked that the rebellion caused him no “uneasiness.” “We have had 13 states independent 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century and a half without a rebellion?” he asked.47