by Jon Meacham
Jefferson did not like the omission of a declaration (or bill) of rights to guarantee “freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal and unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury.”
He allowed that such matters could be addressed by future amendment or by the calling of a new convention. In the end, he was prepared to accept the verdict of the ratifying process. “After all, it is my principle that the will of the majority should always prevail,” he told Madison. “If they approve the proposed Convention in all its parts, I shall concur in it cheerfully, in hopes that they will amend it whenever they shall find it work wrong.”
Yet the more he thought about it, the more he hoped that the rights issue could be resolved before the new government was formed. Jefferson suggested that the first nine states ratify the Constitution but the remaining four states reject it until a declaration of individual rights could be added.
Jefferson decided to make his peace with the Constitution as drafted. “There are indeed some faults which revolted me a good deal in the first moment: but we must be contented to travel on towards perfection, step by step,” he wrote in May 1788.
This was a key element of Jefferson’s vision: He wrote beautifully of the pursuit of the perfect, but he knew good when he saw it. He would not make the two enemies.
Jefferson followed the politics of ratification with precision and passion. Seeking news from each state convention, he kept careful records of vote tallies. In May 1788 he believed the outcome certain. “It is very possible that the President and new Congress may be sitting at New York in the month of September,” he said on May 15.
The significance of the presidency was clear to Jefferson from the beginning. Writing of George Washington, James Monroe told Jefferson: “Having … commenced again on the public theatre the course which [Washington] takes becomes not only highly interesting to him but likewise so to us: the human character is not perfect; and if he partakes of those qualities which we have too much reason to believe are almost inseparable from the frail nature of our being, the people of America will perhaps be lost.”
So much depended on a single man.
Arriving home in Paris after a European journey in April 1788, Jefferson glimpsed Maria Cosway’s handwriting in his pile of letters. He opened her note before any other and replied to her before reading his other mail.
He had, he said, dreamed of her on his trip. “At Heidelberg I wished for you.… In fact I led you by the hand through the whole garden,” he wrote. “You must … now write me a letter teeming with affection; such as I feel for you.” He shared a joke with her about the connection between noses and phalluses from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a fairly standard flirtatious allusion.
One suspects, though, that on the road Sally Hemings may have also figured in his imagination. In Dusseldorf, Jefferson was fascinated by a 1699 painting of Abraham taking the young Hagar to his bed, an image by the Dutch artist Adriaen van der Werff. The picture, he said, was “delicious. I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years.”
In May 1788, back at the Hôtel de Langeac, he wrote a friend: “Paris is now become a furnace of politics. All the world is run politically mad. Men, women, children talk nothing else.”
TWENTY-TWO
A TREATY IN PARIS
He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred.
—MADISON HEMINGS
THE YEARS 1788 AND 1789 were a time of cascading events in Jefferson’s public and private lives. In Holland there were difficult financial negotiations. In France there was the rush of revolution. And within the walls of the Hôtel de Langeac there was Sally Hemings.
The French impulse for liberty—both in its laws against slavery and in the revolution against Louis XVI—tested Jefferson personally and politically in 1788 and 1789, threatening him in the most intimate of spheres and forcing him to confront the full implications of his philosophical creed.
In this tempestuous time, Jefferson apparently began a sexual relationship with his late wife’s enslaved half sister. Since her arrival with Polly in the summer of 1787, Hemings had been paid some small wages—twelve livres a month for ten months. Jefferson had bought clothing for her and had her inoculated against smallpox. Her brother James was trained as a chef. Sally’s day-to-day routine is less clear, though she may have served the Jefferson daughters as a maid at the convent school during part of her time in Paris.
Jefferson could hardly have been leading a more complicated life. His work was urgent, his life in Parisian intellectual and social circles busy and dizzying. He was trying to raise his two daughters. He feared for his young, vulnerable republic, and he had been engaged in a flirtation with a married woman, slipping in and out of hired carriages in the shaded suburbs of Paris and strolling through the romantic forests of the city. From Versailles to the city’s theaters and opera, he was living vibrantly and fretting constantly. Any hour could bring devastating news about America—about her security, her stability, her standing.
There, in the midst of the swirl and the storms, was a beautiful young woman at his command—a woman who may have reminded him of her half sister, his wife. The emotional content of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is a mystery. He may have loved her, and she him. It could have been, as some have argued, coercive, institutionalized rape. She might have just been doing what she had to do to survive a system so evil that much of the civilized world had already abolished it, accepting sexual duty as an element of her enslavement and using what leverage she had to improve the lot of her children. Or each of these things may have been true at different times.
Sex, Jefferson himself once remarked, was “the strongest of the human passions,” and he was not a man to deny himself what he wanted. Sally Hemings, for her part, was “light colored and decidedly good-looking,” Jefferson grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph recalled. In following years Jefferson was always at Monticello at the times she was likely to have conceived the children she is known to have borne.
What little evidence we have strongly suggests that Sally Hemings was an intelligent, brave woman who did as much as she could with what little the world had given her. She began this phase of her life as she apparently intended to carry on: with strength and an instinct for survival.
For in this opening hour, geography and culture—those things that had conspired to enslave her—were on her side. In France, enslaved persons could apply for their liberty and be granted it—and there was nothing their masters could do about it.
Jefferson knew this well. As the American minister he had once advised a fellow slave owner on the system. And Sally Hemings was no lonely slave girl in Europe: Her big brother James was there with her, at the Hôtel de Langeac, and could have helped her win her freedom.
According to their son Madison Hemings’s later account, Sally, who had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” was pregnant when Jefferson was preparing to return to the United States. “He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred,” Madison Hemings said.
To demur was to refuse, and Jefferson was unaccustomed to encountering resistance to his absolute will at all, much less from a slave. His whole life was about controlling as many of the world’s variables as he could. Yet here was a girl basically the same age as his own eldest daughter refusing to take her docile part in the long-running drama of the sexual domination of enslaved women by their white masters.
“She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved,” said Madison Hemings. “So she refused to return with him.”
It was an extraordinary moment. Fresh from arranging terms with t
he bankers of Europe over a debt that was threatening the foundation of the French nation, Thomas Jefferson found himself in negotiations with a pregnant enslaved teenager who, in a reversal of fortune hardly likely to be repeated, had the means at hand to free herself.
She, not he, was in control. It must have seemed surreal, unthinkable, even absurd. For the first time in his life, perhaps, Jefferson was truly in a position of weakness at a moment that mattered to him. So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.
Sally Hemings agreed. “In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia,” said Madison Hemings. “Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself), and Eston—three sons and one daughter.”
Their father kept the promise he had made to Sally in Paris. “We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born,” Madison Hemings said. It was one of the most important pacts of Jefferson’s life.
In Paris, the Assembly of Notables had given way to the calling of the Estates-General for May 1789. “I imagine you have heard terrible stories of the internal confusions of this country,” Jefferson wrote a correspondent in July 1788. “These things swell as they go on.… As yet the tumults have not cost a single life according to the most sober testimony I have been able to collect.” He would not be able to say this much longer.
On the diplomatic front, the American failure to pay its European debts—chiefly its debt to France, which was one of the many reasons the royal treasury was in such trouble—was problematic for Jefferson and Adams. In early 1788 the two men met in Amsterdam for sessions with Dutch bankers. Among Jefferson’s concerns was finding capital enough to repay French officers for their services to America during the Revolution and to ensure that there was money to support the American diplomatic establishments in Europe. He and Adams accomplished both ends in 1788.
As confidence in American stability grew, so did America’s credit in European markets. Jefferson, a man with large personal debts, deplored the weakness that came with weighty borrowing. “I am anxious about everything which may affect our credit,” he wrote Washington in May 1788. “My wish would be to possess it in the highest degree, but to use it little.”
With deftness, Jefferson also negotiated the first treaty to be ratified under the new Constitution: a convention with France that defined diplomatic relations between the two nations. The initial version of this convention, negotiated by Franklin in 1784, was thought to have been too accommodating to the French. Jefferson reentered the fray, saying that he took as his guide the principle that “instead … of declining every article which will be useless to us, we accede to every one which will not be inconvenient.”
It was a practical way of executing a delicate duty. Under the convention as ratified, the United States was seen and treated as a stronger, more sophisticated, more respected force in the world. Jefferson had done his work well.
American politics under the Constitution fascinated him. Washington was to be president, Madison told him. John Hancock and John Adams were “talked of principally” for vice president. “Mr. Jay or General Knox would I believe be preferred to either, but both of them will probably choose to remain where they are,” said Madison. “It is impossible to say which of the former would be preferred, or what other candidates may be brought forward.”
The speculation was irresistible. “It is … doubtful who will be Vice President,” Jefferson wrote a correspondent in August 1788. “The age of Dr. Franklin, and the doubt whether he would accept it, are the only circumstances that admit a question but that he would be the man.… J. Adams, Hancock, Jay, Madison, Rutledge will be all voted for.”
The maneuvering became more pronounced as the October days passed. Given Washington’s Virginia roots, the choice for vice president, Madison reported, lay between Hancock and Adams. For Madison, the two-man field left much to be desired. “Hancock is weak, ambitious, a courtier of popularity given to low intrigue.… J. Adams has made himself obnoxious to many, particularly in the Southern states, by the political principles avowed in his book.”
Jefferson watched it avidly. There was, he said in November 1788, an “ill understanding between Mr. Adams and Mr. Hancock. Both proposed as vice presidents.”
Always there were whispers about monarchy. Supporters of a strong national government, “who had been utterly averse to royalty, began to imagine that hardly anything but a king could cure the evil,” Washington aide David Humphreys told Jefferson. “It was truly astonishing to have been witness to some conversations, which I have heard.”
Jefferson wanted to come home, at least for a while, and he was especially interested in establishing personal contact with Washington. To be on the scene in America had its political uses, for he hated the thought that things were said of him behind his back, a subject of annoyance his friend Francis Hopkinson touched on in a letter from Philadelphia in December 1788: “By the bye, you have been often dished up to me as a strong Antifederalist, which is almost equivalent to what a Tory was in the days of the war.”
Jefferson took the occasion to attack the spirit of faction. “I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson replied to Hopkinson in March 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.”
Reiterating his positions, he said: “My great wish is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty: to avoid attracting notice and to keep my name out of newspapers, because I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”
From America, Madison archly reported John Adams’s failed attempt to coin a grand title for the president. “J. Adams espoused the cause of titles with great earnestness.… The projected title was—His Highness the President of the United States and protector of their liberties. Had the project succeeded it would have subjected the President to a severe dilemma and given a deep wound to our infant government.”
Jefferson called Adams’s proposal “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of. It is a proof the more of the justice of the character given by Dr. Franklin of my friend: ‘Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.’ ”
It was a brutally cold winter in France, but Jefferson was cheerful. “Our new constitution … has succeeded beyond what I apprehended it would have done,” he wrote in January 1789.
Whether something similar might one day be said of the French was a live, explosive question. The cold winter of 1788–89, a scarcity of bread, and general political unease made for a potent mix. As the Estates-General met in May 1789 riots in Paris killed about one hundred people. Beginning a pattern that persisted, Jefferson interpreted the violence in the most benign light possible, arguing that the episode was unconnected to the larger national questions.
In the first week of June, Jefferson had sketched a charter of rights for the French and sent it to the Marquis de Lafayette. Jefferson’s draft was minutely practical. There was no rhetoric about human liberty, no rigorous listing of rights to free speech and the like. It was, rather, a document about process and the workings of power. (“Laws shall be made by the [Estates-General] only, with th
e consent of the king,” for example, and “The military shall be subordinate to the civil authority.”) He wrote it in a hurry, caught up in the drama of the hour and engaged by its possibilities.
On Wednesday, June 17, 1789, the frustrated Third Estate of commoners successfully designated itself the National Assembly, effectively igniting what history calls the French Revolution. Reacting to centuries of royal absolutism and popular powerlessness, embarking on an odyssey that would lead to successive attempts at republican government, the murders of the king and queen, the institution of a Reign of Terror, and finally the establishment of a dictatorial empire under Napoleon Bonaparte, the French would spend the next quarter century struggling to find their way into modernity. It was a struggle with concrete implications not only for France but for the world, not least for the United States, the nation it had helped bring into being, and for its leaders, including the American minister living at the Hôtel de Langeac, Thomas Jefferson.
The unrest in Paris struck home for Jefferson. His house was robbed three times. He monitored a street battle between mobs of Parisians and German cavalry at the Place Louis XV that began with the people hurling stones and ended with “considerable firing” from the mercenary troops.
On the night of Tuesday, July 14, 1789, he was at his friend Madame de Corny’s when he learned of the storming of the Bastille. As he reported two days later: “The tumults in Paris which took place on the change of the ministry, the slaughter of the people in the assault of the Bastille, the beheading [of] the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of it, and the Prevost de Marchands, excited in the king so much concern” that he went to the Estates-General promising to disperse the troops and pledging reform “to restore peace and happiness to his people.”