The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Despite Adams’s extreme praise of Polly’s preternatural maturity, some of her other comments sound a discordant note. Her description of the way Polly clung, almost desperately, to each adult who came into her life for any length of time is inconsistent with the picture of her being a well-adjusted and wise-beyond-her-years child. At first Polly did not want to leave Captain Ramsey. Then she did not want to part with Abigail Adams, whom she had known for only six days. Adams wrote that she had been “so often deceived” that she did not want to leave whoever was the last person who had charge of her.25 Polly was evidently traumatized by the events leading up to her arrival in Europe, and given the circumstances of her life to that time, one understands why. Hemings was, no doubt, a comforting presence to the little girl. Taking her away from Polly would seem to have been the last thing for anyone to think of doing.

  In the end Captain Ramsey’s and Adams’s expressions of doubt about Hemings were couched as their mere observations that she would be of no use to Polly, when what they really were trying to convey to Jefferson was that Sally Hemings would be of no use to him in his household. And because of that, neither of them seemed to think she should go to Paris. One wonders why they cared so much. Fawn Brodie’s explanation for Ramsey’s and Adams’s responses to Hemings very reasonably centered on her appearance. The very course of females’ lives may turn on whether people find them attractive. The eighteenth century was no different on this point. Even as standards of beauty have varied from culture to culture, and epoch to epoch, the concept of attractive versus unattractive has always operated in human affairs. Hemings was a very attractive young female, an attribute that could awaken one response in Ramsey (sexual desire or just a more platonic wish to be around such a person) and quite another in Abigail Adams, who would be greatly attuned to how others—namely men—would view her.

  Brodie suggested that the quite astute Adams took one look at Hemings, saw a beautiful young girl, and made the silent determination that it was not a very good idea to send her to live on a long-term basis with an unmarried man who was, for all she knew, lonely.26 No matter how opinionated and blunt Adams may have been throughout her life, if that was truly the root of her concern, she could never have conveyed that sentiment to Jefferson. On the other hand, if we take seriously Adams’s statement that Hemings was still young enough to require supervision herself, she may have thought that the last thing her friend the minister needed to take on, in addition to his already long list of duties, was the responsibility for a teenage girl with time on her hands. That was something Adams could have said outright. But she did not, and instead repeatedly voiced concerns about a problem she knew did not exist.

  With no apparent qualms about having Hemings continue on to Paris with his daughter, Jefferson took immediate steps to make that possible. He did not, however, in the coming weeks or ever, register her with French authorities. For all the years the Hemingses were in Paris, Jefferson was subject to a fine of 3,000 livres—the going rate for a slave in France—for each one of them.27 To put this in perspective, Jefferson’s yearly rent for the spectacular Hôtel de Langeac was 7,500 livres, until he bargained it down to 6,000 the last year he was there. He paid around 5,400 livres a year for his daughters’ combined tuition at the Abbaye de Panthemont.28 A fine of at least 6,000 livres would have been no small thing to the cash-strapped Jefferson. A penalty of that magnitude, coupled with the loss of the value of his slaves if they filed a freedom petition, would have been tremendous.

  Jefferson’s decision not to register the Hemings siblings was essentially a gamble that weighed the uncertain chance that they might find out about their status against the virtual certainty that they would discover it if he were to get into a confrontation with French officials. His failure to register the siblings provided the court with an additional ground, besides the Freedom Principle, for granting any petition they filed.29 As we will see, not too surprisingly, he lost the gamble that the brother and sister would never find out about the law, but he hit upon another way to deal with the situation, a very Jeffersonian solution—one-on-one persuasion—when the conflict arose.

  Jefferson did, however, attend to his own official administrative requirements related to Hemings’s and his daughter’s arrival in France. He kept a ledger in his own hand of the passports he issued during his time as minister to France. In his entry for July 1, the day after he received Adams’s first letter announcing his daughter’s arrival along with Hemings’s, Jefferson wrote, “Petit, Polly J. & Sally Hemings 2.m,” indicating that he had issued passports for each that would be effective for two months from the date of issuance. On that same day he wrote to Abigail Adams that he would be sending his servant, Adrien Petit, to get his daughter. He did not mention Hemings at all.30

  Although Adams’s letters to Jefferson warning him about Hemings arrived after Petit had already left, there was still time, had he thought Adams’s worries at all important, to arrange to have Hemings return to Virginia. When the clearly perturbed Adams wrote to him on July 6 upon hearing that Petit, instead of he, was coming for Polly, she told Jefferson that she had promised the little girl that she would not have to leave London with Petit until they had gotten another letter from him. Jefferson received Adams’s letter on July 10 and responded the same day. His missive shows that he was well aware of the situation in the Adams household—Polly’s tendency to cling to adults, her specific attachment to Abigail Adams, but he made no mention at all of Adams’s view of Hemings and whether she should come to Paris or go home.31 As far as he was concerned, the matter was settled. He had abandoned his idea of having Polly’s companion return immediately to Virginia.

  Hemings’s journey to Paris was really assured when Jefferson sent Petit to London with passports and enough money to pay for his passage to England and to buy return tickets to Paris for both her and Polly Jefferson.32 Jefferson’s action raises at least two questions, the first more puzzling than the second: Why did he not go himself to pick up his daughter, and why did he not send Hemings back to Virginia? Jefferson offered an answer to the first question, but never addressed the second one. He explained to the Adamses that he had recently returned from a trip through southern Europe just two weeks before he received the letter announcing Polly’s arrival, and was detained by the press of catching up on the business of the ministry. His principal biographer, Dumas Malone, accepted this explanation.33 Jefferson could well have been sincere about handling ministry business, but his choice is still odd, given how fervently he had wished to see Polly and that he understood what his daughter had gone through from the time she had been put on the Robert and sent on an Atlantic voyage.

  One of the recurring criticisms of Jefferson over his career was that he was too much attached to his family, to the detriment of whatever office he held. Why he abandoned that inclination at so critical and singular a moment in his family’s life is hard to understand. It was a few days’ journey at most to pick his daughter up and return home. If he did not want a Channel crossing, he could have at least met her at Le Havre for a symbolic welcoming to France. In addition, he did have a secretary, William Short, to help with the business of the ministry.

  In Fawn Brodie’s view, Maria Cosway’s (Jefferson’s paramour of sorts) impending arrival in Paris kept Jefferson in the city instead of venturing to London.34 He certainly could never have given that as an excuse to the Adamses or anyone else. Cosway had written to him that she would soon be there, but did not give a firm date. Brodie believed he did not want to miss her, and opted for the chance to be with her over welcoming his daughter to Europe. This might seem a natural choice for a man in the throes of an attraction to a woman whom he seldom saw. He was now sure he was going to see Polly, not so sure that he might ever get to see Maria Cosway again. But Cosway was set to be in Paris for more than the few days it took to get Polly and return. He could have retrieved Polly in London and socialized with Cosway when he returned.

  Conor Cruise O’Brien, an infinite
ly more hostile commentator on Jefferson’s behavior than either Malone or Brodie, who both loved him, offered that there must have been a serious and deeply personal reason for Jefferson’s failure to fetch his little girl, one that matched the seriousness of his breach of fatherly duty, and it centered on Sally Hemings and slavery. He did not, O’Brien surmised, want to be so visibly and recognizably a slave owner in the home of Abigail and John Adams. He wanted to avoid having to interact with Hemings under their eyes.35 This was before Jefferson and the Adamses became estranged and even longer before the men achieved a rapprochement during their retirements from public office. In the late 1780s, before the bruising political battles to come, these three were really at the highest point of their mutual affection, and each wanted the esteem of the other. O’Brien’s view is quite plausible.

  The Adamses knew that Jefferson owned slaves. John may actually have seen Robert Hemings in Philadelphia in the 1770s, and the couple either saw James Hemings or knew of his existence when they were all in Paris together for a brief period before John Adams became the minister to the Court of St. James in London. The situation with Sally Hemings was different and more problematic. It would have been one thing to see Jefferson with an enslaved manservant before the couple actually knew him very well, or to hear a story of how he had brought a servant to be trained to a trade, quite another to personally observe a much respected friend acting the role of a slave owner before his own child with the most vulnerable type of person in the system: a young enslaved girl.

  Jefferson’s New England friends would have observed the most critical means through which slavery perpetuated itself—from parent to child. This feature of the institution prompted one of Jefferson’s most perceptive and famous criticisms of slavery: parents passed on the habits of mastery to their own children.36 That male slave owners exercised this mastery over females like Hemings was a particularly delicate issue. By the time she was in London with the Adamses, the stories of what slavery meant for men like her brothers and what it meant for females like her was already well known, with the differences centering on embattled motherhood, the sexual exploitation of women, and the stigma of interracial sex. The Adamses, both enormously intelligent people, knew what slavery involved. They could not have looked at Jefferson, Polly, and what they took to be the sixteen-year-old Hemings in the same room, and not have had at least a fleeting thought of what Hemings’s life as an enslaved woman might turn out to be.

  All the factors Malone, Brodie, and O’Brien identified—business, a prospective rendezvous with a lover, and embarrassment about his position as a slave owner—may have contributed to Jefferson’s surprising inertia. Whatever his reason for not going to get his daughter, even Malone acknowledged that it was a great mistake on his part.37 Jefferson knew that Polly was expecting to see him, and it jars to note that so normally sensitive a man as he did not perceive how his daughter and others would take his failure to meet her entirely reasonable and foreseeable expectations. John and Abigail Adams were extremely unhappy with Jefferson; and their letters to him contain only thinly veiled rebukes of what they took to be a form of parental negligence. Polly was devastated to learn that her father was not coming for her, and it took a while to persuade her to leave with Petit, and when she left, she left reluctantly.38

  As to the second question, we will probably never know why Jefferson did not send Hemings back home, because neither he nor any anyone else left an explanation to be analyzed. This seems a less mysterious decision than his choice not to meet Polly in London. Sending Hemings home by herself would have made no sense to anyone who had any feeling at all about her as a person. Just as the Bentalous fretted over sending a nine-year-old enslaved boy alone on an Atlantic voyage, Jefferson’s closer relations with Hemings’s family would certainly have led him to think more about her potential vulnerability as a young female than either Abigail Adams or Captain Ramsey did. Jefferson knew he would be sending his late wife’s and James Hemings’s sister home under extremely questionable circumstances. She was someone he actually knew, and he understood how her brother might feel about this. The stakes for Jefferson were quite different. There is, of course, great irony in this; but that could not have been known at the time.

  There was also a great advantage to Jefferson and his family if Hemings stayed in Europe. As Polly’s father, he probably discerned a fact that Adams and Ramsey either had not noticed or had suppressed in favor of their own preferences: the comfort of Hemings’s familiar face might help ease his daughter’s transition into her new life. That was no small matter to him, because he knew from his sister-in-law’s correspondence that Polly did not really know him or her sister, and they did not know her.

  As the mere “Girl” in this Adams-dominated tableau, Sally Hemings did not have her responses to these extremely stressful, but also exciting, days recorded. London in 1787 was a huge, teeming city with buildings and sights the likes of which she had never seen. One is reminded of the reaction of Harriet Jacobs, another enslaved woman whose life has reached iconic status, upon seeing Philadelphia for the first time. Writing of her escape from the rural south, Jacobs remembered being staggered by the sights, sounds, and the crowded masses of people in the city. Her first morning there, she woke early to sit at the window and gaze at “that unknown tide of life” filling the streets below her. Her next destination, New York, drew a similar response within her.39 Hemings was no doubt at once awed, a little confused (Jacobs’s term for her response to her new urban environment), and perhaps even afraid of the city and the people who had charge of her. Again, one does not get the impression of great warmth emanating from Adams to Hemings during the time they were together. The New England matron did buy her new clothes, saying that she had done so as if she and Polly were “her own,” but that was more about Jefferson’s and Polly’s requirements than Hemings’s.40 Adams was very much aware, as she told Jefferson, of how important it was to keep up appearances in France, with one’s home, clothing, and servants. Hemings simply could not go around without proper clothing, since badly dressed servants reflected poorly on their employers.

  For Sally Hemings there was no one in London to welcome her to this strange land with the same heartfelt enthusiasm with which Polly was welcomed—and no one to be as patient and understanding in calming whatever were her entirely natural fears as the Adamses were with Jefferson’s daughter. Just because those things were not forthcoming does not mean they were less needed and desired by this young girl. Like Polly, she had suffered the loss of a sister the preceding year, nine-year-old Lucy. The reality of death was in her view. She was separated from her mother and other siblings and sent across the Atlantic Ocean for no reason that had anything to do with her, but solely to suit the aims of her white owners. It had been a time as difficult for her as for Polly, and she, too, could have been traumatized by the hasty and forced nature of her travel. While the adults who had charge of her on her trip to and during her stay in London found time and space to record their reproaches of Hemings, there was no time or space to express any sympathy for her equally difficult circumstances.

  And then another stranger came to take her somewhere else, Adrien Petit, who spoke a language Hemings could not yet understand. Over the next years they would become friends, but during these first days she was likely as perplexed by him as Polly Jefferson professed to be.41 Although Sally Hemings was older than Polly, and although we can never know whether she was happier about being sent on this journey than her young charge, or what she made of her time in London and the Adamses, we do know that she was as much in the dark about what awaited her in Paris as the frightened little girl whom she accompanied to Europe.

  10

  DR. SUTTON

  WHEN SALLY HEMINGS arrived in Paris on July 15, 1787, at least one person was there to welcome her with the enthusiasm and warmth of family: her brother.1 He had last seen his youngest sister when she was eleven years old, and she had probably changed greatly in appearance during that
time. While he had gone from age nineteen to twenty-two, the changes in the elder Hemings were likely more psychological and emotional than physical, but nevertheless profound. Sally Hemings met in her older brother a man who had traveled throughout France, lived and worked among people from a completely different culture, and been responsible for himself in this foreign environment. He knew firsthand, as his sister would come to know, that there were different and more varied ways for them to go through the world than existed in Virginia. She also met a man who was about to come into his own as a highly skilled professional. James Hemings was nearing the end of his various apprenticeships, and in the months immediately after his sister’s arrival he became the official chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Langeac in charge of the kitchen and, thus, a supervisor in his own right.2

  With the new title came a larger steady monthly wage for Hemings, instead of the spending money that Jefferson had doled out to him over the years and the smaller salary he had been receiving in the months just before he took on the role of chef. 3 He also had available to him now one of the traditional perquisites of the chef in great houses, one that could bring him substantial side income, given the number of people who dined at the Hôtel de Langeac: the right to sell the renderings from the chickens, pork, beef, and any other animals prepared in the kitchen. Nothing was wasted in that era, and there existed a lucrative market in grease and animal skins that might be cast off today. Though he was used to working for wages for other employers, Hemings’s new job marked an evolution in his self-image and in his relationship with Jefferson. He now had a true trade that he could ply for others, though it seems clear that Jefferson expected Hemings’s services, if not for a lifetime, for the foreseeable future. Things did not work out as Jefferson expected, and they ended up working to James Hemings’s advantage, but that was all to come. In that summer of 1787, Sally Hemings brought a new dimension to James’s life. He now had someone to share this adventure, for the present and the future, should they decide to take their freedom in France. For the immediate moment, she could fill him in on the state of things in Virginia, while he could speak to her frankly about all that had happened to him since he had come to France and what it meant to him. And, best of all, probably to his great relief, he could do that in his native language.