The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  For Jefferson’s part, it was not Sally Hemings’s arrival but the reunion with his daughter that ranked uppermost in his mind. He noted with great emotion that neither he nor her sister would have recognized Polly had they encountered her on the street, she had grown so much. With only a dim memory of her father, Polly did not remember her sister at all.4 Making matters even more delicate, Patsy had spent almost three years living in a completely different and more complicated world than her younger sister. The two girls clearly had much ground to cover in getting to know each other again, and their father was eager to see them do that.

  What Jefferson initially thought of his daughter’s young companion is unknown. He remembered Hemings as the little girl who was present at his wife’s, her sister’s, deathbed. These were at best bittersweet associations that called forth memories both of loss and of Virginia. Indeed, when Hemings had last seen Jefferson, he was still in the emotional fog brought on by Martha’s loss. Not much time had passed between the day they had gathered together as Martha lay dying and the day he left his daughters at Eppington to begin the journey that would take him to France. What did Hemings make of Jefferson’s now rejuvenated and resplendent self, hair powdered and dressed—when he could sit still for it—outfitted in the French style? However he had thought of Hemings previously, he had to think about her differently now for several reasons, not the least of which was how to fit her into his present household. There was no reason for Hemings to play the role that had brought her to France, at least not in the same way, for Polly almost immediately joined Patsy Jefferson at the abbey, where she would now have the companionship of her sister and the opportunity to make new friends at school while she pursued her studies.5

  It has been suggested that Hemings could have gone to live with Patsy and Polly at their school, for some of the girls at the abbey might have brought their servants. Although it is possible she spent time there, Jefferson’s records place her at the Hôtel de Langeac with her brother. No known records—account entries or references in letters to paying for her food and board, which Jefferson would have to have done—link her to Panthemont.6 His very quick placement of Polly in school indicates he felt it important for the young girl to bond with a sister whom she did not remember, make more rapid progress in learning a new language, and find new friends. Having Hemings continue her relationship with Polly might have impeded each one of these desired developments.

  Whatever it meant for the Jefferson girls, it might have been much better for Hemings if she had lived at the abbey, even if that meant seeing her brother only on the days when Jefferson’s daughters came home to visit their father. Being at the school, with its religious atmosphere and rituals, would have provided a powerful and educational experience for Hemings. Many people have been moved by the beauty of the rituals of the Catholic Church, even when they did not understand the words of the Latin Mass or adhere to the faith at all. Living at the abbey full-time would also have offered Hemings the chance to be with, and get to know, girls her own age. No one would have expected her to develop true friendships at a school attended by France’s elite. But “true” friendship is not always required. There can be great comfort in the superficial, particularly when one is in a foreign country and simple curiosity about a person from a different culture can often substitute for true affinity.

  Just observing the girls and listening to their conversation would have broadened Hemings’s world, exposing her to different ideas and ways of doing things, even though she would not have taken part in the formal lessons. Despite the social and cultural distance that existed between her and elite girls, there were some very important points of commonality—first and foremost, getting used to their changing bodies and coming into womanhood. This was one of the main reasons for having an all-girls school and, no doubt, one of the unstated reasons the widower Jefferson found the abbey attractive. He almost certainly thought it better to have these transformations involving what he referred to as “certain periodical indispositions to which nature has subjected” women (and any awkward conversations about them) take place among females without his involvement.7 Instead, at the Hôtel de Langeac, Hemings was a young girl in a predominantly male environment. Her brother and Jefferson, the people with whom she was most familiar, were very busy with their own tasks and not likely attuned to the preoccupations, tendencies, and needs of girls her age. Jefferson’s letters to his own much loved young daughters show that he sometimes had a poor understanding of these matters, though he was much better by the time he had grandchildren.

  Despite the potential benefits to Hemings of living at the abbey, there were significant disadvantages to Jefferson and his daughters beyond the fact that she might slow Polly’s acculturation into French society and her bonding with her sister. The most important benefit of all to Hemings posed the most direct threat to the Jeffersons. If she lived at the abbey, she would make contact with people outside of their circle, who might influence her. She, in turn, might charm them and inspire their sympathy. There is no reason to think he knew anything of this prior incident, but decades before Jefferson and Hemings were in Paris, the sisters in a convent in Nantes refused to turn over an enslaved girl who had been left in their care when her owner came to retrieve her. The case, pivotal to the development of French laws regarding slavery, was decided in favor of the young girl and the nuns.8 That was well before the very public rights of man/anti-slavery rhetoric became a part of the conversation in Paris as it was during Hemings’s time there. Even with no knowledge of that situation, Jefferson was astute enough to see that giving Hemings a life away from the Hôtel de Langeac, under the direction of other adults on a long-term basis, posed significant risks.

  There was also the issue of Hemings’s status under French law. That she was African American would have alerted the curious among the residents of the abbey to the fact that she was something other than just a servant to the Jefferson girls. The French believed there were no slaves in France, but they knew there were slaves in America. If asked who Hemings was to them, Patsy and Polly could lie, or tell the truth and perhaps provoke the kind of embarrassment their father tried so hard to avoid. What of the officials at the school? Sending Hemings to live at the abbey would needlessly have involved them in his decision to skirt the law, having them house his unregistered slave in their midst. It is hard to say precisely how law figured into the way Jefferson dealt with Sally Hemings, because when he addressed the issue of slavery in France, he wrote in a manner that was at once clear and cryptic. He lived a good part of his life in letters and understood what tactics and maneuvers to use to protect himself as he moved in that very specialized and enduring world.

  As was noted in chapter 8, many people took their chances with the laws regulating the black presence in Paris and managed to get away with it. One does not get the impression that there was great efficiency in carrying out the law’s provisions. Jefferson, however, was not just any person. He was a minister from a new nation trying to establish its bona fides on the world stage. The Americans had thrown off a government by revolution and instituted a new one that claimed its legitimacy through its origins in and adherence to law. There was great skepticism about this new, unprecedented, untried, and still fragile enterprise. Those who represented the country abroad could ill afford to be seen picking and choosing which laws to comply with, because taking laws seriously—whether one thinks them merely irritating or outright inane—shows respect for the concept of the rule of law, the sine qua non of a civilized society. Jefferson “was” the United States in France. Any potential embarrassment he suffered would reflect on the country. For reasons personal and legal, whatever it meant for her, it was better all around for the Jeffersons not to have Hemings living away from the residence full-time.

  Forty Days

  More important for Jefferson than figuring out what role Sally Hemings would play in France was the pressing issue of her health. In addition to her youth, there was another important way
that Hemings did not fit his specifications for the female attendant who was to come to France. He expressly asked that a person who had had smallpox make the journey. The Eppeses complied only partially with this request by having Isabel Hern inoculated.9 They did not have Hemings inoculated, and no extant letters reveal whether the issue was ever raised with Jefferson. This suggests that the decision to send Hemings was made at the very last minute. Inoculating her would have involved several more weeks of waiting, and they opted, one might say, negligently, given Jefferson’s stated concern, to send her anyway. Jefferson had arranged for Hemings’s older brothers to be inoculated—Robert in Philadelphia in 1775 and Martin and James in 1778—but he knew he had no hand in inoculating their little sister.10 This was a quite pressing matter, and he must have asked Hemings as soon as she arrived at the Hôtel de Langeac whether she had, in fact, been inoculated. She had not. Jefferson needed to deal with this issue as quickly as possible, and his concerns about her contracting the disease militated against allowing her to move too freely in her new environs. In those very first months of her time in Paris, Hemings’s life very likely centered on her new residence and immediate neighborhood.

  As it had been since ancient times, smallpox was a periodic scourge during the eighteenth century. Seemingly out of nowhere, epidemics swooped down and carried off large numbers of people to excruciating deaths. Thirteen years before Hemings arrived in France, an epidemic at Versailles took the life of many, including King Louis XV, famous for his apocryphal last words, après moi, le déluge. Jaded French society reeled upon hearing the horrifying details of Louis’s agonizing death. Voltaire himself was moved to write a pamphlet on the subject, citing the king’s terrible end. Up until that time, France had been slow, compared with England, to adopt the procedure of inoculation. After King Louis’s ordeal the French nobility in particular enthusiastically embraced it.11

  There is no cure for smallpox, and throughout the ages populations across the globe have had to find ways of preventing its spread. Inoculation, also called variolation, after the name of the smallpox virus Variola major, was practiced in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East.12 White Americans first became aware of the procedure from African slaves who described it to them. Cotton Mather brought it to the widespread attention of the American public after an African-born slave, Onesimus, told him that he had undergone the procedure while still in his native land and was thus immune to smallpox. In the mid-1700s, after much debate, the American colonies initiated the procedure with great trepidation. The technique involved taking from an infected person a small amount of the secretions from the pustules (the inoculum) and transferring it to a healthy individual with the aim of creating a milder version of the disease and permanent immunity to it. This was done by creating an incision and placing the inoculum into it. Naturally, this very crude version of the procedure often failed—the healthy person contracted full-blown smallpox and died or lived, but was seriously disfigured by the scarring.13

  Jefferson was an early believer in inoculation. In 1766, during his first trip to the northern part of what would become the United States, he went to Philadelphia for the specific purpose of being inoculated. In the months after his wife’s death, he took Patsy and Polly to undergo the procedure, personally caring for them at the Ampthill home of his friend Archibald Cary.14 While many religious people had deep reservations about the practice—thinking it somehow interfered with the will of God—forward-thinking people like Jefferson regarded inoculation as a milestone in the march of progress and reason. One scholar has written that the procedure was “regarded by the age itself as the greatest medical discovery since Hippocratic days” and “shared with Newtonianism a prominent position in enlightened scientific thought.” Newton was very famously among Jefferson’s trinity of personal gods, along with Francis Bacon and John Locke.15

  When Jefferson wanted to have Sally Hemings inoculated in Paris, he had available to him, and Hemings got to meet, a member of the foremost family of inoculators in the world: the Suttons. In the mid-eighteenth century, Robert Sutton Sr., an English doctor, developed a more sophisticated method of inoculation. Building upon the work of earlier physicians, Dr. Sutton discovered that he could bring on a mild case of smallpox by eschewing “deep incisions that thrust the virus directly and dangerously in the bloodstream and that increased the chances of secondary infections.”16 Sutton also took the inoculum from patients who had been inoculated rather than from individuals suffering from a full-blown case of smallpox. Dr. Sutton and, later, his six sons “reduced variolation [inoculation] to a slight pricking of the skin” that was so gentle that the patient might not even feel when it had happened.17 The “Suttonian method” or “Suttonian system” was very well known in the American colonies, and Jefferson certainly had heard of the Suttons before he came to Europe and had to deal with getting Hemings inoculated.18

  The mortality rate for the Suttons’ inoculations was remarkably low for what was, after all, a very dangerous undertaking because the men were especially adept at carrying out their own procedures. They personally inoculated thousands of people and lost only about one percent of their patients, which meant that the chances Hemings might die were extremely low. An additional advantage for Hemings was that Sutton’s method almost invariably reduced the amount of scarring down to the site of the pricking on the arm, leaving the kind of scar that would be familiar to millions of twentieth-century Americans who received smallpox vaccinations before entering kindergarten. Other inoculators were not as successful in reducing complications from the procedure, and their patients were sometimes grossly disfigured, even blinded.19 This, too, would have been of great importance to the vanity of a young girl in a world where the appearance of females (at all strata of society) was more important than that of males: a man with pock-marks on his face suffered fewer social consequences than a woman with even just a few. Voltaire appealed to Frenchwomen’s vanity in the cause of persuading the French to inoculate, reminding them how a full-blown case of the disease could ruin “their beauty.”20

  After inoculating entire communities in England, for it was thought safer to inoculate on a mass basis rather than run the risk that one inoculated person would imperil a village, the Suttons eventually branched out to other parts of Europe and were invited by members of the nobility and heads of states on the Continent to perform inoculations. Although they emphasized their services to the poor in England, their reputation for beneficence was exaggerated. They certainly came to the Continent to make money, and the patients of the brothers who practiced there tended to be rich and aristocratic. The family operated very much as a business, keeping aspects of its method secret, sharing it only with designated inoculators in the manner of a franchise operation.21 Jefferson wrote that he paid “Dr. Sutton for inoculating Sally” about three months after she arrived in Paris, and he paid an enormous sum indeed—about forty dollars, the equivalent of roughly one thousand dollars today.22 That was very much in keeping with the Suttons’ practice of charging wealthy patients, in this case the owner of the patient, very high fees. One nineteenth-century detractor noted that the Suttons had been especially “popular” with the “nobility who paid them immense sums for their services,” and suggested that an air of celebrity surrounded the Suttons that outstripped their true medical skill. The Suttons, he pronounced dismissively, had merely discovered the importance of hygiene to the process of inoculation, referring to their “device of cleanliness” as if it were some devious and underhanded strategy.23

  Modern observers know that the discovery of the role that hygiene plays in all medicine transformed the field. Certainly, the attention to hygiene contributed to the Suttons’ ability to prevent scarring on their patients. Then, as now, it was hard to argue with success. Jefferson and others were willing to pay the high price because the Suttons’ demonstrated skill and success rate were so great and the disease they were fighting so nightmarish. And while the brothers’ reputation tumbled greatly a
fter the advent of Jenner’s vaccine, inoculation was the only pre-Jenner alternative for those who did not want to risk developing the disease in uncontrolled circumstances.24 Hard businessmen that they were, the Suttons insisted upon payment before services were rendered. So unless Jefferson was able to persuade Dr. Sutton otherwise, Hemings must have been inoculated on the day of or sometime just after his November 7 notation that he had made the payment.

  Jefferson did not say which Sutton inoculated Hemings. Robert Sutton Sr. had died by 1787. The most famous of his sons was Daniel, who fashioned himself grandly as “Professor of Inoculation in the Kingdom of Great Britain and in all the dominions of his Britannic Majesty.”25 All of the sons were in the inoculation business, each setting up his own practice in various parts of England and on the Continent when that market opened up, with Robert Jr. having the greatest presence in France. Robert Jr., whose bad experience with inoculation when he was a boy had prompted his father’s interest in the subject, was in charge of the Suttons’ inoculation house outside of Paris. In 1774 he, and perhaps at least one of his brothers, Joseph, was brought in to try to help King Louis XV. Given the patient’s prominence, the Bourbons would have brought in all six Sutton brothers if that had been necessary to save him, although there is evidence that at least some of the French physicians resented having the Suttons in the role of last-resort rescuers.26 A French biographer of the king when describing Louis’s final days wrote of the arrival of “les Sutton, les célèbres inoculateurs anglais,” and “leur remède” as if there were more than one Sutton present at the king’s bedside during those days working together to save this famous and powerful patient. But the efforts of whatever number of Suttons were to no avail. King Louis was beyond anyone’s help.27