The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  In his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson pronounced white skin more aesthetically attractive than black skin because it enabled whites to blush and thus to display sincere emotions, “the expression of every passion,” which included the exchange of sentiment between males and females, as the blushing female is a staple representation in stories of courtship and love. He also offered “flowing hair” as a particularly important attribute of whites’ beauty. Jefferson knew that not every white person, and he was speaking really about females, had flowing hair and that people who were not “all” white could have it. Jefferson lived his entire life among black people, and was familiar enough with them to know that many African Americans, of varying degrees of skin color, from yellow to light bronzed, can blush. These were the effects of the racial intermixture that Jefferson said brought on the “improvement[s] in body and mind” of black people “in [their] first mixture with whites,” improvements that he said had been “observed by every one.”12

  Sally Hemings and her siblings were the products not of the “first mixture” of blacks and whites but of the second. This almost certainly accounted for the Jefferson family’s view that they were of “superior intellect” compared with their fellow slaves, who could have been just as intelligent or creative as the Hemingses but, lacking “white” blood, would never have been given as much credit for it. That was also why the African American Sally Hemings was light-skinned enough to blush and have long flowing hair.

  There is more. In the passages in the Notes in which he casts doubt on blacks’ equal intellectual capacity, Jefferson expressed his greatest confidence in blacks, besides his opinion that they had better rhythm than whites, in matters of the heart stating with great certainty that nature had done them “justice” in that department. These formulations about people of African origin—skepticism of their equal intellectual capacity and certainty about the quality of their hearts—were ideas from which he apparently never wavered. According to one visitor to Monticello late in Jefferson’s life, he echoed these sentiments, saying that he had not yet found a true “genius” among blacks, but believed that they had the “best hearts of any people in the world.”13 Sally Hemings, then, combined what Jefferson regarded as the best in white people with what he regarded as the best in black people, an evidently appealing blend of the head and the heart.

  The men testifying to Hemings’s attractiveness saw her when she was older. The teenager at the Hôtel de Langeac had not yet given birth to seven children, or experienced the inevitable results of gravity, and may well have been absolutely stunning to look at. Talking to her would have been more of a pleasure for Jefferson than a chore, whether there was any immediate sexual frisson or not. Males and females, even of different rank and race, engage in light banter that acknowledges the other’s gender. That is one of the ways that relationships—licit and illicit—are formed. Sometimes male-female small talk rises to the level of flirting, especially when no one else is around. Male-female banter and flirting are usually totally meaningless and innocent—empty, stylized—perhaps even biologically influenced, faux mating rituals. They can, however, take on a wholly different import when external constraints are loosened, that is, when people ignore the concept of inappropriateness.

  Though Patsy and Polly were away at school, Hemings and Jefferson did not have the Hôtel de Langeac to themselves. Their household included her brother, the other servants, and the many people who enjoyed Jefferson’s hospitality there on a periodic basis. He had come to Paris very willing to share quarters with others who needed a place to stay, though of the people who had started out living with him in those early days, only William Short remained by the time Sally Hemings arrived.14 Though Hemings and Jefferson shared space with others, the pair need not have conducted themselves in ways that drew attention, and the spacious house, with its “ingenious arrangement of passageways,” was specifically designed to protect the privacy of its residents. Jefferson’s easy and sociable personality was undoubtedly trained on everyone in the household, Hemings included. Noticing that he reacted to her in a positive way—and she to him, for that matter—would not have given immediate cause to think that they were, or were going to be, having a sexual relationship.

  If anyone in the household did suspect something, it would not have occasioned writing down what they suspected or even what they knew. It is hard to imagine a French servant, particularly the one most closely associated with Jefferson, Adrien Petit, being shocked at the idea that a man—an unmarried man at that—had taken a mistress. Having no woman in his life might have seemed more bizarre. The adage is true: “No man is a hero to his valet.” A valet’s job, if he is doing it the right way, is not to be shocked. As for the rest of the servants—gardener, coachman, garçon de cuisine—it is unlikely that they would have regarded it as unusual or have acted as impediments. If Jefferson paid their salary on time, which he always did, making him an anomaly in that society, and was good and decent otherwise, his affair with a chambermaid would have been just one more example of the kinds of things that members of the servant class knew about their masters—an occasion for gossip, but not one for judgment or memorializing. It is also unclear how many of Jefferson’s servants were twenty-four-hour presences at his residence. While the higher-level servants almost certainly lived there, the “lower”-level ones, like the gardener and frotteur, probably did not.

  Other people lived at the Hôtel de Langeac for varying lengths of time—for example, the American painter John Trumbull, famous for his rendition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Based in London in the 1780s, Trumbull met Jefferson when he came to the city in 1785. Trumbull first stayed at the Hôtel de Langeac in 1786, before Sally Hemings arrived. He made a return visit in December of 1787 and remained there until February 1788. Near the end of the Hemingses’s stay in France, he came back to Paris and was able to see his friend Jefferson off on what everyone thought would be a temporary visit home. Trumbull met both James and Sally Hemings.15

  Of course, William Short had used the Hôtel de Langeac as his primary residence throughout all of Jefferson’s time there. He was well familiar with Hemings and her family even before he came to Paris. He did not, however, have a presence at the mansion that would have inhibited a liaison between Hemings and Jefferson, assuming anyone’s presence would have mattered. As was noted in chapter 12, Short effectively divided his time between Paris and Saint-Germain—a town then fifteen miles outside of Paris. Between 1785 and 1788, he made almost monthly visits there, staying for extended stretches of time with the Royers. In September 1788 he left Paris for an eight-month tour through Europe, returning to the city in the second week of May 1789. Just a week later he headed straight for Saint-Germain to visit his beloved Lilite. Throughout all the time that Sally Hemings was in Paris, there were many, quite long periods of time (months), when Short was not at the Hôtel de Langeac with her and Jefferson at all.16

  Both Trumbull and Short venerated Jefferson. If they suspected or knew about Hemings, they had no incentive to make a written record of whatever they knew. Men often keep the secrets of their male friends, especially where women are involved, hoping the favor will be returned, if needed. Short knew very well from his own experiences how valuable it was to have others be sympathetic about one’s socially unacceptable liaisons. If he knew about Hemings and Jefferson, his infatuation with Lilite Royer, taking place at the same time, left him little room to make judgments about his mentor. All the while Short was visiting the married Lilite, he wrote and spoke to his friends of his deep love for her. It is unclear what he ultimately hoped to gain by carrying on in this way, but the besotted American evidently could not help himself. What could he, doggedly acting the role of the “extra man” in Lilite’s marriage just to remain close to her, reasonably have said about Jefferson and his teenager? Even after giving up on Lilite after 1789, Short moved on to Rosalie, the young wife of the duc de La Rochefoucauld with whom he lived without marriage for
a number of years. Nothing about Short’s life suggests he was a moralizer on sexual matters. Jefferson’s “protégé” was not at all put off by the unconventional.

  We know of Lilite Royer only because Short himself could not resist writing to a few friends about her, always hiding her identity, but writing about her nevertheless. One correspondent, a Virginian, Preeson Bowdoin, who was also in France at the time, promised Short, “Every thing you have said, or may say, respecting the Belle of St. Germain, you may rest assured, shall remain a profound secret. Yes, I have been too often a Lover myself not to know the value of such a confidance.”17 Howard Rice has suggested that Jefferson knew about Short and Lilite, and it made him uneasy. Jefferson knew where and with whom Short was living. If the sensitive mentor was at all perceptive about the demeanor and attitudes of his “adoptive son,”18 he figured out that something more than the prospect of learning and keeping up his French kept drawing the young man back to the countryside even after he had made it clear to him that he wanted him to spend more time in Paris.19 Yet Jefferson apparently never wrote to his friends about anything that he suspected or knew about the reason for Short’s intense attraction to Saint-Germain.

  Unlike Short, Jefferson could never and would never write to anyone about Hemings in a way that revealed their connection. Already a man of note, he knew what his white countrymen would make of this. When it came to the care and deployment of his image, which if managed properly would leave him with the positive legacy of “great man,” Jefferson was supremely disciplined and controlled. At the same time, his status as Hemings’s master actually made it easier for him to carry on a relationship with her in relative secrecy and security than it would have been for William Short to have had an extended affair with Lilite Royer. All he had to do was be hard minded enough never to write anyone about it. It is unlikely that we will ever learn how much Jefferson knew about Short and his “secret love” in Saint-Germain, and how much Short knew about Jefferson and Sally Hemings at the Hôtel de Langeac. It was, however, an interesting, though not surprising, confluence of circumstances.

  Amazons and Angels

  Until very recently, the focus on Jefferson’s relationships with women in Paris centered largely upon his dealings with Maria Cosway, with side references to his correspondence with Abigail Adams, several French society ladies, and well-born American visitors to the Continent like Angelica Church. Because it is fairly plain that his interest in Cosway was more than merely platonic, their letters have been used as a guide for his views about love and romance. Jefferson did not have an extensive or, one should say a very varied, career in this regard insofar as we know, and so every scrap of information on that subject counts.

  One could get the impression from some depictions of the Jefferson-Cosway affair that it was steady and long-standing, stretching from the time he arrived in Paris until the time he left. They wrote to each other over a long period, but the actual time they spent together was quite short. And by the start of 1788 Jefferson seemed to lose interest in actively pursuing the affair or very practically saw the complete hopelessness of it. The most telling sign of this is that he, the inveterate correspondent, sometimes let long periods go by before answering Cosway’s often very impassioned letters.20 When he did answer her, he followed a course he often took with correspondents, one that makes it difficult to gauge his true feelings from merely considering what he said in letters. He responded to her as the man he knew she very much wanted him to be, saying what he perceived she wanted to hear. He wrote as if they were still quasi-lovers with a relationship that was ongoing, with some definite and fixed place to go. His actions, or inaction (not writing to her during periods when he wrote many letters to other people, sometimes multiple letters to certain individuals, and sent out missives dealing with absolutely mundane things), tell a different story.

  Because we do not know precisely when Jefferson took an interest in Sally Hemings, we cannot know how, or even whether, his feelings about her accelerated or influenced the marked cooling of his ardor for Cosway. It is possible for a man to maintain an attraction to more than one woman at a time, and for attraction to wax and wane. In fact, at points in 1788, if one were to read Jefferson’s letters to Angelica Church, whom he met in Paris in 1787, and Maria Cosway together, one would be hard-pressed to know which woman he liked better. This gives a good indication of the depth of his feelings about these two women, as the equally flirtatious tone taken with both tends to cancel out the idea that either one was the object of a serious pursuit. Or to put it another way, Jefferson’s pursuit may have been serious in that he would not have minded having sex with these women, but not serious in the sense that he ever thought of making a life with either of them. Just as men can be interested in more than one woman simultaneously, they can also have women for different purposes—short-term dalliances or long-term alliances.

  Though Jefferson continued to flirt harmlessly and intermittently in his letters to Church after he returned to the United States, it is not likely that he contemplated a deep involvement with her. Not only was she married, she had four children. An affair would have threatened her marriage and her family. It is almost inconceivable that Jefferson would have been serious about, or even comfortable with, a woman who would have sacrificed her relationship with her children for him. Of Cosway, Church, and Hemings, Hemings was the only one he had any reasonable prospect of being involved with on a serious and long-term basis. Except in the occasional letters that passed between him, Cosway, and Church over the years, once Jefferson returned to America with Hemings, he never again developed with any other woman the kind of relationship he had with Cosway and Church or engaged in the same type of playful quasi-sexual epistolary banter.21

  Although we can never really know what Hemings was like with Jefferson when they were alone, her status and, even more particularly, her age may well have made her the very embodiment of the domestic and submissive woman that he so clearly favored. The thirty-year gap in their ages meant that at every stage of their existences he would appear drastically older and wiser—she would never outgrow him personally. The few comments about her personality and her role at Monticello—taking care of his rooms and his clothing, that is, taking personal care of him—suggests this. It is hard to imagine the extravagant and worldly Maria Cosway being content to live on Jefferson’s farm mending his stockings and shirts, bottling the cider he liked so much, and chatting about the goings-on among the denizens of Monticello.

  The women Jefferson met in France alternately fascinated and repelled him. He enjoyed mixing with the attractive and intelligent among them, so long as the conversations did not veer into politics or get too serious. At the same time, they frightened him. The very things he found delightful about these women—their openness, their ability to move in the world freely—also hinted that they might be just a bit too much, not feminine in the way that was most satisfying to him in the long term. These were sophisticated “city girls,” wonderful and reliable for the casual amusement of witty repartee, but not the type of woman he wanted a serious life with in the intimacy of his domestic realm. What a contrast Sally Hemings must have presented! When he came home to the Hôtel de Langeac after spending time with the Cosways, Churches, and Madame de Tessés of that world, there he would find his wife’s half sister, the extremely attractive, sweet-natured, sewing, Virginia farm girl. She was the very opposite of frightening.

  At the end of the 1780s in Paris, when Jefferson was ready to go home, Hemings represented the place and way of life he expected to return to, with no inkling at the time that he would ever leave it again for any sustained period. He knew that when they got back to Monticello they could resume life in a shared universe of which he would be the unquestioned center. Aside from all the other reasons a male might want to attach himself to a particular female—her looks, personality, their personal chemistry—it made sense for Jefferson to have fixated on a young woman who knew and understood that universe, his place t
here, and how she could best fit into it. Near the end of his stay in France, Jefferson contrasted American “Angels” with European “Amazons.”22 Who was an angel in his eyes?—a domestically oriented woman who believed that her place was in the home, attending to the needs of the man in her life and her children, not out engaging in adulterous intrigues with foreign diplomats or other such persons. An angel let the man in her life take the lead and make the important decisions affecting their lives. She accepted his well-tempered dominance as a show of his love and desire to protect her and their family. The dreaded Amazons, on the other hand, were politically and socially assertive women who sought self-fulfillment outside of the home, challenging men in what was supposed to be an exclusively male domain. Women in France were out of synch with the natural order of things. Their determined self-assertion emasculated the men in their lives.

  Amazons also posed a grave sexual threat. While counseling a parent about the best place to send her son to learn French, Jefferson picked Canada because “in France a young man’s morals, health, and fortune are more irresistibly endangered than in any other country in the universe.”23 What imperiled young men did he have in mind? Jefferson had a way of silently exempting himself from many of the admonitions and platitudes he passed along to others, and probably did not count himself as a young man in Paris, though his affair with Maria Cosway and his construction of the liaison with Sally Hemings had the air of a man anxious to start a new life as if he were operating, as a young man would be, on a clean slate. The two young men Jefferson observed most closely in France were the ones who lived in his house: James Hemings and William Short. We know nothing of James Hemings’s dealings with women, although it is highly probable that a young man between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four who had money and free movement had the chance to meet them. The women of his family were described as beautiful, and one might assume that he, too, was attractive. Short’s amorous adventures have already been noted. He surely counted as a young man who took advantage of the easier relations between males and females in France.