That was certainly true of Jefferson’s son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, whose dire financial straits and emotional problems required Jefferson to step in and support his family. Martha (Patsy) Randolph received, and receives, no penalty for being cared for by her father. Her husband, however, was, and is still, perceived differently. His inability to provide for his own family, and dependence upon his father-in-law, is a tacit statement about his worth as a man. Even his eldest son seems to have held his weakness against him.15 In a world that valued male supremacy, and identified superior males as those who were self-sufficient and able to see to the needs of their dependents, in every way, Jefferson’s “care” of the adult James Hemings was infantilizing.
Much as Jefferson’s gestures tracked the workings of traditional male-female relations, Sally Hemings knew that they could take her only so far. She was different from white girls her age: marriage and social respectability could never be the end result of whatever developed with Jefferson at the Hôtel de Langeac. Even armed with this very obvious bit of knowledge, Hemings was a human being, and that was as important to her response to Jefferson as her being, by American law, a slave. A full-fledged person lived underneath that heavy legal status, one who was subject to a wide variety of often conflicting emotions and influences. What might make sense for her to think or feel about him from an ideological standpoint could be overcome, or even made irrelevant, by the promptings of her inner life that grew out of her own experiences. Her age, fatherless state, time in France, knowledge of her family’s relations with Jefferson, and the way he treated her specifically contributed to the way she viewed him and evidently gave her ideas about how she thought she might be able to handle him. French law, a check on his Virginia-based power over her, also helped shape her view of Jefferson in this setting. What type of man did she see?
Over the years Jefferson’s pattern of dealing with the enslaved people closest to him was very much like his way of dealing with his white family, friends, political allies, and even some of his adversaries. He appealed to their emotions as a way of extracting the behavior he wanted, doing things to make them feel bound and grateful to him, rather than being directly coercive. While some persons are quite comfortable with open conflict—in actual war and its simulations in daily life—and may even enjoy sparring and the sensation of making others uncomfortable, Jefferson never wanted to be the too obvious source of a person’s distress—even when he was. In both his public and his private lives, “peace” was indeed his “passion,” though that imposed peace sometimes came at an enormous price for himself and others around him; it often amounted to postponing or submerging and hiding conflict rather than truly ending it.
Jefferson’s preference for stratagems over direct confrontation led Henry Adams to label him “feminine”—associating his elliptical style with females whose subordinate position made it necessary, even endearing, for them to adopt an indirect way of dealing deemed unworthy of “manly” straightforwardness. Women’s indirection acknowledged and flattered male power. Jefferson used indirection not to flatter power but to obtain it in the way that was, for whatever reason, most comfortable for him. Machiavelli’s “wise prince” preferred to be feared than loved because men love “according to their own will” and fear “according to that of the prince.”16 In his private and public lives, Jefferson much preferred to be loved than feared, and he moved in a way (“operated,” his detractors would say) designed to achieve that outcome.
“It is charming,” he once wrote to his grandchildren, “to be loved by everybody.”17 Charming, perhaps, but exceedingly problematic unless one adopts a very cramped definition of “everybody.” Jefferson did not. He assiduously collected people and sought to bind them to himself in any way he could. He often told people what he knew they wanted to hear, instead of being frank, so that he could stay in their favor. He involved himself deeply in sorting out others’ personal problems and tolerated, often to his extreme disadvantage, those who imposed themselves upon him—all so that he would be “loved” by “everybody” whom he could personally persuade to do that. Jefferson was simply unable to follow Machiavelli’s advice about the wise prince and love and fear, for he had greater confidence in his ability to inspire the one rather than the other, even though he was in his public and private lives a “prince” and longed to be an effective one. In both realms he determined that people would, in fact, love him according to his will; all he had to do was find the right formula. This was the personality that Sally Hemings confronted at the Hôtel de Langeac.
A DELICATE ISSUE remains. There is the fascinating and important, but ultimately unanswerable, question of when Jefferson first began to look at Hemings as something more than just a teenage girl living in his house. What happened to them near the end of their stay, and the length of their relationship, suggests that he was serious about creating a long-term bond with her from the beginning. How did he go about doing that with her? We are not totally in the dark on this question and do not have to resort to generalizations about master and slave relationships, for there are relevant comparisons to look to from their specific lives.
Sally Hemings was the female counterpart to those of her male relatives who were most intimately connected to Jefferson—her brothers Robert and James and her nephew Burwell Colbert, the son of Betty Brown. The way Jefferson treated these three offers some clues about how he approached her. Of the three, his handling of Colbert is, perhaps, the most instructive. Jefferson emancipated Robert and James Hemings in the 1790s. After they were gone, he had no interest in replacing them with a man who would become as close to him as they had been. The age of the austere, plain, and republican Jefferson had arrived, and such an obvious trapping of aristocracy, moving among “the people” with an enslaved body servant from his plantation, was no longer useful. Instead, he leased John Freeman to serve as a footman at the White House and accompany him to and from Monticello during his presidency.18 Jefferson did, however, want a personal servant to attend him at Monticello.
Colbert spent his early childhood as a house servant, until at age ten he became one of the “nail boys” (teens and preteens most of them) who worked in the nail factory Jefferson built on the mountain during his first retirement in the 1790s. Some of the boys who originally worked there grew up to become his most trusted artisans and workers: Joseph Fossett served as head of the blacksmith shop, Isaac Jefferson went into the “tinning business,” and Wormley Hughes became the head gardener at Monticello. Just as he determined early on that the teenage John Hemings would be a carpenter, Jefferson evidently decided, perhaps because of his appearance and personality, that Colbert might eventually take up where Robert and James left off, as his trusted personal manservant, at least while they were at Monticello.
Colbert’s version of personal loyalty to and affection for Jefferson, which, as we will see, was reciprocated, is well known in Jefferson scholarship. Most of the descriptions of their relationship come from Jefferson’s retirement years, when the men were older, with little attention given to the origins of their connection. Colbert’s apparent attachment to Jefferson was not born in those later years. Nor did it necessarily come naturally. Jefferson specifically cultivated it, making efforts to win Colbert over well before he became an adult. While Colbert was still quite young, Jefferson let everyone who mattered to him know that Colbert was especially important. He instructed his overseer to be lenient with all the nail boys and to avoid whipping them, though his overseers did not always follow that rule. Jefferson made it clear—not only to his overseer but to others on the plantation—that Colbert was never to be whipped, no matter what.19 That strict order was probably not a license for the teenager to do as he pleased. It was a show of faith designed to shape Colbert’s character. The young man would avoid doing things precisely because Jefferson had singled him out as a favorite. When he grew older, and became a painter and glazer at Monticello during Jefferson’s presidency, serving as the butler/attendant when Jeffe
rson was at home, he remained out of the control of the overseer. In fact, Jefferson directed his overseer Edmund Bacon to give Colbert spending money whenever he asked for it.
This was not just about Jefferson’s affection for Colbert, though he certainly cared for him—after all, why him and not someone else? This was also in part calculation. Colbert’s identity as an enslaved man was not enough to achieve what Jefferson wanted from him. He had to create another level of identity for the young man, one that would make Colbert the kind of person he wanted to have in his intimate circle. Such a person had to have enough affection for him to make him want to be loyal, know to keep his private affairs private, and never make him ill at ease. It was probably easier to arrive at this point more quickly and naturally with Robert and James Hemings because they were his wife’s half brothers, and he could use that connection as a basis for bonding. Jefferson could have made any man on his plantation act as his manservant. He could not, with force or induced fear, make that person genuinely like or love him. His protective and indulgent actions told Colbert, while still young and impressionable, that he was special in Jefferson’s eyes. He had saved him from the pain and humiliation that other men on the plantation might have to endure, and he even forced a white man to answer to Colbert’s whims. Colbert, from boyhood, knew that this was all Jefferson’s doing, and that shaped the way he viewed Jefferson all his life. The strategy apparently worked.
To call this “strategy” or “calculation” is not to say it was cold. It was the opposite. Jefferson did not want—could not have endured—having a person in his innermost circle who obviously did not like him. Many men would not have cared one way or the other, so long as the person did as he or she was told. He preferred to idealize his relationship to Colbert, and shielding him from the “normal” vicissitudes of slavery allowed him to do this. The male servant closest to him would not know the “worst” of slavery, and Jefferson would show himself to Colbert at his “best” when he took him away from all that. He styled Colbert as his “friend.”20 As utterly preposterous a notion as that seems, it is nevertheless instructive that Jefferson felt the need to characterize his relationship with Colbert in this way in order to be comfortable around him.
Close as Colbert and Jefferson would become over the years, Jefferson and Sally Hemings were, from the very start, at another level of intimacy: skin-to-skin, sexual and emotional vulnerability–bearing, closeness. If he worked years to cultivate a favored manservant, to gain his loyalty and affection, there is every reason to believe that when he first determined he wanted Sally Hemings in his life in an even more intimate way, he followed the same pattern. The point could never have been for Jefferson to do things to make Hemings hate him, to fix her identity so that she would recoil every time she saw him or cringe at his touch. He wanted a domestic life that was as comfortable as it could be, and having a young mistress who despised him was not the way to do that. What must always be kept in mind when considering Jefferson’s actions toward the Hemingses in Paris is that they were in a place where a serious misstep on his part could have prompted these two young people to leave him for good, under circumstances that would have caused him great embarrassment—and he would have had no recourse. The far easier and more pleasing thing for him in the long run was to try to win her over. That may not have been hard to do.
While the defined category of “teenager” did not exist as we know it today, even in the eighteenth century it was understood that young people like Hemings were prone to making irrational decisions in their dealings with members of the opposite sex. That is why there were legislative attempts to ensure that minors obtained parental consent before marriage. Young enslaved people were expected to seek the guidance and permission of their parents (when they were available) as they contemplated marrying. Older people of all races tried to protect their young people from the hazards of acting under the influence of youthful optimism, and naïveté, conditions that were not the province of free young whites alone.
Sixteen-year-old Hemings, in her particular circumstances in Paris, was perfectly positioned to be swept up in a Jeffersonian charm offensive to the detriment of what made any sense. Throughout his life, men and women far more worldly than she were similarly swayed, even when Jefferson did not seem to be trying very hard. No young girl was better prepared by the complex nature of her family configuration and her life to date to take seriously the professed intentions of a man whom, by any system of logic, she should have seen as an enemy, but who undoubtedly believed himself to be—and presented himself to her and her family as if he were—the very opposite of that.
15
THE TEENAGERS AND THE WOMAN
MANY THINGS ABOUT the world young Sally Hemings confronted seem almost impossible to grasp. She had spent her first fourteen years in a country that defined her as human chattel. In her fifteenth and sixteenth years, she was in a place where a court would eagerly transform her status, turning her into a legally recognized free person. Sometime between 1787 and 1789, this teenager learned the difference between law in Virginia and law in France. The power of the former could reenslave her, while the power of the latter could set her free. So she stood poised between the reality of life in the place of her birth and the moment when she had to decide whether to take the step toward freedom in a new land. She could make her journey alone or with her older brother, leaving not only slavery behind but also a large and intensely connected family in Virginia.
Then Jefferson intruded into that moment in a way that complicated her understanding of what course her life should take. Becoming “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine” had worked a transformation of its own, which linked her even more tightly to the lives of her mother and grandmother. Although she was different from both women in the most salient way—neither her African grandmother nor her mother had the power to turn to law to end their enslavement—what had happened between her and Jefferson was an important part of Virginia’s slave society. There were certainly things that the mothers and other female relatives of girls who were in this position said to them when this happened—advice and assurances given. Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters would have been especially equipped to talk to Sally, given their dealings with white men. But to talk to them, she had to be in Virginia and thus back under that state’s laws. There was much for this young person to consider.
Not all the incomprehensible aspects of Hemings’s world had to do with slavery and her family’s complicated connections to Jefferson. Relations between the sexes in those days seem equally far away from our modern understanding of what constitutes civilized behavior. Much as it may assault present-day sensibilities, fifteen-and sixteen-year-old girls were in Hemings’s time thought eligible to become seriously involved with men, even men who were substantially older. Jefferson’s daughter Patsy became a married woman, with her father’s enthusiastic approval, just several months after her seventeenth birthday. That attitude made sense in an era when higher education and career, the reasons for postponing marriage and child-bearing in modern times, did not compete with what were thought to be a woman’s most basic functions in life: to be a wife and a mother. Jefferson’s parents were not really age cohorts. Peter Jefferson was thirty-one or thirty-two to Jane Jefferson’s nineteen when they married.1 Even within enslaved communities “slave husbands tended to be older than their wives.” Philip Morgan has noted that “in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, eight of ten husbands were older than their wives by an average of nine years.” Morgan cited the “imbalance of the sexes” as a possible reason for this, along with “African customs,” for “large age gaps between spouses were commonplace in many African societies.”2 In all Virginia communities a girl of fifteen would be considered very young, but she would not be totally off-limits, as events in the lives of people in Jefferson’s social cohort indicate.
In the year before he left for France, Jefferson played matchmaker between thirty-two-year-old James Madison and fifteen-year-old Catherine (Kitty)
Floyd. Madison first encountered Floyd in 1779 as the twelve-year-old daughter of William Floyd, a fellow representative to the Continental Congress. Both men, Floyd with his daughter and two other children, had rooms at Eliza House Trist’s boardinghouse, on Market Street in Philadelphia. Out of respect for Madison, we will say that we can likely never know what he thought of the young girl when he first met her as a preteen. We do know that by the time Floyd turned fifteen, the very shy Madison’s romantic interest in her burned brightly, and he very much wanted to make her his wife. Time together and—as with Lilite Royer and Short, Lee and McCarty, and Hemings and Jefferson—seeing each other on a daily basis in shared living quarters allowed this intergenerational couple to get to know each other in a way they would not have had their circumstances been different.3
Madison’s dealings with Floyd were so intensely personal that when he and Jefferson corresponded about her, they did so in their agreed-upon code. During that same period, Jefferson took time out in a letter to his great friend to include a gossipy reference, also in code, telling Madison that one of their fellow Virginians, forty-four-year-old Arthur Lee, whom Jefferson disliked, was “courting Miss Sprig a young girl of seventeen and of thirty thousand pounds expectation.”4 In the end, the much older Lee was unable to capture young Miss Sprig.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 37