Jefferson, a sometime resident of Trist’s boardinghouse himself, spoke to Floyd on Madison’s behalf on several occasions—talking up his friend’s virtues and explaining what he had to offer her as a husband.5 There is no indication he ever talked to Floyd’s father about any of this. In speaking with her alone about Madison, Jefferson treated the fifteen-year-old girl as a free agent in matters of male-female courtship. One wonders what the teenage Floyd really thought of the idea that a man who was more than twice her age had a sexual interest in her, and that a man almost three times her age would approach her repeatedly to encourage her to bring the situation to a formal conclusion.
Marriage is certainly about more than sex, but sex is an integral part of the bargain. Floyd, whose great beauty attracted Madison, knew that if she married him she would be, on her wedding night, having sex with a man in his thirties. Madison knew that if he married Floyd, he would be having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. That did not bother him, nor did it bother Jefferson, whose efforts on his friend’s behalf initially met with some success, as Madison informed him. Floyd sounded amenable to the match—she and Madison exchanged gifts—and his hopes were raised. Then Floyd fell in love with a more age-appropriate fellow, a nineteen-year-old, and she ultimately rejected her older suitor. After many decades, the pain of the experience moved the elderly former president to try to mark over all references to Floyd in copies of the letters that had passed between him and Jefferson. Floyd had meant a great deal to him, and although he had had a happy life and fulfilling marriage in the interim, her loss wounded him deeply.6
John Marshall, the nation’s chief justice of the Supreme Court, began to pursue his future wife, Polly Ambler, while he was twenty-five and she was fourteen. He wanted to marry her right away, but the courtship took two years, and he married Polly when she was sixteen and he was twenty-seven.7 Both Madison and Marshall were younger men and closer in age to the teenage girls to whom they were attracted than Jefferson was to Hemings. From our modern perspective, however, both were still very far outside the range of our tolerance for older man–younger woman attraction.
It was not just males in their twenties and thirties who pursued adolescent girls. Besides Arthur Lee, another man in Jefferson’s circle sought a teenage companion. In the year after he returned from France, Jefferson’s boyhood friend and father-in-law to his daughter Patsy, Thomas Mann Randolph, married, at age fifty, seventeen-year-old Gabriella Harvie. According to family tradition Harvie did not want to marry Randolph. She was in love with someone else, a man to whom her parents objected. They insisted that she marry Randolph, who was, on paper at least, a man of considerable property and wealth, whose land was adjacent to her family’s.8
The thirty-three-year gap between Randolph and Harvie was a little beyond the thirty-year gap between Jefferson and Hemings, and unlike his friend, Jefferson did not envision Hemings as a potential legal bride. Neither he nor Randolph, however, would have seen the object of his attention as a child disqualified from sexual activity as we would today. Nor does the trajectory of their lives suggest that either man was an ephebophile, an adult who is sexually fixated on teenagers. Both men had previous marriages and children with females close to their own ages, and clearly intended to make lives with these younger females that extended far beyond the girls’ teenage years. Hemings’s relationship lasted well into her middle age, as Jefferson lived much longer than Randolph. Hemings and Harvie were attractive because in their day they were seen as young women, and youth in females has attracted men in all eras across all cultures even as the definition of “young woman” has shifted along with changing social mores. As for the girls themselves, whether Harvie wanted Randolph or not, she knew that in her time girls her age did get married and have sex. Hemings certainly knew that as well.
Under Slavery and Edicts
The pivotal differences between Catherine Floyd, Mary Ambler Marshall, “Miss Sprig,” Gabriella Harvie, and Sally Hemings, of course, is that Hemings was born an enslaved African American, while her white counterparts were born free. Although the social distance between these females should never be understated, it will not do to treat them as if they were separate species living in different universes with no overlapping attributes and points of commonality. Legal marriage made sex between much older males and sometimes unwilling (and by our lights, immature) teenage girls perfectly acceptable in the eyes of society. This was not pedophilia, ephebophilia, or rape. Nor would it be construed that way in the pages of history, because the female in this circumstance received the title “Mrs.,” the right to share in her husband’s property, and the honor of giving birth to legal heirs—no matter what private horrors or wounds she suffered at the touch of a man whom she did not want. Being “legal” protected all married couples during their time, and long after their deaths as if their reputations were a property right. Sally Hemings—an item of property herself, according to American law—had no opportunity to create such a property right for her family to help shape the way historians would view her life.
Even though she was not under American law, thinking seriously about the beginning of Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson in France requires confronting the vexing issue of sex between enslaved women and white men. Enslaved women’s vulnerability to rape is well known, and the question naturally arises about this pair. Exploring this issue for these two people requires moving for a time beyond the kind of discussion that, in understandable deference to the suffering of black female victims of sexual abuse, casts every enslaved woman who ever had sex with a white man during slavery in the United States as a rape victim. This view describes the way things were between enslaved women and white men generally, but deserves greater scrutiny when one takes on the responsibility of seeking to understand and present the story of one individual’s life.
There are at least two possible routes to the conclusion that what happened between Hemings and Jefferson during their beginnings in Paris was presumptively rape. One idea rests on an understanding about enslaved women and the other one, which works in tandem with it, on an understanding about white male slave owners. As to enslaved women, we may assume that none—because of the obvious state of war that existed between masters and slaves—would ever have wanted to have sex with any white man. Faced with white men who showed interest in them, enslaved women, for completely sound ideological reasons, would be unwilling. Evidence that sex took place between the two—a child, for example—would itself be evidence of rape. Sally Hemings would think that the only mate allowable to her—indeed the only one she should want in her heart—was a man who shared her legal status and, therefore, her race, a man of African origin. In this view, because her part “whiteness” did not prevent her enslavement, Hemings, acting on an instinctive sense of racial solidarity (solidarity with her black ancestors alone), would stay in her racial place when it came to feelings about members of the opposite sex.
If the young Hemings were open to the idea of having Jefferson as a lover, she would be a traitor who denied the reality of her enslavement and provided her enemy—Jefferson—with something that he very much wanted, while keeping her body from the men who shared her oppression and thus had a superior moral claim to it, that is to say, African American males. Under Virginia law, Thomas Jefferson owned her body by positive, legal right, but black men owned her body by natural right. This formulation has its roots in some very long-held beliefs and assumptions that require examination. Traditionally, in times of war, men of opposing camps who have sex with (forcibly and not) the women of the enemy are seen as encroaching upon territory that belongs to their male opponents—dealing them a heavy psychological blow in the conflict at hand. For victors, taking the women of the defeated group is one of the surest signs of conquest. On the other hand, males of the conquered group who have sex with the women of the conquerors are styled as insurgents or rebels, striking their own direct and meaningful blow against the conquerors by taking “their women”—“their” t
erritory. The intergroup sexuality of these men is not deemed traitorous.
This wholly male-centered construction of the rules and meaning of conflict between warring parties—how one is to behave, how one properly calculates one’s individual interests—leaves no room for the feelings, obsessions, and strategies of females. Women are merely objects upon whom men, the prime movers and the owners of female bodies, carry out their battles. Women know this and are supposed to adjust their behavior according to men’s rules of engagement. When they run afoul of them, they are to be criticized or punished, if possible, severely.
It is doubtful that the black men whom Martha Hodes, as well as other historians, have written of, who were involved with white women before, during, and after Hemings’s and Jefferson’s time would be so easily deemed traitors as a willing Sally Hemings.9 She would appear a less sympathetic version of the lead character in the opera Aida, who sings an impassioned and heartrending aria about the pain of being in thrall to a man who was her lover and also the determined enemy of her own people. We might be more comfortable with that scenario placed in a nineteenth-century Italian opera about ancient Egypt and Nubia. It provokes a completely different response when set down within the context of the still too close and painful American slave system.
For women of every color, rape has long been a notoriously underreported and unpunished crime, as male-dominated societies have liberally construed the notion of consent against women who complained about male behavior. A married woman could not complain about being forced into sex by her husband, because her marriage was seen as consent to sexual relations with him whenever he wanted. The tendency to liberally construe consent has been markedly worse for black women since the days of slavery. Powerful apologists for the institution long claimed that black women could not be raped because they were so promiscuous anyway. From their very first interactions with Africans, Europeans created a picture of black women as inherently licentious beings to justify their mistreatment of them and to degrade the black race. That notion lasted throughout the days of slavery and has continued into modern times. By the mid-nineteenth century the southern legal commentator Thomas R. R. Cobb in his treatise on southern slavery and law claimed that the rape of black women by white men was an almost unknown event precisely because one could never establish the legal trigger for a rape charge, “no consent,” because it was well known that black women always consented to sex.10
It makes perfect sense when faced with the devastating effects of such patently vicious, yet extremely influential, thinking—no protection for black female rape victims—to adopt a position to rebut such nonsense. There are, however, some problematic conclusions that flow from countering the Cobbses of the world with the idea that no enslaved woman would ever want to consent to sex with a white man, and if there was sex, there was rape. First, rape is determined by the race of the partners without reference to anything we know about the individuals or the circumstances involved. We will always know little or nothing about the vast majority of enslaved women and the scores of them who suffered rape. One might adopt a presumption about those anonymous women in deference to their unquestionable status as victims of slavery. What we know about the way slave women were treated generally should most inform our thoughts about their lives. We are on different terrain when there is information suggesting another possible understanding about what has gone on between one specific man and one specific woman. In those very rare cases, it would be intellectually unsound to ignore evidence, or skip over reasonable inferences, in order to return to the presumption based upon the experiences of the overall group of enslaved women.
The idea of the presumptive unwillingness on the part of all enslaved women may be added to the idea that there could never have been consent between Hemings and Jefferson to sexual relations because of the unequal power distribution between them. Whether Jefferson used violence or employed his well-known charming manner with women to win Hemings over, his power was such that one could never be sure of her true desires. Therefore, Sally Hemings when she was at the Hôtel de Langeac did not—because she could not—consent to sex with Thomas Jefferson. If power is the only issue, what we may call the bright-line “no-possible-consent rule” must also include all white men, not just the legal owners of women like Hemings. White supremacy, a force strong enough to have survived slavery, gave even white men who were not the legal owners of enslaved women wildly disproportionate amounts of power over them—far more than enough to force sex upon them without real consequence.
Depending upon how many slaves he had, and how the woman fit into his work scheme, a given slave owner might have had no incentive to seek redress for the rape of his slave, if the rape did not physically impair her ability to work. Her psychological pain, though deep, would not have excused her from the fields or whatever work she was doing. If the woman became pregnant and had a child, it added to her master’s capital. No enslaved woman had the power to ensure punishment of her rapist, whether he was white, black, free, or enslaved. Differentiating between white slave owners and non–slave owners when considering an enslaved woman’s capacity to consent cuts against the centrality of power in the activity and creates space for consensual interracial sex, so long as it was carried out with white men who had no economic interest in the woman.
There are even more problematic results of the no-possible-consent rule. It suggests that the individual personalities, life stories, and dignity of enslaved women are meaningless or, in the case of “dignity,” even nonexistent. The rule also imposes a version of eternal childhood on them, no matter what their circumstances in life. Ironically, that choice, though made for different reasons, eerily echoes slave owners’ construction of all enslaved people as “children” who lacked the ability and power to make rational decisions and who needed to be kept in slavery to protect them from the vagaries and harsh realities of living as free people in a hostile world.
An issue remains: How is it possible to get at the nature of a relationship between a man and a woman like Jefferson and Hemings when neither party specifically writes or speaks to others about that relationship or their feelings? Even written words can be quite deceptive and seldom tell the whole story, for people sometimes choose, for whatever reason, to tell a story of their lives that is rosier, or grimmer, than it actually was. In the absence of words, actions may be quite telling. An event in the life of Hemings’s oldest sister Mary that took place at the same time that Hemings was in Paris dealing with Jefferson offers some insight into the varied nature of the veiled relationships between enslaved women and white men.
Back in Albemarle County
John Wayles’s legacy, which had shaped so many of the Hemings family’s experiences over the years, altered the course of their lives at the end of the 1780s. Marriage to Wayles’s daughter made Jefferson a wealthy man. Unfortunately, his debts were almost equally staggering. What is more, while serving as executors to the Wayles estate, Jefferson and his fellow executors—the husbands of Martha’s sisters—made a strategic error. They decided that there was no chance to repay Wayles’s creditors with the income his estate generated through the sale of tobacco. That would take too long, and a good amount of the payments would go solely to pay the interest on the running balance of the debt. It was better, they felt, to sell assets and pay the debt off as quickly as possible, to avoid wasteful interest payments and settle their accounts. To effectuate their plan, Jefferson and his coexecutors, as was perfectly legal for them to do, divided the estate and took their share of land and slaves.11
What seemed like a good idea at the time actually had disastrous results that hurt Jefferson financially for many years afterward. Having given themselves the Wayles assets before the estate itself paid the creditors, the creditors could now hold each executor personally liable for repayment of the debts. Had they kept the assets within the estate, Wayles’s creditors would have had to satisfy themselves out of the estate alone and could not have proceeded against the
executors in their individual capacities. Problems with creditors chased Jefferson all the way to France, and in 1788 he received word that he owed more money on the Wayles debt than he had originally thought.12
Jefferson’s problems with debt directly affected the Hemingses and all of the enslaved people on his plantations, and would for years to come. When he received word in Paris of his deteriorating financial situation, he saw three alternative ways to deal with the emergency: he could sell parts of his land, sell some of his slaves, or lease his slaves out. Landownership made Jefferson feel like a wealthy man, and he was loath to sell any part of his holdings, for he thought they provided the ultimate form of security for his family. He decided not to sell land. He also did not want to sell any slaves, “if the debts [could] be paid without” doing that. He characterized his “unwillingness” to take this route as being “for their [the slaves’] sake” Leasing them, he thought, was the better choice. He wrote to Nicholas Lewis, a neighbor who was overseeing Monticello in his absence, to proceed with arrangements, specifically stating that George and Ursula Granger and Elizabeth Hemings were not to be leased out at all, and that Martin and Robert Hemings could continue with whatever arrangements they had already made.13
Mary Hemings, Sally’s oldest sibling, was hired out to a prosperous merchant named Thomas Bell, probably just before Jefferson’s financial crisis. She moved, along with three of her children—Molly, Joseph, and Betsy—to Bell’s home on Main Street. During the course of her time there, she and Bell began a relationship that lasted until his death in 1800 and produced two children, Robert and Sarah. The hiring out of young enslaved women must be viewed as something of a hazard for them. They were in unfamiliar surroundings with no social support, and if the man who hired them had no wife, it is difficult to imagine that the thought of sex did not at least cross his mind, or any of the minds of other men, enslaved or freed, connected to his household. Mary’s younger sister Critta conceived her son James while leased to a man named David Wood. James Hemings’s father is unknown. He was not listed in the Frm Book, so Jefferson did not own him.14
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 38