The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  An upper-class, married white woman in Virginia, no matter how her status was obtained—as part of a plan to unite large property holdings, to rein in the impulses of a headstrong girl, or to achieve a step up in her family’s circumstances—could never have been a rape victim or degraded sexual object in her marriage. The marriage contract made her consent to sex implicit and all the resulting sexual activity “clean.” A married white man, no matter how he came to be the husband of the bride—with the aid of family force or from a desire to gain wealth—could never have been a rapist or one who tainted the notion of true love in the relationship by bringing ambition for material or social gain into the plan for union. The law created a reality beyond itself and its purposes. It told a story about the lives of those whom it protected—men and women like Thomas and Martha—supposedly defining their basic natures and the quality of their characters, almost the very state of their souls.

  The cover of legal marriage made every white “wife” an honorable woman, presumptively morally and spiritually superior to any enslaved woman, actually any black woman. This attitude prevailed among whites long after Hemings’s time and shaped the way black people and their families and sexuality were viewed, the coupling of blackness with the degradation of slavery having done its work. As late as the 1950s, some newspapers in southern states refused to apply the honorific “Mrs.” to even legally married black women. This had nothing to do with the disabilities of slavery—it had been abolished—and nothing to do with protective veil of legal matrimony: these women had it. When all was said and done, “honor” and dignity were racially based. No black woman, even a lawfully wedded one, could ever have had either, or certainly their honor and dignity could not have been recognized on an equal footing with that of white women’s in any public forum.8

  Because they were legally married, the question whether Thomas Jefferson loved Martha Wayles Skelton as he first got to know her would never have been asked. We assume we know what he was thinking and feeling simply because he married her. Even raising the question might be considered an insult to their memory. The truth is that we do not know exactly what the young Thomas was thinking when he encountered Martha, the beautiful and rich widow. We do not even know when and where he first encountered her. What percentage of his initial attraction to her was that ineffable feeling that draws one human being to another in a heartfelt way that we all respect and honor as one of the highest expressions of our emotions? And what percentage of the attraction was the reality that a legal marriage to a woman whose father was very rich and well connected in the society in which Jefferson wanted to rise would bring him vast wealth that he might never have achieved on his own—a mercenary concern that is not a part of the kind of “love” that we long for and revere? The fact is we simply cannot know.

  We know that Jefferson waxed enthusiastic about his prospective bride to friends during his courtship,9 although he could not very well have gone on and on about his sexual attraction to her—apart from tasteful paeans to her beauty—and the virtues of her father’s extensive land holdings and slaves. He would never have put cards on the table like that. With no letters from her and no diary, Martha left no trace of her thoughts during this period. So we do not even have Jefferson filtered through her observations. There is the testimony of their affection during their courtship from their great-granddaughter, who never knew either of them, and the statement, ironically enough, of one of his sons with Sally Hemings.10 We do know from the way Jefferson conducted himself during his life with his wife—and from his actions at the end of their marriage—that he loved her profoundly and was utterly devastated by her loss. That was after the passage of ten years. It still does not get precisely at what the twenty-seven-year-old man was thinking as he first met and then planned to join his life with Martha Wayles Skelton.

  What is left to us to do is to work our way back from what we know of the Jefferson marriage and add that to the actual fact of their marriage to reach a conclusion about his likely earliest feelings for her. The legal marriage, as an origin of their life together, gives us the freedom to feel comfortable saying we know for certain that the kind of romantic love we respect and understand existed between Thomas and Martha Jefferson, not as an outgrowth of their years together, but from the very moment they first interacted with each other. We take this freedom to know the quality of the Jeffersons’ love even though the basic contours and expectations of their eighteenth-century marriage would be utterly foreign (and totally unacceptable) to modern sensibilities. In one extremely important area—property—it was not even acceptable to nineteenth-century sensibilities. The reforms of the Married Women’s Property Acts that swept across the nation in the mid to late 1800s altered what Jefferson thought was a key component of his relationship with and marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton: the right as her husband to control her considerable property.11

  After John Wayles died and his daughters inherited his thousands of acres and hundreds of slaves, Jefferson convened a meeting between himself and the husbands of Martha’s sisters. He and his brothers-in-law decided on a plan of action for handling and disposing of the property.12 In their time, that extreme display of paternalism, which essentially treated their wives like children, would be construed as evidence of their love for their spouses, a kind of love that would likely be incomprehensible to most modern Americans. Even an attempted display of it in a current-day context might land the men in divorce court.

  Hemings and Jefferson, slave and master, who had no chance for a legal union, were in a particular bind. The basic quality of their relationship, what they meant to each other in their daily intimate lives, not how the world outside characterized them, may have been better than that of many other legally married couples. As the legal historian Ariela Gross has noted, “Legal language is made up of words that do things. Saying ‘I do’ makes you legally married, if the words are said in the right setting.”13 Hemings and Jefferson were nowhere near the “right” setting when they were formulating a plan for their life together at Monticello. Without the safety blanket of legal marriage to gather up all our beliefs and fictions about love and unions between men and women, and with our knowledge of all that could legally happen between a master and a slave, there is an understandable uncertainty about exactly what a union between the two could really have been about. They do not fit any respectable couple that we can imagine, because they were absolutely not supposed to exist as a respectable couple.

  Working Backward and Forward

  When we work our way backward over the course of the thirty-eight years of Hemings and Jefferson’s life together at Monticello to their beginnings in France, we come not to a wedding ceremony between a free white man and free white woman. We come instead to a white man who was the legal owner, under American law, of a young African American woman who believed that she was free under the laws of the country where they were living. We assume that Jefferson could not have forced himself upon Hemings’s sister Martha without repercussion. He could have been arrested or his behavior might have caused her to reject him as a partner. Hemings, too, evidently cared how Jefferson treated her.14 While it is certain that the Admiralty Court would have supported Hemings’s bid for freedom, there was no assurance that Jefferson would have suffered any penalty (beyond mortification) if she had sought help from the authorities if he had forced himself upon her. It would have been her word against his; and at all levels of society, proving rape accusations has always been difficult for women. But even if Hemings had had no support from French authorities, a violent act or obnoxious pressure would likely have turned her against Jefferson and figured greatly in her decision about staying in France. The questions are whether Jefferson’s ability to rape Hemings means we are to assume that he did it, and whether we are to take his ability to do it as the strict measure of how he felt about her.

  For some, the reality that Jefferson “could have” raped Hemings is the only reality that counts. For it is here that we find,
in concentrated form, the evil of slavery, the enormous power that one group had to control and wreak havoc in the lives of another. The problem with making what Jefferson “could have” done the sole question is that it suggests that the actual details of Hemings’s life are meaningless. This way of viewing African Americans has survived slavery and hints that some present-day considerations of Hemings and Jefferson, which typically proceed as discussions about the nature of slavery, are really discussions about experiences supposedly universal to all black people throughout American history. The erasure of individual black lives—indeed, the assumption that the concept of individual as opposed to group identity is meaningless for blacks—makes it hard to accept any presentation of a black life that moves beyond well-set, predetermined, and very limited parameters. Making what could have happened to black people as a group the only question about a given black person’s life saves one the effort of having to care about, discover, and analyze any of the details of that person’s life. The idea of black people matters more than actual black people themselves. What is known about a defined group is very useful for predicting what might happen in the life of one of its members that is yet unfolding. When the person’s life is over, however, what actually happened to him or her should take precedence over the almost infinite variety of things that could have happened. If we do not ignore specific information about Sally and James Hemings in favor of making a larger point about slaveholders’ overall power, we have evidence that sheds light on the nature of the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson.

  As to Sally Hemings, there is no one response to rape. It takes a huge liberty with her life, however, to assume that she was raped, and that she knew she could escape from her rapist forever, and for a time actually asserted her right to be free of him, but nevertheless decided to return with him to Virginia to live out the rest of her life having more forced sex. That construction too easily uses the fact that she was born a slave (and a black person) to presume an irreparably damaged, completely cowed, and irrational personality over one who had the capacity to know her circumstances and to intelligently use her knowledge to assess the risks and possible rewards of taking a particular action—in other words, to think. Her son, who was clearly proud of her, depicted her as a person who thought rationally about her situation and came to a conclusion. In the absence of any specific information about her to rebut his portrayal, all that is left is stereotype. Too many enslaved women, with far fewer opportunities than Hemings had in France, complained about, resisted, and ran away from rape at the threat and cost of their lives, to assume that willing and unconsidered submission was the automatic response of any enslaved woman—especially one who had an alternative.15 An even more staggering notion is that Hemings, who showed such obvious concern for her children’s future, would have “implicitly relied” on a man who had violated any trust she could have had in him by forcing sex on her. What would such a vicious act have told an intelligent person about the likelihood that Jefferson would be honorable enough to carry out his promises to her at some distant point in the future? Nothing about the institution of slavery warrants an assumption that an enslaved woman in Hemings’s position in France would have operated at that level of mentality.

  The historian Sharon Block describes the sexual coercion of enslaved women as a “process” in which some of the women tried to “bargain their way out of sexual assaults.”16 Their bargaining made it easy for those insensitive to their plight to portray any subsequent “sexual encounters” with their masters as having been based upon consent. Block rightly sounds a note of caution about drawing that conclusion in situations where enslaved women had no law or surrounding society to guide them or support their “bargaining” with their masters. The critical difference for Hemings, of course, is that her negotiations with Jefferson were conducted on French soil under the power of French, not American, law—which they both knew. She could speak to Jefferson in a different voice. Although Hemings ultimately decided not to invoke the formal machinery of law, her use of law as a basis for negotiating was not the act of cowed individual. It sounds much more like the handiwork of a smart, if overconfident, attractive teenage girl who understood very well how men saw her and was greatly impressed with her newly discovered power to move an infatuated middle-aged man. Her mother was not there to tell her that such spells rarely last forever.

  Hemings and Jefferson did not exist in vacuum. What happened between them in France necessarily moved through the web of her enslaved relatives. For seventeen years Robert and James Hemings had traveled with Jefferson, personally attended him, shaved him, and anticipated his wants and needs. Because of the extraordinary experience of living abroad with him for a substantial period of time in very intimate and singular circumstances, Sally Hemings was the logical extension of Robert and James; she was a female version perfectly suited to take their role as intimate personal caterers to Jefferson to a level where neither man could go—to his bed. How he dealt with her in that role mattered greatly. Her mother and siblings would have felt any of her misery he inspired, thus destroying the delicate ecology of the world he had built with the family. They would have had to carry on serving him, but in a changed climate, one that he would not have cared for. On the other hand, if they saw him acting in as decent a fashion as possible, that he was now bound to them by blood might have made at least some of them more inclined to see him a positive light, thus shoring up the affective role that they certainly played in his life. As will be shown in the chapter to come, members of Hemings’s family, free and enslaved, sometimes responded to Jefferson in ways that suggest they thought of him as more a version of an in-law than the rapist of their family member.

  Her brother James knew the institution of slavery firsthand, including the special problems slave women faced. Aggressive as he was, we would not expect him to have exacted any direct reprisal if he believed Jefferson had raped his sister. We might think, however, that the rape of his sister would have meant something to him and affected his views about returning to Virginia with Jefferson, and his view of the man overall. Hemings, as we know, did return to America, and after he was a free man visited then Vice-President Jefferson, while he was in Philadelphia, talking to him about his past travel, his future travel plans, and life in general.17 Until the end of his too brief life, he told people he always kept his work situations open so that if Jefferson wanted to hire him as a chef—for the right pay, of course—he would be ready to go.18

  American slavery, in and of itself, would not make an enslaved man act with such callous disregard of his sister’s life. Eighteenth-century enslaved siblings, perhaps echoing kinship traditions from Africa, were known to be especially close to one another.19 We see this very clearly in the Hemings family’s insistence on naming their children after one another down the generations. If they were not close before their time in France, James and Sally Hemings shared a very intense, life-altering experience together in an alien land. One cannot tell the sister’s story without telling the story of the brother; his responses to her situation speak to the kind of man he was.

  Certainly no white man in freedom, in the depths of villeinage, serfdom, or Arab enslavement, could be casually portrayed as so base and craven that he would pay gratuitous social calls on his sister’s rapist and voluntarily make his sister’s attacker his employer of first choice, because a white man would be presumed to have had a soul. One would have to offer very specific and persuasive evidence about the man himself to rebut that presumption, for the system of oppression a white man lived under would never be said to automatically signal the state of his individual character.

  Enslaved men who lived on the same plantation with their sisters, wives, and daughters who were raped had little choice but to continue in the company of the men who raped them. They weighed responding to one horrific event against the likelihood of provoking other, more extensive horrific events that could destroy their families even more thoroughly. That was one of the deepest
and harshest realities of slave life. James Hemings could be excused if he visited Monticello to see the rest of his family and deemed it better for their well-being to swallow any pride and stop by and visit with his former master who had raped, and was continuing to rape, his sister. After the Philadelphia visits, Hemings did return to Monticello to work for Jefferson as a paid employee, for a time, and was thinking about taking Jefferson’s offer to be the White House chef just before his death.19 But no other Hemingses were in Philadelphia when he visited Jefferson after his emancipation. Going to see Jefferson was merely going to see Jefferson. There is no indication that the Hemings family would have suffered reprisals if Hemings had simply never bothered to call on him.

  IT IS, IN part, the uncertainly about the precise origins of the Hemings and Jefferson relationship that makes it hard to accept the idea that they were emotionally attracted to one another. Even if working our way back to the Hôtel de Langeac brings us to a beginning that was not presumptively pristine, as we view his origins with his wife, we find enough signs from both Hemings and Jefferson (him far more particularly) that these two people were emotionally attached to one another, and there is no reason to suppose that they were not from the very beginning. Saying that works no fundamental change in the nature of American slavery, even if many choose to treat Hemings and Jefferson as symbols of the institution—the violation of an entire people by the system of slavery, the violation of countless black women—reenacted in the lives of these two human beings, who because of their fame are easy to use as stand-ins for those larger phenomena.