Whatever the notion that Hemings and Jefferson may have loved each other makes us think of them as individuals, the idea of their love has no power to change the basic reality of slavery’s essential inhumanity. For any who fear the effects of romanticizing the pair, the romance is not in saying that they may have loved one another. The romance is in thinking that it makes any difference if they did. Rhys Isaac, writing of Hemings and Jefferson (although the idea applies to Jefferson and Martha Wayles, too), has wisely cautioned, “We have to recognize that gender relations in past times and other cultures make ‘love,’ as we are inclined to idealize it, extremely problematic.”21 And how do we tend to “idealize it”? By demanding a great deal of the emotion, separating it out, and enshrining it above all others that move and direct the course of human affairs, viewing it as cure-all, able to end war, famine, disease—even beliefs in white supremacy. It is common to think of love as an always positive transformative force and, from our inevitably personal perspectives, transformative in just the ways we think are significant.
Love has been many things throughout history: the simple comfort of the familiar, having a person to know and being known by that person in return; a connection born of shared experiences, an irrational joy in another’s presence; a particular calming influence that one member of the couple may exert on the other, or that they both provide to one another. A combination of all these and myriad other things can go into making one person wish to stay tied to another. Anyone who is not in the couple—that is, everyone else in the world—will not understand precisely how or why it works for two people.
The most intimate of situations, the one least likely to be observed by others—sexual compatibility—can also be a form of love. But in our Western culture (and some others, to be fair) sex is considered, if not exactly dirty or shameful, a somewhat guilty pleasure that must always be separated from more exalted love. This is especially true when a couple, like Hemings and Jefferson, for reasons of race, status, or gender are not supposed to be together, as if partners who do not have the imprimatur of law, society, and custom could never feel the emotion of love for one another. The invariable charge against such pairs is that they are inauthentic per se, because they are bound together purely for sex, rather than love.
We may turn once again to “Old Man Eloquent,” John Quincy Adams, on Othello to make the point emphatically. After his earlier essay on the subject, mentioned in chapter 9, Adams confronted the issue of Desdemona’s character again in a review essay written in 1836 in which he explained more fully the source of his objections to her.
She absconds, from her father’s house, in the dead of night, to marry a blackamoor. She breaks a father’s heart, and covers his noble house with shame, to gratify—what? Pure love, like that of Juliet or Miranda? No! Unnatural passion; it cannot be named with delicacy…. Her admirers now say…that the color of Othello has nothing to do with the passion of Desdemona. No? Why, if Othello were white…she could have made no better match. Her father could have made no reasonable objection to it; and there could have been no tragedy. If the color of Othello is not as vital to the whole tragedy as the age of Juliet is to her character and destiny, then I have read Shakespeare in vain. The father of Desdemona charges Othello with magic arts in obtaining the affection for his daughter. Why, because her passion for him is unnatural; and why is it unnatural, but because of his color!22
After noting that Shakespeare could not have intended to present Desdemona as an example of feminine virtue, because he has her “eloping in the dead of night to marry a thick-lipped wool-headed Moor,” Adams wrote further of the black and white pair,
Othello, setting aside his color, has every quality to fascinate and charm the female heart. Desdemona, apart from the grossness of her fault in being accessible to such a passion for such an object [Othello], is amiable and lovely; among the attractive of her sex and condition.23
In the end, the couple’s individual personal qualities, which Adams concedes are excellent (aside from Desdemona’s flaw in being able to become attracted to a person of another race), are totally irrelevant to the plausibility of their feelings for one another. The two could never connect on the basis of their mutually attractive innate human attributes. There was a barrier that could never be breached, and Adams makes clear what that barrier is when he intones, “I have said the moral of the tragedy is, that the intermarriage of black and white blood is a violation of the law of nature.”24 Even across the years, in other passages dripping with disgust, Adams’s turmoil and conviction fairly leap off the pages of his essay. He well knew that intermarriage between the races was not actually against the law of nature, because if “nature” had cared whether blacks and whites mixed their blood, “nature” would have fixed it so they could not: black and white people would not be able to have children together. They could and did, of course, so the locus of nature’s prohibition had to shift. Blacks and whites can have sex and produce children (a basic, biological function), but they can never experience together higher-order emotional responses; they can never love each other in a romantic way. Only a lower-order (animalistic) response—lust—can explain the lives of men and women who connect across the boundaries of race. Nature’s loophole that allowed for black and white procreation was to be closed by refusing to credit (and certainly not to dignify) interracial couples’ feelings for one another. Indeed, they and their feelings were to be subjected to extreme ridicule to discourage others from following their example. The statement about the inability of men and women of different races to love one another was (is) at its heart an expression of anxiety-driven aspiration rather than a description of reality.
Adams very openly grounded his belief in the impossibility of real love between Othello and Desdemona in his superstitions about race and the rules of human nature in a way that might make at least some modern readers uncomfortable. The fact is his views are not so different in practical effect from grounding the notion of the impossibility of love in inter-status and interracial contexts in superstitions about the power of law and social customs: that they operate (like Adams’s human nature) as irresistible forces that inevitably control individual sensibilities. When they do not, it is the result of deep perversion: something is morally (in Adams’s time) or psychologically (in our time) wrong with the people who transgress.
Neither view takes account of the almost infinite permutations of human personality and circumstances that make every person unique. Nor do they account for human beings’ great ability to rationalize behavior until it fits, at least in the privacy of their own minds, the rules of whatever social game is being played. “What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man!” indeed. 25 Both approaches to the question of authentic love—faith in a version of human nature, faith in the plenary power of law and social custom—are troubling because they are deterministic and, like all deterministic formulations about the ways of men and women in society and history, diminish the human spirit and virtually require ignoring contrary evidence and the role of contingency and subjectivity in the lives of people and societies. They are even more problematic because one suspects that they are invoked to achieve a particular end: control. The idea of authentic love, and wielding the power to say when that can legitimately exist for some people and not others, emerges as a tool (with a romance all its own) used to ratify some aspect of an existing social order, or to make sense of one that is perhaps too difficult to comprehend or merely deeply disturbing. What one cannot understand, or put into a suitable category, simply does not exist.
It is an empirical, not just an intuitive or romantic, fact that law and social mores have never been able to stamp out constitutive elements of the human personality. The American slave society in which Hemings and Jefferson lived, with its tremendous grant of power to one group over another, grossly distorted the distribution of human emotions. One encounters vastly more instances of the negative ones that helped the institution along—some from Jefferson�
��s own hand—than benign or positive ones that contradicted its basic tenets. Yet we would never expect law and even extreme social opprobrium to remove from a population jealousy, hatred, greed, sympathy, mirth, possessiveness—the entire palette of human emotions. If the shapers of law and social customs had that kind of power, social orders would stand forever. Cultures would never change. Very often the seeds of change are planted in the privacy of individual minds, homes, and bedrooms—any place where people retreat to escape from the demands of society’s rules and to take on personae that are more suited to their own needs than those the external community would have them adopt.
In the Marriage Act of 1753 in England, parts of which Jefferson tried without success to bring to Virginia as one of his proposals for legislative reforms, parents were given the right to void the marriages of their minor children. Jefferson had his own reasons for supporting the law, but the original drafters’ primary concern was that children might make matches that threatened the status of great families in the society. What if, one supporter asked, “‘a young Girl of fifteen, for instance, one of the Daughters of a gentleman, happening to fall in Love with her Father’s Butler’ would marry him rather than ‘her equal’; or that ‘a boy of sixteen, heir apparent to an Estate, whose Fancy is captivated with his Mother’s maid,’ would marry her in order to ‘gratify an impetuous passion.’”26 As this supporter of the law recognized, being in vastly different social classes did not mean that males and females could never fall in love with their social “inferiors” or “superiors,” for there was a deep and knowing understanding, no doubt born of familiarity with life and crises within English manor houses, about the ways of human beings when they were put in certain circumstances. Note the hypothetical’s pairing of the daughter of a gentleman with his butler, and son of the lady of the house with her maid, instead of imagining a cross-class liaison between people who would not have encountered one another in a household on a daily basis.
This commentator knew that for males and females, it was a simple matter of proximity and opportunity, and positive law had to step in sometimes to protect society (those at the top of the hierarchy, actually) from the all too predictable course of human nature. Societies can effectively shape how, when, and whether people express and act on certain emotions in public. They cannot decree that individuals not have them, nor can they control what individuals do behind closed doors. A gentleman’s daughter and his butler, or a lady’s son and her maid, might feel as deeply for one another as they wanted, but they should not be allowed to translate their feelings into publicly supported actions that might disrupt the social order. Benjamin Rush, Jefferson’s great friend and noted Philadelphia doctor, patriot, and signer of the Declaration of the Independence, understood the problem very well, and fretted about its operation in the United States. Anxious to maintain what he thought were the necessary “class divisions” in the emerging Republic, he pronounced it dangerous for men (the upper-class males with whom he was most concerned) to live alone; for these unmarried men, Rush said, were at great risk for crossing socially constructed barriers to form liaisons with women of lower classes. Sex, Dr. Rush believed, was a basic and natural part of life, but only legally established relationships could preserve it in its most wholesome form. He wrote, “While men live by themselves…they do not view washerwomen or oyster-wenches as washerwomen or oyster wenches, but simply as women.”27 Given this at once astute and banal observation, one would love to know what Rush truly thought upon hearing that his dear friend Jefferson, a longtime widower, had succumbed to the tendency that he outlined so plainly.
The reality Rush described had particular consequences for slaveholding societies. Hamilton W. Pierson, who took down the memoirs of Jefferson’s overseer, Edmund Bacon, wrote his own memoir of his days riding circuit as a minister in the nineteenth century. He wrote of how common it was, more common than many wanted to believe, he said, to come upon farmhouses with bachelor or widowed white men living and having children with black women who had started out as their housekeepers.27 More formal evidence of this can be found in legal cases from southern states that pitted the free white children of masters against their enslaved siblings in challenges to their slave owner fathers’ bequests of freedom and/or property to their enslaved children. The facts recounted in the cases are telling. These fathers, usually widowers, lived with enslaved women, usually housekeepers with whom they were in close daily contact, as if they were married. The patterns of their behavior, and sometimes their words, show that these couples conducted themselves for all intents and purposes like married people, even though the law did not recognize their unions—the man providing a home and material goods, the woman cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the man. Interestingly enough, the judges hearing these cases often referred to how common, though lamentable in their view, these unions were.29 For every case that made it to court, let alone to a published opinion, some multiple number of similar situations did not. Rather than air family business in public, some white family members accepted the emancipations of their enslaved relatives and whatever grants of property were made to them. It would not have saved Monticello, but Martha Randolph could have contested the emancipations of her siblings Madison and Eston and employed slave catchers to try to go and get her brother Beverley and sister Harriet, and bring them back to be assets in the hands of the executors of their father’s estate. She chose to abide by her father’s wishes.
The conflict between social rules and human impulses operated at all levels of society. Think again of Celia’s George. If anyone should have absorbed the lessons of society’s laws and rules, and adjusted his feelings accordingly, it was he. The relatively powerless, enslaved George should have known better than to fall in love with and feel possessive toward Celia and jealous of Newsom. But he did, and his love and possessiveness put in motion a chain of events leading to Celia’s execution. Although George’s responses are completely understandable, his “error” was to seek something beyond what his society would tolerate from him as an enslaved black man: the right to be in an exclusive relationship with the woman for whom he cared.
Jefferson was the complete opposite of George in terms of the power and freedom he possessed. Still, however he felt about Hemings, he would never have flaunted his relationship with her or made public declarations that would alienate friends like Benjamin Rush, offend the social order, and harm him politically, and it would be wildly romantic and naïve to make such actions the litmus test for his inner feelings. The very savvy and legacy-conscious Jefferson knew the way these things worked. As long as he did not issue a direct challenge to the announced values of Anglo-American society—he did not attempt to marry Hemings or legally establish his paternity of her children—he could do as he pleased, feel as he pleased at Monticello for reasons that were entirely his own. She and their children left slavery in ways designed to draw the least public attention possible to how Jefferson had lived for thirty-eight years. But, though he would never openly challenge society’s expectations of him as a white man, society could not demand everything of him. To have freedom, privacy, and dominion over himself was why he had built his mountain home in the first place.
As for the transformation by love so important to modern sensibilities, we can see little trace of it in Sally Hemings, because of her status and relative invisibility in the record. One looks at Jefferson and sees none of the transformations that some, ignoring the clear limitations of his eighteenth-century Anglo-American heritage, might hope would naturally have flowed from his having loved her: giving up career and legacy and openly acknowledging her and their children, working to get himself in the position to free all of his slaves, recanting any disparaging comments about the nature of black people. Jefferson did none of those things. What he did instead was to ring down a curtain on his relations with Hemings and their children so heavy and thick that it took over a century and a half to effectively raise it. Any personal transformation that took place was
conducted behind that curtain at Monticello, off-limits to all who did not see Hemings and Jefferson there and experience what it was like to occupy the same space with them.
Perhaps the most salient question for our times about Hemings, Jefferson, and love is about history, definitions, and who has the power to define. On the question of beginnings and love, some of the most important and often repeated stories illustrating the completely affectionate (as opposed to partially utilitarian) origins of Jefferson’s relationship with his wife come to us from his legal white great-granddaughter, born many years after their deaths. Those stories have played a major role in defining Jefferson in relationship to his wife. For most of American history, Jefferson’s biographers had the power to write the “official” record of his family life, and they essentially wrote the Hemingses out of it. Moreover, they accepted the Jefferson family’s denial of Sally Hemings’s connection to him, citing that family’s insistent and much repeated alternative version of who she was at Monticello, a version that ultimately could not withstand the close scrutiny of either careful analysis or modern science.30
It is also true that a Jefferson great-granddaughter through the Hemings line told a similar story about Hemings and Jefferson’s origins in France when explaining why her great-grandmother gave up the chance for freedom and came back to Virginia, saying, “Jefferson loved her dearly.”31 In other words, she and other family members answered the questions why Hemings trusted Jefferson and came back to Virginia with him, by referencing her confidence in her knowledge of that fact, a confidence that allowed her to take what seems a breathtakingly large risk. Other members of that generation had their own stories about their family. Of course, they were no more in Paris at the Hôtel de Langeac in 1789 than Jefferson’s legal white descendants were present at their ancestors’ beginnings in Williamsburg. There is, however, every reason to believe that both sets of descendants correctly described the state of affairs in their forebears’ lives.
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 45