The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

by Gordon-Reed, Annette

  Although Patsy was still in her teens, she was, in Jefferson’s view, of marriageable age. Much as he loved the French, he wanted her to make a match in her own country. His daughter was enjoying the gilded life in Paris perhaps a bit too much for his tastes, going out to balls where she danced with eligible bachelors, socializing with other young women who were doing the same, no doubt exchanging notes about the new world they had entered and the people, that is to say, young men, they encountered in that world. He had left America with no idea he would be gone for so long. Before he knew it, five of his daughter’s formative years had been spent abroad, and she had been thoroughly acculturated. When Polly arrived in 1787, all the people who were the most important to Patsy were in France. Her mother was gone. While she probably longed to see her other relatives and Virginia, she could do that without having to remain there. Jefferson, however, meant to take her to Virginia for good and come back to France without her. Despite what he was saying to people back home, she was not ready to go and spoke of remaining in Paris and renting rooms at the abbey. That she was willing to stay in France without him shows just how far away from Virginia and his values she had grown.

  With the young people in the house making noises about staying, Jefferson was the beleaguered patriarch confronted with various mini-rebellions breaking out in his domestic realm. He was, if anything, extremely effective when it came to tamping down dissension within the ranks, personal and political. He managed to sail through the difficult last months with the household intact, and the gathering of belongings at the Hôtel de Langeac accelerated after August 23 when he received word (“tho’ not officially”) from John Jay that he had permission to take his leave of absence and that his secretary, William Short, was to serve in his stead for the duration of his leave.9 Once it was clear that the return home was imminent, the first order of business after packing was to find a suitable ship bound for Virginia. Jefferson immediately set out to do this, but the process turned out to be something of an ordeal itself—one that would not be over until the day in late October that he, James and Sally Hemings, and his daughters set foot on the Clermont bound for Norfolk, Virginia.

  With a revolution breaking out and Jefferson feverish to find a ship to take them all back to Virginia, the Hemingses faced squarely the stark reality that if they were to go with him they would be leaving the chance for legal freedom and returning to legal slavery. There had been a long time to think this over during the course of Jefferson’s preparations for going home. But Jay’s letter put matters on a do-or-die footing for the siblings, and it was evidently during the roughly one-month interval between receiving the letter and leaving Paris that Sally Hemings, in the very early stages of pregnancy, and Jefferson had their most direct confrontation.

  Fawn Brodie tied Jefferson’s sudden illness in the days immediately after he got word that he could come home to his conflict with Hemings. About a week after receiving Jay’s letter, he suffered a migraine attack that lasted for six days and confined him to bed.10 For a man who hated confrontation and, as he confided to his friend James Madison, particularly hated face-to-face bargaining, being in conflict with Hemings over her decision to stay in France would have indeed distressed him greatly, particularly because he knew that he could not legally make her come home. If he were desperate enough (and lost all sense of himself), he could try to physically take hold of her and her brother, an absurd plan on its face. He could not enlist the police to help him force them out of the country. What basis could he cite? They knew the status of blacks in the country, and he knew he had not followed the law and registered the Hemingses. There is no reason to think the servants at the Hôtel de Langeac would have stood idly by while Jefferson played kidnapper if the Hemingses had asked for their help. It is quite clear that workers in Paris in 1789 tended to support one another and were not exactly in a deferential mood toward their “superiors.”

  A Jefferson attempt at force would have been as ironic and problematic as showing up in the Admiralty Court to argue against the Hemingses’ freedom. As a twenty-eight-year-old, he had copied in his commonplace book “An Inscription for an African Slave.” It is not known why, or for whom, he prepared the inscription—whether it was to be used for a specific individual or as an all-purpose one for the burial ground for enslaved people at Monticello—but it appeared just below one written for the headstone of his favorite sister, Jane. The inscription contained lines from William Shenstone’s poem attacking the African slave trade. The stanzas express the longing of an African captured from the “bless’d” shores of his homeland and taken by “stern tyrant[s]” to toil for others.11 He would not be “trading” slaves, but trying to impress James and Sally Hemings and put them on a ship to take them across the Atlantic to Virginia would have put Jefferson in the position of the Barbary pirates he would fight a decade later as president.

  Stress often made Jefferson physically ill.12 Historians have long noticed (and he did too) that at pivotal moments in his life when he received unwelcome news or faced great pressure, his body responded negatively. When his mother died in 1776, he suffered a severe attack of migraine that confined him to his home for weeks. Although he never wrote, “I have developed a migraine because of the stress over my mother’s death,” the proximity in time of the two events and the pattern of his attacks suggest a causal relationship that says much about his personality and how he responded to serious emotional challenges.

  Jefferson was, without question, a deeply passionate and emotional man behind his peaceful and amiable exterior. The uniform kindness that his son Madison Hemings recalled was one of the ways he controlled himself. Disarming people with niceness allowed him to retreat from the rough-and-tumble of daily life. Hemings also described his father as one who “hardly ever allowed himself to be made unhappy any great length of time.”13 Although he was generally a cheerful and optimistic man, when matters were not in order, or when he was faced with a tough and seemingly intractable problem, one that his engineer-like efficiency, superhuman work ethic, and dogged perseverance could not solve, he could break down or act in ways designed to render the problem invisible.

  Although Jefferson’s prolonged headache during those final weeks in Paris may have been brought on by a dispute with Hemings over her plan to stay in France, he had other important reasons to be anxious and ambivalent—namely, the things he had to deal with when he got there, including what to do about Hemings once back on their home turf. The trip to Paris had provided a respite from personal tragedy and the wrenching experience of his professional failure as the governor of Virginia. He had actually been seeking escape almost from the time of his wife’s death, when one counts the months between September of 1782 and July of 1784 when he was away from Monticello almost all the time. Now he would go home and be very forcefully reminded, just by being there, of what had taken place on the mountain in the autumn of 1782.

  It did not help that one of the reasons he needed to return to Virginia was very much connected to his wife. Possession of his father-in-law’s tremendous wealth, combined with the social pedigree from his mother, had created a synergy propelling Jefferson to the forefront of Virginia’s economic and social elite. He was sent there, however, with an almost equally tremendous debt and its radiating effects, with which he grappled like Sisyphus for the rest of his life. As he prepared to go home in 1789, the “Wayles debt,” as he called it, threatened to overcome him financially.14

  John Wayles’s legacy operated on so many different fronts in Jefferson’s life that it was impossible for him to totally detach from it. The predicament with Hemings powerfully emphasized that truth. Once home, his in-laws, relatives, and others who were close to him would learn that the Gordian knot of family relationships that already existed on the mountain among the Hemingses, Wayles, and Jeffersons had now become even more tightly wound. Along with a very complicated economic profile, Wayles had given Jefferson a legal wife and, now, a young mistress. He could not have apprehended i
t, but her name would become more firmly attached to his than that of any other member of his legal family.

  Though Jefferson voiced certainty that he would return to Paris after his leave of absence, he had word from James Madison, two weeks before he received official permission to come home, that President Washington might ask him to join his administration.15 Jefferson was adamant. He had no interest, he said, in a job that would take him away from his home for any length of time, and he seemed sincere in this. But it is perhaps significant that when the position of secretary of state was actually offered to him, he said he did not feel that he could ever refuse a request from George Washington. Madison’s early query alerted him to the possibility that this inclination would be tested. So one can at least say that Jefferson’s faith in his return to Paris was not as firm as it had been the year before when he originally conceived the plan to go home.

  In his unfinished autobiography, which he decided to end just after his Paris years, Jefferson makes clear that he had had no intention of matching Franklin’s eight and half years in France and that he planned in 1789 to “place [his] daughters in the society & care of their friends, and to return for a short time to [his] station at Paris” (emphasis added).16 He could scarcely have contemplated anything else. Going back as minister to France on an open-ended basis could have meant a long-term separation from both of his daughters. His closeness to Patsy especially would not have allowed him to leave her on another continent for any extended period of time with an ocean between them. He had already lost one child under those circumstances, and the vagaries of mail carriage prevented him from finding that out until she was long dead and buried. As he was soon to learn, his life as a public servant would take him away from Monticello and his daughters for long stretches of time. He took comfort in the association of person and place. It was important for him to know—gratifying even—that when he was away his daughters were either at Monticello or within the vicinity of his home. The Atlantic Ocean was a different proposition altogether.

  Because he never spoke publicly or wrote about Sally Hemings, and her association with the place and idea of Monticello, Jefferson’s actions must substitute for his words. They make it clear: the association of person with place in Hemings’s case was absolute. There was never any serious question about where she was going to be. As we will see, there would be several key moments between 1790 and 1805 when, but for his relationship with her, she should have been somewhere else. Jefferson did not want that, and the people around him knew it very well. The reason he did not want Hemings to be anyplace other than Monticello was never meant to be a part of his public legacy, for reasons of privacy and prudence.

  Jefferson made a clear distinction between private and public life. When a correspondent who wanted to write about him asked him for the names of his grandchildren, he was incredulous. Why, he wanted to know, should the public care about the names of his grandchildren, and what did they have to do with anything that was going to be written about his life, which he took to mean a writing that focused on the only thing that should matter to the world at large: his acts as a public man.17 Hemings, even more than his grandchildren, was very definitely of his private world, the very deepest part of it. If he destroyed letters from his legitimate white wife to keep the details of their intimate world private, there could be no record at all of his time with an entirely forbidden enslaved black woman.

  As for prudence, Jefferson understood as well as any great man casting an eye toward posterity what types of things, fairly or not, could threaten what he took to be his legacy. Any out-of-marriage liaison that produced illegitimate children would be a threat to the way posterity viewed him; living with and having children with an African American enslaved woman, however, posed an exponentially greater one. That kind of thing was done, but the Anglo-American culture that formed Jefferson demanded that the men involved in those liaisons not lay their transgression before society in any open way. Then all could go about their business, pretending that what they knew was true was not true at all, but even entirely fanciful. The fictions of white society—the bedrock upon which white supremacy rested—could continue unchallenged. Jefferson knew his white countrymen’s attitudes quite well, and surely understood that in his time, and for a long time to come, they would forgive him almost anything but her. For one who wanted to be loved by “everybody,” or as many people as possible, that was a risk never to be taken. He may not have been thinking of himself as a future president, but he readily comprehended that his involvement in the American Revolution, his turn as minister to France, and whatever he might be able to do in Virginia assured him a place in history.

  Thus, Jefferson could openly express his longing for Monticello in a way that would be easily understood for what it generally and truly was: a desire for home, a place of memory existing alongside ambitious plans for the future where there was much to love and look forward to. But that desire would not be connected to Hemings specifically. What he knew, however, is that when he was away from Monticello, she was there and when he came home, she would be there, whatever others did or did not know about how she figured into his private construction of his life on the mountain—a process begun during what turned out to be his final months as minister to France.

  Jefferson pressed on with his initial plan, making references in letters during the summer to his requirements for the trip that mentioned very generally that he would be traveling with his “servants.” Given the Hemingses’ position, that could well have been just his assumption. By September 16, 1789, he was ready to be specific about his travel plans. He wrote to James Maurice on that day, telling him that he required “three masters births” for himself, Patsy, and Polly and regular berths “for a man and woman servant, the latter convenient to that of [his] daughters.”18 He was quite confident in the place he occupied in the lives of his traveling companions, for he then requested “a use of the cabbin in common with the others, and not exclusive of them which serves only to render [him] odious to those excluded,” as if there were no doubt in his mind that he was the sun around which all four young people revolved.

  JAMES AND SALLY Hemings left on Paris on September 26, 1789.19 While there are indications that her brother James returned to the city after his emancipation, Sally Hemings never did. Her last carriage ride out of the city and her final look at the place where she had seen and done so much and where her life had been transformed forever put an irrevocable end to an important possibility. The twenty-six days that passed between the time of her departure from the Hôtel de Langeac and when she set sail with her brother and the Jeffersons on the Clermont marked the last period in which she would ever have a legal right to claim freedom on her own terms. Now her future was in Jefferson’s hands. One must say in the hands of his relatives as well. He would be forty-seven on his next birthday in April of 1790. Hemings would be seventeen at some point in that same year. Almost three of her lifetimes could fit into his, and in their day Jefferson was long past being considered a young man. His own father had not made it past fifty, and there could have been no reasonable expectation that he would be given the gift of almost four more decades of life. If anything had happened to him, Jefferson’s daughters, and, most likely, Francis and Elizabeth Eppes—if anything happened to Patsy and Polly—would have controlled Hemings’s fate. There was no guarantee that these surrogates would have been at all concerned about what Jefferson had promised Hemings in Paris. The decision had been made, however, and they were now all on their way.

  Adrien Petit came along to assist the Virginians who were retracing steps and seeing sites and terrain—churches and small villages—that they had seen before as they passed for the last time together through Normandy’s rolling hills and green countryside. The night of the same day they left Paris, they lodged at an ancient Norman town along the Seine, Vernon, whose heart was the spectacular Collegiate Church Notre-Dame, dedicated in 1072, though not completely constructed until the seventeenth century.2
0 After Vernon, the party proceeded to Bolbec, which Benjamin Franklin described in 1785 as a “market-town of considerable bigness” that was “thriving,” its residents well dressed and in better physical condition than the people he had observed in other wine-growing regions.21

  After a night in Bolbec, they went on to Le Havre, only to find a raging storm that delayed travel across the Channel to Cowes, where they were to meet their ship bound for Virginia. Almost as soon as the party arrived in the port city, Jefferson met up with Nathaniel Cutting, an American living in Le Havre, who was one of the people Jefferson had consulted about finding passage to the United States. The two men spent time together while the Virginians waited for fair weather. Cutting’s diary records the time spent touring the city with Jefferson and his daughters and having tea with them at the Hotel L’Aigle d’Or, where the Jeffersons and Hemingses were staying. He made no specific mention of James and Sally Hemings except to note that “Jefferson with his daughters and servants rode round thro’ the Citadelle” on their way to what would be a failed attempt to board a ship to cross the Channel. A break in the weather turned out to be temporary, and the party returned to the hotel.22 Unless Cutting was following the normal practice of rendering servants invisible, the Hemings siblings were not involved in the Cutting-Jefferson excursions and were instead left to explore the town and find amusement by themselves.

  Petit left the Americans to return to Paris on October 7 with a gift Jefferson gave him “for his extraordinary trouble.”23 There is no evidence he ever saw Sally Hemings again, but he would have a reunion with James Hemings and Jefferson, not in France, as they expected, but in the United States. The day Petit left, Jefferson wrote to William Short describing a disturbing event that had taken place the day before. He had gone in search of “a pair of shepherd’s dogs.” He continued, “We walked 10 miles, clambering the cliffs in quest of shepherds, during the most furious tempest of wind and rain I was ever in.” He did not identify his companion, but it was not Nathaniel Cutting, whose diary makes no mention of the notable event Jefferson went on to describe. Cutting’s entry for that day confirms that it was awful with a “squally, Dirty, tempestuous morning, and contrary Wind,”24 but suggests that he did not see Jefferson until dinnertime. Given the nature of what he was doing, which might require someone to actually carry something for him, James Hemings was Jefferson’s most probable companion. With no way to be the chef, during those days of transit, Hemings temporarily reverted to the position he had held when he first came to France: manservant to Jefferson. It is possible that Petit may have been along with them, although he was readying himself for his return to Paris the next day. Campaigning through rough terrain up and down cliffs in a blinding storm looking for puppies to buy would seem to go well beyond the limits of the job description, maître d’ hôtel. The journey, long, arduous, and ultimately “fruitless,” had an almost surreal coda. Jefferson wrote,