Return to Philadelphia: Petit and Banneker
After a journey of over eight hundred miles, Hemings returned to Philadelphia and settled back into his routine as chef and butler.39 There were constant reminders of his life in France. The furniture Jefferson had bought there filled the renovated house, and at least part of the look of the interior of the Hôtel de Langeac was re-created right there on High Street. Letters from Jefferson’s friends still in France arrived, and though Jefferson’s records would not reveal this, it is possible that Hemings himself had communications from people he had met in the country. Other items evoked physically intimate memories for him. The bedding he had used in France and that of his sister Sally had arrived in the country just before he started the northern tour. Jefferson wrote to his daughter that he was shipping them home, that James’s bedding was to be kept for him, and that Sally Hemings was to be given hers to keep.40
The most potent reminder of Paris arrived in July of 1791 when Adrien Petit came to Philadelphia, answering Jefferson’s entreaty of the year before to come and be his “housekeeper” at a very generous salary. This was luring him back into the work force because after Jefferson left Paris he had retired from service and gone back to his native Champagne to live with his mother. He quickly became bored with his life there, telling William Short “qu’il meure d’ennui,” and decided to take the offer, which was both an adventure and an opportunity.41 Jefferson had grown accustomed to a certain style of living in France and wanted to re-create that to the extent that it could be done in the United States. Bringing the maître d’Hôtel de Langeac to the United States fit perfectly with his desire to be comforted in his immediate surroundings—having the same people in his circle following familiar routines and procedures. So intent was he on having Petit back in his household that he did not even bother to look for another person to fulfill that role. When Maria Jefferson came to live with her father in the fall of 1791, a small core of those who had resided at the Hôtel de Langeac, without Sally Hemings and Martha Randolph, was reunited.
Petit worked for Jefferson until he resigned his post as secretary of state in 1793, he and James Hemings re-creating the old division of labor that had existed at the Hôtel de Langeac. Petit was in charge of the overall running of the household, doing the grocery shopping and preparing the desserts, which Jefferson said was absolutely required of his maître d’hôtel.42 So Hemings and Petit collaborated on food preparation from before the meals were prepared to the end, for Petit’s desserts had to complement Hemings’s dinners. The two men likely accompanied one another on early morning excursions to the market to find the best fare for the table.
Petit’s arrival, along with the French furniture and paintings, completed the Francophile cast to the house on High Street. Even Jefferson’s coachman, François Seche, was of French extraction. Petit may not have been terribly comfortable in English, for all of the correspondence between himself and Jefferson was in French. So French was probably very much in the air as Hemings, Jefferson, and Petit interacted with one another in the household—out of both necessity (Petit’s) and self-interest (Hemings’s and Jefferson’s). After over five years abroad, and a heavy investment in learning French, both Americans no doubt very much wanted to preserve as much of the language as they could. Jefferson, for a time, very noticeably kept the style of dress of a man who had spent time at the French court.
All of this contributed to the picture of Jefferson as a “cosmopolitan and artistic pacesetter” in a city that had become a more “sophisticated place” than it was when he first lived there as a young revolutionary.43 The furniture, paintings, and knowledge of Jefferson’s service in Paris alone would not have set his image so firmly in the eyes of those observing him. Hemings and Petit brought the food and language of France, the country’s most distinctive treasures, to Jefferson’s household. The interior of the house was designed to be viewed, and when Jefferson’s guests, people as diverse in political views as Benjamin Rush and Alexander Hamilton, wandered through the dining room, or “salon,” as Petit called it, and parlor admiring the paintings, they perhaps overheard snippets of French pass between Petit and Hemings, or when Jefferson made a request or gave an order to his transplanted maître d’.44 The entirety of this presentation—French furniture, people, and food—enhanced the authenticity of Jefferson’s effort to re-create a little part of Paris in the heart of Philadelphia. Here was definitely a case where the personal was political. The Francophilia displayed so openly in Jefferson’s home gave ammunition to his political foes as the French Revolution grew more out of control and bloody. What probably seemed a charming affectation on his part at first took on a more sinister import as the 1790s unfolded.
The idea of home was never very far away from Hemings, as letters and packages were going to and coming from Monticello. Approaching Christmases away from the mountain, in 1791 and 1792, each year Jefferson sent home boxes containing a football field length of linen and material for Sally, Critta, and Betsy Hemings. The 1792 packet included “2. peices of linen. 52. yards, 9. pairs of cotton stockings (3 of them small) 13. yds. cotton in three patterns, 36. yds. Calimanco, 9. yards of muslin.” Whether he or James, or both of them, went shopping for all this is unknown. Jefferson also noted that “Bob” (Robert Hemings) was “to have a share of the linen.” He had “promised” to send Hemings “a new suit of clothes” but “instead” sent him “a suit of superfine ratteen” of his own, which Jefferson had “scarcely ever worn.” He mentioned that he had forgotten to buy stockings for Robert, and asked his daughter Martha to purchase some from “Colo. Bell’s on [his] account.”45
The most maddening aspect of James Hemings’s story is that both his voice and the conversations he had with his family and people like Petit are lost to us. Their situation was extraordinary—a French white servant and an American black slave who had worked together for the same man on two continents. Both understood the position they occupied in Jefferson’s life and were willing to use their knowledge to their advantage when the occasion warranted. James Hemings’s time would come near the end of his stay in Philadelphia, whereas Petit’s moment of truth with Jefferson came just a bit earlier, during one particularly incendiary time in the life of the household. Petit’s days in Philadelphia were not easy. While he and Hemings apparently got along well, he had a difficult time with Jefferson’s other employees, and it caused a great amount of turmoil in the household, becoming so intense that it disrupted the harmony that Jefferson always sought to maintain.
The coachman, Seche, along with his wife and children, lived in an “apartment” on the grounds of Jefferson’s Philadelphia residence. Petit and Seche’s wife fell into a simmering conflict that grew to full-scale war when the wife alleged that Petit engaged in sodomy and that he loved men. She had apparently said many other things to him that he found objectionable, but he was unwilling to ignore this. He wrote to Jefferson, who had gone with James Hemings to Monticello for a visit, saying essentially that it was either Seche’s wife or him. If she was not immediately removed from the household, he would return to France.46
Jefferson’s response to Petit was on par with his letter to his daughter after she wrote to him complaining about Thomas Mann Randolph’s impending marriage to Gabriella Harvie, in terms of the clarity of the voice that comes through in the letter. When matters were really serious, Jefferson’s tone in letters became almost conversational—not in the sense of employing informal language, which he did not, but in terms of his ability to convey effectively a true connection to the recipient of his letter. At those times, he managed to establish a sense of intimacy unhindered by the form of writing on a page, bridging the geographical distance between himself and whomever he was writing to, allowing the person to hear what he was saying and how he was saying it, not merely to read his words.
Even though he wrote back to Petit in French, Jefferson’s “voice” comes through very clearly in the different language. His first sentence immediately r
eassured: “It was yesterday, my friend, that I received your letter of July 28.” He did not address directly what Seche’s wife had said, nor did he attempt to analyze any of the details that had set Petit off. Instead, he concentrated on making it plain that the matter would be handled entirely to Petit’s satisfaction. He ended by eloquently invoking an expression of his long association with Petit and his regard for him, saying to his furious employee that since he had sought him out in France and waited a whole year for him to arrive he should know that he was not going to allow anyone to make him let him go so quickly, and then, finally, “je suis et serai toujours votre ami” (I am and always will be your friend).47 That same day Jefferson wrote to George Taylor, who was handling his affairs in Philadelphia in his absence. Without mentioning the substance of the dispute, he instructed his agent to let Seche and his wife know where he stood. Taylor was to tell Seche that he “had such long experience of the fidelity of Petit, and value[d] him so much, that [he] would not have a moment’s hesitation to say that no person shall stay about the house who treats him [Petit] ill.”48
Petit, still in a tizzy about all this, evidently got the message from Jefferson’s letter and knew his employer was on his side, for when Taylor talked to him about Seche he upped the ante and insisted that both the wife and the coachman had to go. Taylor thought this unfair. “I told him that as he alleged nothing against him [the coachman], it would not only be cruel but unjustifiable in me to discharge him. He declared that unless both were removed he would go to france.”49 This was a volatile situation that could easily have erupted into violence, a dispute between a man and a married woman whose husband would naturally take his wife’s part.
Taylor instructed Seche not to go into the house or even speak to Petit, if that was possible. He was also directed to find another place for his wife and children to live. In the end, Petit would not budge from his position that the whole family had to go, and Jefferson’s agent, with understandable nervousness, given that he was putting a man who had a family to support out of work, fired him. When he told Jefferson what had happened, Jefferson assured him, “What you have done…is exactly what I would have wished.”50
There is little question whose side Hemings took once he returned to the city. This conflict had been brewing over the months before the final confrontation, and he probably already had chosen a side. His connection to Petit was far stronger and more long-standing than his connection to Seche and his wife. Petit referenced this shared history in the last line of his letter detailing his problem with the Seches when he told Jefferson that he wanted him to pass along his greetings to “Gimme” and “Salait” (Jimmy and Sally), the brother and sister serving as touchstones, reinforcing his own association with Jefferson.51
Whether true or not, Mrs. Seche’s statement would in her and Petit’s time, though not in ours, have been characterized as a “charge” or “allegation” or “accusation,” as if Petit had engaged in sodomy, or really did love men, and had actually done something wrong. Sodomy was a crime, although no criminal prosecutions were brought for it in Philadelphia during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and no trials at all during the entire century. There was a fairly extensive subculture of men who engaged in same-sex activity in the city, who met in taverns and other establishments, but Philadelphians adopted a look-the-other-way attitude about the matter. Loving men, short of any kind of physical display of it, was not a crime, and it is fascinating that Mrs. Seche separated the two, suggesting that there was as early as the 1790s, as some scholars have posited and others have actively disputed, a consciousness in the general public of men who loved other men, not just men who engaged in same-sex activity.52
That Mrs. Seche thought to deploy homosexuality as a weapon in her conflict with Petit is also intriguing, given that there were other things she could have said. Was this a common taunt by women to men? Very little is known about Petit, and it is impossible at this juncture to know whether Mrs. Seche really believed that what she said was true, somehow knew it was true, or simply reached for what she thought might be a hurtful thing to say. Servants who worked closely with one another knew the backgrounds and activities of their co-workers. Indeed, Petit’s reputation probably preceded him, as his arrival had been greatly anticipated for many months. Members of the household knew at least that Petit was a bachelor with no obvious sign of wife or children. They may well have heard that when Jefferson contacted him he had retired to the countryside to live with his mother and thought he was not living the life of a “normal” man, without understanding the nature of French society. As noted earlier, many French masters refused to hire, or fired, personal servants who married. Petit may well have loved men just as she said, or he may have been the victim of the excessive power that French masters exercised over their servants, a power that came back to haunt them during the 1790s when the “lower orders” exacted revenge upon those who had taken unimaginable liberties with their lives.
Petit’s strong response conveys how serious a matter it was to him in the context of the world in which he lived. Still, to insist not only that Mrs. Seche be removed from the household but that her husband, who had not figured at all in his angry letter to Jefferson, also be put out of work for his wife’s invectives seems an overreaction. Mr. Seche had a family to support, one who had suffered a grievous loss in the year before this, which Jefferson revealed when he noted that he paid the funeral expenses for one of the Seches children.53 Was Petit incensed at Mrs. Seche for lying about him, or angry at her for bringing the truth of his life into the open? One wonders whether he would have repeated in a letter to Jefferson what she had said if her statement was true, unless the couple had threatened to say something to Jefferson themselves and this was Petit’s preemptive move.
Jefferson showed no sign that he was bothered by what Mrs. Seche had said about Petit, beside the discomfort it caused his longtime employee. There is no indication he made any effort to investigate the truth or falsity of her statement, no show of concern that it posed any threat to his household. Either he did not believe Petit loved other men, already knew he did, or simply did not care one way or the other. His chief concern was to make sure that his maître d’hôtel, who had come all the way from France at his request, did not leave the country hurt. Above all, Jefferson could not abide domestic discord. One sees echoes of his response to the Petit-Seche battle in his handling of a later power struggle in the President’s House. When one of his white servants, Edward Maher, complained about having to wear the same livery that Jefferson’s black servant John Freeman wore, Jefferson’s response was acid. He said that he had known and valued Freeman longer and better than Maher, suggesting that the disgruntled man should simply put the livery on and fall into line.54 The complaining Maher did not survive long in Jefferson’s employ, and the master of Monticello was sanguine about his departure: “I like servants who will do everything they are wanted to do.”55
In the end, the Seches, or at least his wife, badly misjudged how far they could go in baiting Petit and suffered for their miscalculation. They probably did not understand that Jefferson was not a prude and did not abandon friends or family easily. When his son-in-law’s sister Nancy Randolph got into her famous trouble with her brother-in-law at Bizarre and became a social pariah, he continued to host her at Monticello—even when his daughter Martha refused to have Nancy in her home.56 Jefferson’s presence evidently had been sufficient to keep matters in the household from coming to the point of exactly the kind of poisonous domestic turmoil that he feared and loathed. Away at Monticello, he had had no way to keep the peace. Three days after he returned to Philadelphia with James Hemings, Jefferson closed the book on his time with his coachman from New York: “Pd Francis Seche for wages & board from Sep 1. to this day 19.D. He now leaves my service & John Riddle comes.”57
IN PHILADELPHIA, James Hemings was at once at the center and periphery of momentous events in the life of the nation—at the center because of his physic
al proximity to some of the men who were making history, at the periphery because his race and status did not allow him to have a direct and personal hand in shaping those events. His impact on society came from being a member of the group whose past, present, and future in the country loomed over all serious discussions of where the nation would head in the coming years. In August of 1791 Jefferson received a letter from an African American who put the matter to him directly, not raising James Hemings’s name specifically, of course, but seeking some clarification of what the future would hold for men like Hemings and his brothers and women like his sisters.
Benjamin Banneker, a free black man from Maryland was both a mathematician and astronomer. He prepared a scientific almanac that he sent to Jefferson, thinking that he would understand the spirit in which it was presented. He said that he was writing
in consequence of that report which hath reached me, that you are a man far less inflexible in Sentiments of this nature [that blacks were inferior beings], than many others, that you are measurably friendly and well disposed toward us, and that you are willing and ready to Lend your aid and assistance to our relief from those many distresses and numerous calamities to which we are reduced.58
Banneker went on to appeal to Jefferson on the basis of his words in the Declaration of Independence about the equality of mankind, suggesting that it served as a basis for him and other whites to “wean” themselves “from those narrow prejudices” which they had “imbibed with respect to” blacks and to work toward ending slavery. Banneker’s approach to Jefferson can be seen as the formal start of black Americans’ conflicted political engagement with him. Even before this time, and certainly long after it, blacks used the words of Jefferson’s declaration as a promise, or as a tool of irony, to express the gap between American ideals and the reality of blacks’ lives.59
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 58