Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  Following her lonely quarantine, Sally returned to Jefferson’s home. In the new year of 1788, she, like her brother, received wages, although irregularly: twenty-four livres in January, then nothing until the following November, when Jefferson began several monthly payments of twelve livres. That monthly salary was, as Gordon-Reed pointed out, “well above that of the average female live-in servant in Paris” and matched the allowance that Martha was receiving. There is no record to suggest what Sally was doing to earn this pay, but there are many possibilities. She could have been assisting her brother the chef; sewing, mending, and doing some washing; perhaps engaging in some light housework. Jefferson’s Paris household staff was unusual in that, before Sally Hemings’s arrival, it was all-male. With no designated housekeeper, Sally Hemings may have taken on that responsibility. She was probably responsible for caring for his clothing and linens, as well as those of Jefferson’s daughters when they visited him. In any event, for Jefferson, who believed that domesticity was the work nature fitted women to do, these tasks would have been completely reasonable for a female servant.

  How and when their relationship changed during Hemings’s two years in Paris have been the subject of much controversy, as has the question of the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children. For generations, historians followed the lead of Jefferson’s grandchildren, whose defense of him seemed sufficient to quash the first rumors of the relationship that surfaced in a Richmond newspaper in 1802. Not until 1974 did a white historian take seriously the words of Sally Hemings’s son Madison, who had recounted his family history a century earlier in 1873. After laying out her theory in her book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Fawn Brodie was excoriated by a cadre of Jefferson experts, who did not shrink from personal attacks on Brodie herself. But a new trend in early American history of asking about the experiences of ordinary people of the past facilitated deeper questions about slavery and opened up additional avenues of research.

  The path-breaking work of Annette Gordon-Reed and Monticello historian Lucia Stanton shed even more light on the Hemings-Jefferson controversy and opened up the history of the slave communities at Monticello. In 1998, DNA testing documented a connection between Sally Hemings’s youngest child, Eston, and the Jefferson male line and conclusively refuted the assertions of Jefferson’s grandchildren that their Carr cousins had fathered Hemings’s children. While not direct proof of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity, the science appeared to offer the best hard evidence to counter the stout denials of those who styled themselves Jefferson’s “defenders.” After a year’s reexamination of all the evidence—historical and scientific—the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation published a report on its website in January 2000, concluding that the preponderance of the evidence pointed toward a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings that resulted in four surviving children.

  That relationship began in Paris. It is impossible to know precisely how or when. But it is possible to deduce why. Sally Hemings was a lovely young woman of sixteen or seventeen, who contrasted greatly with the educated and vocal aristocratic French women whose free expression of political ideas so distressed Jefferson. Domesticity was Sally Hemings’s venue; care of Jefferson’s rooms was her job. Nor was the age difference a problem. Jefferson and his elder daughter had teasingly encouraged James Madison’s courtship of Kitty Floyd, a woman almost twenty years his junior, while in Philadelphia; and when Martha’s future father-in-law took a second wife, no one batted an eye at the thirty-one years that separated them. Sally Hemings reminded Jefferson of the home he missed and likely of his wife, who was, after all, her half sister. Of course, at home, slave women were frequent targets of their owners’ desire; and although Jefferson hated confrontation, preferring persuasion rather than force, his actions were entirely in line with the presumptions of all masters in a slave society. Such a woman answered all that Jefferson needed, without the complications of a broken deathbed pledge, an unwanted stepmother for his daughters, and a second set of heirs.

  The calculations of this relationship were considerably more complicated for Sally Hemings. “She was just beginning to understand the French language well,” her son Madison related in 1873, “and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved.” Undoubtedly she and James had talked about staying. He was equipped with a skill, and unwilling to sound like the country people so often hired for menial labor in the city, he had hired a tutor who would school him in aristocratic French. James Hemings was planning for his future clientele, and they were not in Virginia. Sally too had a marketable skill as a femme de chambre. And they both knew French law would be on their side if they pressed for their freedom. But if she stayed, she would never see the rest of her family again. She would never again see the breathtaking views from Monticello or experience the softness of a Virginia spring. The beauties of Albemarle County tugged at the heartstrings of Monticello’s slaves as well as its master’s.

  As Jefferson’s thoughts turned toward returning home, he made it clear to Sally Hemings that he wanted her to accompany him. But, according to Madison, she refused. Thus began Jefferson’s persistent campaign of persuasion. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges,” Madison continued, “and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years.” From their subsequent history, we can guess what some of these privileges were. Neither Sally Hemings nor her children would be forced to work “in the ground,” the common phrase for agricultural work. Unlike Jefferson’s other slaves, her children would not go to work until they were fourteen years old. They would spend their childhood at her side. Their clothing would be better than that of most slaves. Neither she nor her children would be compelled to serve Jefferson’s daughters, her contemporaries.

  The most extraordinary privilege that Sally Hemings won in her own treaty, as Madison called it, was freedom for her children. It was a remarkable promise, given and accepted, although she knew that no court in the United States would force Jefferson to keep it. Her son’s words suggest that Sally Hemings was already pregnant with Jefferson’s child as she deliberated. “During that time,” Madison Hemings related, “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte by him.” Strictly speaking, the word concubine refers to the legal status occupied by a woman who lives with a man without marrying him. But marriage between a master and slave was a legal impossibility in every state; nor was Sally Hemings Jefferson’s mistress, since he was not married. But Madison’s use of the word to describe his mother’s relationship with Jefferson is tinged with his own pain and humiliation at his mother’s perpetually inferior status. She would never acquire the honor and respect that came with being a wife.

  Madison’s use of the French-derived word enceinte is also curious and equally suggestive. In its most common usage, it means pregnant. However, it has a longer history dating back to the medieval period, when it referred to the outer wall of a castle. Surrounded by moats, the castle’s outer fortification could be breached only by a drawbridge, lowered from inside. That is, it served as a defensive military boundary. In an account of his mother’s Paris negotiations with his father, Madison used not one but two martial terms: treaty and enceinte. Returning to slavery in Virginia, Sally Hemings may not have had the leverage to refuse Jefferson when he wanted access to her body. But her body certainly formed the line of fortification for her children. Through her body, the hereditary tie to slavery mandated in Virginia law in 1662 would be broken. In her line, she would be the last slave.

  So when Jefferson finally received the long-awaited word from Congress granting him permission to come home, she had a life-altering decision to make. Whether their relationship would continue depended upon Sally Hemings. Perhaps she weighed her options in long conversations with her brother. Or perhaps she was already quite sure about where she wanted to live her life. In the end, Madison tells us, “in consequence of his promise, on which s
he implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.”

  ONLY TWO DAYS AFTER JEFFERSON crossed the Place Louis XV and witnessed an angry Paris mob beat back Swiss and German mercenaries, another Paris crowd stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. It was the explosion that the king, the new National Assembly, and even diplomats like Jefferson had, with cautious optimism, hoped could be averted. In his role as American ambassador, Jefferson had enjoyed a front-row seat to the unfolding drama as France lurched, step by step, toward revolution. He had attended the first meeting of the Estates General at Versailles in May. A representative body composed of three estates—clergy, nobility, and commoners—the Estates General never acquired the status of a political institution over its almost five-hundred-year history; rather it was called only occasionally by French monarchs. It was in his desperation to deal with the worsening state of his nation’s finances—in large part a result of its expensive participation in the American Revolution—that Louis XVI called the Estates General into being that spring. The question of taxes was almost immediately overshadowed, however, by that of representation, that is, the distribution of power. Would each estate have one vote, thus giving the advantage to the king when the first two estates outvoted the common people, the Third Estate, two to one? Or, would each individual representative have a vote, giving the advantage to the greater numbers of the Third Estate?

  Jefferson followed the debates closely, attending the meetings at Versailles almost daily in May and June. There he witnessed the growing impasse between clergy and nobles on one side and the Third Estate on the other. Impatient, the Third Estate claimed the authority to conduct the nation’s business and broke away in mid-June to form the National Assembly. They invited clergy and nobles to join them, but as equals. In doing so, they destroyed the notion that government should be based on a hierarchy of people, just as the American Revolution had so recently done. The king’s concession, ordering the first two estates to accept the invitation of the third, had brokered the fragile peace Jefferson was enjoying that Sunday morning until furious nobles forced Louis to reconsider.

  Jefferson decided to remove his daughters from the volatile city, although not because of the violence he knew would reverberate out from the streets of Paris into the provinces. Almost a year earlier, he had written to Congress asking for leave to return home, “with a view,” as he diplomatically put it, “to place my daughters in the society & care of their friends.” But he was a worried father. At seventeen, Martha had arrived at a marriageable age, and he had decided it was time to separate her from the temptations of French high society before she could be swept off her feet by a glittering aristocratic suitor. He had been thinking about this since the previous summer but had wanted the girls to stay in Paris long enough for Maria to perfect her French. By the explosive summer of 1789, however, “the necessity of my going is so imperious,” he anxiously told James Madison, “that I shall be in a most distressing dilemma” if the family could not leave before the winter, when travel would become even more hazardous.

  One wonders why the necessity had become “imperious.” Martha certainly did not want to go. She had arrived in Paris a girl, but had grown into a cosmopolitan young woman. A year after their arrival in France, she was speaking French as easily as English, Jefferson admitted, while his secretaries “Humphries, Short, and myself are scarcely better at it than when we landed.” Language was only the first mark of her cultural immersion. Martha was becoming French in other ways: in her religion (as we have seen), dress, appreciation of fashion, manners, and perhaps her views on love and marriage as well. And even in the few letters that survive from this period, it is plain that she was gaining confidence in her own voice. In Paris, she had formed and was unafraid to make clear her abhorrence of slavery (months before Sally Hemings arrived) and an interest in politics. These were developments that could easily alarm a republican from Virginia who infinitely preferred a society in which women were “too wise to wrinkle their heads” with the subject, as Jefferson diplomatically put it, to that which was “filled with political debates into which both sexes enter with equal eagerness.”

  Martha had not always cared about such things. As a child in Philadelphia, she had been so inattentive to her dress, for example, that Eliza Trist had quietly suggested that Jefferson may want to mention it in his next letter to her. Nor did Martha’s admission to the convent school effect an immediate change, as indicated by Marie de Botidoux’s recollection of her coffee-stained aprons and Jefferson’s reproach that when she went abroad from the convent for visits, she was to change out of her uniform. Yet in her latter days at Panthemont she was receiving commissions from Bettie Hawkins in London to buy her a cloak, advise her about the latest fashion in hats “chez vous,” and consult with others to “enquire what skins are the most in fashion for Pelises—a pale pink satin trimm’d with either white or red Foxes skin?” Martha’s newly acquired taste pleased; Bettie thought “the cloak you have sent me, is the most beautiful thing of the kind I ever recollect to have seen.” Jefferson’s accounts also reveal her heightened interest in fashion, which began just before her withdrawal from the school in late April 1789 and increased steadily thereafter. Jefferson recorded expenditures for luxury summer fabrics, gloves, silks, shoes, stays, and a hat—and that was just in the month of May!

  These purchases document preparations for Martha Jefferson’s more formal entry into French society, at a time in her life when courtship and marriage loomed large on her horizon and marital calculations were of the utmost importance. The notes and letters she received from her school friends (which, significantly, she kept for the rest of her life) allow us to overhear their conversations, even when we cannot listen to Martha’s side of them. As we have seen, these young women straddled the precarious divide between respectability and infamy, no small challenge in a school designed to maintain their childish innocence, even as they were expected to know how to fend off assaults on it. They shared stories, passed judgment, and spent hours considering the workings of the marriage market.

  An English classmate named Rachel Dashwood was the subject of much discussion. Her “bold” conduct led Bettie Hawkins to fear for her “light character,” although she hoped that separation from the bad influence of her “infamous cousin” might result in both “better principles” and “a little more virtue.” Martha’s opinion was more charitable on the subject of Miss Dashwood, but she, too, indulged in gossip about her. “The story you told me today of her and the Eaton boys really shocked me,” Bettie gasped in response. Martha liked to tease Marie de Botidoux about her beau, apparently in front of their other friends. “I wrote some nonsense to Botidoux last week about Boident,” Elizabeth Tufton told Martha. “I hope I have not affronted her. If I have it is all your fault, so you must prepare to be well scolded Tuesday.”

  Martha had her own romances and suffered teasing in turn. Her friend Julia Annesley noticed her early first crush: the Irish-born Abbé Edgeworth de Firmont. “Do you know I have an idea the Abbe has rather—a—a—a—penchant for you—” Julia began, before finishing slyly, “Oh Lord I beg your pardon, it is owing to your learning your lessons so well.” A week later, ostensibly offended that Martha had not yet answered her note, Julia pretended to pout. “I wish out of mere spite that the Abbe may scold you tomorrow. I do not care—I think that is the greatest mortification you could possibly experience, therefore I wish it you—I am sure you look very pretty now you read this—Lord!” she laughed, mindful of her friend’s fair skin, easily prone to blushing. “What a—pretty—color you have.”

  Well beyond the stage of first crushes by her last summer in Paris, Martha was sixteen, old enough among her aristocratic acquaintances to be seriously considered in marriage. In August 1789, Elizabeth Tufton thought she had detected a secret crush. “You cannot think how I laughed yesterday on somebody’s asking me whether I was in love with Tom,” she wrote from London, “upon which I answered that I was not but that I knew an Amer
ican young lady who admired him above all things in the world.”

  Even though she had returned to England, Bettie Hawkins also thought she caught a whiff of romance. “I thank you for the Italian verses, which by the bye you never sent me—let me add en passant [in passing] that absences generally proceed from les affaires du Coeur cela ne fait ciel [affairs of the heart and not just out of the blue],” she wrote. Surely only Martha’s preoccupation with a romance could explain her failure to keep up her correspondence with Bettie. “I ask no questions as one is shy,” Bettie teased before turning to persuasion to extract more information. “I have heard of making those kinds of confidences.” Precisely which romance kept Martha so distracted is difficult to say; there appears to have been several possibilities.

  In addition to the mysterious Tom, there was an American, a Mr. St. John, who confessed to Marie de Botidoux that Martha was his first passion. St. John had been a student at Messieurs Loiseau and Lemoine’s Institution Pour le Jeune Noblesse (school for the young nobleman) on the rue de Berri. From his perch across the street from the Hôtel de Langeac, St. John “spent the nights at his window, contemplating your house,” Marie wrote to Martha years later. His account shocked Marie, who had never heard Martha mention him. But she remembered that Martha had received and then returned a ring from an unnamed young man. “Well, it is precisely me,” St. John told Marie.