Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

  To John Trumbull a month later, he was more direct. “My daughters have been sick two months, and still continue sick; the younger very seriously so.” In fact, Jefferson feared for her life. Maria suffered all the classic symptoms of the disease. Contracted from fleas or body lice, typhus strikes when the bacteria they carry enters the bloodstream after the victim has broken the skin by scratching. A very high fever then follows, sometimes for as long as two weeks. Extreme cases, such as Maria’s seemed to be, can also induce delirium and a subsequent stupor. By the end of January, however, Maria was on the mend and, Jefferson hoped, out of danger. He would send the girls back to their school once they were fully recovered.

  Their permanent return to his home a few months later, in April 1789, was a happier occasion, even if it had been prompted by yet another worrisome event: Martha’s desire to join the convent. Martha nonetheless continued to correspond with her English friends who had left Panthemont before her and those who remained behind. Marie de Botidoux was crushed when Martha’s father remained intractable in his decision to withdraw his daughters. “At last, dear Jefferson, it has been decided that you will not come back here,” she wrote to Martha, disconsolate. “I did not want to believe it but, unfortunately, there is no reason to doubt it. You have no idea how sad I am. I cried last night despite all my attempts to turn my mind away from such thoughts, and I am crying again at this very moment.” To relieve the pain of their separation, however, Martha received visitors at her father’s home, especially Marie, and went out in company with them.

  Jefferson ensured that Martha’s last few months in Paris were enjoyable. According to a granddaughter, she was “introduced into society at the brilliant court of Louis the Sixteenth” and importuned her father to let her go to more balls than the three-per-week limit (he said no). No longer needing to request the Abbess’s permission, Martha enjoyed promenades in the parks and gardens near the Hôtel de Langeac. She continued to frequent the Palais Royal, including an outing in late June with the Duke of Dorset and his nieces. “A Gentleman told me he had seen you,” one friend wrote, impressed by the duke’s attentions to Martha, “& that you remain’d there till it was quite duskish.”

  Jefferson also showered Martha with gifts. In addition to her new clothes, he bought her a ring, increased her monthly allowance by a factor of five, and paid for a whip as she resumed riding. These purchases signaled Jefferson’s tacit acknowledgment that Martha had arrived at courtship age; he well understood that marriageable young women “of course require to be clothed more expensively than at any earlier period.” But shopping for these new items was also meant to provide sufficient distraction and entertainment so that her last few months in Paris would wipe out any desire for the cloistered life of a nun.

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  THE SUMMER OF 1789 brought an enormous transition in the life of Sally Hemings as well. It is difficult to reconstruct her life at the Hôtel de Langeac during this period. Certainly an attraction was growing, at least on Jefferson’s part, since Hemings was pregnant by the time they left Paris in September. We do know she left the house for a five-week period in early 1789, unexplained in Jefferson’s accounts except for the notation that he paid “Dupré 5. Wks board of Sally.” Although we know that Dupré was Jefferson’s launderer, we do not know the dates of Sally’s absence from his household. Annette Gordon-Reed has suggested that Hemings’s stay with Dupré overlapped with the earlier period of the Jefferson girls’ illness, when Maria was at her lowest ebb. Perhaps Jefferson sent Sally Hemings away to prevent her from contracting the disease, easily spread through body lice, after seeing its harrowing effects on Maria.

  With the girls’ return in April, Sally Hemings’s duties may have changed as well. The care of Martha Jefferson’s new silk gowns may have fallen to her, as well as dressing her hair, mending, running errands, and generally attending to the girls’ requirements of a lady’s maid. But Jefferson’s expenditures rose for Sally Hemings as well, as she more frequently accompanied them in public. The 168 livres that Jefferson spent in April on Hemings’s clothes does not compare with the single purchase of 229 livres’ worth of silk for Martha; nor does the 25-livre fee for making Sally’s clothes compare with the bill for 303 livres that Jefferson paid Martha’s tailor. Still, it was a significant amount of money to invest in a servant’s clothing, considering that her wages of twelve livres per month already exceeded that of the best-paid female domestics in the city. Certainly Hemings needed to be well dressed as she accompanied Martha, since servants’ dress reflected their employer’s status. But whether this expenditure constitutes evidence of Jefferson’s growing interest in her, we cannot be sure.

  In the course of her duties as Martha’s maid, Sally Hemings met her friends and made an impression on them. In her letters to Martha, Marie de Botidoux asked to be remembered to “Mlle Sallie.” But if anyone was confused about Sally Hemings’s place in the Jefferson household, with knowing French discretion, they refrained from asking. It was not unusual in French families for poorer relations to serve their wealthier connections in exchange for bed and board; nor were sexual predations of masters on their female servants unusual either. The young but worldly-wise Botidoux took the unusual household configuration in stride, diplomatically using the honorific “mademoiselle” (which normally was never used to address servants) to signal her acceptance of Martha’s lead that Hemings was not an ordinary servant.

  That was just one of many ways in which Hemings learned something about her position in French society: Whatever her status in Virginia, as far as Parisians were concerned she was not a slave in France. Sally Hemings saw a great deal of aristocratic Paris in her attendance on Martha Jefferson. She ate fine French cooking (her brother was a master chef, after all), she chatted with Martha’s aristocratic friends, and she learned about French social mores from overhearing their talk. Thus, Paris had taught Sally Hemings a great deal about society, rank, presentation, dress, and language in addition to her skills as a femme de chambre by the time Jefferson decided to return to Virginia.

  Added to the intelligence and maturity the Eppeses had already seen in Hemings, these lessons would certainly have bolstered her confidence in herself and in her ability to enter into negotiations with her master about returning home. These conversations did not go well for Jefferson, who fell ill with a migraine at the beginning of September, as he often did when faced with stressful situations. “She refused to return with him,” Madison said of his mother, when Jefferson received word of his leave. Hating confrontation, he began the campaign to win her consent instead. In the end, she trusted her judgment of the man who made so many promises in exchange for hers, and went back to Virginia.

  Departure preparations were not as extensive as they would have been had Jefferson been leaving Paris permanently. Having applied for a temporary leave to escort his daughters home to Virginia, he fully anticipated returning the following spring. Thus, the Hôtel de Langeac was not topsy-turvy with the crating of eighty-five boxes of furniture, paintings, sculptures, and plates that William Short, left behind to tend to Jefferson’s affairs, would have to contend with later. Rather, Martha and Maria shopped for gifts for their Virginia relatives and arranged for the careful packing of their French fashions. Sally Hemings may have persuaded her brother to escort her on the shopping trip that secured a lotion pot from a pharmacy on the fashionable rue de Richelieu, hard by the Palais Royal. Almost two centuries later, the cracked remnants of that pot would be excavated from the soil of Mulberry Row, Sally Hemings’s first home on her return to Virginia.

  Martha’s Paris goodbyes were limited. Julia Annesley and Bettie Hawkins had left long before, of course. But it seems that the Tufton sisters, Elizabeth and Caroline, were prevented from seeing Martha by a collusion of their elders. “We are in such confusion ever since nine oclock this morning when the Duke decided to go to England tomorrow,” Elizabeth wrote in haste to Martha one August morning. “The idea of parting with you hurt us more than
we can describe, but as we have a great deal to do, we think it better not to see you.” Martha sent them parting gifts, including a ring for Caroline. “I shall value it for your sake and I will never part with it,” Caroline wrote gratefully from London. Still, it did not make up for the hurt of not being able to say their goodbyes in person, “but Mr Jefferson likewise told the Duke it was better not so we must submit.” Elizabeth’s rationalization that a last visit would be a “very painful task” best avoided echoes the soothing platitudes of her uncle and her friend’s father. Rather more likely, the two men preferred to avoid the awkwardness of a last meeting that would underscore the spurned suitor’s disappointment. As he waited at Cowes to embark for America, Jefferson wrote several letters to Paris friends, such as that to Madame de Corny admitting that “adieus are painful; therefore I left Paris without sending one to you.” But at least Jefferson could look forward to renewed acquaintances in the spring; as far as they knew, his daughters were going home forever.

  Jefferson’s efforts to find direct passage from Havre, on the French coast, to Virginia were fruitless, so he, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings were forced to make a channel crossing to pick up a ship leaving from England. Leaving Paris on September 26, the family group arrived in Havre two days later, where they lingered for ten days waiting for a break in the miserable weather. Nathaniel Cutting, a Massachusetts sea captain who had helped Jefferson make his travel arrangements, was waiting with them. The night of September 30 was particularly bad, he remembered. “I do not recollect to have heard the Wind blow so very violently before, since I have known this Country,” the experienced seaman wrote in his diary. After a couple of false starts, the Jefferson party arrived in Cowes on the Isle of Wight at two A.M. on October 9. Weary with seasickness from their rough twenty-six-hour crossing, they fell gratefully into the warm, dry beds Captain Cutting had secured for them at the Fountain Inn. There the family spent another thirteen days waiting for their ship, shopping and sightseeing. At Jefferson’s invitation, Cutting frequently took tea with the family as they whiled away the days before finally departing England on October 23.

  They sailed aboard the Clermont, which Jefferson had secured exclusively for his own party and his baggage. Under the supervision of “as bold a sailor as a judicious one should be,” as Jefferson described him, the ship made the crossing in twenty-nine days. What Jefferson had feared from a two-leg voyage came to pass: They suffered a second bout of seasickness, more severe than the first. But after several days they were all well enough to enjoy the rest of a pleasant voyage. As she had two years earlier, Maria made friends during her travels. “Maria, who is at my elbow desires me to tell you she has not forgot you,” Jefferson later wrote to Cutting with a smile.

  The smooth passage ended as dramatically as it had begun, however. Approaching the Virginia coast, Martha remembered, they were surrounded by “as thick a mist as to render it impossible to see the pilot” who would have guided them into port. After three days, the captain decided to make a run for it, even though he had not yet seen the capes that mark the entrance to the James River. “We had to beat up against a strong head wind which carried away our topsail and were very near being run down by a brig coming out of port who having the wind in her favour was almost upon us before we could get out of the way,” Martha recalled later, the frightening memory of near catastrophe still vivid. The family safely disembarked, but their travails were not over. Less than two hours after its arrival, the Clermont caught fire and would have been scuttled had not the flames been discovered just in time to prevent it. An agonized Jefferson waited to see if any of his papers of state survived. By sheer accident, the captain, having seen the doors to the Jefferson family quarters open after they had left the ship, closed them, keeping the flames from penetrating their staterooms. The thickness of the trunks likewise protected their new French clothes from destruction.

  The shock of the change of scene from Paris to Norfolk confirmed Martha’s worst fears. Small and incommodious, Norfolk still bore the scars of the Revolution, during which, as a thriving commercial port, it had been burned by the British in 1776. The family party would not have even been able to find any lodgings “but for the politeness of the gentlemen at the hotel (Lindsay’s) who were kind enough to give up their own rooms for our accommodation.” As it was, James Hemings had to sleep in a hammock. The contrast with their first Paris hotels (either of them) could not have dismayed Martha more.

  Clearly she had confided her fears about what she would find in America to her friends: Elizabeth Tufton hoped that Martha would find that “the idea you had formed of America was an unfavorable one, and that you will spend your time more agreeably than you imagined.” Martha must have sketched a bleak picture of Charlottesville to Bettie Hawkins Curzon, since she also wanted a full accounting when Martha returned. “Pray tell me if you have Balls, Plays & all the amusements we enjoy in Europe?” the new Mrs. Curzon wanted to know, both curious and anxious. Assuming that in the backwoods of Virginia “you cannot get every article of dress with as much facility as we do,” she also helpfully offered to procure for her anything Martha might want. Privy to many of her friend’s secrets, Marie de Botidoux knew that Martha would have preferred even a nun’s life in the convent in Paris to going back to life in Virginia. And although newly met as they waited in Havre, Captain Cutting had noticed in Martha “some emotion of chagrin at the thought of being separated from the engaging circle” of her friends in Paris. Martha’s heart sank as she surveyed the town before her. Norfolk presented such a dismal view that even Maria sobbed her distress at what she saw. “Mais c’est bien different de Paris!” she cried.

  Maria was eventually comforted upon her arrival at Eppington, where she was reunited with her beloved aunt and uncle Eppes. There she met the twins, Matilda and Mary, who had been born in her absence. Maria’s delight that Mary was named in her honor had been one of the bright spots of her Paris exile. Although they had made landfall on the twenty-third of November, it had taken the Jefferson party almost three weeks to reach Eppington. In the meantime, they had proceeded slowly through Virginia, stopping to visit friends and relatives. They had joyous reunions with Anne Skipwith, the half sister of his dead wife, and her husband, Henry, at their plantation of Hors du Monde, and with Jefferson’s sisters Martha Carr at Spring Forest and Mary Bolling at Chestnut Grove. They stopped as well at the Randolphs’ home at Tuckahoe, where Jefferson had spent so much of his childhood. There Martha regaled her cousin Judith with the stories of Paris that, five years earlier, Judith had predicted would be so entertaining. At some point on their trip home, she met again her cousin Thomas; they saw each other with different eyes now after their European education, hers in Paris, his in Edinburgh.

  Two days before Christmas they arrived home at last. After a six-year absence, the master of Monticello returned to a joyous welcome. “The negroes discovered the approach of the carriage as soon as it reached Shadwell,” Martha recalled at length, “and such a scene I never witnessed in my life. They collected in crowds around it, and almost drew it up the mountain by hand. The shouting, etc., had been sufficiently obstreperous before, but the moment it arrived at the top it reached the climax. When the door of the carriage was opened, they received him in their arms and bore him to the house, crowding around and kissing his hands and feet—some blubbering and crying—others laughing.” Such a homecoming for Jefferson, seventeen-year-old Martha, and eleven-year-old Maria was indelibly impressed in their memories. The story was told and retold, Martha remembered, embellished by later generations of slaves who swore that “the horses were actually ‘unhitched,’ and the vehicle drawn by the strong black arms up to…the door at Monticello.”

  Somewhere in the scene that day—perhaps—was sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings, pregnant for the first time, with her master’s child. It was a homecoming for her as well. She had been gone from Monticello as long as Jefferson had been. It was her childhood home, from which she had been
called as a girl of nine or ten, a maid to a child. She returned a woman, committed to a lifetime relationship with Monticello’s master. A new chapter was beginning for her and for the Hemings family: As Jefferson’s “substitute for a wife” (in the phrase of one of his neighbors), Hemings was positioned to defeat the reach of slavery for her children and to ameliorate slavery’s impact on her extended family.

  But while the records reverberate with the exuberant celebration of the white family’s return, they are utterly silent about Sally’s. She may have arrived earlier with her brother James, if he had gone on ahead from Richmond. James was with Jefferson as late as December 10, when Jefferson gave him money to pay for their laundry, but there are no further notations in Jefferson’s account book for the rest of the trip to track James’s whereabouts. It is impossible to know.

  The silence of the record is typical of white disregard for the significance of slaves’ lives; it is striking how infrequently slaveholding families, particularly women, discussed the slaves on whom their daily lives depended. At the same time, the silence also underscores the deep significance of Sally Hemings in Thomas Jefferson’s life as he returned to Monticello. As time would tell, Jefferson would arrange his life to accommodate the promises he made to her; he would refuse to acknowledge the accusations of his political enemies when they exposed his relationship with her; he never banished her from Monticello when it might have been easier for Martha and Maria if he did. His discretion protected his reputation as a Virginia gentleman, it is true; but it also provided some cover for Sally Hemings and her children. So effective was his silence, as Annette Gordon-Reed observed, it brought “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.”