Jefferson's Daughters

by Catherine Kerrison

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  OF COURSE, BOTH JAMES and Sally Hemings returned to slavery. Although France’s revolution was just beginning, the American Revolution was over, concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. But the changes it had effected for enslaved Americans were severely limited. Jefferson’s own attempt to condemn slavery in the Declaration of Independence had been deleted by the Continental Congress. Even though Jefferson had—inaccurately—framed slavery as a grievous evil imposed on the colonies by a corrupt monarchy, its condemnation in an American founding document could have had far-reaching implications. Instead the Constitution, just barely ratified by the time Jefferson got back from France, engraved in the country’s legal framework a variety of protections for slavery, not least of which was a provision that forbade Congress from ending the slave trade for twenty years.

  Still, a combination of the Revolution’s egalitarian rhetoric, economic considerations, and the press of evangelical Christianity had resulted in a more explicit reconsideration of slavery as a national institution after the war. By 1804, every state north of Delaware had either abolished slavery altogether or enacted a program of gradual emancipation. In the Upper South, particularly on the Delmarva Peninsula on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake, thousands of slaves would be manumitted, that is, formally freed. By 1810, free blacks formed almost a quarter of the black population in Maryland, three quarters in Delaware, and almost a third in the capital district.

  The scope of those changes had not reached Albemarle County, however. And to the extent that the horrors of slavery were ameliorated somewhat for Sally Hemings and her brother, it was because of the choices Jefferson was free to make. His decisions may have been prompted by sentiment, to honor his wife’s memory; they may have been selfish, to fool himself into thinking he was a benevolent slaveholder. They may have been entirely pragmatic, suiting his own purposes. Whatever his motives, they do not change the fact that like all southern slaveholders, Jefferson was the final law on his plantations. Jefferson would eventually free James Hemings, but grudgingly and not for seven long years. And he extracted a grievous price for doing so: James would pay for his freedom at the cost of training his younger brother Peter, whose new skills ensured his captivity for the rest of his life.

  Sally Hemings had been promised freedom for her children in her own remarkable “treaty” (as Madison called it) of Paris in exchange for her return to Virginia. But unlike the diplomatic treaty that ended the Revolution, Hemings’s received no fanfare; it was made behind closed doors. It was both secret and unenforceable. Yet both treaties bore deep significance. Both were deeply rooted in past relationships: centuries of enmity between England and France that indeed would persist beyond 1783, and almost two centuries of slavery, legislation, and social practices that in their persistence were emblematic of the inconsistencies and limits of the Revolution. Both also looked forward, however: the first as it announced international recognition of the infant United States and its republican experiment, and the second in its promise that the ancient bonds of slavery would be broken for Hemings’s descendants.

  The transatlantic revolutions also prompted fresh questions about the role of women in society. This was not an entirely new subject; Enlightenment figures had been debating the nature and role of women since the seventeenth century. A variety of theories had crystallized into two main competing views. The first, promoted by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), asserted that men and women were equal; since both could think (“I think, therefore I am,” Descartes famously wrote), both were set apart as equally human from the animals. The second, popular in Scottish Enlightenment circles, understood men and women as complementary beings, possessing characteristics unique to each sex’s function in the world but incomplete without the other. Several French writers followed Descartes’s thinking, most notably François Poulain de La Barre. Poulain’s On the Equality of the Sexes (1673) pointedly took the common ability of men and women to reason as a starting point rather than as an analytical conclusion in his thought. Thus, rather than arguing as so many male thinkers did that women’s inferior intellect justified male governance over them, he concluded that it was men’s application of force, defying nature’s dictates, that explained centuries of women’s subordination.

  Not until Mary Wollstonecraft, at the end of the eighteenth century, would a British writer follow Poulain’s thinking. Instead the view of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers had overwhelmingly prevailed. David Hume believed that, over the centuries, the nurturing female had gradually exercised a civilizing influence over the more brutal male, resulting in progressively more rational civilizations. (The English philosopher John Locke, much read by prominent American revolutionaries, dismissed women entirely from his political tracts, however, believing that self-government could work only among independent men.) The eventual triumph of reason, Hume anticipated, would temper men’s brutish nature, raise women’s status, and produce a harmonious society. But even so, it could never forecast the equality of the sexes, since they were so fundamentally different.

  Certainly Martha Jefferson’s readings at Panthemont in history, moral philosophy, and literature assured her that she was of the class of thinking, rational beings. Indeed, her literacy alone marked her apart from most European women; only 27 percent of French women and 40 percent of English women could read by the end of the eighteenth century. But from her childhood, her education—however extraordinary it may have been by Virginia standards—had been circumscribed by gender conventions and by her father. Jefferson had made that quite clear in a letter he had written to her from Annapolis when she was eleven. “If you love me then, strive…to acquire those accomplishments which I have put in your power,” he wrote, assuring her that her efforts “will go far towards ensuring you the warmest love of your affectionate father.” Although the boundaries of music, dancing, drawing, writing, and French widened from Philadelphia to Panthemont, Martha Jefferson’s opportunities—like those of all young girls—remained limited to those allowed and provided for by men.

  But France had given Martha a different view and vision. She grew up in a kind of semi-independence from her father during her years in the convent, and her friendships with both English and French aristocratic women had refined her manners, polished her appearance, and bolstered her confidence. Like them, she was an eager spectator to the political theater playing out on French streets. She forever kept a red, white, and blue cockade, the kind sported by Lafayette’s officers; and she told her story about witnessing Lafayette’s procession into Paris so many times, it eventually found its way into print in the early twentieth century. Two days after the storming of the Bastille, the popular general had met the king on the outskirts of Paris and escorted him to the city center in an effort to calm the unrest. Sixty thousand people, armed with pistols, swords, and a variety of improvised weapons, formed a dubious welcoming party as they lined the streets through which the king, the assembly members, and Lafayette passed. Watching the excitement from the safety of her window perch, Martha Jefferson heard the roar of the crowd as Lafayette approached. Looking up, he spied Martha and bowed. “Her young friends declared they were filled with envy,” a great-granddaughter reported at this mark of favor.

  Should women remain on the sidelines in such times, however, content merely to accept the homage of men who lived in the thick of the action? Jefferson certainly thought so, but to his distaste he found this question increasingly debated in the salons he had previously enjoyed frequenting. Indeed, the salons, the acceptable sites of female intellectual engagement, had changed over the course of that crucial decade of the 1780s: Those that had earlier been devoted to literature, philosophy, and science had become increasingly politicized. From his regular attendance at her salon, for example, the American Revolutionary Gouverneur Morris recognized that Madame de Tessé’s zeal for republicanism far outstripped his own. In that, she was hardly alone; Morris had observed in his diary that 1780s France was a “wom
an’s country” in which wives were as keen to discuss politics as their husbands. Morris was entranced, but Jefferson grumbled sourly, “Society is spoilt by it.”

  French women of all ranks enthusiastically embraced political participation, as the events of the summer of 1789 signaled new possibilities for governing: a constitutional monarchy in which the people, previously subjects to a king, were recognized as citizens with equal rights, guaranteed by a national constitution. Madame de Staël’s passionate interest in politics never wavered, even after she was forced into exile; in 1797 she published On the Current Circumstances Which Can End the Revolution, criticizing the excesses of the Jacobins and urging the creation of a representative government based on popular sovereignty. In 1791, Olympe de Gouges, the self-educated daughter of a butcher, published her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen,” an essay contesting the view of the world-renowned “Declaration of the Rights of Man,” adopted by French revolutionaries in 1789, that women were inherently inferior to men. Women whose names are forever lost to us took their places in formation alongside the national guard, following the drumbeat as they marched Paris streets; they demanded (and won) entry into local electoral assemblies, occupied the National Assembly the night that thousands of other women marched on Versailles, and gathered on the Champ de Mars (familiar today to millions of visitors to the Eiffel Tower) to insist that the sovereign will of the people be considered as the assembly deliberated about what to do with the king when he was recaptured after his escape attempt. No wonder Marie de Botidoux had exulted in her republicanism. The heady excitement as the old gave way to the new was intoxicating, bringing forth the possibility that a new order might embrace the contributions of women. And who better to influence, inform, and lead than educated women of rank—such as those who had studied at Panthemont?

  Across the ocean, the American Revolution had also politicized women. White women formed chapters of the Daughters of Liberty that ran spinning bees, published patriotic appeals, and supported boycotts to stiffen the resistance against Britain. During the war, they bought war bonds, donated food and clothing to the army, and stoically stood behind their soldiering husbands and sons. Men’s public recognition of women’s efforts, as one historian explained, “affirmed women’s capacity to act as political agents.” Still, in an age in which property qualifications excluded many white men as well as free black men from the vote, female suffrage was not a question that garnered much attention.

  A single book changed all that. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792 and immediately devoured in England and America, generated a full-bore national conversation about the woman question. Wollstonecraft’s appeals for equal educational and economic opportunities for women struck a chord among Americans of both sexes, for whom recent experience had made clear both women’s capacities and the artificiality of societal limits on them. In the 1780s and 1790s, male college debating societies discussed questions like “Whether Women Ought to Have a Share in Civil Government.” A 1793 graduate of the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia was emboldened to excoriate “our high and mighty Lords,” who, she charged, “have denied us the means of knowledge,” so that “the Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us.” An article in a New York magazine judged women’s exclusion from lawmaking as “both unjust and detrimental.”

  When Massachusetts writer Judith Sargent Murray exuberantly looked forward to a “new era in female history” in 1798, she echoed the enthusiasm of Martha Jefferson’s French friend Marie de Botidoux, for whom the egalitarian rhetoric of revolution also seemed so rich with promise. Following the Revolution’s human rights argument to its logical conclusion, New Jersey legislators had written a state constitution that allowed all propertied “inhabitants,” male and female, to vote. Over the course of thirty years, several hundred single propertied women braved the raucous male milieu at the polling stations to cast their ballots until that right was retracted in 1807.

  More Americans, however, agreed with the writer who found the prospect of a female politician “like a monkey in a China ware shop, where he can’t do any good but may do a great deal of mischief.” Women feared being labeled masculine or, worse, sexually aggressive if they took too great an interest in politics, falling afoul of those men for whom, to quote a minister of the era, a “dove-like temper is so necessary to Female beauty.” And although many women took advantage of the liberality of New Jersey laws to vote, they voiced no public outcry when they were formally disenfranchised in 1807.

  Martha Jefferson would not contribute a word to this international conversation about the rights of women. Perhaps she was persuaded by her father’s assessment that a good wheat harvest in the fall would calm the bestirred Parisians, pulling them back from the extremes of their radicalism. Perhaps she agreed with him that women were better suited to soothing men rather than engaging in divisive partisan politics. Or perhaps, as she followed the slaves carrying her father into the house and the great door of Monticello was closed behind her, she heard its thump unequivocally bring her Paris life to a close. The end of a life of balls and plays, fashion and learning, outings and gossip. The end of sparklingly clever conversations about politics and literature with well-educated, self-assured aristocratic women. The end of Roman Catholic churches, with all their beauty, mystery, and grandeur. The end of the pleasures of urban life in one of the most captivating cities in the world.

  There were other considerations now. Summoned by President George Washington to a new post almost as soon as they landed, her father was preparing for his imminent departure to New York to take his office as secretary of state. There apparently was no talk of his daughters going with him, but neither would he leave them at Monticello alone. Martha and Maria could be safely lodged with the Eppeses in their sleepy neighborhood on the banks of the sluggish Appomattox River. Elizabeth Eppes, he was confident, could supply those elements of female education so glaringly absent at Panthemont yet completely necessary in rural Virginia. She could teach them how to make a pudding, organize a household, and supervise slaves. It was the perfect solution for everyone but Martha, who no longer considered herself a child to be supervised. If she was not going to be buried alive at Eppington, she had to act fast.

  Thus it was, on a winter’s day in 1790, less than two months after her homecoming, she stood in the parlor of her father’s home and pledged herself for life to Thomas Mann Randolph, her cousin with whom she had just become reacquainted. The new Mrs. Randolph was all of seventeen years old.

  IT HAD BEEN A WHIRLWIND courtship. The cousins had barely known each other when they reconnected in 1789. They had met only twice before that we know of, during the war when eight-year-old Martha sought refuge from the British attack on Richmond with her mother and sister at the Randolph homestead of Tuckahoe, and again two years later in May 1783, as Martha and her father returned to Monticello from Philadelphia. Four years older than Martha, Tom Randolph saw his cousin with different eyes on her return from France, when she and her sister and father stopped in at Tuckahoe as they made their way back to Monticello.

  An immediate and strong attraction drew Tom Randolph to follow Martha to Monticello in December. Like Martha, Tom was well educated, having returned from two years’ study at the university in Edinburgh—the epicenter of the Scottish Enlightenment. He was tall, which would have suited Martha’s own height, and darkly handsome; Tom’s father, Jefferson’s second cousin, would have passed on the family legend that the Randolphs descended from Pocahontas herself. Unlike most young men Martha met on her return to Virginia, Tom shone with the polish of his cosmopolitan European experience. Their courtship may well have featured rides in the Albemarle countryside; Martha was an expert rider from her childhood, and we know she continued to ride in Paris. Tom, too, sat well in the saddle. His reserve complemented her fun-loving temperament. One of Martha’s favorite pastimes, perhaps more easily indulged in her native Albemarle County
than in the aristocratic circles of Paris, was sliding on ice. Scottish immigrants who migrated to Virginia by the thousands in the mid-eighteenth century had popularized the sport when they introduced ice skates to colonial America. Her less adventurous suitor contented himself with watching her, although he must have seen skating often in Edinburgh. Tom Randolph did have a temper that exploded unaccountably from time to time, but both father and daughter may have chalked that up to youth; the bridegroom was only twenty-one, after all. He would soon grow out of it.

  The only known portrait of Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., shows a darkly handsome young man. Plainly dressed, Randolph is depicted more as the serious planter and man of business he strove to be than as a gentrified grandee recently returned from his European sojourn. As governor, he would propose a modest though unpopular antislavery bill, encouraging the emancipation of a “fair proportion” of young male and female slaves each year.

  As Martha stood in her father’s parlor that February day in 1790 to be joined to Thomas Mann Randolph forever, Jefferson beamed, pleased with her choice. Tom was the son of his former schoolmate Thomas Mann Randolph, Sr., a man Jefferson thought of as a brother. As the eldest son, Tom stood to inherit the Tuckahoe estate where Jefferson had spent so much of his childhood and of which they expected Martha would one day be mistress. Tom had pursued a variety of intellectual interests in Scotland but was particularly keen on science and politics—subjects that fascinated his future father-in-law as well and furnished hours of convivial fireside conversations during Tom’s visits that winter. And there was comfort in taking a spouse from a family already well known to them: Martha and Tom were third cousins, hardly a problem among Virginia gentry who frequently married first cousins. Jefferson may have “scrupulously suppressed my wishes, that my daughter might indulge her own sentiments freely,” as he wrote to a French friend, but once the couple told him of their plans, he probably pushed to get the business accomplished before he had to leave for New York by the end of the month to join President Washington’s cabinet.