TWENTY-TWO
He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred.
—MADISON HEMINGS
THE YEARS 1788 AND 1789 were a time of cascading events in Jefferson’s public and private lives. In Holland there were difficult financial negotiations. In France there was the rush of revolution. And within the walls of the Hôtel de Langeac there was Sally Hemings.
The French impulse for liberty—both in its laws against slavery and in the revolution against Louis XVI—tested Jefferson personally and politically in 1788 and 1789, threatening him in the most intimate of spheres and forcing him to confront the full implications of his philosophical creed.
In this tempestuous time, Jefferson apparently began a sexual relationship with his late wife’s enslaved half sister. Since her arrival with Polly in the summer of 1787, Hemings had been paid some small wages—twelve livres a month for ten months. Jefferson had bought clothing for her and had her inoculated against smallpox. Her brother James was trained as a chef. Sally’s day-to-day routine is less clear, though she may have served the Jefferson daughters as a maid at the convent school during part of her time in Paris.
Jefferson could hardly have been leading a more complicated life. His work was urgent, his life in Parisian intellectual and social circles busy and dizzying. He was trying to raise his two daughters. He feared for his young, vulnerable republic, and he had been engaged in a flirtation with a married woman, slipping in and out of hired carriages in the shaded suburbs of Paris and strolling through the romantic forests of the city. From Versailles to the city’s theaters and opera, he was living vibrantly and fretting constantly. Any hour could bring devastating news about America—about her security, her stability, her standing.
There, in the midst of the swirl and the storms, was a beautiful young woman at his command—a woman who may have reminded him of her half sister, his wife. The emotional content of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is a mystery. He may have loved her, and she him. It could have been, as some have argued, coercive, institutionalized rape. She might have just been doing what she had to do to survive a system so evil that much of the civilized world had already abolished it, accepting sexual duty as an element of her enslavement and using what leverage she had to improve the lot of her children. Or each of these things may have been true at different times.
Sex, Jefferson himself once remarked, was “the strongest of the human passions,” and he was not a man to deny himself what he wanted. Sally Hemings, for her part, was “light colored and decidedly good-looking,” Jefferson grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph recalled. In following years Jefferson was always at Monticello at the times she was likely to have conceived the children she is known to have borne.
What little evidence we have strongly suggests that Sally Hemings was an intelligent, brave woman who did as much as she could with what little the world had given her. She began this phase of her life as she apparently intended to carry on: with strength and an instinct for survival.
For in this opening hour, geography and culture—those things that had conspired to enslave her—were on her side. In France, enslaved persons could apply for their liberty and be granted it—and there was nothing their masters could do about it.
Jefferson knew this well. As the American minister he had once advised a fellow slave owner on the system. And Sally Hemings was no lonely slave girl in Europe: Her big brother James was there with her, at the Hôtel de Langeac, and could have helped her win her freedom.
According to their son Madison Hemings’s later account, Sally, who had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” was pregnant when Jefferson was preparing to return to the United States. “He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred,” Madison Hemings said.
To demur was to refuse, and Jefferson was unaccustomed to encountering resistance to his absolute will at all, much less from a slave. His whole life was about controlling as many of the world’s variables as he could. Yet here was a girl basically the same age as his own eldest daughter refusing to take her docile part in the long-running drama of the sexual domination of enslaved women by their white masters.
“She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved,” said Madison Hemings. “So she refused to return with him.”
It was an extraordinary moment. Fresh from arranging terms with the bankers of Europe over a debt that was threatening the foundation of the French nation, Thomas Jefferson found himself in negotiations with a pregnant enslaved teenager who, in a reversal of fortune hardly likely to be repeated, had the means at hand to free herself.
She, not he, was in control. It must have seemed surreal, unthinkable, even absurd. For the first time in his life, perhaps, Jefferson was truly in a position of weakness at a moment that mattered to him. So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.
Sally Hemings agreed. “In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia,” said Madison Hemings. “Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself), and Eston—three sons and one daughter.”
Their father kept the promise he had made to Sally in Paris. “We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born,” Madison Hemings said. It was one of the most important pacts of Jefferson’s life.
In Paris, the Assembly of Notables had given way to the calling of the Estates-General for May 1789. “I imagine you have heard terrible stories of the internal confusions of this country,” Jefferson wrote a correspondent in July 1788. “These things swell as they go on.… As yet the tumults have not cost a single life according to the most sober testimony I have been able to collect.” He would not be able to say this much longer.
On the diplomatic front, the American failure to pay its European debts—chiefly its debt to France, which was one of the many reasons the royal treasury was in such trouble—was problematic for Jefferson and Adams. In early 1788 the two men met in Amsterdam for sessions with Dutch bankers. Among Jefferson’s concerns was finding capital enough to repay French officers for their services to America during the Revolution and to ensure that there was money to support the American diplomatic establishments in Europe. He and Adams accomplished both ends in 1788.
As confidence in American stability grew, so did America’s credit in European markets. Jefferson, a man with large personal debts, deplored the weakness that came with weighty borrowing. “I am anxious about everything which may affect our credit,” he wrote Washington in May 1788. “My wish would be to possess it in the highest degree, but to use it little.”
With deftness, Jefferson also negotiated the first treaty to be ratified under the new Constitution: a convention with France that defined diplomatic relations between the two nations. The initial version of this convention, negotiated by Franklin in 1784, was thought to have been too accommodating to the French. Jefferson reentered the fray, saying that he took as his guide the principle that “instead … of declining every article which will be useless to us, we accede to every one which will not be inconvenient.”
It was a practical way of executing a delicate duty. Under the convention as ratified, the United States was seen and treated as a stronger, more sophisticated, more respected force in the world. Jefferson had done his work well.
American politics under the Constitution fascinated him. Washington was to be president, Madison told him. John Hancock and John Adams were “talked of principally” for vice president. “Mr. Jay or General Knox would I believe be preferred to either, but both of them will probably choose to remain where they are,” said Madison. “It is impossible to say which of the former would be preferred, or what other candidates may be brought forward.”
The speculation was irresistible. “It is … doubtful who will be Vice President,” Jefferson wrote a correspondent in August 1788. “The age of Dr. Franklin, and the doubt whether he would accept it, are the only circumstances that admit a question but that he would be the man.… J. Adams, Hancock, Jay, Madison, Rutledge will be all voted for.”
The maneuvering became more pronounced as the October days passed. Given Washington’s Virginia roots, the choice for vice president, Madison reported, lay between Hancock and Adams. For Madison, the two-man field left much to be desired. “Hancock is weak, ambitious, a courtier of popularity given to low intrigue.… J. Adams has made himself obnoxious to many, particularly in the Southern states, by the political principles avowed in his book.”
Jefferson watched it avidly. There was, he said in November 1788, an “ill understanding between Mr. Adams and Mr. Hancock. Both proposed as vice presidents.”
Always there were whispers about monarchy. Supporters of a strong national government, “who had been utterly averse to royalty, began to imagine that hardly anything but a king could cure the evil,” Washington aide David Humphreys told Jefferson. “It was truly astonishing to have been witness to some conversations, which I have heard.”
Jefferson wanted to come home, at least for a while, and he was especially interested in establishing personal contact with Washington. To be on the scene in America had its political uses, for he hated the thought that things were said of him behind his back, a subject of annoyance his friend Francis Hopkinson touched on in a letter from Philadelphia in December 1788: “By the bye, you have been often dished up to me as a strong Antifederalist, which is almost equivalent to what a Tory was in the days of the war.”
Jefferson took the occasion to attack the spirit of faction. “I am not a Federalist, because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever in religion, in philosophy, in politics, or in anything else where I was capable of thinking for myself,” Jefferson replied to Hopkinson in March 1789. “Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore I protest to you I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much farther from that of the Antifederalists.”
Reiterating his positions, he said: “My great wish is to go on in a strict but silent performance of my duty: to avoid attracting notice and to keep my name out of newspapers, because I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”
From America, Madison archly reported John Adams’s failed attempt to coin a grand title for the president. “J. Adams espoused the cause of titles with great earnestness.… The projected title was—His Highness the President of the United States and protector of their liberties. Had the project succeeded it would have subjected the President to a severe dilemma and given a deep wound to our infant government.”
Jefferson called Adams’s proposal “the most superlatively ridiculous thing I ever heard of. It is a proof the more of the justice of the character given by Dr. Franklin of my friend: ‘Always an honest man, often a great one, but sometimes absolutely mad.’ ”
It was a brutally cold winter in France, but Jefferson was cheerful. “Our new constitution … has succeeded beyond what I apprehended it would have done,” he wrote in January 1789.
Whether something similar might one day be said of the French was a live, explosive question. The cold winter of 1788–89, a scarcity of bread, and general political unease made for a potent mix. As the Estates-General met in May 1789 riots in Paris killed about one hundred people. Beginning a pattern that persisted, Jefferson interpreted the violence in the most benign light possible, arguing that the episode was unconnected to the larger national questions.
In the first week of June, Jefferson had sketched a charter of rights for the French and sent it to the Marquis de Lafayette. Jefferson’s draft was minutely practical. There was no rhetoric about human liberty, no rigorous listing of rights to free speech and the like. It was, rather, a document about process and the workings of power. (“Laws shall be made by the [Estates-General] only, with the consent of the king,” for example, and “The military shall be subordinate to the civil authority.”) He wrote it in a hurry, caught up in the drama of the hour and engaged by its possibilities.
On Wednesday, June 17, 1789, the frustrated Third Estate of commoners successfully designated itself the National Assembly, effectively igniting what history calls the French Revolution. Reacting to centuries of royal absolutism and popular powerlessness, embarking on an odyssey that would lead to successive attempts at republican government, the murders of the king and queen, the institution of a Reign of Terror, and finally the establishment of a dictatorial empire under Napoleon Bonaparte, the French would spend the next quarter century struggling to find their way into modernity. It was a struggle with concrete implications not only for France but for the world, not least for the United States, the nation it had helped bring into being, and for its leaders, including the American minister living at the Hôtel de Langeac, Thomas Jefferson.
The unrest in Paris struck home for Jefferson. His house was robbed three times. He monitored a street battle between mobs of Parisians and German cavalry at the Place Louis XV that began with the people hurling stones and ended with “considerable firing” from the mercenary troops.
On the night of Tuesday, July 14, 1789, he was at his friend Madame de Corny’s when he learned of the storming of the Bastille. As he reported two days later: “The tumults in Paris which took place on the change of the ministry, the slaughter of the people in the assault of the Bastille, the beheading [of] the Governor and Lieutenant Governor of it, and the Prevost de Marchands, excited in the king so much concern” that he went to the Estates-General promising to disperse the troops and pledging reform “to restore peace and happiness to his people.”
The next act remained uncertain. “The heat of this city is as yet too great to give entire credit to this, and they continue to arm and organize the Bourgeoisie.” By the following day, the seventeenth, Jefferson was telling Thomas Paine that “a more dangerous scene of war I never saw in America, than what Paris has presented for 5 days past.”
He confronted the prevailing terror with grace. Writing Maria Cosway, he said that “here in the midst of tumult and violence,” the “cutting off heads is become so much a la mode, that one is apt to feel of a morning whether their own is on their shoulders.”
On Tuesday, August 25, 1789, Lafayette asked Jefferson to “break every engagement to give us a dinner tomorrow, Wednesday. We shall be some members of the National Assembly—eight of us whom I want to [coalesce] as being the only means to prevent a total dissolution and a civil war.” The next day the National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written by Lafayette. Not only was this central document of the French Revolution influenced by the Declaration of Independence, but Jefferson had given counsel to Lafayette during its drafting.
That evening, dinner began at four at the Hôtel de Langeac, and conversation continued until ten. For six hours, he was, Jefferson recalled, “a silent witness to a coolness and candor of argument unusual in the conflicts of political opinion; to a logical reasoning, and chaste eloquence, disfigured by no gaudy tinsel of rhetoric or declamation, and truly worthy of being placed in parallel with the finest dialogue of antiquity, as handed to us by Xenophon, by Plato, and Cicero.” At Jefferson’s table, the group had agreed to a structure for the new republic and “decided the fate of the [French] Constitution.”
Expectations for revolutionary success ran high. Lafayette, who had sent George Washington the key to the Bastille, was in charge of the security of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, hoping to preserve order as the revolution moved forward. Patsy Jefferson recalled standing at the window with some friends looking out into the streets of Paris as the king and queen rode by under the protection of her father’s colleague and friend. First came the royal coach, and a chamberlain bowed to her. Next the young women heard cries that resembled “the bellowings of thousand of bulls.” They were cheers for Lafayette. “Lafayette! Lafayette!” cried the crowds, and the young Frenchman, noticing Patsy watching from the window, bowed to her—a mark of respect she never forgot. All her life she kept a tricolored cockade, the symbol of the early days of the Revolution, as a memento.
Jefferson himself was to remain cheerful despite violence and threats of violence. “So far it seemed that your revolution had got along with a steady pace: meeting indeed with occasional difficulties and dangers, but we are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a feather-bed,” Jefferson would tell Lafayette.
In early September 1789, fighting illness, Jefferson wrote a long letter to James Madison. He composed it in the fevered context of the French Revolution, and by his own account his thinking sprang from particular events in Europe. “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” A little later, he added: “The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [the Jeffersonian definition of a generation].”
Taken literally, these musings are a prescription for chaos. If there were no authority from precedent, no laws governing property or examples to guide us, then society would be reduced to a state of nature in which the strong could thrive most effectively, taking advantage of the disorder to consolidate power.
A key question is whether Jefferson meant posterity to follow his thoughts to the letter, or whether, as he so often did, he was sharing the churnings of an eager mind in a time of change. The latter possibility is most likely, for while he long held to the idea of the exaltation of the present rather than the reflexive preservation of the past, he did not seriously press for the expiration of all laws at generational intervals. In 1789 in particular, he was thinking of the world in which he had lived for the past five years: the French nation in which individual and institutional destinies were determined largely by hereditary station. “This principle that the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive application and consequences, in every country, and most especially in France [emphasis added].”
Writing to the Reverend Charles Clay within months of returning to the United States in 1790, Jefferson was decidedly earthbound. Clay was seeking a congressional seat at the time. Jefferson wrote that “you are too well informed a politician, too good a judge of men, not to know that the ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time, and eternally press forward for what is yet to get.”
So which was the real Jefferson—the philosopher advocating the end of binding laws, or the politician who believed “that we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time”?
The likely truth is that these competing Jeffersons were both real. He thought one way in one era and another way in other eras—and sometimes he thought differently more or less simultaneously, a common human trait, particularly among the curious and the intellectually active.
As a political man he was able to operate on these sundry levels yet always returned to the arena from the mountaintop to take up governing an imperfect world—in his phrase, eternally pressing forward for what is yet to be had. (In France, he was soon back on the issue of rifle manufacturing—a sign he remained tethered to reality.)
Madison took care with his reply to Jefferson’s rhapsodic letter. It often fell to him to absorb raw Jefferson thoughts. One of Madison’s many services to the republic was the mediating role he played in Jefferson’s life, often protecting Jefferson from himself.
This was such an occasion, and Madison was gently but frankly skeptical. “The spirit of philosophical legislation has never reached some parts of the Union, and is by no means the fashion here, either within or without Congress,” he wrote Jefferson. “Besides this … our hemisphere must be still more enlightened before many of the sublime truths which are seen through the medium of philosophy, become visible to the naked eye of the ordinary politician.”
The medium of philosophy: Madison is saying that Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the revolutionary nature of the rights of man in Europe was an enthusiasm divorced from the realities of governing in America. It was a fair point, and the exchange offers an example of Madison’s utility to Jefferson as an affectionate, respectful, discreet check on his episodic flights of philosophy. Madison would always be there for Jefferson, reminding him—deftly—of his own core convictions about the limits of politics, the imperfections of government, and the realities of human nature.
On the last Sunday in September 1789, Thomas Jefferson left Paris with his daughters and Sally and James Hemings to return to America. At Le Havre and Cowes, he showed others how to measure the width of a river and tutored Polly in Spanish. He also set out “roving through the neighborhood of this place to try to get a pair of shepherd’s dogs,” he wrote. “We walked 10 miles, clambering the cliffs in quest of the shepherds, during the most furious tempest of wind and rain I was ever in.” No dogs, but on the walk he encountered a disturbing scene. “On our return,” he wrote, “we came on the body of a man who had that moment shot himself. His pistol had dropped at his feet, and himself fallen backward without ever moving. The shot had completely separated his whole face from the forehead to the chin and so torn it to atoms that it could not be known. The center of the head was entirely laid bare.” The day after the storm and the discovery of the suicide, Jefferson found a dog to buy, purchasing “a chienne bergere big with pup.” He thought sheepdogs “the most careful intelligent dogs in the world.”
He soon set sail. Aboard the ship, Sally Hemings was among those in service to Jefferson and his family, as she would remain until the day he died, thirty-seven summers later.