Jefferson and Hamilton (32 page)

Beguiled, Jefferson begged off a prior engagement so that he could dine with the Cosways on the evening they met. That was the beginning. Over an indeterminate period, probably somewhere in the vicinity of six weeks, he spent numerous “half days, and whole days” with her. They explored Paris, visited galleries and museums, attended concerts and the theater, even ranged into the countryside. On one excursion along the Seine, Jefferson, feeling his oats and forgetting his age, attempted to bound over a fence. He did not succeed. He fell, breaking his right wrist. He underwent surgery, and for up to two weeks was confined at home with racking pain. Maria visited him throughout his convalescence. Richard Cosway’s feelings are unknown. However, once he learned that his wife planned to see the recuperating Jefferson, Cosway “kill’d my project,” as she put it, and suddenly cut short their stay in France. She thought her husband was more eager to return home than she had “seen him all this time.”
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Knowing that Maria would be leaving the next day, Jefferson called for her and they rode together in his new cabriolet. That night, the pain of her imminent departure was accompanied by an excruciating throbbing in his
wrist, brought on, he said, by “having rattled a little too much over the pavement.” He found “No sleep, no rest” that evening.
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The next morning, his agony notwithstanding, Jefferson had the horse hitched to his small carriage and accompanied the Cosways out of Paris.

Soon after returning home, Jefferson sent Maria one of the lengthiest missives he ever wrote, a four-thousand-word composition, all of it written with his left hand. This so-called “head and heart” letter was abstruse, deliberately so, as he was searching to learn if she thought their relationship had a future, but at the same moment fearful of where his unbridled passion was leading. He confessed that he had been a “mass of happiness” while with her, and that “every moment” they shared had been “filled with something agreeable.” He waxed on about her “qualities and accomplishments,” specifically her artistic skills and “modesty, beauty, and that softness of disposition.” But since the “awful moment” of her leaving, he had sunk to the depths of sadness. “I am rent into fragments by the force of my grief,” he wrote, adding that without her, he was “more dead than alive.” He portrayed himself and Maria as similar in many ways, but especially as victims of “the same wound.” Each suffered the sad, lacerating pain of loneliness, hers due to an unhappy marriage, his the consequence of a marriage that had come to a devastating end.

The “art of life is the art of avoiding pain,” he said, and one way for them to avoid their pain was “to retire within ourselves.” Though he did not say so, this was the course he had chosen following both his disappointments as a clumsy collegiate suitor and his wife’s death. On each occasion, he had become a “gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world” and left to face “unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell!” His life changed when he met Maria. Having “felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart,” he never wished to return to a “frigid” existence. Instead, he wanted to embrace her “wonderful proposition”; when two lonely people were thrown together and fell in love, she had apparently said, they should “retire” together. Sharing their love would “insulate” them against the “dull and insipid” world of sorrow and anguish.

Jefferson spoke of their “follies” in Paris, a married woman and single man carrying on an affair. But the risks they had run had been “worth the price.” He had no regrets. “We have no rose without it’s thorn: no pleasure without alloy.” Looking “back on the pleasures” he had found in being with her, he assured Maria that his tender memories remained secure in the “warmest cell” of his heart.

Reason told him that there was no hope for a permanent relationship with her, but he contrasted his situation with that of the patriots in his country who in 1776 had longed to be independent but knew that their dream could
only be realized through a seemingly impossible war against mighty Great Britain. Thankfully, he continued, America’s rebels had sought that which they cherished. “[W]e supplied enthusiasm against wealth and numbers: we put our existence to the hazard, when the hazard seemed against us, and we saved our country.”

Jefferson seemed to be saying that he and Maria should act daringly to save themselves. In the most esoteric fashion, he appeared to say that he wanted Maria to live with him at “our dear Monticello.” Together on his remote hilltop, they would “ride above the storms,” living happily not “in the shade but in the sunshine of life.” How “sweet it is to have a bosom whereon to recline our heads.”
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Jefferson wrote three additional times during the first weeks after Maria’s return to London, routing his letters through Trumbull, so that Richard Co-sway would remain unaware. In each, he probed to learn her feelings. “Write to me often. Write affectionately, and freely…. Say many kind things and say them without reserve,” he said. A Christmas Eve missive was filled with love. He confessed, “I am always thinking of you,” adding, “I am determined not to suppose I am never to see you again.” And he implored her to “Think of me much, and warmly. Place me in your breast with those who you love most.”
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Maria responded that she wanted to write “an endless letter,” one in which she would presumably say all the things he wanted to hear. However, given what she called the “torments, temptations, and weariness” that had forever haunted females, she said she was unable to be straightforward. Her guarded letter was so diffuse that its meaning was difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle. One way to read it was that she was telling Jefferson of her hope to leave her husband and live with him. Though perhaps not “reasonable in [her] expectations,” she said, she and Jefferson shared “trait[s] of character” and thought, and both had long been “suffering patiently” with the hand that fate had dealt them. Maria appeared to tell Jefferson that he could spend his days alone “on the beautiful Monticello tormented by the shadow of a woman”—his deceased wife—or he could live a happy and productive life with the woman he loved, a choice that would permit him to reach his full potential, so that history would remember him as a muse “held by Genius, inspired by wit.”
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No less recondite than he had been in his “head and heart” letter, Maria gave the appearance of saying that the next move was Jefferson’s.

Jefferson, who had been writing to Maria roughly every three weeks, waited four months to respond, though the delay was due largely to his long trek through France and northern Italy. Either he had not understood her letter, or he wanted to make sure that he had not misunderstood what she had written, for he again delved to learn her feelings. He began by telling her that
he longed to see her, and that if she came to Paris, he wanted to see her every day. During every minute they were together, he wrote, “we will … forget that we are ever to part again.” But this too, was a letter that was more about discovering her thinking. He begged her to express the sentiments “flowing from the heart.”
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Maria did not do that in a letter, but late in the summer of 1787 she returned to Paris, and without her husband. Officially, she had come to further her artistic aspirations, but her act was so extraordinary that in some measure she must have undertaken the trip to discover whether she and Jefferson had a future. Moreover, by acting so daringly, defiantly even, she was, as Jefferson had requested, expressing the sentiments that flowed from her heart. She arrived late in August and remained for nearly one hundred days. Though she lodged with a Polish princess on the other side of Paris, Maria and Jefferson saw each other frequently. No one knows what transpired between them, what was said, what was done. All that is known is that they were together on what was scheduled to be her last night in Paris, December 6, and that they agreed to meet the following morning for breakfast. Maria did not appear. In fact, she left Paris without saying goodbye. She subsequently pleaded both that she was “Confus’d and distracted” and that she “could not bear to take leave any more.” Both explanations were probably true, but confusion, or discomfiture, was probably paramount. Something had brought matters to a head during their final night together. Indeed, she told Jefferson that she had “suspected” the evening would end as it did. She must have said that she was ready to leave her husband for him, but she must also have said that she would not divorce Cosway, a step nearly unheard of in the eighteenth century, and one forbidden by the Catholic Church.
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It may have been that Jefferson, like many another, could conduct an epistolary romance but could not make a face-to-face commitment. Perhaps, despite all the things he had written, he never wished for more than occasional trysts with Maria. It was possible that his feelings changed—that head triumphed over heart—during the long year that he and Maria had been separated. Or, it may have been that Jefferson would have married Maria had she been divorced but was unwilling to live with her in an adulterous relationship—which would have been scandalous and put an end to the political ambitions he still harbored.

They never saw each other again. They corresponded, but where Maria was anxious to keep alive the relationship—years later she confessed to still keeping his picture beside her bed—Jefferson’s interest flagged.
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More and more time passed between his letters, and he no longer inquired about her feelings toward him. His earlier expressions of love were replaced by banalities:
“Adieu! God bless you!”; “Be our affections unchangeable”; “think of me often and warmly, as I do of you.”
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Not until 1790, when he was back in America to stay, was he able to tell Maria what he had never ceased to feel: “I will always love you.”
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Sometime within eighteen months of his final night with Maria Cosway, another woman entered Jefferson’s life, with even more fateful consequences. During Jefferson’s lifetime, the public never knew of his romance with Maria Cosway. But a dozen years after he last saw Maria, and while he still held public office, charges would be broadcast that Jefferson had long had a sexual liaison with one of his female slaves, and that he had fathered children by her. Her name was Sarah (Sally) Hemings.

Born in 1773, Sally was the child of John Wayles—Jefferson’s father-in-law—and Betty Hemings, one of the slaves at the Forest. Sometime around 1776, roughly three years after Wayles’s death, Jefferson brought Betty and her six children to Monticello. The Hemings family remained chattel and lived in the slave quarters, but they enjoyed a special status. The males were trained as skilled artisans, and no one in the family was ever put to work as a field hand.

Sally was three when she came to Monticello, nine when Martha died, and eleven when Jefferson, accompanied by her brother James Hemings, sailed for France. Following the death in 1785 of his infant child, the second Lucy Elizabeth, Jefferson decided that Polly, his seven-year-old daughter in Virginia, be sent to France. Planning to enroll her in the same convent school that Patsy attended, he requested that Elizabeth Eppes and her husband, with whom Polly was living, book passage for her Atlantic crossing on a vessel making for France. Jefferson also instructed them to send her in the company of a “careful negro woman,” but added that Polly’s attendant was to “return to Virginia directly,” that is, to make a round-trip voyage. Nearly two years passed before Polly finally sailed, and when she did, the Eppeses put her aboard a vessel bound for London. What is more, they did not choose a mature woman to look after Polly, but sent fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings as her companion.
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Late in June 1787, Polly, now nine, and Sally arrived in London, and the ship’s captain arranged to have the two girls taken to the residence of the American minister, John Adams. Abigail Adams immediately sent word to Jefferson. She added that the slave girl who had accompanied Maria was the “Sister of the Servant you have with you.” She described Sally as “good naturd,” but “quite like a child,” and requiring “more care” than Polly, who was five years younger. She asked Jefferson to come for his daughter when it was convenient, and also inquired about sending Sally back to Virginia.
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One of the many mysteries of Jefferson’s behavior is why he did not cross
to London to retrieve the daughter he had not seen for four years. It has been suggested that Jefferson did not go to London to get Polly because “he was afraid to be in the same room with Sally and Abigail Adams,” who abhorred slavery. However, Jefferson had never hidden his slaves when traveling, and in all likelihood Abigail Adams had already seen him dealing with James Hemings. Jefferson attributed his decision to the pressing business he faced in Paris, as he had only just returned from his extended trip to Italy. There is yet another explanation for his decision to remain in Paris. Maria Cosway was expected to arrive any day for her second stay in the city, and he likely wanted to be there to welcome her. Whatever the reason, Jefferson remained in Paris and dispatched his valet to fetch both his daughter and Sally Hemings to Paris. Jefferson had originally planned to send the slave who accompanied Polly back to Virginia. But the thought of sending this young girl alone on an Atlantic crossing aboard a ship filled with seamen likely gave him pause. It is also conceivable that his decision may have arisen from how her brother had blossomed during his three years in Paris. Jefferson had paid handsomely to have James Hemings trained as a French chef. Having nearly completed his apprenticeship by mid-1787, Hemings had grown so accomplished in his trade that he was about to become the
chef de cuisine
at the Hôtel de Langeac, a position that would give him responsibility for running the kitchen and supervising its staff. As Jefferson must have suspected that he would never again marry, and that public life would keep him from Monticello for long stretches, he may have thought that Sally could be trained to manage a household, a responsibility usually borne on southern plantations by the wife of the planter.
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