The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (34 page)

Sally Hemings: Female and Obscure

Although Jefferson’s records of his financial dealings seem almost maniacally detailed, they were not exhaustive. His correspondence and other sources refer to expenses that he did not record in his memorandum books, so we know that he did not keep a record of every single one of his financial transactions over the course of his long life. It should be noted, however, that Jefferson’s records indicate that he apparently did not, while he was in France, give Sally Hemings spending money as he gave her brother James and his daughters. Of all the Virginia members of the household, only she was, ostensibly, left out of this show of Jefferson’s largesse. While James Hemings was a man and Jefferson believed that men had broader lives that required having money on hand—to spend in taverns, to go to the theater, on clothes, on women—he also gave money to his daughters, who were living in a convent six days a week. The decision whether to provide spending money could not have been a matter of gender alone. Notions of gender
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propriety likely shaped Jefferson’s actions. Hemings was a slave like her brother, a female like Patsy and Polly, but she was different from all of them. It is one thing to dole out spending money to a male servant for no particular purpose or to one’s daughters. It is quite another to do the same for a female nonrelative. When a presumptively heterosexual man makes gratuitous transfers of money to a woman who is not his wife or daughter, it raises, fairly or not, questions about the man’s motivation.

Imagine going through Jefferson’s memorandum books and substituting the name Sally for James every time there is an entry noting the payment of money. Even if there were no back story about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, readers might pause over those entries and wonder about the nature of the relationship between the male and the female engaged in those transactions. This is not to say that Jefferson was attempting to hide anything during those early years in France. There was, at that point, no reason for him to act as if anyone were looking over his shoulder at any of this. Who would ever go that carefully through his memorandum books? It is to suggest how gender influenced Jefferson’s thinking about the way to deal with male slaves versus female ones. They were not all the same in his eyes, and he was conscious of the fact that he had to behave, or at least be seen to behave, very differently toward them. Getting into the habit of giving and recording payments of pin money to a female slave put the master-slave relationship too obviously close to the terrain of typical husband-to-wife, lover-to-mistress transactions. This does not mean, of course, that Jefferson never gave Hemings any spending money that he simply did not record. He may well have. It is also likely that he knew her brother would share with her, as families, black and white, were expected to do. He gave James Hemings money over and above his salary, some of which he could have expected to go to his little sister.

Sally Hemings’s position as a slave who was an important, but somewhat mysterious, figure in the Jefferson household began in Paris as soon as Polly went to join her sister at the abbey. When trying to reconstruct her life in Paris, and afterward, one has to look to Hemings’s own family and people outside of Jefferson’s immediate family to find personal information or comments about her. One might say that the lack of information about her was a function of American slavery, an institution that forced most enslaved people into anonymity. Even with that there is something strange about her near-invisibility in Jefferson family exchanges. Given the length of time she spent with Polly and Patsy, and the intimate and unique circumstances in which they interacted, one might expect to see some substantive references to her in the letters written over the course of her life by those two women. Yet there is nearly total silence. The letter Polly Jefferson wrote to her aunt describing her trip to France, which held the greatest promise of a reference to Hemings, is no longer extant. Except for Polly’s letter to Kitty Church while they were still in Paris in May of 1789, and in another letter written to her brother-in-law in the fall of 1790, Polly said nothing about Hemings.
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Near the end of her life, Patsy mentioned giving Hemings “her time,” freeing her without a formal document and a request to the legislature or county court that she be allowed to remain in Virginia.
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Other than that, neither Jefferson daughter talked about Sally Hemings at any length in any of their correspondence that has come to light—from the time either before or after they returned from France—although they did talk about other Hemingses and other enslaved people.

We can know something of James Hemings in France through Jefferson’s correspondence and memorandum books, yet his sister lives pretty much only in the memorandum books. There is no way to tell for sure, but Fawn Brodie raised the possibility that some culling of Jefferson’s correspondence had gone on over the years to erase any possible reconstruction of what went on between Hemings and Jefferson—removing letters that contained even innocent references that might give information about her place in the Monticello household.
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Jefferson’s family was in charge of his correspondence for years after his death. While preparing the documents for publication to raise money to help retire the massive debts he left behind, his daughter Martha and some of her daughters combed meticulously through the letters to transcribe them for Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the named editor of the volumes. What was in the documents and how they would be received by posterity was very clearly important to them. Randolph actually held back letters that he thought might reflect poorly on his grandfather, including correspondence relating to James Callender, who first wrote openly about Jefferson and Hemings.
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Randolph, his sister Ellen Coolidge, and to a lesser degree, their mother, played prominent roles in the white Jefferson family’s attempt to cover up Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, and Randolph and Coolidge pressed their efforts on paper.
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There is no reason to think that members of the family who were willing to create documents to hide the truth about Hemings and Jefferson would have paused for a second over destroying documents that dealt with her in any substantive way. While one cannot rule out the possibility that letters were removed or destroyed, removing letters after the fact was probably not necessary. Given the state of things between the pair once they returned to Monticello, no members of the family would have been very keen to write about Hemings at all. They simply did not create the kind of letters that had to be destroyed at some later point.

Consider two events in Hemings’s life in France: first, her inoculation. The Suttons were to the world of inoculation what Edward Jenner was to the world of vaccination. Imagine Jenner showing up at Monticello, and Jefferson never writing a word about it. How odd that he, who was so curious about the subject of smallpox and enthusiastic about efforts to eradicate it that he was moved to write a fan letter to Jenner, should have written nothing to one of Jenner’s precursors before or after he treated a member of his household.

Then there is the matter of Hemings’s absence from the Hôtel de Langeac for five weeks.
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Because none of Jefferson’s letters or other accounts state explicitly why Hemings lived with Dupré, the Jeffersons’ launderer, there have emerged alternative explanations for what she was doing there and even for when she was there. In one view, Jefferson sent her to Dupré’s during his seven-week trip through eastern France, Germany, and Holland in the spring of 1788 to protect her in his absence.
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The most obvious problem with linking Hemings’s time at Dupré’s with Jefferson’s concerns about leaving her unattended at the residence is that he was gone for seven weeks, and she was with Dupré for only five. Why would he not care about the two-week gap? Moreover, the payment to Dupré was made in April of 1789, a year after this trip, though Jefferson frequently paid his bills late. But his records are really fatal to the “Dupré as protector” scenario because they indicate that Dupré did not become his launderer until eight months after he took this trip.
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It has also been suggested that Jefferson sent Hemings to Dupré for instructions in how to improve her sewing and to learn how to care for fine fabrics, skills that she would need if she were to be a truly useful lady’s maid to Patsy and Polly. That idea is certainly more reasonable than the suggestion that Jefferson sent her there to be protected while he went on his tour through northern Europe. This is particularly so since Dupré first appears in Jefferson’s records just when he began buying more expensive clothing for Patsy, who started to venture out into society in 1788.
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There are launderers for different occasions and types of clothing, and when one has made a substantial investment in precious items of apparel, one chooses the right professional to care for them. Patsy was going to take these clothes back to Monticello, and someone had to care for them.

Jefferson, however, speaks only of paying for “board of Sally” and says nothing about having her trained. His account entries recording payments for her brothers’ apprenticeships do not require speculation about what is going on. He specifically states the purpose, or one can discern it from other correspondence or immediately adjacent memorandum book entries. If Hemings was sent to Dupré’s for more than just boarding, Jefferson would have just said that. While she may have received some instruction while living there, his matter-of-fact notation suggests that boarding Hemings was the real issue. An extremely important event in the lives of the residents of the Hôtel de Langeac—indeed, a nearly, catastrophic family crisis—points to why Hemings was away from her home for five weeks.

At the beginning of December of 1788, both Patsy and Polly Jefferson contracted typhus. When they failed to improve, they were sent home from school to recover under the care of Dr. Richard Gem, whom Jefferson many years later credited with helping them through the ordeal.
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The disease waxed and waned in both girls at first, and Patsy, always heartier than her younger sister, recovered more quickly. Polly remained critically ill from the final weeks of December until sometime near the end of January, and one can sense from her normally upbeat father’s letters that he feared for her life at points. After giving general reports of the girls’ sickness to correspondents, he confided to William Short on January 22 that Polly “had been in considerable danger” and that even though she was better, she was still “very low and her fever continu[ed].”
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That was as close as he came to unburdening himself on paper, but, in fact, Polly’s illness led to a problem that remained buried in the Jefferson family history, or at least in its correspondence, for many years. Long after her sister’s death and a year after her father died, Patsy Jefferson, by then known as Martha Randolph, wrote of the “horrors of typhus” that she knew well from her personal bout with it, revealing in a letter to her sister-in-law that as result of the disease her sister Polly “was for many weeks Deaf and stupid.” She went on to say that she believed that Polly’s “mind” never “entirely recovered from” the effects of typhus and that she retained “a torpor of the intellect” that she did not think “natural for her.”
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Typhus, she believed, had damaged her sister’s brain.

This was serious business indeed. Deafness and mental impairment are side effects of very serious cases of typhus, and though usually temporary, both can persist to varying degrees after the disease has run its course.
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One can imagine Polly’s terror—as well as that of her father, sister, and the Hemings siblings, particularly Sally, who had known her and been close to her for many years by this time—upon learning that Polly had lost the ability to hear without knowing whether her deafness would continue. Her mental confusion during her illness may have alarmed them less at first. That could have been attributed to the high fever, with the expectation that her faculties would return to normal once the fever broke. But Martha Randolph’s description of Polly as “stupid” during her illness, and linking that to her impaired mental capacity for the rest of her life, suggests that Polly’s confusion while sick may have been different from the delirium brought on by a high fever. They lacked a full understanding of the risks posed by typhus-induced encephalitis (brain swelling); indeed, they were probably unaware of the phenomenon at all.

Typhus was known to be extremely contagious, but it was not understood until the early twentieth century how it was transmitted. The disease is carried by arthropods like body lice and fleas, infecting those who live in the kind of close quarters that allow the organisms to go from one person to the next, as was evidently the case at the abbey. Before this discovery, it was thought to be spread simply upon contact with ill persons, sharing their air or touching them. Even if he did not know how the disease was transmitted, or call it typhus, Dr. Gem was almost certainly familiar with the basic nature of the illness and the dangers it posed, including, perhaps the permanent loss of hearing.
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Under that state of knowledge about transmission, and with the frightening prospect of deafness, even if the person recovered from the disease, it would have made perfect sense to get Hemings, who had the most intimate contact with Polly and Patsy, away from the household so that she would not get sick, and perhaps go deaf, too. In the gender construction of the day, as the only young female in the Virginia coterie at the Hôtel de Langeac who had not become ill, the men in the house would have thought her particularly vulnerable. Whether her chief value at this time was to Jefferson, because she had already become or he wanted her to become his mistress, or to Polly, to have Hemings—and Polly—deaf would have been a disaster all around. The length of Hemings’s stay at Dupré’s coincides almost precisely with the length of time that Polly was most seriously ill.