The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (39 page)

Unlike Short, Jefferson could never and would never write to anyone about Hemings in a way that revealed their connection. Already a man of note, he knew what his white countrymen would make of this. When it came to the care and deployment of his image, which if managed properly would leave him with the positive legacy of “great man,” Jefferson was supremely disciplined and controlled. At the same time, his status as Hemings’s master actually made it easier for him to carry on a relationship with her in relative secrecy and security than it would have been for William Short to have had an extended affair with Lilite Royer. All he had to do was be hard minded enough
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to write anyone about it. It is unlikely that we will ever learn how much Jefferson knew about Short and his “secret love” in Saint-Germain, and how much Short knew about Jefferson and Sally Hemings at the Hôtel de Langeac. It was, however, an interesting, though not surprising, confluence of circumstances.

Amazons and Angels

Until very recently, the focus on Jefferson’s relationships with women in Paris centered largely upon his dealings with Maria Cosway, with side references to his correspondence with Abigail Adams, several French society ladies, and well-born American visitors to the Continent like Angelica Church. Because it is fairly plain that his interest in Cosway was more than merely platonic, their letters have been used as a guide for his views about love and romance. Jefferson did not have an extensive or, one should say a very varied, career in this regard insofar as we know, and so every scrap of information on that subject counts.

One could get the impression from some depictions of the Jefferson-Cosway affair that it was steady and long-standing, stretching from the time he arrived in Paris until the time he left. They wrote to each other over a long period, but the actual time they spent together was quite short. And by the start of 1788 Jefferson seemed to lose interest in actively pursuing the affair or very practically saw the complete hopelessness of it. The most telling sign of this is that he, the inveterate correspondent, sometimes let long periods go by before answering Cosway’s often very impassioned letters.
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When he did answer her, he followed a course he often took with correspondents, one that makes it difficult to gauge his true feelings from merely considering what he said in letters. He responded to her as the man he knew she very much wanted him to be, saying what he perceived she wanted to hear. He wrote as if they were still quasi-lovers with a relationship that was ongoing, with some definite and fixed place to go. His actions, or inaction (not writing to her during periods when he wrote many letters to other people, sometimes multiple letters to certain individuals, and sent out missives dealing with absolutely mundane things), tell a different story.

Because we do not know precisely when Jefferson took an interest in Sally Hemings, we cannot know how, or even whether, his feelings about her accelerated or influenced the marked cooling of his ardor for Cosway. It is possible for a man to maintain an attraction to more than one woman at a time, and for attraction to wax and wane. In fact, at points in 1788, if one were to read Jefferson’s letters to Angelica Church, whom he met in Paris in 1787, and Maria Cosway together, one would be hard-pressed to know which woman he liked better. This gives a good indication of the depth of his feelings about these two women, as the equally flirtatious tone taken with both tends to cancel out the idea that either one was the object of a serious pursuit. Or to put it another way, Jefferson’s pursuit may have been serious in that he would not have minded having sex with these women, but not serious in the sense that he ever thought of making a life with either of them. Just as men can be interested in more than one woman simultaneously, they can also have women for different purposes—short-term dalliances or long-term alliances.

Though Jefferson continued to flirt harmlessly and intermittently in his letters to Church after he returned to the United States, it is not likely that he contemplated a deep involvement with her. Not only was she married, she had four children. An affair would have threatened her marriage and her family. It is almost inconceivable that Jefferson would have been serious about, or even comfortable with, a woman who would have sacrificed her relationship with her children for him. Of Cosway, Church, and Hemings, Hemings was the only one he had any reasonable prospect of being involved with on a serious and long-term basis. Except in the occasional letters that passed between him, Cosway, and Church over the years, once Jefferson returned to America with Hemings, he never again developed with any other woman the kind of relationship he had with Cosway and Church or engaged in the same type of playful quasi-sexual epistolary banter.
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Although we can never really know what Hemings was like with Jefferson when they were alone, her status and, even more particularly, her age may well have made her the very embodiment of the domestic and submissive woman that he so clearly favored. The thirty-year gap in their ages meant that at every stage of their existences he would appear drastically older and wiser—she would never outgrow him personally. The few comments about her personality and her role at Monticello—taking care of his rooms and his clothing, that is, taking personal care of him—suggests this. It is hard to imagine the extravagant and worldly Maria Cosway being content to live on Jefferson’s farm mending his stockings and shirts, bottling the cider he liked so much, and chatting about the goings-on among the denizens of Monticello.

The women Jefferson met in France alternately fascinated and repelled him. He enjoyed mixing with the attractive and intelligent among them, so long as the conversations did not veer into politics or get too serious. At the same time, they frightened him. The very things he found delightful about these women—their openness, their ability to move in the world freely—also hinted that they might be just a bit too much, not feminine in the way that was most satisfying to him in the long term. These were sophisticated “city girls,” wonderful and reliable for the casual amusement of witty repartee, but not the type of woman he wanted a serious life with in the intimacy of his domestic realm. What a contrast Sally Hemings must have presented! When he came home to the Hôtel de Langeac after spending time with the Cosways, Churches, and Madame de Tessés of that world, there he would find his wife’s half sister, the extremely attractive, sweet-natured, sewing, Virginia farm girl. She was the very opposite of frightening.

At the end of the 1780s in Paris, when Jefferson was ready to go home, Hemings represented the place and way of life he expected to return to, with no inkling at the time that he would ever leave it again for any sustained period. He knew that when they got back to Monticello they could resume life in a shared universe of which he would be the unquestioned center. Aside from all the other reasons a male might want to attach himself to a particular female—her looks, personality, their personal chemistry—it made sense for Jefferson to have fixated on a young woman who knew and understood that universe, his place there, and how she could best fit into it. Near the end of his stay in France, Jefferson contrasted American “Angels” with European “Amazons.”
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Who was an angel in his eyes?—a domestically oriented woman who believed that her place was in the home, attending to the needs of the man in her life and her children, not out engaging in adulterous intrigues with foreign diplomats or other such persons. An angel let the man in her life take the lead and make the important decisions affecting their lives. She accepted his well-tempered dominance as a show of his love and desire to protect her and their family. The dreaded Amazons, on the other hand, were politically and socially assertive women who sought self-fulfillment outside of the home, challenging men in what was supposed to be an exclusively male domain. Women in France were out of synch with the natural order of things. Their determined self-assertion emasculated the men in their lives.

Amazons also posed a grave sexual threat. While counseling a parent about the best place to send her son to learn French, Jefferson picked Canada because “in France a young man’s morals, health, and fortune are more irresistibly endangered than in any other country in the universe.”
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What imperiled young men did he have in mind? Jefferson had a way of silently exempting himself from many of the admonitions and platitudes he passed along to others, and probably did not count himself as a young man in Paris, though his affair with Maria Cosway and his construction of the liaison with Sally Hemings had the air of a man anxious to start a new life as if he were operating, as a young man would be, on a clean slate. The two young men Jefferson observed most closely in France were the ones who lived in his house: James Hemings and William Short. We know nothing of James Hemings’s dealings with women, although it is highly probable that a young man between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four who had money and free movement had the chance to meet them. The women of his family were described as beautiful, and one might assume that he, too, was attractive. Short’s amorous adventures have already been noted. He surely counted as a young man who took advantage of the easier relations between males and females in France.

Jefferson knew that men’s greater role out in the world necessarily led to an imbalance in power, because it gave them greater access to and control over the wealth and resources of the community. He did not believe that men should take advantage of this and mistreat women who relied upon them for protection. In fact, he wrote that men showed their highest level of civilization when they refused to use their superior physical power to hurt women. The onus, however, was on women to find a way to live under this system so that they would never directly challenge male authority. When one of his sisters had trouble with her alcoholic and abusive husband, Jefferson—in a mildly scolding tone that suggested she was being an Amazon—put the burden on her to adjust in response to her husband’s aggression. Sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings could never have been his idea of an Amazon.

Jefferson made his views on women’s proper roles in life very clear to his daughters. While both Patsy and Polly received what would be considered first-class educations for girls while in France, meaning they studied languages and took art, music, and dance lessons, he disparaged that somewhat when he told his sister-in-law that what the girls had learned there would not make them particularly “useful in [their] own country.” He characterized women’s traditional domestic duties “as being of more solid value than anything else.” He wanted to know how well his daughters sewed, what type of dishes they knew how to cook, the kinds of things one would expect a farmer’s wife to be doing instead of being a Madame de Staël
manquée
, trading bons mots about various literary works or debating philosophy or politics.
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Jefferson well understood that marriage is both a social institution and an intensely personal one. His daughters would not spend all their married life sewing, setting hens, and making puddings. There was a social aspect of marriage that addressed itself to the place of the couple in the world outside the home. For an upper-class man, that required an acceptable woman to play the role of wife, to bear legitimate heirs, to be presented to the world at large as the extension of her husband, and to move with her mate throughout their social set. This is, in part, the reason Martha Jefferson is often treated as a known quantity when surprisingly little about her is actually known. As “Mrs. Thomas Jefferson,” she was he. His talents and accomplishments are imputed to her, as are his values, tastes, and feelings. Having picked her for a wife, he told us who she was, and we trust that she must have been a certain kind of person, even though we know far less about Martha Jefferson than we know about Sally Hemings. That kind of trust based upon our assumptions about the meaning of legal marriage, and the putatively “universal” qualities of upper-class white women, is unavailable to Hemings. Her attributes and personality are likely to be defined solely by assumptions about the legal status of being a slave and assumptions (usually negative ones) about being African American.

The personal aspect of marriage directs itself to the intimate domestic relations between husband and wife and addresses issues of compatibility (emotional and sexual), affection, and trust between partners. The deepest and most telling expressions of these aspects of marriage take place totally out of public view. One could, of course, have all the attributes of a social marriage with none of the personal ones. A couple perfectly matched in terms of their social qualifications may not really connect on the personal level, because there is no real compatibility, affection, or trust between them. The social function of the marriage is the lifeblood of that type of union. None but the closest, or most cynical, observers of the couple will be able to discern the absence of the personal connection, particularly if the couple is good at acting and has significant reasons for keeping up the front.

Though admittedly sparse, the available evidence indicates that Jefferson and his wife were matched socially and personally. By 1789, however, Martha Jefferson had been gone almost as many years as Jefferson had been married to her. He had already had, in Rhys Isaac’s phrase, his “parlor and dining-room wife,”
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who had given him legitimate heirs and who, when she was not too ill to do so, entertained his guests and was an appropriate ornament at social functions. Either because of her request or his own determination, Jefferson was not going to replace her. His socially acceptable white female relatives could carry out those duties as needed. This says nothing at all about Jefferson’s desire for the more personal aspects of a union with a woman. A question arises: If it is possible to have a union based solely on the social attributes of marriage without the personal ones, can one have a relationship based solely on the personal aspects of a union without the social attributes? Is social legitimacy the sine qua non of an authentic connection between two people? That Hemings and Jefferson were not merely an unmarried couple but were, under American law, in a specific kind of legal relationship—master and slave—complicates the equation further and raises other questions. Do people always see themselves as the law says they are? Could a man and a woman, in their situation, have an “outlawed” personal human bond that was worthy of any degree of respect or understanding?