The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (44 page)

While the defined category of “teenager” did not exist as we know it today, even in the eighteenth century it was understood that young people like Hemings were prone to making irrational decisions in their dealings with members of the opposite sex. That is why there were legislative attempts to ensure that minors obtained parental consent before marriage. Young enslaved people were expected to seek the guidance and permission of their parents (when they were available) as they contemplated marrying. Older people of all races tried to protect their young people from the hazards of acting under the influence of youthful optimism, and naïveté, conditions that were not the province of free young whites alone.

Sixteen-year-old Hemings, in her particular circumstances in Paris, was perfectly positioned to be swept up in a Jeffersonian charm offensive to the detriment of what made any sense. Throughout his life, men and women far more worldly than she were similarly swayed, even when Jefferson did not seem to be trying very hard. No young girl was better prepared by the complex nature of her family configuration and her life to date to take seriously the professed intentions of a man whom, by any system of logic, she should have seen as an enemy, but who undoubtedly believed himself to be—and presented himself to her and her family as if he were—the very opposite of that.

M
ANY THINGS ABOUT
the world young Sally Hemings confronted seem almost impossible to grasp. She had spent her first fourteen years in a country that defined her as human chattel. In her fifteenth and sixteenth years, she was in a place where a court would eagerly transform her status, turning her into a legally recognized free person. Sometime between 1787 and 1789, this teenager learned the difference between law in Virginia and law in France. The power of the former could reenslave her, while the power of the latter could set her free. So she stood poised between the reality of life in the place of her birth and the moment when she had to decide whether to take the step toward freedom in a new land. She could make her journey alone or with her older brother, leaving not only slavery behind but also a large and intensely connected family in Virginia.

Then Jefferson intruded into that moment in a way that complicated her understanding of what course her life should take. Becoming “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine” had worked a transformation of its own, which linked her even more tightly to the lives of her mother and grandmother. Although she was different from both women in the most salient way—neither her African grandmother nor her mother had the power to turn to law to end their enslavement—what had happened between her and Jefferson was an important part of Virginia’s slave society. There were certainly things that the mothers and other female relatives of girls who were in this position said to them when this happened—advice and assurances given. Elizabeth Hemings and her daughters would have been especially equipped to talk to Sally, given their dealings with white men. But to talk to them, she had to be in Virginia and thus back under that state’s laws. There was much for this young person to consider.

Not all the incomprehensible aspects of Hemings’s world had to do with slavery and her family’s complicated connections to Jefferson. Relations between the sexes in those days seem equally far away from our modern understanding of what constitutes civilized behavior. Much as it may assault present-day sensibilities, fifteen-and sixteen-year-old girls were in Hemings’s time thought eligible to become seriously involved with men, even men who were substantially older. Jefferson’s daughter Patsy became a married woman, with her father’s enthusiastic approval, just several months after her seventeenth birthday. That attitude made sense in an era when higher education and career, the reasons for postponing marriage and child-bearing in modern times, did not compete with what were thought to be a woman’s most basic functions in life: to be a wife and a mother. Jefferson’s parents were not really age cohorts. Peter Jefferson was thirty-one or thirty-two to Jane Jefferson’s nineteen when they married.
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Even within enslaved communities “slave husbands tended to be older than their wives.” Philip Morgan has noted that “in the eighteenth-century Chesapeake, eight of ten husbands were older than their wives by an average of nine years.” Morgan cited the “imbalance of the sexes” as a possible reason for this, along with “African customs,” for “large age gaps between spouses were commonplace in many African societies.”
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In all Virginia communities a girl of fifteen would be considered very young, but she would not be totally off-limits, as events in the lives of people in Jefferson’s social cohort indicate.

In the year before he left for France, Jefferson played matchmaker between thirty-two-year-old James Madison and fifteen-year-old Catherine (Kitty) Floyd. Madison first encountered Floyd in 1779 as the twelve-year-old daughter of William Floyd, a fellow representative to the Continental Congress. Both men, Floyd with his daughter and two other children, had rooms at Eliza House Trist’s boardinghouse, on Market Street in Philadelphia. Out of respect for Madison, we will say that we can likely never know what he thought of the young girl when he first met her as a preteen. We do know that by the time Floyd turned fifteen, the very shy Madison’s romantic interest in her burned brightly, and he very much wanted to make her his wife. Time together and—as with Lilite Royer and Short, Lee and McCarty, and Hemings and Jefferson—seeing each other on a daily basis in shared living quarters allowed this intergenerational couple to get to know each other in a way they would not have had their circumstances been different.
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Madison’s dealings with Floyd were so intensely personal that when he and Jefferson corresponded about her, they did so in their agreed-upon code. During that same period, Jefferson took time out in a letter to his great friend to include a gossipy reference, also in code, telling Madison that one of their fellow Virginians, forty-four-year-old Arthur Lee, whom Jefferson disliked, was “courting Miss Sprig a young girl of seventeen and of thirty thousand pounds expectation.”
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In the end, the much older Lee was unable to capture young Miss Sprig.

Jefferson, a sometime resident of Trist’s boardinghouse himself, spoke to Floyd on Madison’s behalf on several occasions—talking up his friend’s virtues and explaining what he had to offer her as a husband.
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There is no indication he ever talked to Floyd’s father about any of this. In speaking with her alone about Madison, Jefferson treated the fifteen-year-old girl as a free agent in matters of male-female courtship. One wonders what the teenage Floyd really thought of the idea that a man who was more than twice her age had a sexual interest in her, and that a man almost three times her age would approach her repeatedly to encourage her to bring the situation to a formal conclusion.

Marriage is certainly about more than sex, but sex is an integral part of the bargain. Floyd, whose great beauty attracted Madison, knew that if she married him she would be, on her wedding night, having sex with a man in his thirties. Madison knew that if he married Floyd, he would be having sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. That did not bother him, nor did it bother Jefferson, whose efforts on his friend’s behalf initially met with some success, as Madison informed him. Floyd sounded amenable to the match—she and Madison exchanged gifts—and his hopes were raised. Then Floyd fell in love with a more age-appropriate fellow, a nineteen-year-old, and she ultimately rejected her older suitor. After many decades, the pain of the experience moved the elderly former president to try to mark over all references to Floyd in copies of the letters that had passed between him and Jefferson. Floyd had meant a great deal to him, and although he had had a happy life and fulfilling marriage in the interim, her loss wounded him deeply.
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John Marshall, the nation’s chief justice of the Supreme Court, began to pursue his future wife, Polly Ambler, while he was twenty-five and she was fourteen. He wanted to marry her right away, but the courtship took two years, and he married Polly when she was sixteen and he was twenty-seven.
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Both Madison and Marshall were younger men and closer in age to the teenage girls to whom they were attracted than Jefferson was to Hemings. From our modern perspective, however, both were still very far outside the range of our tolerance for older man–younger woman attraction.

It was not just males in their twenties and thirties who pursued adolescent girls. Besides Arthur Lee, another man in Jefferson’s circle sought a teenage companion. In the year after he returned from France, Jefferson’s boyhood friend and father-in-law to his daughter Patsy, Thomas Mann Randolph, married, at age fifty, seventeen-year-old Gabriella Harvie. According to family tradition Harvie did not want to marry Randolph. She was in love with someone else, a man to whom her parents objected. They insisted that she marry Randolph, who was, on paper at least, a man of considerable property and wealth, whose land was adjacent to her family’s.
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The thirty-three-year gap between Randolph and Harvie was a little beyond the thirty-year gap between Jefferson and Hemings, and unlike his friend, Jefferson did not envision Hemings as a potential legal bride. Neither he nor Randolph, however, would have seen the object of his attention as a child disqualified from sexual activity as we would today. Nor does the trajectory of their lives suggest that either man was an ephebophile, an adult who is sexually fixated on teenagers. Both men had previous marriages and children with females close to their own ages, and clearly intended to make lives with these younger females that extended far beyond the girls’ teenage years. Hemings’s relationship lasted well into her middle age, as Jefferson lived much longer than Randolph. Hemings and Harvie were attractive because in their day they were seen as young women, and youth in females has attracted men in all eras across all cultures even as the definition of “young woman” has shifted along with changing social mores. As for the girls themselves, whether Harvie wanted Randolph or not, she knew that in her time girls her age did get married and have sex. Hemings certainly knew that as well.

Under Slavery and Edicts

The pivotal differences between Catherine Floyd, Mary Ambler Marshall, “Miss Sprig,” Gabriella Harvie, and Sally Hemings, of course, is that Hemings was born an enslaved African American, while her white counterparts were born free. Although the social distance between these females should never be understated, it will not do to treat them as if they were separate species living in different universes with no overlapping attributes and points of commonality. Legal marriage made sex between much older males and sometimes unwilling (and by our lights, immature) teenage girls perfectly acceptable in the eyes of society. This was not pedophilia, ephebophilia, or rape. Nor would it be construed that way in the pages of history, because the female in this circumstance received the title “Mrs.,” the right to share in her husband’s property, and the honor of giving birth to legal heirs—no matter what private horrors or wounds she suffered at the touch of a man whom she did not want. Being “legal” protected all married couples during their time, and long after their deaths as if their reputations were a property right. Sally Hemings—an item of property herself, according to American law—had no opportunity to create such a property right for her family to help shape the way historians would view her life.

Even though she was not under American law, thinking seriously about the beginning of Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson in France requires confronting the vexing issue of sex between enslaved women and white men. Enslaved women’s vulnerability to rape is well known, and the question naturally arises about this pair. Exploring this issue for these two people requires moving for a time beyond the kind of discussion that, in understandable deference to the suffering of black female victims of sexual abuse, casts every enslaved woman who ever had sex with a white man during slavery in the United States as a rape victim. This view describes the way things were between enslaved women and white men generally, but deserves greater scrutiny when one takes on the responsibility of seeking to understand and present the story of one individual’s life.

There are at least two possible routes to the conclusion that what happened between Hemings and Jefferson during their beginnings in Paris was presumptively rape. One idea rests on an understanding about enslaved women and the other one, which works in tandem with it, on an understanding about white male slave owners. As to enslaved women, we may assume that none—because of the obvious state of war that existed between masters and slaves—would ever have wanted to have sex with any white man. Faced with white men who showed interest in them, enslaved women, for completely sound ideological reasons, would be unwilling. Evidence that sex took place between the two—a child, for example—would itself be evidence of rape. Sally Hemings would think that the only mate allowable to her—indeed the only one she should want in her heart—was a man who shared her legal status and, therefore, her race, a man of African origin. In this view, because her part “whiteness” did not prevent her enslavement, Hemings, acting on an instinctive sense of racial solidarity (solidarity with her black ancestors alone), would stay in her racial place when it came to feelings about members of the opposite sex.

If the young Hemings were open to the idea of having Jefferson as a lover, she would be a traitor who denied the reality of her enslavement and provided her enemy—Jefferson—with something that he very much wanted, while keeping her body from the men who shared her oppression and thus had a superior moral claim to it, that is to say, African American males. Under Virginia law, Thomas Jefferson owned her body by positive, legal right, but black men owned her body by natural right. This formulation has its roots in some very long-held beliefs and assumptions that require examination. Traditionally, in times of war, men of opposing camps who have sex with (forcibly and not) the women of the enemy are seen as encroaching upon territory that belongs to their male opponents—dealing them a heavy psychological blow in the conflict at hand. For victors, taking the women of the defeated group is one of the surest signs of conquest. On the other hand, males of the conquered group who have sex with the women of the conquerors are styled as insurgents or rebels, striking their own direct and meaningful blow against the conquerors by taking “their women”—“their” territory. The intergroup sexuality of these men is not deemed traitorous.

This wholly male-centered construction of the rules and meaning of conflict between warring parties—how one is to behave, how one properly calculates one’s individual interests—leaves no room for the feelings, obsessions, and strategies of females. Women are merely objects upon whom men, the prime movers and the owners of female bodies, carry out their battles. Women know this and are supposed to adjust their behavior according to men’s rules of engagement. When they run afoul of them, they are to be criticized or punished, if possible, severely.