The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (78 page)

Jefferson avoided any uncomfortable moments by refusing to engage Short on the subject—either to defend his comments in the
Notes
or to repudiate them. He apparently never, in any document found to date, even acknowledged what Short had said, although Short twice asked him for a response, explicitly in one letter and indirectly, but clearly, in a second.
³²
Short wanted to draw his mentor out on the subject: to have him either defend his position on interracial mixture, in which case he could extend the debate and try to persuade Jefferson through examples that he was wrong, or repudiate his earlier writings and concede that Short’s proposal had merit. In either case, Jefferson had been checkmated. If he answered Short by reiterating the views he expressed in the
Notes
, or by trying out the language he later used in his famous 1814 letter to Edward Coles about “amalgamation” producing “a degradation,” he would invite the willing-to-be-specific Short to go further.
³³
The younger man’s mind would immediately turn to the Hemingses, and he could ask Jefferson point-blank whether he really believed that Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally Hemings were “degradations” produced by his father-in-law, John Wayles. And what of Elizabeth, Mary, Martin, and Nancy Hemings and Betty Brown, people whom Short knew from the times he spent at Monticello before he joined Jefferson in France? Were they all degradations, too?

There were things that Jefferson could say to Edward Coles that he could not say to William Short, because he bore a completely different relationship to the two men. In addition to being closely tied to Jefferson by the Wayles connection, Short had lived with the Hemingses and Jeffersons for over five years in Paris. If Jefferson tried out the “amalgamation equals degradation” formulation on Short, he would appear the perfect hypocrite or simply mindlessly hateful. Unlike Coles, Short had personally observed Jefferson living with two intelligent and attractive mixed-race African Americans working alongside with and being paid like free white workers—and the earth had continued to turn. Whatever he knew of Sally Hemings and Jefferson, Short had firsthand knowledge of Jefferson’s general affection for her family. Why could not Jefferson’s own experiences be replicated all over the United States? As Short observed, white people outnumbered blacks so greatly in the country that blacks, not whites, would be bred out. Virginia’s way of determining race, as Jefferson well knew, relied on just such a known possibility: black families could become white.

On the other hand, if Jefferson recanted the position voiced in the
Notes
and sided with Short, he would be leaving for posterity a Rosetta stone that might help crack the code of a part of his life he wanted to remain totally private. He was already living the life Short recommended, but at a time long before it could ever be accepted openly. Three of his children would fulfill Short’s prescription, melding into the white population as if Africa had never been a part of them.

In a letter written on his birthday, April 13, 1800, Jefferson acknowledged all the letters he received from Short in 1798 and 1799, save for his February 27, 1798, communication seeking comments on his suggestion that the way out of the American dilemma was to do essentially what Jefferson was doing: creating children who breached the color barrier. Instead, he changed the subject in a rather spectacular fashion—admitting to Short that he had been, for several years, without Short’s knowledge, borrowing money from one of Short’s accounts over which he held a power of attorney. He owed Short thousands of dollars, and he detailed the steps he was taking to repay the sum as quickly as he could. The Summary Journal of Letters shows that Jefferson received Short’s February letter on June 22, 1798, but he had no intention of discussing this matter with his protégé.
³⁴
He had to find his own private way out of the American dilemma as it unfolded on his mountain. Abstractions worked best in the republic of letters. What had to be done for Beverley, and then Harriet, Madison, and Eston who followed, was too serious for that—this was a concrete problem to be dealt with only in the real world.

P
EOPLE IN
C
HARLOTTESVILLE
and its environs had been talking about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson for nearly ten years, gossiping as neighbors will. No matter how strenuously people claim to be “above” such things, the romantic and sexual lives of others have been of natural interest to humans from time immemorial. The situation at Monticello, however, would not have surprised the residents of Albemarle County or the rest of Virginia, for that matter. Mixed-race people existed in great numbers, and they did not, as Mary Chesnut wryly noted, fall “from the sky.” They were the children of rape, the children of casual encounters, and the children of men and women in long-term relationships, like those of Thomas Bell and Mary Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

The difference for Hemings and Jefferson was that Jefferson decided to resume his public career, and he did so at a singular moment in American political history—a moment he had helped create. No politician, then or later, had a better sense of the uses of newspapers and journalism than Jefferson. From his earliest days as a young revolutionary, he involved himself in attempts to use the press to get “the message” out to the people at large. He understood the concept of “talking points” and being “on message” centuries before those terms became part of our political vernacular. In the late 1760s when the
Virginia Gazette
struck him as being too pro-Royalist, he moved to have a new newspaper started to serve as a counter-weight to what he thought was conservative pro-British propaganda.
¹
This was a precursor to his well-known debacle with the
National Gazette
, when he and Hamilton waged internecine warfare through their rival newspapers even as they served in the same government. By the end of the 1790s, partisan politics was the order of the day, and each side had its publications waiting and willing to do battle for their cause.

In this take-no-prisoners environment, the closer Jefferson came to the ultimate prize in politics—the presidency—the more desperate his foes became. By all accounts, the talk of Jefferson’s private life reached the newspapers at the very end of the 1790s. James Callender said that he had first seen hints of it in William Rind’s
Virginia Federalist
in January of 1800. Rind wrote that he had “damning proofs” of what he called Jefferson’s “depravity,” but chose not to elaborate. The word did not stay in Virginia. Ten months after Rind’s comment, a New York paper said flatly that Jefferson’s “private life was far from spotless.”
²
Earlier historians assumed that the innuendos about Jefferson from above the Mason-Dixon line were references either to the Betsy Walker affair, when he tried to seduce the wife of his friend, or to his affair with Maria Cosway, put into circulation by Hamilton, who may have learned of the connection from his sister-in-law, Angelica Church, who knew the pair in Paris. Although Church and Jefferson shared a lively and charged correspondence, she was nowhere near as close to the Virginian as she was to her brother-in-law, Hamilton, who some suspected was her lover. The two almost certainly talked to one another about Jefferson once he became Hamilton’s determined foe in the 1790s.

We have in recent decades expanded the category of people who can be considered historical actors in the founding era, taking in the enslaved, servants, and people who are not founding fathers or related to founding fathers. Some of those enslaved at Monticello, as well as the white men who worked there, had as much valuable information about Jefferson as Alexander Hamilton or Angelica Church. We have no inkling of what members of the Hemings family thought about their relatives’ connection to Jefferson. Were they ashamed or proud of the association? They could have gone either way. Jefferson was considered a great man, but this phenomenon of generational concubinage that had yet to bring about the emancipation of family members may have been distressing. Did they talk about this to outsiders? If so, there would have been no way to keep the knowledge within the strict confines of the house at Monticello.

It is hard to believe that James Hemings, during his years in Philadelphia—with and without Jefferson—never breathed to a soul the true nature of his connection to Jefferson in all its aspects. One can imagine an entirely predictable conversation with a companion, platonic and otherwise.

The more time Hemings spent with a person, and the closer he grew to her or him, the greater the temptation would be to tell the person who he really was, for his sister’s life was intimately bound up with his own life story. It was, in fact, part of the reason he was back in the United States and not in Paris.

We can posit the same of Robert Hemings living in the household of Dr. Stras in Richmond. These two men must have had a fairly close relationship for Stras to do something for Hemings that Jefferson did not think to do: help him set up a plan for his emancipation. It is virtually impossible to keep a secret that more than one person knows, and after too many people know, it can no longer be called a secret. Under the circumstances, it is just as likely that the talk about Jefferson’s “far from spotless” personal life referred to what he was doing
at the time
, and not just his attempt to seduce his best friend’s wife or his fleeting sixteen-year-old affair in a foreign land with a foreign woman. Far more people on American soil in the 1790s knew about Jefferson and Hemings than knew about Jefferson and Cosway.

So it was clear by January of 1800, and probably before, that there was a chance that Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings might become a source of public trouble for him. The most sensational sex scandal to date had been Alexander Hamilton’s admission of his adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds, an act from which he never really recovered.
³
The astute Jefferson understood that Hamilton’s mistake, if he had wanted to remain a public figure, was in talking about the matter. Had he remained silent or, at most, opted for the ever useful, but quite transparent, “Why, I won’t dignify such trash with a response,” he might have been able to salvage a national career for himself. That is, if he had not also rushed headlong into publishing a bizarre diatribe against John Adams.
³
He was a brilliant man, still young, who could have looked forward to making additional contributions to the nation.

It is natural to think first of what the gossip meant to Jefferson because he obviously had a great deal at stake, as did the nation. He was in the midst of trying to become president of the United States when the first blind items about his private life had begun to circulate in public. But this talk was likely far down on Jefferson’s list of preoccupations in 1800 as his political future was being decided by the American electorate and while he waited, far longer, as it turned out, than he had expected, to find out whether he would become president.

The Hemingses had things at stake, too, but none of national import. Sally Hemings’s brother Robert and his wife lived in what would become the epicenter of the scandal. The Richmond newspapers carried the story to the outside world, and Robert probably learned very early on that his sister’s story—even if not given in detail at first—had reached beyond Charlottesville. What might this mean for her? He and other family members would be entirely justified if they feared that all the talk might become too much of a problem for Jefferson and his white family, and Sally and her child—there was only Beverley in 1800—might be sent away. Enslaved people were well aware that slave owners almost always made decisions on the basis of the needs of their white families, not the enslaved people they called “family” in the paternalistic sense or those enslaved people who really were part of their biological family. Whatever they may have thought Jefferson felt for Hemings, there could be no guarantee of what he was going to do about this until he did it.

The election was close—an actual electoral tie—until after thirty-six ballots in the House of Representatives, Jefferson was elected the third president of the United States on February 17, 1801. He was already in Washington, having come there in December to finish out his duties as president of the Senate and to await the election results. With that behind him, he immediately set about making plans for his administration and for his life in the President’s House. There was no question whom he wanted to be his chef.

A Life Unravels

James Hemings had returned from his travels and settled in Baltimore. Why he was there instead of in Philadelphia remains a mystery. Although the city did have a large free black population, with opportunities for work, it was located in a southern slave state, and appears to have been more like an expanded version of Richmond than a city like Philadelphia. Baltimore’s large and busy port carried many people to and from the United States, and it was a possible point of departure and return for Hemings during his travels. He may have simply decided to settle there after one of his trips. Jefferson knew where he was, and five days after his election he wrote to a Baltimore resident and innkeeper, William Evans,

Evans’s comments about Hemings had given Jefferson every indication that the younger man was anxious to work for him again. Hemings had no difficulty finding jobs, but apparently acted as if his employment was temporary until Jefferson sent for him. Jefferson was so confident about Hemings’s arrival that he wrote to the French envoy, Philippe de Létombe, the same day he wrote to Evans that he was looking for a maître d’hôtel from “among the French in Philadelphia,” adding, “I have a good cook: but it is pour l’office, & to take charge of the family [meaning his servants in the President’s House] that I am distressed.”
⁵

Three days after writing to Evans, he received a letter from another of his former employees, Francis Say. Say also lived in Baltimore and was in contact with Hemings. As Jefferson had told Evans in his letter of February 23, Say had come to him earlier seeking employment, and he, too, mentioned that James Hemings was anxious to work for him again. Say was reporting on what Hemings was now saying about working for Jefferson and repeating his own offer to serve the new president.
⁶
This was a delicate business because Jefferson wanted to hire only Hemings, not Say, who drank and quarreled too much with his wife for Jefferson’s taste. When he got serious about contacting his former chef, he decided to write to Evans instead of Say. After asking Evans to have Hemings come to work for him, he asked the innkeeper to try to persuade Say not to ask him for a job.
⁷
The man who wanted to be loved by everybody—the president-elect of the United States—did not have the heart to tell Say that he did not want to hire him. Before Evans could get to him, Say wrote,

By February 27 Evans had received Jefferson’s letter. He responded saying that he had immediately passed along Jefferson’s message to Hemings, who said in return that he was working in a tavern for a “Mr. Peck” and that it was “out of [his] power” to quit “for a few days.” Evans pressed him to be specific about the date he could leave. Hemings told him that he would think about it and get back to him later that evening, but he did not. Evans explained what happened next: “I sent for him a second time, the answer he returned me, was, that he would not go until you should write to himself—”
⁹
Evans’s communication about Hemings trailed off with that suggestive dash, and then he promised to try to persuade Say not to ask Jefferson for a job.

This awkward correspondence clearly suggests a power struggle between Hemings and Jefferson that hints at feelings that may have existed between the two for years. Lucia Stanton has persuasively suggested that Jefferson offended Hemings by summoning him as he had in years past when Hemings was first a boy and then an enslaved man.
¹⁰
He was an adult free man now. He could read and write. He knew that Jefferson spent hours at his desk writing to everyone under the sun. Why not a line formally asking him to come to Washington? Being the president’s chef de cuisine was a serious job. Why not spell out in writing all that was expected?