Jefferson in Love
And what if he was?
Author’s note: An earlier draft of this essay was published on my website: Don’t Know Cacca About Jefferson
“ We’re not two separate people, blacks and whites. We’re related by culture and by blood. That reality has been denied.” Annette Gordon-Reed
In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published her opening salvo, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American Controversy. Here was this inquisitive academic writing in meticulous prose to work out in her own mind what to make of their story, asking ‘did they or didn’t they? It’s slow, careful sledding, because she was going after the sparse evidence found in written correspondence, both in what existed and what curiously did not.
Gordon-Reed herself is one more survivor of American slavery, though she judiciously avoids editorializing about that horror. Here centuries later, everybody’s yelling one side and the other about race, yet she feels no need to go outside what is known, putting brackets around what isn’t. As you work your way through the book, the facts accrue and build her case. Nor does she pass over acknowledging that Jefferson, by his influence on the young nation, was a significant player in this original sin.
Gordon-Reed is kinder to Jefferson that many in the present day, but she doesn’t excuse him. Though be glad no one chases you down as carefully as Gordon-Reed does Jefferson. Don’t post what you can’t admit to. Or be very dead. Then go ahead and scream invectives at the roof of that box you’re crammed into.
Twenty years after her first book was published, in an essay the NY Times published in 2017 , Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past, Gordon-Reed encapsulates her much longer history with the same nuanced care.
“As always, context matters: None of the other young people at the Hôtel de Langeac [in the Paris residence]— not Jefferson’s daughters, not his secretary, William Short — wanted to return to America. His eldest daughter, Martha, was thinking of ways to remain. To get Sally Hemings to come back with him, Jefferson promised her a good life at Monticello, and that their children would be freed when they became adults. Madison Hemings said that his mother ’implicitly relied’ on Jefferson’s promises, a statement that troubled me when I first wrote about Hemings — subjects often exasperate biographers. It was not until I began researching my second book that I could find any probable reason why she might do this.”
from NY Times’ essay, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past
Think you know the whole story? I’ll grace your claim if you’ll hear me out.
After Jefferson retired to Monticello from eight years as the country’s third president, the public scandal had died back from early in his first term in office. James Callender had done his best to convict him of the worst offense a southern gentleman could be accused of, sleeping with his black slave. His concubine, as Callender put it. Though the practice was hardly uncommon. When Jefferson wouldn’t appoint him to a postmaster’s position, always the
schemer, Callender turned on him. Ultimately Callender got what was coming to him: mainly he up and died an outcast by Whigs and Democrats both. The locals in Albemarle County figured the rumors had to be sufficient admonishment to their famous neighbor on the hill, a man known for keeping secrets.
Stepping away from the klieg lights of those days — when candlepower still came from candles — returning to Monticello, his ‘little mountain,’ Jefferson was also returning to the woman he had fallen for all those years before in Paris. He had risked his entire public reputation, his position, something he continued to do for the rest of his life to stay with her. Shear stubbornness, or just maybe he loved Sally.
Jefferson wasn’t an outlier in early American life.
A screenwriter’s dream
Seems Thomas Bell, a friend of Jefferson’s, living in Charlottesville, had ‘leased’ a woman from Jefferson named Mary Hemings — daughter of Elizabeth Hemings and Sally’s oldest sister. Read that a second time and see if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, one farmer leasing ‘property’ from another.
But if you think Steven King can come up with tight plots, follow this one: it has a young beautiful damsel and a conflicted hero finding his soul, perhaps in hers. The opening scene has the damsel’s oldest sister, Mary, asking Jefferson if he’d sell her to Thomas Bell, who really prefers to be wedded to her — and she’s running out of time being in her thirties and terrified she could be sold to the next white man who offers a good price, so the damsel begs her secret lover to help them. Imagine how that goes down. Bell and Hemings have fallen in love, or at least have fallen into bed.
Hollywood might insist on a double wedding performed in secret up in the mountains, but we can work with that.
Bell didn’t come out and declare it to the entire village, but the locals knew they were an item, having babies and all, and if he couldn’t marry her legally, he’d ‘own’ her instead. They remained married by all accounts until Bell died.
“Within the extremely narrow constraints of what life offered her — ownership by Thomas Jefferson or ownership by Thomas Bell — Mary Hemings took an action that had enormous, lasting, and, in the end, quite favorable consequences for her, her two youngest children, and the Hemings family as a whole. She found in Bell a [white] man willing to live openly with her, and to treat her and their children as if they were bound together as a legal family… Over the years she would be able to compare notes on her life with a white man with her youngest sister, [Sally Hemings] whom she honored by giving her own youngest daughter the name Sarah (also Sally), known by the time of her marriage, in the early 1800s, as Sarah Jefferson Bell.”
from The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed with emphasis added.
Another early American love story, like Tom and Sally. People deep in love do some crazy shit ‘proper folks’ don’t always admit to. Like Jefferson refusing to hide Sally from the world, even as he couldn’t acknowledge her beyond the traces of his small mountain.
I imagine Gordon-Reed’s disappointment at finding few notes, no letters and only cryptic citations in his farm book from Jefferson about his common-law wife. And Gordon-Reed can’t say what his ‘white’ kin refused to admit, not absent the correspondence. What doesn’t exist can’t be censored.
Gordon-Reed doesn’t outright state someone cleaned up the record, though it’s a logical conclusion, given how substantial a written correspondence Jefferson otherwise maintained. His surviving ‘white’ daughter would be a candidate for having done that, except Martha was who ultimately freed Sally after Jefferson’s death.
The rumors of his own out-of-wedlock nocturnals had gone quiet since Jefferson retired from the contest. The Whigs had been screaming for his scalp while he watched the rise of John C. Calhoun, father of southern race theory, who was preaching shit about inferior races. Jefferson’s other problem, his running feud with Hamilton, had been taken care of by Aaron Burr with pistols at fifty paces. Everyone was waiting for the musical to come out.
By the time he took that last coach ride leaving DC, Jefferson was already dismissed. Old news, as far as Washington wags were concerned, even if he’d begun a grand Washington tradition for laying out a fabulous table while President. He’d developed a taste for fine food while living in Paris with his personal chef, James Hemings — Sally’s brother.
Jefferson had freed him from servitude as promised, but something kept them from continuing their relationship once he became president. Gordon-Reed suggests James carried a grudge and Jefferson was too stubborn to settle things between them. Sad on both accounts.
Upon his retirement, Jefferson planned to get back to renovating his “Little Mountain” beginning with his dream of recreating Andrea Palladio’s dream of ancient Greek villas perched above outcroppings — of which there are a few in the Aegean Sea.
Jefferson was not known for his monetary acumen, as any architect worth their keep will appreciate, and he ran up a bill on Monticello. And he hoped to see a university growing just down the hill in the village.
The ancient Athenians saw bi-axial symmetry as something to aspire to, and Palladio sought to recreate it as in the Villa Capri. There it was, his jewel on a hilltop.
One will also recognize Palladio in the Jefferson Memorial later designed by John Russell Pope, who knew his Renaissance history. Of all the memorials and public buildings in Washington, D.C, this has to be the purest example of Greek Revival — in perfect Greco-symmetry. Not all of Pope’s works are as stirring.
The Jefferson’s quotes marking the memorial’s interior stone but sample his thoughts on his new country, and go well beyond the usual memorial bull.
His likeness is less than the surrounding volume, as is appropriate for an architect of bigger visions.
As a point of reference, the restored facade in the photo faces out over the original plantation, now a rolling landscape below. Jefferson’s bedroom and study are to the left in the photo. When had he first stood on that high ground and figured it was where to plant himself?
Archeologists think Sally’s room was in the basement.
James Madison had encouraged Jefferson to get away after his wife’s death, his bereavement laying such a depression on him. Madison, ally and friend, must have heard how Jefferson yearned to study in Europe and taste fine wine.
Two years into serving as an envoy to the French court of Louis XVI, getting word that his infant daughter, Lucy, had died from whooping cough back in the States, Jefferson insisted his second child of three, Polly, be sent straightaway to join him. Sally was assigned to accompany her — a fourteen-year-old slave girl escorting a nine-year-old.
So much of a life, even famous ones, is happenstance — even if we rational beings refuse to admit it.
Though there’s nothing like an illicit affair with a beautiful teenager half a boy’s age to stir the blood. And Jefferson, from all accounts, wasn’t inclined to celibacy. Thus, the story of Sally and Tom began.
They say Sally was beautiful, with long flowing black hair.
Then, as now, beautiful women lived in Paris, and a good number hung out at Versailles, ostensibly where Jefferson was working on his best diplomacy. But reading Gordon-Reed’s biography, Jefferson wasn’t a man to be drawn to physical beauty alone.
Any woman contemplating what a centuries-past white slaveowner might have been feeling got me smiling. But being led by a keen historian, what could be better?
The several European women he was attracted to were vivacious and intelligent — one might say ahead of their time. And while he greatly admired the freer spirited women of Europe, he was of Virginia where men — white men — were masters of the universe. The traditional role of women in rural Virginia wasn’t any more likely to suit his European interests than he would be once returned to Monticello. Sally had been ‘his’ before she became his. And this lay at the heart of the scandal they returned to face in 1789.
Yet she’d stayed! With a central question: why did she?
Curiously, the French before the Revolution indulged in slavery in their colonies, but legislated that slaves brought into France had the right to petition for their freedom. Sally had her chance at freedom in Paris, but she returned with him, her brother, James, and Jefferson’s two daughters to Monticello — bearing his child.
After eight years as president, in 1809, he was retiring to Monticello to live with Sally for the remainder of his days.
All I wanted was an explanation. Jefferson had covered his tracks, even if he had not quashed the salacious rumors. Salacious by whose standards? It seems darkly curious that the mortal sin of slavery could be overlooked in those days by the absurdity of keeping the white ‘race’ pure. Moreover, it’s depressing some folks still think in such terms.
Being only so persistent at research myself, long after the fact and a writer of leaner means, it felt necessary to run these leads down without begging a pass for the Library of Congress, or driving to Cambridge for Jefferson’s letters, having to suck up to grad students to be let into the archives, and other such falderal.
I spend too much time on the Google we all bow to for information, avoiding the ads as best we can. After the fourth or fifth Google ‘page’ of advertisements, I found myself agreeing with the right-wing crazies about Big Tech’s motives. Nor was I getting any closer to answering: did she love him or did he love her? Please answer the question — and, no, I don’t want to know where the closest damn hotel to Monticello is — I’ve been there!
Assuming Jefferson had sex with his daughter’s young maid servant, whom he’d inherited as ‘property’ from his deceased wife’s earlier deceased father. And Sally had his babies. Enough to make you wish for a better founding father? The very thought was enough for his whiter descendants to cover it up with vigor.
“Sacré blue!”as his buddy Lafayette might have exclaimed upon discovering the story. Or not. The French are known to have more tolerance for these foibles of the flesh.
Though there it was, a year after Gordon-Reed’s book was published:
“Researchers examined blood samples collected this year from known descendants of the family of America’s third president and from those who trace their ancestry to Hemings. In a paper published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature, they report that DNA comparisons all but conclusively prove that Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, was fathered by Jefferson.
“ ‘The question for 200 years has been, Did they or didn’t they?’ said Eric S. Lander, a genetic researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored a companion essay to the Nature article.
“ ‘There is such a strong case that Jefferson had a liaison with Hemings,’ Lander said, ‘that the DNA evidence converts that possibility into a near certainty.’ ”
From the 1998 Washington Post article by Leef Smith
I had gotten that far in the tale back when the story broke. I recall reading the research confirming the genetic markers and thought, “well there you go.” And the ‘say it ain’t so’ protests from other quarters, including Jefferson’s more white descendants, I read those too. The Washington Post gave the story a fair hearing.
Though Sally Hemings, the woman in question, remained a cipher. For generations, only her descendants were to honor her name.
It was in the turmoil following George Floyd’s murder that I recalled Hemings’s story. It seemed, in the larger slurry of the country’s arguments, that single story wanted to be better understood. I can’t explain why, but it felt necessary to write something about her, and it needed to be from her viewpoint. Yet I didn’t know where to begin or to find sufficient sources for historical fiction. So I set about seeking a few more books — and got lucky.
“ ‘This story is about family and who we are as Americans,’ said Annette Gordon-Reed, an associate professor at the New York School of Law. Her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American Controversy argued that the oral histories of blacks were being pushed aside to protect Jefferson’s reputation.
“ ‘We’re not two separate people, blacks and whites,’ she said. ‘We’re related by culture and by blood. That reality has been denied.’ ”
quoting Annette Gordon-Reed from the Washington Post article by Leef Smith
I’ve said elsewhere Gordon-Reed’s first book about Jefferson and Hemings felt slow starting out, mainly because her neutral, lawyerly tone didn’t shade the story to make a reader want to turn the page. If she didn’t style the book in breathless prose, there wasn’t a solitary mote she wouldn’t probe to suss out the truth. If DNA is too suspect a science for doubters, I’d urge them to read her book. It is yeoman’s work in service of history.
Slavery’s molten sludge blankets early centuries of American history, obscuring any clarity.
The same plantation culture that settled half the thirteen colonies provided others their undeserved wealth, such as the New York and New England mercantile traders, as well as traders from across the Atlantic. Inherited British traditions of privilege were clashing with a stubborn pursuit of freedom from tyranny, while an Enlightenment philosophy disputed Protestant theology. At the bottom lay the sludge and the unavoidable accounting to come.
Jefferson lived a life of contradictions not unlike our own: All men are created equal. The phrase has been turned against him recently by some on the left. And he’s been pilloried in the present day by his own words, largely by those who prefer history like it’s taught to elementary school kids.
“Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state…? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained…[emphasis added] the real distinctions which nature has made…will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”
from Notes on the State Of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, 1785, first published anonymously in England.
If he was wrong about the outcome, Jefferson was right to heed the danger to the country’s enterprise, and if one takes this single sentence, it seems clear where his sympathies lay As he was writing Notes on the State Of Virginia, Jefferson was still six years from Paris and becoming Sally Hemings’s common-law husband, a situation which they maintained until his death, forty-five years later.
If one’s balding but loving grandfather also grew up in a time when white supremacy was unquestioned by his family and peers, and the inherited family bibles he preserved held slave papers, if he was yours, how might you think of him? Kindly as he was, it placed him squarely in the same situation as Jefferson. I don’t know if such is easily forgiven, but my own son’s grandfather on his mother’s side was such a man, who indeed doted on his daughter, a child as innocent of the evil as her son. We are of such contradictions.
Did Jefferson not learn anything from his living decades with a woman so close she bore his children? Even if he could never speak of it in the village of Charlottesville of his day, nor write it down in a note to be later uncovered, did it not occur to him that blacks and whites, whether either were comfortable with the notion — then or now — they might become a future nation?
What Jefferson ought to have recognized just before him at Monticello was that these enslaved people believed Virginia was their home. Returning to Africa, a foreign land, was of no interest. Three generations in, they were Americans.
A cynic might say the reason we became a country of immigrants was a result of the ruling class requiring cheap-as-dirt labor, particularly after slavery was grudgingly given up.
Aye, the labor was needed if the continent was to be ‘settled’ in any fashion — overlooking the native tribes who considered it settled enough. The capitalists needed strong backs in their factories. Leaving worse conditions, unlike those coming from Africa in chains, the European immigrants came willing enough, yet they suffered and died for a distant hope in the future. As did African Americans.
All men are created equal — the question remains: does a sufficient majority continue to believe it? Whether the gratitude our immigrant ancestors felt at simple survival has become an attitude jaded by easy living, or that we are just ignorant of our own history, only our descendants will be able to tell.
For her entire life, excepting the two years in Paris, Sally Hemings was by Virginia law a slave subject to the whims of her owner. Though she was not any more Black than I am Welsh (despite the last name). Both Sally’s grandmother and mother were impregnated in turn by white slaveowners. She was a ‘quadroon’, like those ever precise Europeans liked to define their chattel.
Sally’s story is about as improbable as mine.
My Irish ancestors were surely indentured at various times in the Olde Sod, god bless their souls, if not their bishops, and desperate enough as immigrants to take work in the coal mines, a distinction of little difference from slavery’s forced labor when it came to dying young. Were the coal operators Christians, in fact — like the Virginia plantation owners?
Life was brutal, and too quickly over for my own father and his brother, so what kind of affection can I muster for those coal barons of Pennsylvania? For robber barons in general? Billionaires? Now I’m laughing.
My great grandmother left County Clare at the same age Sally Hemings sailed to Paris, and not so long later. Susan Berry wasn’t sailing for her studies abroad. Neither was Sally. Women were expendable like dray horses — one more affectation brought over by our European ancestors. So were working class men. Possibly women of earlier times were sensitive to being second class citizens, but I suspect only the ones born to privilege could afford any time to dwell on it.
Seems obvious that the species now has spread too thickly — beyond the planet’s carrying capacity, and the fallout is easy enough to recognize, though it also seems we are only moved by suffering when it’s right before us. Then we get busy thrashing out who’s to survive. We could use the example of a loving god, even when we don’t practice the example.
At some point a few centuries from now, assuming the American experiment survives, our descendants living on the outer planets will likely view our present muddle and shudder to comprehend how we balanced perceptions of moral justice against nuclear weapons and drones armed with missiles to bomb semi-desert herders. Or any of the other contradictions we — comfortably or not — accept as part of modern life.
So much is written about the Civil Rights heroes, Martin Luther King, and a legion of others. We have King’s recent holiday to remind us how much we owe those people for reclaiming a nation’s humanity.
Hemings, by comparison, who was she? There’s not even a verifiable portrait of her, yet she bore Jefferson’s children from too young an age, lived decades in his shadow, and witnessed a fantastic piece of early American history, not to overlook the French Revolution. Both her brothers Robert and James could write, and I suspect she could as well, though there’s no trace of that either.
Silent witness to this country at its inception, I admire Ms. Hemings, slim story as hers may be. And salute her best biographer. Annette Gordon-Reed has so gracefully written what story there is to tell and I thank her.
“We’re not two separate people, blacks and whites. We’re related by culture and by blood.” Annette Gordon-Reed.
Postscript
In the 50s and 60s growing up, I recall Sumter as a place of contradictions. Families were tight and caring, observed their faiths, and yet this huge divide existed like a red line down the middle of the town, and everyone was nervous about crossing over such that few ever did. When integration came along, white neighbors you’d grown up with were angry as hell — angry about being told what to do by outsiders, even if they knew the blacks were their neighbors and it was their Christian duty. And blacks were as unhappy as the whites. Not that they loved their second class status, only they knew trouble was surely coming from all the upheaval.
Please allow an allegory: Presume you’ve reached middle age and saw a wore-down black man pushing his beat-up car, and you had been high school mates playing football, you wouldn’t stop to bring out the cables from the trunk to juice his vehicle? Truly, you wouldn’t do that?
Say he’d dragged your drunken butt from that bar ya’ll shoulda never gotten so loaded at back in the day. And say you had a thing for his younger sister at the time and looking back, you wished like crazy you could have been with her more than those chaste times when you two flirted? You’d help him if you’re any kind of human, but would you write any of this down for your white children to read?
Jefferson, what kind of of a man was he? All people are created equal.
Suggested reading:
God’s Shadow — Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World by Alan Mikhall for background on slavery — Christian and Muslim alike. While I don’t buy Mikhall’s entire thesis, what he does make clear is how much both cultures were employing the same subjugation.
Echoes of empire: The case against a Eurocentric view of modern history reviews Alan Mikhall’s book in the Times Literary Supplement
Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson by William Howard Adams. With only a single chapter on Hemings in Paris, yet it’s central to her story, given Paris is where it began.
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed. If she wrote nothing more, this would serve as a remarkable legacy. Would that any writer be as capable of setting aside personal opinions and beliefs as she was.
The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed. Life in the 18th century was as complicated as today’s, and certainly more so for African Americans. The bible story about Jesus’s sermon about casting stones at ‘fallen’ women applies.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. if you need to recall the setting Sally narrowly avoided while living in Paris. Jefferson returned with Sally, her brother and his children only months before the French Revolution.
My own interest in Sally Hemings didn’t start with Linda Caroll’s post in Medium, The Hidden Room Where Thomas Jefferson Kept A Woman, though her story reanimated my interest.
Sally and Tom, A Morality Tale This one was inspired by Linda Caroll in Medium. Even if she regrets it now… it’s too late.
Sally Only because I’ve been thinking about her for a while. It’s a totally secondary source, if that.
