Recently, I argued that Thomas Jefferson’s slave owning was much more complicated than almost anyone today understands, and that he was heroic and unusually intellectually independent by fighting the institution when few in his time and place did. He inherited his slaves, could not free them, and fought for the emancipation of slaves. Despite inconsistencies, he deserves praise, not blame, on that issue—in contrast to the modish and sequacious attacks on him. (That is a brief précis of my last piece. If you have not read it, please do before reading further.)
Briefly, I mentioned the topic of his relationship with Sally Hemings and referred to it as a topic for another day.
That day has arrived.
Did Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings have a romantic relationship?
It is extremely likely that they did.
Does that mean that Jefferson was, as a Hollywood actor who likely had overpaid political advisors feeding him lines once said, a slave-raping pedophile?
Once again, we must consider the full context of the relationship (something today’s allegedly nuanced commentators who are putatively interested in complexity are unable or unwilling to do).
It is true that Sally Hemings was technically a slave (at least when she was at home in America—see below) and that she was around fifteen or sixteen at the time her relationship with Thomas Jefferson likely began.
“Rape” certainly implies lack of consent, whether due to obvious physical coercion or a partner too young or otherwise unable to give informed consent, at least in the moment.
Does this apply to Sally Hemings in Paris circa 1888? Is coercion (whether due to her putative status as a slave or her age) a reasonable descriptor of the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in Paris in the late 1880s or at any time thereafter?
Once again: A brief account of Sally Hemings’s life is appropriate, as it was of Thomas Jefferson’s.
Sarah “Sally” Hemings was the daughter of John Wayles and his slave mistress, Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings. John Wayles was Jefferson’s father-in-law, and Jefferson’s wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson was Sally’s half sister. The sisters were said to have shared a pronounced facial resemblance. (Artist renderings of Sally’s likeness are rare.) When Wayles died in 1773, around the time Sally was born, Jefferson “inherited" the entire Hemings family from his father-in-law.
The Hemings family were not treated like slaves. They were considered almost like family, and they were. (All slaves at Jefferson’s homes at Monticello and Poplar Forest were treated humanely compared to most places in the antebellum south, acknowledging inconsistencies and lapses beyond the abhorrence of the practice itself. The Hemingses were treated even better than the other slaves, including the white slaves seen at Monticello. For those interested in race, Sally was one-quarter black and three-quarters white.)
In 1782, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, who had many problems with parturition and childbirth, died after an illness. She could not recover from the pregnancy and birth of her and her husband’s youngest daughter, Polly. (These problems were extremely common prior to modern medicine.) While she was on her deathbed, she asked her husband to promise not to remarry—she said she could die happy knowing he would never remarry. A distraught Jefferson promised his dying wife he would never remarry. Sally Hemings, among other intimates, was in the room and witnessed this promise—but she did yet know Jefferson well.
Subsequently, Jefferson temporarily moved to Paris when he was named America’s ambassador to France. When one of his daughters, Lucy, died, Jefferson asked for his youngest daughter to be sent to Paris to live with him and her sister Martha. Sally Hemings (and Sally Hemings alone) was entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring nine-year-old Polly’s safe voyage to Paris. That she was entrusted with that responsibility at age fourteen or fifteen demonstrates how responsible and trustworthy she was and was considered to be—and that, in the context of that time, a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old was considered, essentially, an adult.
Jefferson decided it was not safe to send Sally back to Virginia unaccompanied and told her (or asked her?) to remain in Paris.
In Paris, Polly (whose legal name was Mary) and Sally reunited with the Jefferson family and with Sally’s brother James, a popular and successful chef in Paris. Sally became a close personal assistant to Jefferson, working closely in his private living area and bedroom—even taking his measurements.
At this time, Jefferson was working closely with a young woman who may well have greatly resembled his late wife, to whom he had promised he would never remarry.
And slavery was illegal in France, including in the households of foreign diplomats.
As Annette Gordon-Reed documents in The Hemingses of Monticello, it was common for slaves of visiting dignitaries to walk into Paris’s admiralty courts and say something like, “I am free; I am emancipating myself from my master.” The courts regularly granted instant emancipation status to all; there is no record of any magistrate turning down such a request. And James and Sally Hemings certainly knew that that was an option available to them. James could have easily supported both of them with his culinary skills and reputation.
But they didn’t do that. Eventually, they sailed back to Virginia with Jefferson and family.
And one of the first things Jefferson did when they arrived was to free James Hemings. (Something else Gordon-Reed describes in some detail is the difficulty and expense of freeing even one slave in the Virginia of Jefferson’s time, even for one who was not in substantial debt. Gordon-Reed is less sympathetic to Jefferson than I, and her account of Jefferson’s eventual painstaking labors and substantial expenses freeing all six of Sally Hemings’s children is instructive.)
Why did Thomas Jefferson free James Hemings and, eventually, all six of Sally Hemings’s children?
According to her son Madison (named after James Madison), he was also Jefferson’s son. He stated that his mother, in Paris while pregnant, asked Jefferson why she and James should return to Virginia with him when they could be free in Paris. According to Madison Hemings, Jefferson promised Sally that he would ensure she lived a good life in Virginia. She demanded that he promise to free any and all children they had together. Sally already knew what kind of man Jefferson was in that regard.
The late, great Christopher Hitchens, in Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, said it best:
The first clue to the relationship may lie in the simple fact that Jefferson, having met Sally and received his daughter from her in good condition, did not send her home again (as he had planned to do with the original escort). He did not require an extra servant at the Hotel de Langeac, his well-appointed residence, where Sally’s brother James was already on the staff, being trained as a French chef. Possibly the latter consideration influenced him, in inviting Sally to stay on. But nor did he exactly need a governess, since both his daughters were destined for boarding school. Thus the beautiful Sally became a part of the ministerial household, with no specific duties. In 1788, Jefferson began to pay wages to her, and to her brother James, though he had never paid James a regular wage before. Moreover, slavery was not recognized as legal on French soil, a fact of which Jefferson was certainly aware, and one that it would not have taken Sally long to find out. (In an act that was to alter Jefferson’s life in myriad ways, the French Revolution was soon to abolish slavery in all French overseas territories as well.) It’s therefore possible to say that, while they did have a common tie of affection and near-kinship in the person of the departed Martha—whom Sally may have resembled—Jefferson and Hemings did not have a “master-slave” relationship in the vile sense that is normally understood. (60-61)
Elsewhere, Hitchens writes that Sally “was not subjected to the indignities and humiliations of fieldwork and the lash” (59) and that “[i]n status, Sally was barely a slave.” (61)
Hitchens cites Gordon-Reed:
In her brilliant, dispositive study of the subject, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed points out with well- controlled scorn that most analysts have refused even to consider whether Sally might have had a mind of her own, or might even more shockingly have made that mind up— in favor of an affair with a rich, famous, powerful, and fascinating man. We still fail to acknowledge of grant “agency,” as modern jargon has it, to voiceless black [sic] female chattels. Unfortunately, Sally is still voiceless, and the sole volume of Jefferson’s letters that might have contained correspondence with her is the only one in the whole vast set that has chosen to go missing. We do not even know if she was literate, though it seems probable, or whether she spoke any French, though this seems more likely. All we have is the testimony of her son Madison Hemings that she had while in Paris exacted a promise from Jefferson to free any children she had with him as soon as they achieved adulthood. And the “only” evidence for that promise is that he did indeed free them, all of them, and no other slaves, ever.” (62)
Hitchens goes on to extol Jefferson’s “much better-documented” character. He refers to the relationship as one that has “needlessly baffled generations of American historians” (50).
In The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Gordon-Reed wrote:
Whatever one thinks of Sally Hemings’s decision to trust Jefferson on this critical point [freeing their future children], she had an opportunity, entirely lost to historians, to have seen him face-to-face when no one else was around and to make a judgment, on the basis not only of his words but of his demeanor, about the seriousness of his sentiments. Hemings and all her relatives knew a private Jefferson that we do not know. We know a Jefferson of the Notes on the State of Virginia, talking about the need to remove blacks “beyond the reach of mixture” and a late in life letter in which he disparages the very kind of relationship that he was so intent upon entering into in France and lived in for almost four decades. We know something else just as well, or should by now: one must take with a grain of salt an individual’s public pronouncements criticizing certain sexual behavior, particularly when offered gratuitously. For such statements can be as much about that person’s inner struggle with socially forbidden private preferences as about their desire to voice a heartfelt sentiment for the benefit of mankind. They can also be about an attempt to deflect attention from an area where he or she is vulnerable. Even genuinely stated beliefs do not define the scope of private activities. People do things in private, have thoughts and feelings, that they do not want others to know about, and may honestly feel should not be replicated by members of society at large. “Do as I say, not as I do” is a well-known prescription in life, and Jefferson, like many human beings, was sometimes prone to offering it. (343)
Throughout most of human history (including Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime), fifteen was considered marriageable age, at least for females. E.g.: James Madison was engaged to fifteen-year-old Catherine “Kitty” Floyd when he was in his thirties. He is not generally considered a pedophile.
Whatever one thinks of Jefferson’s apparent interpretation of his promise to his dying wife and what her understanding of the promise was, he kept it (literally, anyway). And he kept his apparent promise to Sally Hemings, no matter the effort and expense, which likely did not surprise her in the least—and was presumably worth the effort and expense to him, promises or no promises. Sally Hemings was at an adult age (in the context of the time), and she carried herself like an adult. She and the rest of the Hemings family were more like indentured servants than slaves and were not considered or treated like slaves. Many historians speculate that their relationship, given Sally’s likely resemblance to Jefferson’s late wife and the intimate nature of Sally’s job, was inevitable. Moreover, many speculate that she seduced him, perhaps with the encouragement of her mother, who may well have told her that that was the best life she could have in the world as it was then.
Surely, those immersed in the current culture, accustomed as it is to nuance and the “missing context” admonishments of Facebook “fact checkers”, can understand that Thomas Jefferson, at the very least, deserves the benefit of every doubt when considering his relationship with Sally Hemings—even if he, like most people, was not fully consistent on the subjects of slavery and race in his words and actions.
While much thinking about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings must remain speculative, there is no good reason, in accordance with reason and the available evidence and historical accounts, to think that Thomas Jefferson’s and Sally Hemings’s relationship was not a relationship of consenting adults. The historical record, considered in context, demonstrates that it was a consensual adult relationship. Two complicated, conflicted, and extraordinary humans—two world-historical giants and cynosures—made the most of a complicated context they both inherited and did their best to end.
And, as Hitchens implies, that fact would not be the last bit controversial—would not needlessly baffle generations of historians—in a culture dedicated to the Enlightenment virtues of reason and ratiocination that Jefferson generally extolled and exemplified.
Sources:
Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
Halliday, E.M. Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York: Perennial, 2001.
Hitchens, Christopher. Eminent Lives: Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. New York: Atlas Books/Harper Collins Publishers, 2005.
Kukla, Jon. Mr. Jefferson’s Women. 2007. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.
Ledgin, Norm. Diagnosing Jefferson: Evidence of a Condition that Guided His Beliefs, Behavior, and Personal Associations. 1998. Arlington, Texas: Future Horizons, Inc., 2000. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1997.