The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 14
Historian Joseph Ellis, one of the preeminent scholars to embrace the belief that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally’s children, has acknowledged in a recent issue of the William & Mary Quarterly that—except for Madison’s statement—the “historical record is almost completely blank” about Sally Hemings.30 He writes that “nothing in the vast historical literature, sheds any light on the character of the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings.”31 We do not know exactly when she was born or died, where her body was buried, or—as Professor Fawn Brodie has conceded—anything at all about her personal “feelings.”32 Yet most Americans would be shocked at this reality, as Hollywood and creative scholars have painted a far more detailed portrait based almost entirely on speculation and fantasy.
Sally Hemings in Paris
We know that Sally Hemings and Polly Jefferson arrived in Paris in the middle of July 1787.33 We know that Sally returned to Virginia with Jefferson and his daughters when his diplomatic service came to an end, and that they arrived back at Monticello on December 23, 1789. Beyond that, with some very minor and often ambiguous exceptions, Professors Lander and Ellis were correct in noting, in their Nature commentary that accompanied the Foster DNA report, that “[t]here is no evidence of what transpired” in Paris involving Sally Hemings.34
Professor William Howard Adams, in his 1997 The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, provides this accurate summary of what is known about Sally Hemings during her stay in Paris:
[T]he evidence is meager. Apart from nine notations in Jefferson’s Memorandum Book recording purchases of clothing, her servant’s pay, and a fee for smallpox vaccination, Sally Hemings is completely absent from the Paris record. We know nothing of her living arrangements or duties at the rue de Berri. …She was known to at least one of Polly Jefferson’s classmates at the convent, and there has been reasonable speculation that she acted as maid for the Jefferson girls while they were in school.35
There is indeed some logic in assuming that Sally spent most of her Paris experience at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont on the rue de Grenelle, the convent school where Martha and Polly Jefferson resided (“except on special weekends”36) most of the time they were in Paris, along with daughters of other socially prominent Paris residents.37 She was, scholars seem to agree, charged with serving as the children’s maid; and Jefferson already had a full staff of servants at the Hôtel de Langeac, his cramped Paris residence on the Champs-Elysées, before Sally arrived. The problem with assuming Sally would remain near the daughters whom it was her purpose to serve as a ladies’ maid is that this makes it difficult to sustain the “Tom and Sally” fantasy38 of which many people seem to have grown so fond.
Professor Gordon-Reed almost appears to use the lack of any information to assume that Sally would have spent her days lounging around Jefferson’s residence in a gown of fine French lace, nibbling on fine chocolates while waiting for the start of another night of passion (in the cramped, two-bedroom residence Jefferson shared with others). She asserts: “There probably was not much work for Sally Hemings to do during her stay in France. Martha and Mary were boarding at school. Jefferson had been in Paris for three years, and the residence already had a staff of servants.”39
Similarly, in its January 2000 report, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee asserted that, while in Paris, Sally “probably lived at Jefferson’s residence on the Champs-Elysées, the Hôtel de Langeac,” but notes “it is also possible that she may have lived with Jefferson’s daughters at their convent school, the Abbaye de Panthemont.”40
However, the official Monticello position both before and after the Monticello Report was more consistent with the actual evidence. In a short 1989 biography of Sally Hemings on the Monticello web page, updated in 1994, Lucia C. Stanton wrote: “It is not known whether Sally Hemings lived at Jefferson’s residence, the Hotel de Langeac, or at the Abbaye de Panthemont, where Martha (Patsy) and Mary (Maria) Jefferson were boarding students.” More recently, in her 2000 book, Free Some Day, Ms. Stanton wrote:
Escorted by Jefferson’s French butler, the two girls [Polly and Sally] arrived in Paris on July 15, 1787. Polly Jefferson immediately joined her sister, Martha (Patsy), at the Abbaye de Panthemont, a fashionable convent school with a number of English as well as French students. It is not known whether Sally Hemings lived at the convent or at the Hôtel de Langeac, Jefferson’s residence on the Champs-Elysées. It was not uncommon for the servants of boarding students to continue to attend their mistresses in the Abbaye and some of the Jefferson sisters’ schoolmates knew Sally well enough to send her greetings in their correspondence.41
Given these circumstances, one has to wonder why the Monticello Report declared it “probable” that Sally did not accompany the daughters she was in Paris to serve when they went to the convent—all the more so since the revisionists seem to agree there would have been no work for her to do at Jefferson’s residence and Sally was repeatedly mentioned in letters between Martha and her schoolmate Marie de Boridoux.42
Other assertions about Sally’s life in Paris for which there does not appear to be the slightest serious evidence include Professor Brodie’s claim that Sally was in “daily contact” with Thomas Jefferson43 (which would only have been likely if she had not accompanied the daughters to the Abbaye, an issue that cannot be resolved with the available information); and that she received “formal education” while in Paris.44 Consider this excerpt from Professor Gordon-Reed’s book:
Brodie stated that soon after Hemings came to Paris, a French teacher named Monsieur Perrault was engaged. It was apparently James Hemings who hired the tutor. There is no indication from documents from France that Sally Hemings was included in the lessons, although in later years one political enemy of Jefferson referred to Hemings as having had the “benefits of a French education.” Though the presence of a tutor does not support Fawn Brodie’s claim about Jefferson’s feelings toward Hemings, it does illustrate the extraordinary things she was exposed to as a young woman.
Sally Hemings, who had been entrusted with an assignment and had succeeded in carrying out that assignment, was now living in an opulent residence, learning a new language (either formally or informally) and a new set of customs.45
None of this is seriously supported by evidence. Sally did arrive safely in Paris with Polly, but if the evaluations of both Captain Andrew Ramsay and Abigail Adams are to be believed (and they are the only witnesses who we know observed and commented upon Sally’s behavior at the time), she hardly distinguished herself in “carrying out that assignment.” The un-contradicted testimony is that Captain Ramsay took care of Polly while at sea, and Abigail Adams did so while Polly and Sally stayed in London before Adrien Petit arrived to escort them to Paris. We have no reason to believe Sally lived in “an opulent residence” as opposed to the servants’ quarters at the convent, although that may possibly have been true; and there is no credible46 evidence Sally was learning French in any meaningful way. (James Hemings was learning to cook from French chefs, so his need to be able to communicate in French was obvious. It is well documented that James did receive tutoring in French, but Sally’s name does not appear in any of those references.)
Of course, there is also no clear proof that Sally was not being tutored in French, and perhaps Italian and Chinese as well. Indeed, there is no proof Sally Hemings did not spend most of her days teaching English literature to the people of Paris. But the almost total absence of information does not make such speculation true, or even “probable.” The proper answer is, with very few exceptions, we simply do not know what Sally Hemings did in Paris.
In fairness, there is some evidence that Sally may have received some “formal training” during her stay in Paris. During the spring of 1789, Jefferson paid his launderer to board Sally for more than a month. Speculation about the purpose of this entry in Jefferson’s Memorandum Books ranges from a quarantine period away from his daughters while Sally recovered from her smallpox vaccination
to possibly training Sally at the laundry in the proper care of fine fabrics.47 Since Martha was being presented to French society at the time, the utility of Sally’s having such training may support the latter interpretation. But we will likely never know if that is, in fact, the explanation.
Much of the modern speculation that Sally Hemings may have been “educated” in Paris may come from a partisan letter written by a Georgia Federalist named Thomas Gibbons, who will be discussed further in Chapter Nine. In 1802, Gibbons responded to an inquiry by Federalist representative Jonathan Dayton, who was clearly searching for evidence with which to attack the Republican President. There is no evidence that Thomas Gibbons had ever seen Sally Hemings or even visited Monticello, but he did not hesitate to assert that Sally Hemings was “the most abandoned prostitute of her color—pampered into a lascivious course of life, with the benefits of a French education, she is more lecherous than the other beasts of the Monticellian Mountain.”48
If so, the account may parallel the confusion caused by Fawn Brodie’s ignorance that the expression “mulatto soil” was a geological term of art (also discussed in the Introduction and Chapter Nine). I am informed, although I have not had an opportunity (or, for that matter, sufficient interest) to research the issue, that having the benefit of a “French education” was a disparaging euphemism in the early nineteenth century, not for having engaged in advanced studies at the Sorbonne, but rather for a woman trained or skilled in the arts of sexual pleasure (e.g., a prostitute). The context of the Gibbons charge would more reasonably support such a meaning. Gibbons was not accusing Sally Hemings of being a highly educated, sophisticated woman, but rather clearly alleging she was “more lecherous than the other beasts” at Monticello because of her alleged “French education.” Gibbons’ letter was peppered with vicious racist stereotypes. While he admitted that he had never even seen any of Sally’s children, he told Dayton: “That Jefferson lives in open defiance of all decent rule, with a mulatto slave, his property, named Sally, is as correct as truth itself, and that his children, to wit, Tom, Beverly & Harriot [sic] are flat nosed, thick lipped, and Tawny. … ”49
Gibbons’ clear purpose was to make President Jefferson look bad. Presumably, Jefferson’s alleged behavior might have been more forgivable to many people had Sally been perceived as a slightly darker version of the educated and accomplished Maria Cosway or Angelica Schuyler Church. It is unlikely that Gibbons knew anything beyond Callender’s allegations about Sally’s life in Paris, and he had no motive to portray her in any favorable light. Not only does the context strongly suggest an unusual meaning for “French education,” but we know the word “French” was used during that era as a disparaging adjective in a number of other bawdy euphemisms. Yet, in the absence of almost any reliable information about Sally Hemings, some scholars who seek support for the Jefferson-Hemings story find this sentence to be reliable evidence that Sally was formally “educated” in France.
Yet another assumption about Sally Hemings’ life in Paris that is widely presented as fact is that she knew she had a legal right to freedom while in France. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, Thomas Jefferson himself was unaware of this unwritten customary practice of French law until well into his stay in Paris. And yet Professor Brodie writes: “Both Sally and James Hemings knew they were free if they chose to make an issue of it.”50 She attributes the statement to the 1873 Ohio newspaper article reporting on an alleged conversation with Sally’s son Madison (discussed in Chapter Four), but the article gave no source for Madison’s statement and he was not born until more than fifteen years after Sally returned from Paris.
Similarly, the Monticello Report asserts that Sally and James “would almost certainly have been aware of their right to freedom and the means to achieve it,” because “there was a community of former slaves in Paris and freedom cases were brought and won in this period.”51 Implicit in this reasoning appears to be an assumption that Sally and James “hung out” with this “community of former slaves,” or perhaps that free servants of Patsy’s or Polly’s friends at the convent would have known this and been willing to risk their own comfort by spreading dissension among the slaves of the powerful American Minister to France. Perhaps this is true. But, once again, the real answer is that we simply do not know.
The Monticello Report also clearly accepted as fact Madison Hemings’ allegation that his mother confronted her powerful master in Paris and refused to return to Virginia (where all of her American family and friends lived) unless Jefferson would agree to enter into a “treaty” to free any children they might produce years in the future when the children reached the age of twenty-one. Several statements in Madison’s article seem clearly false, and this one is totally out of character with what we know about the personality of Thomas Jefferson and what little we know about Sally Hemings. Yet Monticello research historian Lucia Stanton writes:
Madison Hemings’s allusions to the promises Jefferson made to his mother to persuade her to leave France evoke a woman who, although limited by her race and condition, exercised a measure of control over her own destiny. The several references to Jefferson’s “promise,” “treaty,” and “solemn pledge” even suggest Sally Hemings’s strength and agency at other times in her life, condensed for the sake of transmitting a story into the single negotiation over the return to Virginia. In Madison Hemings’s account, his mother’s actions were driven by concern for the welfare of her children. …52
Now, every word of this may be true. Perhaps Sally Hemings was this precocious, prescient, powerful feminist role model who confronted the American Minister to France and “negotiated” special privileges for the children she anticipated she might bear some years in the future. Otherwise, we are assured, she was going to demand her freedom and remain in France. And yet, in these remarkable “negotiations,” Sally Hemings apparently did not bother to ask for her own freedom in the event of her alleged lover’s death—when her value as a slave would presumably have been minimal and without which she might have been subjected to abusive treatment of various kinds by a new owner. Indeed, it seems more than a little strange—if Sally’s desire to have her own freedom was so great she would abandon her home, family, and friends in Virginia to commence a new life in a foreign land that was on the brink of a bloody revolution—that Sally would not have bothered to include any provision for her own eventual manumission in the “treaty” she allegedly compelled Jefferson to accept.
It is said that Madison’s “treaty” story is confirmed by the fact that Thomas Jefferson freed all of Sally’s children when they reached the age of twenty-one, but in Chapter Six we show that this widely believed assertion is clearly false. Indeed, as will be discussed, the only two of Sally’s children to be legally manumitted by Thomas Jefferson in his will were treated less favorably than all of the other children and grandchildren of Sally’s mother who were freed during his life or in his will. And, as will also be discussed in Chapter Six, all but two of Betty Hemings’ sons and grandsons who remained Thomas Jefferson’s property at the time of his death were given their freedom in his will, and the two exceptions gained freedom shortly thereafter.
Sally Hemings at Monticello
Our knowledge of Sally Hemings after she returned to Monticello is equally barren. Contrary to the Hollywood version of the story, there is not the slightest bit of evidence she ever lived in the Monticello big house.53 Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, reportedly showed historian Henry Randall “a smoke blackened and sooty room” away from the mansion and asserted it was Sally’s room.54 There is some speculation that she may have shared a small stone house with her sister Critta, and then lived in a twelve- by fourteen-foot log cabin on the plantation.55
There is no known document including a single quotation attributed to Sally Hemings, nor any document known to contain so much as one word written by her hand. Had she been literate, one might have thought she would have attempted to teach her children to read; yet Madison
in 1873 reportedly stated “I learned to read by inducing the white children to teach me the letters. … ”56 Still, the absence of serious information means we cannot prove that Sally was not literate in several languages. We just do not know.
Hollywood movies portray Sally dancing with the President at the White House. Thomas Jefferson took nearly a dozen Monticello slaves to the White House,57 but there is not a bit of evidence that Sally was ever one of them. On the contrary, the Monticello overseer at the time asserted that Sally remained at Monticello during Jefferson’s presidency.58
Then there is the issue of whether Sally served as Thomas Jefferson’s “chambermaid” at Monticello. Without any citation, Professor Gordon-Reed asserts: “There is evidence that Hemings was Jefferson’s chambermaid.”59 Similarly, the Monticello Report asserts that from the “1790s to 1827,” Sally Hemings was employed as a “chambermaid and seamstress.”60 In response to an inquiry about the foundation for this statement, Lucia Stanton wrote: “Madison Hemings’s and Israel Jefferson’s [1873] statements are the only references to Sally Hemings as Jefferson’s chambermaid. Ellen Coolidge in 1858 wrote that ‘no female domestic ever entered [Jefferson’s] chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze.’ . . .”61 Although not cited to any specific source, this quotation was obviously taken from the altered transcription of Ellen Randolph Coolidge’s hand-written letter that appears as Appendix E of Professor Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.62 As Figure 3 on page 36 reveals, counting both words that were deleted and those moved within the sentence, the Gordon-Reed transcription of this sentence includes nearly a dozen alterations that have the effect of reversing the clear meaning of the original letter.