READING: Annette Gordon-Reed on Understanding Sally Hemings's Life

Annette Gordon-Reed's 2019 Twitter thread...

Annette Gordon-Reed's 2019 Twitter thread...

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Because Thomas Jefferson was such a weird dude, gaining even a glimpse of insight on which to ground what we should think of the interaction of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, in view of their extraordinary power imbalance—that is a very knotty problem.

She was a sex slave.

He viewed her (and her children, her nephews and nieces, plus her siblings) as part of his late wife’s and thus of his family.

He had promised his wife never to marry again—never to subject her children to a stepmother. The Hemingses all knew that.

Jefferson saw Sally as Hagar to Martha Jefferson’s Sarah, as Rachel to Martha Jefferson’s Leah. Plus a lot more.

In an age of Couverture, given the constraints Jefferson had imposed on himself by his desire to be the kind of man he thought he should be, how much greater was the patriarchal power imbalance than it was for a free couple?

Answer: a lot more.

And yet…

Annette Gordon-Reed (2019): ‘Some thoughts about Sally Hemings:

It makes no sense to think of her life out of the context of her family's story. She was a part of a web of relationships put in place before she was born. Her specific context can only be discerned by garnering details from the archives. Simply looking at a statute book and/or looking at other people's lives, and extrapolating to create a picture of Sally Hemings’s life, will not do. She cannot be taken, nor should any one person be taken, as the embodiment of the system of American slavery.

Sally Hemings imparted her vision of her life to her son, Madison Hemings, through a story in which she used the leverage of law to negotiate a particular kind of life for herself and her children. It was not a perfect life; not the life that I, her biographer, would have wished for her. But my wishes don't count in trying to discover what people long ago thought they were doing.

I have had to ask myself in considering her story: What would she have seen of women's lives in the 18th Century? She experienced a world in which women were, by and large, attached to men whom they could only hope would treat them well and keep whatever promises they made. Neither outcome was ever assured.

It is wrong to say that Sally Hemings could not have negotiated with Thomas Jefferson because the law didn't allow it. Other members of her family (her siblings and their progeny, before and after Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were in France) negotiated with him to their advantage. Again, these were his wife's relatives. This kind of connection rarely meant anything to other white enslavers, but it means something to Thomas Jefferson. All the evidence indicates that he saw Sally Hemings and her siblings through the prism of his feelings about his deceased wife, their older sister.

He took his cue for how to deal with the Hemings siblings from [is late wife Martha’s] response to them. Many white women whose fathers had children with enslaved women insisted those children be sold or sent away. Martha Jefferson brought her siblings to live closely with her at Monticello. Thomas Jefferson made the eldest of her enslaved siblings, Robert Hemings, his personal valet when he was 12, replacing the adult Jupiter Evans. The Hemings women were at Martha's deathbed, and carried the story of Martha's request that Thomas Jefferson nor remarry and his promise that he would not.

Sally Hemings’s son's recollections presents her as a determined and resourceful person who used the tools at her disposal, law and her knowledge of Thomas Jefferson, to fashion a life for herself that allowed her to be with her family and ensured that her children would leave slavery behind. Partus sequitur ventrum [slave status is inherited from the mother] would end with her. It did.

Only 2 people could have known the details of what happened in France: Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Madison Hemings certainly talked to Thomas Jefferson. Some of the information about Williamsburg is pretty detailed. It is more likely that Sally Hemings told her son. Whether we like it or not, understand it or not, Madison Hemings clearly saw himself as part of a "family". He uses the word. He calls Sally Hemings "Mother" and Thomas Jefferson "Father". He draws a circle around the 6 of them. There were family rituals and an important endpoint was always in mind: the emancipation of the children when they became adults. The "treaty" between his parents, as he terms it, was fulfilled.

After the author John Dos Passos brought Madison Hemings's recollections to the attention of scholars in the mid-Twentieth Century, the near uniform response among white historians was to say that he was lying, or that his mother was lying about her life to try to look "good". But the recollections fit with other information from the archives—the description of Sally Hemings’s life from contemporary 3rd parties, information from Thomas Jefferson's records, and from other sources. Whether we like what he is saying or not, it is the best source for Sally Hemings’s vision of her life.

Of course all members of the Hemings family were victims of the system of slavery. But Sally Hemings presented herself as a forceful and knowledgeable actor in her own story; one who accomplished something that was extremely important to her. I cannot ignore that… <https://twitter.com/agordonreed/status/1147924244342497281>

I sometimes think that E.H. Halliday may have a good piece of the story right in this passage from his Understanding Thomas Jefferson:

E.H. Halliday: Understanding Thomas Jefferson: ‘A very interesting exhibit, however, and one that has been often ignored or misinterpreted, is a letter written by Jefferson to Maria Cosway the morning after he returned from a seven weeks’ journey to Holland and Germany in the early spring of 1788…. Back in Paris on April 23, he found a letter from Maria expressing something closer to fury than to love: he had not written her for three months. “Your long silence is impardonable,” she wrote. “[M]y intention was only to say, nothing, send a blank paper; as a Lady in a Passion is not good for Any thing.”

Jefferson was in a rare mood when he sat down to answer this on April 24. He seems to have been in a slight daze, intending to make amends to Maria, yet unable to quite keep his mind on it. He assures her: “At Dusseldorp I wished for you much. I surely never saw so precious a collection of paintings. Above all things those of Van der Werff affected me the most. His picture of Sarah delivering Agar to Abraham is delicious. I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years…”

What was poor Maria to make of this? There is nothing on record to suggest that she had ever been to Düsseldorf, knew anything about van der Werff, or had ever read or heard the Old Testament story of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar (“Agar”). It was almost as if he were making a diary entry about his trip rather than writing a letter. And what was the point?

The essence of the Bible story is this: Hagar was an Egyptian slave (“bondwoman”) belonging to Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and Sarah said to him, “Behold now, the lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid . . . And Sarah, Abraham’s wife, took Hagar . . . and gave her to her husband . . .” This is the poignant moment depicted in the painting that so enraptured Jefferson—and it is a highly erotic scene, what with the naked Abraham waiting, eagerly ready, in the rather rumpled bed; the lissome Hagar, succulently modest but with her thin gown just slipping off one breast; and Sarah handing her into the bed with that “this is a far better thing” expression of pious self-sacrifice. But the punch line, so to speak, is Jefferson’s: “I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years.” (The fact that in the painting Abraham has red hair and a rangy, muscular build like his own surely did nothing to deter him from seeing himself in the role.)

He wasn’t through with his letter yet. Acknowledging to Maria that he wasn’t much of an art connoisseur, he adds a sentence that should give some pause to the many devotees of Jefferson as a steely, unwavering rationalist: “I am but a son of nature, loving what I see and feel, without being able to give a reason, nor caring much whether there be one.” And as if to give further proof of this he goes on, after a feeble attempt to describe a scenic view on the Rhine at Heidelberg: “At Strasbourg I sat down to write to you. But for my soul I could think of nothing at Strasbourg but the promontory of noses, of Diego, of Slawkenburgius his historian, and the procession of the Strasburgers to meet the man with the nose. Had I written you from thence it would have been a continuation of Sterne upon noses…”

What was this all about? He was talking to himself again, rather than to Maria, letting his mind run where it would. The very specific allusion, of course, is to Tristram Shandy, and though less obviously than the van der Werff painting, the cited passage is hardly less sexual. Sterne, who spends a great deal of time in his lengthy novel making comedy about human genitalia, whether explicitly or by innuendo and metaphor, begins his “Book 4” with a mysterious tale of a stranger who arrives in Strasbourg one summer evening and immediately sets the entire town in an uproar because of the hugeness of his nose. Everyone is in a frenzy to see it and— especially the women—to touch it, and gradually, as the story meanders along, the conviction dawns on the reader that what’s being talked about is not really a nose, but a penis.

Maria Cosway understood none of this—she quite likely had never read a word of Sterne—and sent Jefferson a squawk of outrage by way of reply: “How could you . . . think of me . . . and not find one word to write, but on Noses?” It was a good question; and it leads to another one: What was going on at the Hôtel de Langeac that he should have composed such a letter?

The circumstantial context of the letter suggests some clues. Jefferson had just come from a seven-week trip, and naturally would have been glad to get back to the comforts of home. He got in after nightfall, and the house was probably quiet: it was a Wednesday, and his daughters were away at their boarding school. Sally, however, was presumably there—young, beautiful, and not unhappy to greet him after their first long separation since her arrival in France ten months earlier.

And where had Sally come from? She had been Martha Jefferson’s slave girl, and just as the biblical Sarah had given her slave Hagar to Abraham, Martha had given Sally to Jefferson—not, of course, to be his concubine; but Martha was gone forever, and no longer could bring children to him any more than Sarah could to Abraham, nor the joys and solace of the spousal bed either. He could take Sally to his bed, moreover, without violation of his promise to Martha that he would never marry again.

The fact that Jefferson had van der Werff’s painting so vividly on his mind as his letter to Maria indicates, suggests that the picture may have struck him as a kind of epiphany: almost as a sanction for a sexual affair that may have begun shortly before he went on his tour, or perhaps began on the night of his return. That he felt a compulsion, either consciously or unconsciously, to hint this—however metaphorically—to Maria Cosway, the woman who apparently had failed to match his eager libido, is psychologically quite fascinating. She missed the point, but at least he had managed to get it off his chest.

Whether one is of the pro party or the con, with regard to the validity of the Hemings-Jefferson liaison, it would seem ridiculous to claim, after reading Jefferson’s letter to Maria, looking at the van der Werff painting, and browsing through the relevant passage in Tristram Shandy, that the letter writer was a man of cold detachment who no longer had a personal interest in sex. Yet Dumas Malone, at the end of his chapter on Jefferson’s “sentimental adventure” with Maria Cosway, asserts with certainty that “her middle-aged admirer,” his passion for her evaporated, “embarked on no romantic adventure with anybody else” for the rest of his life. It doesn’t sound much like the man, just turned forty-five, who—humorously but with obvious conviction—declared his willingness to have been in Abraham’s shoes, or rather his bed, with a beautiful young slave girl, and never mind the consequences… <https://archive.org/details/understandingtho00hall>

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Reference:

• Gordon-Reed, Annette. 2019. “Some thoughts about Sally Hemings…”. Twitter, July 7. <https://twitter.com/agordonreed/status/1147924244342497281>.

• Halliday, E.M. 2001. Understanding Thomas Jefferson. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. <https://archive.org/details/understandingtho00hall>.