[In the following essay, Brodie examines Jefferson's writings and records from 1778-1779, concluding that they imply a close relationship between Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings.]

The earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead.

Jefferson to Madison, September 6, 1789¹

Sally Hemings' third son, Madison, born at Monticello in 1805, wrote explicitly of the beginnings of his mother's relationship with Jefferson:

Their stay (my mother and Maria's) was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr Jefferson's concubine, and when he was called home she was enciente by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father.²

Actually Sally Hemings was in Paris not eighteen but almost twenty-six months. Born in 1773, she was between fourteen and fifteen when she arrived, and between sixteen and seventeen when she went back to Virginia. She was certainly lonely in Paris, as well as supremely ready for the first great love of her life, and she was living daily in the presence of a man who was by nature tender and gallant with all women. For any slave child at Monticello Jefferson was a kind of deity. Since her own father John Wayles had died in the year of her birth, Jefferson was perhaps as close to being a parental figure as anyone she had ever known.³

In December of 1787 he had said goodbye to a woman he adored, but who had turned out to be guilt-ridden and ill equipped for adultery. He was bewildered, angered, and somewhat disenchanted, but he did not at once cease loving her, or needing her. Now, living under his roof, was a swiftly maturing young woman who represented all that had been alluring and forbidden in the world of his childhood. In his Notes on the State of Virginia he had described blacks as more “ardent” than whites, a preconception that could have served only to heighten his dilemma of the moment. He had an important model in the person of his father-in-law, who had turned to a slave woman after the death of the last of his three white wives. And Sally Hemings, too, had a model in her own mother, that same Betty Hemings who had apparently dominated the private life and passions of John Wayles until his death.

The first evidence that Sally Hemings had become for Jefferson a special preoccupation may be seen in one of the most subtly illuminating of all his writings, the daily journal he kept on a seven-week trip through eastern France, Germany, and Holland in March and April of 1788. He went to Amsterdam, where with John Adams he completed negotiations for a Dutch loan to the United States, and arranged for a further loan in the years 1789 and 1790. Then he took off as a tourist. He visited Strasbourg, Metz, Saarbrücken, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Düsseldorf. Not normally a diary keeper, he did write an almost daily account of his travels. Anyone who reads with care these twenty-five pages must find it singular that in describing the countryside between these cities he used the word “mulatto” eight times.

The road goes thro' the plains of the Maine, which are mulatto and very fine …

It has a good Southern aspect, the soil a barren mulatto clay …

It is of South Western aspect, very poor, sometimes gray, sometimes mulatto …

These plains are sometimes black, sometimes mulatto, always rich …

… the plains are generally mulatto …

… the valley of the Rhine … varies in quality, sometimes a rich mulatto loam, sometimes a poor sand …

… the hills are mulatto but also whitish …

Meagre mulatto clay mixt with small broken stones …⁴

In marked contrast is the journal Jefferson had kept while touring southern France in the spring of 1787, just before Sally Hemings' disturbing mulatto presence had come to trouble him. In that account, covering forty-eight printed pages, he used the word “mulatto” only once, otherwise describing the hills, plains, and earth as dark, reddish-brown, gray, dark brown, and black.⁵

Another quotation in Jefferson's Holland journal is also illuminating. It follows ruminations about the proper shape of a plow, stimulated by the sight of the badly designed moldboard plows he saw in the fields of eastern France. In his travel journal he drew a design and wrote details of the exact construction of a superior model—later developed at Monticello into his famous “plough of least resistance.” Considering the ancient symbolism of the plow, it is not surprising, perhaps, that writing about the ideal shape of this ancient and basic agricultural tool led him immediately to observations about the women he had seen in the fields who followed close behind it.

The women here … do all sorts of work. While one considers them as useful and rational companions, one cannot forget that they are also objects of our pleasures. Nor can they ever forget it. While employed in dirt and drudgery some tag of ribbon, some ring or bit of bracelet, earbob or necklace, or something of that kind will shew that the desire of pleasing is never suspended in them. … They are formed by nature for attentions and not for hard labour.⁶

This is all very tender, and suggests that he was thinking not at all about the splendidly dressed Maria Cosway when he wrote it.

Jefferson later was extremely proud of his moldboard plow, which was awarded a prize by the Agricultural Society of the Seine. “The plough,” he would write, “is to the farmer what the wand is to the Sorcerer, its effect is really like sorcery.”⁷ He told Robert Fulton his own model was “the finest plough which has ever been constructed in America,” and kept a model on display at Monticello. He designed improvements on his original model, writing in 1798, “… if the plough be in truth the most useful of all instruments known to man, it's perfection cannot be an idle speculation.”⁸

Upon his return to Paris on April 23, 1788, Jefferson found a letter from Maria Cosway reproaching him in mixed rage and anguish for not writing to her for three months. “Your long silence is impardonable. … My war against you is of such a Nature that I cannot even find terms to express it … my intention was only to say, nothing, send a blank paper; as a Lady in a Passion is not fit for Any thing.”⁹ Jefferson's reply is a great curiosity. He described briefly his trip to Germany, with a glowing description of the art gallery at Düsseldorf. Here, in describing the painting that excited him above all others, he betrayed, inadvertently as a man often does to an old love, that he had been captured by a new one.

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. … 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.¹⁰

“Agar”—Hagar the Egyptian—it will be remembered, was Abraham's concubine, given to him by his wife Sarah when she could not bear a child, and destined to become the legendary mother of the Arab peoples. In this painting she is pictured as very young, partly nude, but seductive in a fashion that is innocence itself. She is blond, with long straight hair down her back. Abraham, though bearded, is far from old, with the nude shoulders and chest of a young and vigorous giant. The round “bull's-eye” windows in the conventional Dutch interior are very like those Jefferson later installed in his own bedroom in Monticello, after remodeling it in 1797.¹¹

Although Jefferson included tender passages in this letter to Maria Cosway—“At Dusseldorp I wished for you much. … At Heidelberg I wished for you too. In fact I led you by the hand thro' the whole garden”—he confessed callously that he had found it impossible to write a letter to her on the whole seven-week journey. “At Strasbourg I sat down to write to you,” he admitted. “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 to you from thence it would have been a continuation of Sterne upon noses.”¹²

Anyone not familiar with Sterne's Tristram Shandy would find this passage incomprehensible. Maria Cosway was not only baffled but enraged:

How could you led me by the hand all the way, think of me, have Many things to say, and not find One word to write, but on Noses?¹³

In Tristram Shandy there is a great deal about noses, including a formal discussion on the hierarchy of caste among men based on their length and shape. Jefferson was specifically referring to the ironic tale told by Slawkenburgius about a Spaniard named Diego whose nose was so long he needed a specially large bedroom in the inn. Diego's visit to Strasbourg had set the city atwitter with argument as to its cause, and on the day he was due to return the whole populace trooped outside the walls in a procession to greet him. Whereupon the French troops, who had been waiting to capture the city, moved in and occupied it without firing a shot.

Even if one understands all this, one may well echo Maria Cosway's question, “Why Noses?” As we have already asked, “Why mulatto?” Jefferson's bemusement with the one may well have been related to the other. If Sally Hemings, though “mighty near white,” retained a suggestion of her grandmother's physical heritage in the shape of her nose, it could be that Jefferson, caught up in a new passion, was cursing the world's insistence on caring about such matters. Though his preoccupation with this girl of mixed blood did not cost him a city, as did the preoccupation of the Strasbourgers with a nose, it would eventually threaten to cost him the presidency.

During the succeeding months after his return to Paris, similar otherwise inexplicable curiosities continued to surface in Jefferson's letters. In the severe cold of January 1789, when the Seine was frozen so solid carriages could cross on the ice, and the Parisian poor perished by the hundreds for want of heat and shelter, Jefferson wrote to Maria Cosway, “Surely it was never so cold before. To me who am an animal of a warm climate, a mere Oran-ootan, it has been a severe trial.”¹⁴ In 1789 the word “orangutan” meant for most people not one of the great apes but “wild man of the woods,” the literal translation of the Malay words from which it is derived. There was much confusion about the relation of the great apes to man; even the gorilla was as yet unknown in Europe and America. Jefferson had doubtless read Buffon's chapter, “The Orang-Outang, or the Pongo, and the Jocko,” in his Histoire naturelle, where the French naturalist contributed mightily to the mythology that the great apes ravished women, and himself confused the orangutan, which he had never seen, with the chimpanzee of Africa, which he had seen and which he greatly admired for its capacity to learn some of the habits of men. Buffon also insisted that pygmies were apes, and that some apes were intelligent enough to serve as servants in Africa.¹⁵

We do not know exactly what Jefferson conceived an “Oran-ootan” to be, but we do know that in his Notes on the State of Virginia, published only a few months before Sally Hemings' arrival, he had indiscreetly written that blacks preferred whites over their own species, just as “the Oran-ootan” preferred “the black woman over those of his own species.”¹⁶ That he may now suddenly have become uneasy about what he had written concerning this mysterious man of nature, or man of the woods, is suggested by the fact that on October 2, 1788, when he sent away to his London bookdealer a list of books for purchase, he included E. Tyson's Oran-outang; or, An Anatomy of a Pigmy (1699), one of the earliest scholarly volumes which had tried to clarify the whole classification problem. Jefferson had good reason to be uncomfortable. For when the Federalist press in America later heard rumors about his slave paramour, the editors needled him cruelly on this very passage in his Notes.¹⁷

There is also what one might call hard evidence as well as psychological evidence that Jefferson in Paris treated Sally Hemings with special consideration. On November 6, 1787, he paid 240 francs to a Dr. Sutton for Sally's smallpox inoculation, a very great sum. Shortly after her arrival a French tutor was hired, whose services lasted at least twenty months. A letter from this Monsieur Perrault to Jefferson on January 9, 1789, makes clear that he was tutoring “gimme” (Jimmy), Sally's brother, and one could expect that Sally would likely have been included. Perrault had come to the kitchen to ask for his pay; there had been an altercation, and the tutor complained bitterly to Jefferson of “mauvais traitemens de gimme” and “Sotisses les plus durs,” which suggests that Jimmy Hemings was quick of temper and anything but the stereotype of the docile slave.¹⁸ By January 1788, Jefferson had begun to pay this slave youth wages, 24 francs a month, with “étrennes,” an additional gift of 12 francs for the New Year holiday. Sally received 36 francs in the same month, but did not get regular wages until December 1788. The French servants received 50 to 60 francs per month.¹⁹

There is a curious item in Jefferson's account book for April 29, 1789:

This suggests the possibility that when Jefferson went to Holland and Germany he saw to it that Sally was properly chaperoned in a French home and not left as prey to the French servants at the ministry on the Champs Elysées.

Did he write to her when he was away? Was there ever even a brief note, wishing her well in her study of French? The one record that might illuminate this, the letter-index volume recording Jefferson's incoming and outgoing letters for this critical year of 1788, has disappeared. It is the only volume missing in the whole forty-three-year epistolary record. Julian Boyd tells us that “entries once existed but cannot now be found.”²¹ Also missing are any letters Jefferson may have written to his daughters on this seven-week trip. On his previous trip to southern France in the spring of 1787 Jefferson had written Patsy five letters, and he had taken his small letter-copying press with him so that copies are extant as well as some originals. This letter press he took with him again to Holland,²² but even the copies of whatever letters he wrote to his daughters have mysteriously vanished. This raises the question whether or not someone at some time went through Jefferson's papers systematically eliminating every possible reference to Sally Hemings. Letters from Jefferson to Sally's brothers, and from her brothers to him, are extant.²³ But no letters or notes exchanged between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson have as yet ever found their way into the public record.

His account books were preserved intact, however, and here occasional references to Sally during the Paris years provide a slight but important illumination of a record that seems to have been kept as secret as possible. In April 1789, for example, Jefferson began to spend a surprising amount of money on Sally Hemings' clothes. There is an item for 96 francs for “clothes for Sally” on April 6, 72 francs on April 16, and an itemized 23 francs on April 26 for “making clothes for servts.” May 25 has another item, “pd making clothes for Sally 25# 2.” The money Jefferson spent for Patsy's clothes is several times that of her maid during roughly the same period. Still, if one knows that a pair of gloves could be had for two francs, the expenditure of 216 francs for Sally in seven weeks plus her monthly salary of 24 francs would seem to be considerable, especially when compared with the total lack of specific expenditures on her behalf in the earlier months.

Both Sally and James Hemings knew they were free if they chose to make an issue of it,²⁴ and Jefferson knew from his earliest months in Paris that even his diplomatic status did not give him the right to hold slaves against their will. When another American in Paris wrote asking him the legal status of a slave boy he had brought with him, Jefferson replied, “The laws of France give him freedom if he claims it, and … it will be difficult, if not impossible, to interrupt the course of the law.” He added cautiously, and apparently without guilt, “Nevertheless I have known an instance where a person bringing in a slave, and saying nothing about it, has not been disturbed in his possession. I think it will be easier in your case to pursue the same plan, as the boy is so young that it is not probable he will think of claiming freedom.”²⁵

It will be seen that for a man theoretically intent upon emancipation of all slaves, Jefferson was extremely possessive about his own. When he received a letter from Edward Bancroft asking him pointedly his opinion on the value of Quaker experiments in Virginia where owners freed and then hired their own slaves, Jefferson replied with notable lack of enthusiasm, “As far as I can judge from the experiments which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather, to abandon persons whose habits have been formed in slavery is like abandoning children.” And he went on to describe in rather vague terms what was essentially a sharecropping experiment he hoped to carry out on his return, dividing his farms into 50 acres each, importing about as many Germans as he had slaves, and settling them together “intermingled,” with the same education “in habits of property and foresight”—all this without emancipation.²⁶

Still, Jefferson had under his roof in Paris two slaves who were learning to speak French, who counted themselves free, and were thinking of becoming expatriates. James Hemings, who had served as an apprentice under the cook of the Prince de Conde, and also with a pâtissier, was now an experienced chef, and could easily command a salary in Paris.²⁷ Freeing him would hardly have been “abandoning” a child. In using such an argument against emancipation Jefferson was falling back into a pattern of thinking that had already long been a cliché in Virginia. Whence this sudden backing away from his old zeal for emancipation? In these same months he could on the one hand spend hours translating the Marquis de Condorcet's passionate indictment of slavery, and yet refuse to lend his name to a new organization in France agitating for an end simply to the slave trade.²⁸ So he was locked in a conflict that was in a sense old, and which had been with him from childhood—but which was now new and compellingly personal.

Jefferson's letter to Bancroft marks the first time in all his writings that he moved backward, however slightly, to defend slavery, just as his failure to free James and Sally Hemings in Paris marks a decisive watershed in his zeal for emancipation. To free them was to lose them, and Jefferson was an extraordinarily possessive man. He did free James Hemings. Faced with the threat of his staying in Paris, Jefferson agreed to emancipate him in Virginia once James had taught someone else at Monticello to cook French style. Jefferson kept his word, but not before seven years had passed.²⁹ The reasons for not freeing Sally Hemings would complicate the rest of his life.

What meanwhile, during these successive interludes of the heart, had been happening to Jefferson's eldest daughter? By April 1789 she had been in the convent school five years, and was now seventeen. Though the nuns were kind and motherly, they watched her rigorously and forbade her to leave the school for any purpose without her father's written permission.³⁰ In America, when father and daughter had been separated, it had been Jefferson who begged for letters from her. But when Jefferson spent thirteen weeks in southern France in 1787, it was she who had chided him for not writing every week, as he had promised, adding, as he had so often written to her, “you are never a moment absent from my thoughts.”³¹ He replied from Aixen-Provence with his old tenderness: “No body in this world can make me so happy, or so miserable as you. Retirement from public life will ere long become necessary for me. To your sister and yourself I look to render the evening of my life serene and contented. It's morning has been clouded by loss after loss till I have nothing left but you.”³²

Still, his letters indicate that he continued to treat Patsy very much as he had done when she was eleven. He gave her the same repetitious homiletic advice—never be angry—never be idle—“Be good and be industrious, and you will be what I shall most love in this world.”³³ He did not respond, at least in his letters, to her attempts to discuss anything other than her schoolwork, ignoring comments on French scandals and politics, and her rampant abolitionism which burst out in a letter of May 3, 1787—“I wish with all my soul the poor negroes were all freed. It grieves my heart.”³⁴ She told him what he most wanted to hear, “Believe me to be for life your most tender and affectionate child,”³⁵ and he seemed largely unaware that she was no longer a child and was tormented with longings the nature of which she did not herself understand.

William Short, more astute than Jefferson in this matter, sensed that Patsy was jealous of both Maria Cosway and Angelica Church. He wrote secretly to John Trumbull, who had painted portraits of Jefferson for both these women, suggesting that to make a third for Martha Jefferson would be a “very clever gallant thing,” to do, and exacting secrecy concerning his own role in the matter. Trumbull followed the suggestion, and we thus have three separate miniatures of Jefferson, all based on the portrait made in the larger Signing of the Declaration of Independence. The one made for Martha is the most youthful, the most endearing, with an unusual suggestion of a smile.³⁶

Sometime in 1788 Jefferson learned to his consternation that Patsy was considering becoming a nun. The papal nuncio in Paris, Comte Dugnani, who knew Jefferson, wrote to John Carroll of Baltimore on July 5, “The eldest seems to have tendencies toward the Catholic religion. She is only sixteen. Her father, without absolutely opposing her vocation, has tried to distract her.”³⁷ Henry Randall, who had access to Jefferson family gossip, wrote by way of explanation that “the daring and flippant infidelity now rife in French society, disgusted the earnest, serious, naturally reverential girl.”³⁸ But the “daring and flippant infidelity” of Paris had caught up her own beloved parent. She could hardly have missed his new joie de vivre in the autumn of 1786 when he first fell in love with Maria Cosway and joined what may well have seemed to her the giddy and lascivious turmoil of the artist colony. She had written to her father in April 1787, “There was a gentleman, a few days ago, that killed himself because he thought his wife did not love him. They had been married ten years. I believe that if every husband in Paris was to do as much there would be nothing but widows left.”³⁹ If she was subtly warning her father to beware of married women as they were all wanton, he did not heed the message.

Jefferson was sufficiently alarmed by Patsy's possible conversion that he thought of taking his daughters home in the summer of 1788. But he delayed. “I wished Polly to perfect her French,” he explained to Elizabeth Eppes.⁴⁰ Still, in September he formally petitioned for a leave of absence the following spring, planning to take his daughters home in April 1789, arrange for their schooling, and return in the autumn. Though Jefferson complained that the prospect of returning without his daughters was indeed dreary, the fact that he could even consider the separation seems to have been for Patsy a shattering knowledge.

For Jefferson Paris in 1788 was becoming an increasingly exciting political experience. The growing threat of revolution delighted him, and he eagerly became a quiet, even secret, participant, consulting with Lafayette on several papers pertinent to the ever deepening crisis between the King and the Estates-General, which was to be convened in May 1789, the first time since 1614. There has been a great deal of astute analysis of Jefferson's somewhat conservative role in the beginnings of the French Revolution. While the stream of his letters back to the United States in 1788, particularly to Madison, reflect what would seem to be an almost total absorption in the beginnings of the potentially momentous social experiment, they also show that he expected it to move with a good deal more rationality and less upheaval than it did.⁴¹ So, indeed, did everyone else.

There are also letters which offer important clues to Jefferson's personal life in this great year of ferment, clues to intimate conflicts which exploded in a small but crucial fashion in the spring of 1789, just as Paris itself exploded into revolutionary violence. To Anne W. Bingham, an American friend who had recently returned home from Paris, he wrote on May 11, 1788:

The gay and thoughtless Paris is now become a furnace of Politics. All the world is run politically mad. Men, women, children talk nothing else; and you know that naturally they talk much, loud and warm. Society is spoilt by it, at least for those who, like myself, are but lookers on—You too, have had your political fever. But our good ladies, I trust, have been too wise to wrinkle their foreheads with politics. They are contented to soothe and calm the minds of their husbands returning ruffled from political debate. They have the good sense to value domestic happiness above all other, and the art to cultivate it beyond all others. There is no part of the earth where so much of this is enjoyed as in America.⁴²

Thus Jefferson, who in 1785 had delighted in sparring with the sharp intellect of Abigail Adams, and who in 1786 and 1787 had listened with admiration to Madame Helvétius, Madame Necker, and Madame de Staël, now sang the virtues of the totally domestic woman who lived only to soothe and calm her husband. To an old Virginia friend he wrote on February 7, 1788, “No attachments soothe the mind so much as those contracted in early life. … I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage, with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post which any human power can give.”⁴³ And he, who had devotedly followed Maria Cosway from gallery to gallery, and who had ordered copies of paintings by the score and the sculptures of busts of notable Europeans and Americans, now turned even against the artists. In a paper he drew up in 1788 for the use of American travelers in Europe, “Hints on European Travel,” he urged his countrymen to study agriculture, gardens, architecture, and politics. But for “Painting and Statuary” he wrote, with a trace of contempt, “Too expensive for the state of wealth among us. It would be useless and therefore preposterous for us to endeavor to make ourselves connoisseurs in those arts. They are worth seeing, but not studying.”⁴⁴

In his letter to Anne Bingham he had also written, “Recollect the women of this capital, some on foot, some on horses, and some in carriages hunting pleasure in the streets, in routs and assemblies, and forgetting that they have left it behind them in their nurseries; compare them with our countrywomen occupied in the tender and tranquil amusements of domestic life, and confess that it is a comparison of Amazons and Angels.”⁴⁵

If the political woman—the Amazon—remained a threat, and the domestic woman—the Angel—had now triumphed, still the Angel who was apparently at present providing the “tender and tranquil amusements” in his own domestic life was in the most crucial sense a fallen angel, and forbidden. It is not surprising that he wrote to Maria Cosway on May 21, 1789, “All is politics in this capital. Even love has lost it's part in conversation. This is not well, for love is always a consolatory thing. I am going to a country where it is felt in its sublimest degree.”⁴⁶ In 1786 and 1787 Jefferson could talk about his affection for Maria Cosway at least within a limited circle, including Trumbull, d'Hancarville, William Short, and possibly Angelica Church. But in 1788 he could share his delight in his new love with no one, and had to be content with the glowing generalizations about American angels such as we find in his letter to Mrs. Bingham. There was only one advantage for Jefferson in this new attachment without marriage, as against a new marriage to a woman he could love as much, and that advantage may for Jefferson have been preëminent. The slave girl, unlike a wife, could never be a rival to his old and continuing mistress, politics. Nor need she ever become a threat to any decision-making on his part that had to do with his political life.

We know from his account books that Jefferson in September 1788 went to his old haunts—St. Germain and Marly, and that he went back to the “Desert” in May 1789. Was it Sally Hemings who accompanied him? Conceivably it could have been his daughters. We know that he bought a “watch for Patsy” on January 5, 1789, costing 554 francs, and on June 30 a “ring for Patsy” costing 48 francs. Was it for Sally Hemings, on September 30, 1788, that he paid 40 francs for “a locket”? If so, Jefferson even here was too discrete to leave a trace. Still, only the most naïve of men could have believed that he could continue to keep a liaison with the slave girl secret, especially from his daughters. One wonders if it ever occurred to him that Patsy upon coming home from school on Sunday would look upon the spectacle of her maid newly dressed in stylish Parisian clothes with absolute incomprehension. Perhaps it didn't happen that way. But there is the coincidence that it was in early April that Jefferson spent almost two hundred francs on “clothes for Sally,” and that on April 18 Jefferson was appalled to get a note from Patsy formally requesting his permission to let her become a nun. However affectionate the pressures may have been by the motherly nuns, or however Martha may have convinced herself that the life of a nun was her true vocation, the act was one of enormous hostility to her father. One has only to read the letters of the papal nuncio to see with what satisfaction he would have looked upon the conversion of the daughter of a man whose suspicion of priestcraft and contempt for organized religion was known all over Europe.⁴⁷

Randall, who learned of Martha's request to join the nunnery from her children, reported what happened afterward:

For a day or two she received no answer. Then his carriage rolled up to the door of the Abbaye, and poor Martha met her father in a fever of doubts and fears. Never was his smile more benignant and gentle. He had a private interview with the Abbess. He then told his daughters he had come for them. They stepped into his carriage—it rolled away—and Martha's school life was ended.⁴⁸

Jefferson's account book provides fascinating additional details. On April 19, the day before he went to the convent school, he recorded a purchase of “linen for Patsy,” costing 274 francs. On the twentieth Patsy herself was permitted to buy “lawn and cambrick” amounting to 332 francs. The explosion of clothes buying continued into May, with 229 francs for silks, 106 francs for shoes, and 84 francs for stays, and shortly afterward an important symbolic purchase—48 francs for “a ring for Patsy.” The 12 francs he paid for “a whip for Patsy” on May 7 suggests that he was now taking her horseback riding. And it may have been at this time that he arranged to have her portrait painted by Joseph Boze.⁴⁹

That Jefferson's control over his daughters was implicit rather than explicit, and that he chose what should and should not be discussed, even in this important crisis, is suggested by Sarah Randolph, Jefferson's great-granddaughter, who added a significant footnote to the whole story. “No word in allusion to the subject [of Patsy's becoming a nun] ever passed between father and daughter, and it was not referred to by either of them until years afterwards, when she spoke of it to her children.”⁵⁰ This is the kind of control many parents succeed in imposing who rule exclusively by love. Where annoyance or even hatred is explicit, the child has the advantage of being able to reply in kind, and the hatred can often be exorcised in the heated exchange. This was not permitted to Martha Jefferson. And one suspects that the same kind of control was employed by Jefferson in the fall of 1789, when it could no longer be kept a secret that Sally Hemings was pregnant.⁵¹

There had been plenty of political crises in Jefferson's life during the previous months—a serious bread shortage in Paris because of the bad harvest of 1788, a riot among Paris workmen which took a hundred lives in April, and finally on July 14 the fall of the Bastille, which astonished and delighted him. He went to watch the demolition of what he called a “fortification of infinite strength … which in other times had stood several sieges, and had never been taken,”⁵² and noted in his account book a contribution of 60 francs on August 21 for the widows of the men who had been slain capturing it. He wrote to Madison on July 22, 1789, of “this astonishing train of events as will be forever memorable in history,” concluding with a classic understatement, “Indeed this scene is too interesting to be left at present.”⁵³

The mob violence and decapitations that accompanied the Bastille destruction did not trouble him, and even as an old man he wrote with satisfaction that when the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt forced his way into the King's bedchamber and told him the Bastille's Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Prévôt des Marchands had had their heads chopped off and their bodies dragged through the streets of Paris, the King “went to bed fearfully impressed.”⁵⁴ Even two years earlier Jefferson had written in defense of Shays' Rebellion, a brief armed revolt of Massachusetts farmers against heavier taxes, which had frightened John and Abigail Adams into believing the United States was threatened with anarchy:

What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.⁵⁵

With the revolutionary fervor spreading among French intellectuals Jefferson had become, finally, what Franklin had been before him, a kind of hero in Paris. American inventor James Rumsey, writing home on March 20, 1789, described him as “the most popular Embassador at the French Court.” “American principles,” he said, “are bursting forth in Every quarter: it must give pleasure to the feeling mind, to see millions of his fellow Creatures Emerging from a state not much better than Slavery.”⁵⁶ Jefferson had gone daily to Versailles to hear the debates of the Estates-General, and had helped Lafayette draft his Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was presented to the National Assembly on July 11.⁵⁷ Though almost no one knew of this special collaboration, the indebtedness of Lafayette's famous document at least to the Declaration of Independence was secret to no one in the French government, and Jefferson could hardly have lived through these weeks without an exciting sense of involvement, a recognition that if not a father he was at least one of the patron saints of the new revolution.

He hoped for a peaceful evolution into a constitutional monarchy, with the King giving “freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of commerce and industry, freedom of persons against arbitrary arrests, and modification if not total prohibition of military agency in civil cases.” And with his characteristic optimism he wrote to John Mason on July 17, “I have not a single doubt of the sincerity of the king, and that there will not be another disagreeable act from him.”⁵⁸

There is every indication that when Jefferson finally received congressional permission to return to America he was loath to go, and eager to return quickly to Paris. For the first time he seemed willing to be free of his daughters, and he told Trumbull he expected to come back for several years. Whether he planned to take James and Sally Hemings back with him and return with them again to Paris is unknown; that they were agitating to stay in Paris as free citizens at this point is suggested by the reminiscences of Madison Hemings.

Maria Cosway, learning that Jefferson was returning to America, peppered him with letters begging him to visit her in England en route. “Pray write, pray write,” she said, “and dont go to America without coming to England.”⁵⁹ This request he dodged with pleasantries, suggesting that she and Angelica Church come to America on the same boat, but in the same breath warning her how “furiously displeased” was Madame de Brehan with America, a gentle warning that the United States was not Arcadia, like Paris.⁶⁰ Late in May he wrote cruelly that he might be traveling across the Atlantic with Angelica Church. “We shall talk a great deal of you. … Adieu, my dear friend. Be our affections unchangeable, and if our little history is to last beyond the grave, be the longest chapter in it that which shall record their purity, warmth and duration.”⁶¹ Still, he found it difficult to let go even of this dying love, and told Maria in a letter from the Isle of Wight (he embarked for America this close to London), “The ensuing spring might give us a meeting at Paris with the first swallow … remember me and love me.”⁶²

The knowledge that he might never return to Paris came to Jefferson stealthily in September, six weeks before he left. He had received a letter from Madison on August 6 with an ominous query: “I have been asked whether any appointment at home would be agreeable to you.”⁶³ Jefferson recognized at once that this was a tacit bid to join the government under the new constitution, with Washington as president, and he replied with as firm a no as he could muster: “You ask me if I would accept any appointment on that side of the water? You know the circumstances which led me from retirement, step by step and from one nomination to another, up to the present. My object is a return to the same retirement. Whenever therefore I quit the present, it will not be to engage in any other office, and most especially any one which would require a constant residence from home.”⁶⁴

But could he say no directly to Washington? On the first of September he made a final list of what to take with him and what to leave behind in Paris. Patsy's harpsichord and guitar were to go, along with clocks, beds, mattresses, and clothes, boxes of books specially packed for Franklin, Washington, and Madison, as well as wine, cheese, tea, pictures, busts, and his old phaeton. The list included also two cork oaks, four melon apricots, one white fig, five larch trees, four Cresanne pears, three Italian poplars, and numerous other small trees and plants.⁶⁵ So the nostalgia for Monticello showed its power, and underlined the fundamental precariousness of his will to return to France. On September 2 he said goodbye to John Trumbull, whom he had asked to become his secretary should William Short decide to return to America.⁶⁶ One hour after Trumbull left for London Jefferson was in bed seriously ill. The old migraine was back for the first time since he had set foot on French soil. It lasted six days.⁶⁷ Again it was triggered, it would seem, by a sense of loss. He was losing friends, artists, scholars, scientists, Paris—all of Europe—to say nothing of a place in the new French Revolution, possibly for a few months but probably forever.

How Sally Hemings figured in this agonized conflict is simply non-recoverable. We know only what her son later wrote, that she was pregnant and refused to return to America with Jefferson till he promised to free her children at age twenty-one.⁶⁸ We know, too, Jefferson waited to a surprisingly late date—September 16, sixteen days after completing the baggage list and eight days after his recovery—before writing to James Maurice in London the exact specifications for cabins on the boat he was taking: “three master births (for himself and two daughters of 17. and 11. years of age) and births [surely an odd misspelling, under the circumstances] for a man and woman servant, the latter convenient to that of my daughters: A use of the cabbin in common with the others, and not exclusive of them which serves only to render me odious to those excluded.”⁶⁹ So he insisted that on shipboard he be close to all three young females, from whom he would not—and could not—in the end be separated.

During his six-day illness, Jefferson was treated by Dr. Richard Gem, whom he later described as the ablest doctor he ever met.⁷⁰ Gem was a seventy-two-year-old Welshman, known to be an atheist and a strong supporter of the French Revolution. He had been separated from his wife for thirty years, and his children had died in infancy, so he and Jefferson had certain personal tragedies as well as intellectual convictions in common. Out of their conversations during these six days came one of the most remarkable of all Jefferson's writings, the elaborate enunciation of a theme he came to live by, “The earth belongs to the living.”

“A subject comes into my head,” he wrote to Madison on September 6, 1789, “… the question Whether one generation of men has the right to bind another.” He believed it to be, he wrote, “a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. I set out on this ground,” he continued, “which I suppose to be self evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” Again and again he amplified the theme with repetition—“the earth belongs to each of these generations, during it's course fully, and in their own right”—“the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead.”

No other of Jefferson's writings save his Declaration of Independence and Virginia Constitution has been subjected to so much exegesis as this letter to Madison. The ideas in it have been traced to Adam Smith, to Dr. Gem, and to Thomas Paine. Julian Boyd, who has noted that this was the second draft of a smaller document intended for Lafayette, believes it was a legislative proposal intended to be written into the new French system of government, and was later amplified in the letter to Madison to include the American government as well. As Jefferson elaborated his central idea, he argued that no nation should have the right to bind a new generation by public debts, and suggested a permanent legislative program providing that no new laws, constitutions, or financial contracts be drawn up that would last more than a generation, which he defined as nineteen years. “This would put the lenders, and the borrowers also, on their guard,” he wrote, and “it would bridle the spirit of war.” Boyd believes it was intended to be only a “practical, relevant, utilitarian” device for overthrowing the tyranny of the French institutions, ecclesiastical and feudal. Peterson, who believes Jefferson never intended it to become a part of public law in America, but wrote it as a “moral directive to society,” counts it “the most original and most radical idea in the whole Jefferson catalogue.”⁷¹

The great letter, like so many others of Jefferson's, can be read on several levels, political, personal, and deeply psychological. His complaints in it of the injustice of a child's inheriting debts from his parents were an obvious personal reference to the debts which his wife had inherited from John Wayles, and the smaller debt he had inherited from his mother, which were still an albatross around his own neck. But there were two sentences in particular in this letter which suggest a repudiation of something far more deeply buried.

The earth belongs always to the living generation. They may manage it then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct. They are masters too of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please.⁷²

Who was denying Jefferson the right to govern his own person as he pleased? Does one here see him struggling to repudiate the bondage in which he had been so long enchained by the memories of his dead wife? Was he battling also the whole tyranny of the past, with its inherited legacy of taboos against the pursuit of happiness? In this connection one notes with curiosity his choice of nineteen years, instead of twenty or twenty-five, to define a generation. Jefferson tells us that he chose this figure after revising some demographic tables developed by Buffon. Why nineteen? Did it mean anything that the year was 1789, exactly nineteen years since he had met and fallen in love with Martha Wayles?

Jefferson described this new truth as “self evident,” but it was no more self-evident in 1789 than the great political ideals of the Declaration of Independence, which he had also called “self-evident.” The whole of Europe was a living testament to the truth that the world belonged not to the living but to the dead, who continued inexorably to bind the living in the chains of ancient law, religious ritual, social protocol, and sexual prohibition. As if this were not complicating enough in Jefferson's own life, he was about to return to Virginia, where the bondage of white men to the dead was as nothing compared with the bondage of black men and women to the living. Jefferson would feel the menacing strength of the slaveholding society in the first hours of his arrival. After some months he would write back to Lafayette, using a peculiar metaphor that could have sprung from the complications of his intimate life:

So far it seemed that your revolution had got along with a steady pace: meeting occasional difficulties and dangers, but we are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty, in a feather-bed.⁷³

Notes

1. Jefferson to Madison, September 6, 1789, [The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Julian P. Boyd, ed., 18 vols. to date. Princeton, 1950-1972.], XV, 396.

2. Pike County Republican, March 13, 1873. See Appendix I.

3. Her father, John Wayles, had died May 28, 1773, as recorded in Jefferson's account book on May 31. Born the year of his death, Sally had lived for a time at the Elkhill plantation ([Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book, With Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings. Edwin Morris Betts, ed. Princeton, 1953], 18), and had come with her mother to Monticello before 1776. The Farm Book frequently lists Sally's name with the year of her birth, '73, after it.

4. “Notes of a Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley,” Papers, Boyd, XIII, 8-33. See especially 17, 19-20, 22, 24-25, 28-29.

5. “Notes of a Tour into the Southern Parts of France, &c,” Papers, Boyd, XI, 415-63. For the single use of the word “mulatto,” see 415. Freud noted that many landscapes in dreams, especially wooded hills, were often symbols for the female body. Complete Psychological Works, V (1900-1901), part 2, 356.

6. “Notes of a Tour through Holland and the Rhine Valley, Papers, Boyd, XIII, 27. Freud noted the phallic symbolism, in dreams, of “ploughs, hammers, rifles, revolvers, daggers, etc.” Complete Psychological Works, V, part 2, 356.

7. Jefferson to Charles Willson Peale, April 17, 1813 (film, University of Virginia, Case M, Reel 50 B).

8. Jefferson to Robert Fulton, April 16, 1810, [The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, eds., 20 vols. Washington D.C., 1903], XIX, 173. Jefferson to St. John Sinclair, March 23, 1798, [Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book, 1766-1824, with Relevant Extracts from His Other Writing. Edwin Morris Betts, ed. Philadelphia, 1944.], 653.

9. Maria Cosway to Jefferson, March 6, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XII, 645.

10. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, April 24, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XII, 103-4. Trumbull had urged Jefferson to visit the Düsseldorf gallery, though he held Adriaen van der Werff's paintings in contempt, describing them as “mere monuments of labor, patience, and want of genius.” [Trumbull, John. The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull, Patriot-Artist, 1756-1843. Theodore Sizer, ed. New Haven, 1953. First Published in 1841.], 137. A copy of the Düsseldorf museum catalogue may be seen today among Maria Cosway's papers in the library of the Collegio di Maria SS. Bambina, Lodi, Italy.

11. When I first pointed out the relationship between “Agar” and Sally Hemings in “The Great Jefferson Taboo,” American Heritage, XXIII (June 1972), 53-54, John Maass traced the present location of the Adriaen van der Werff painting to a museum in Franconia, Bavaria. It was he who first pointed out the similarity in hair styles between that of Hagar and Sally Hemings, and the similarity in window styles between those in the painting and those at Monticello. See Maass, “Postscripts to History,” American Heritage, XXIV (December, 1972), 111.

12. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, April 24, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XIII, 104.

13. Maria Cosway to Jefferson, April 29, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XIII, 115.

14. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, January 14, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 446.

15. Buffon, George Louis Natural History, 10 vols. in 5 (London, 1792), IX, 149-77. Buffon described the confusion of scholars such as Linnaeus, M. Noel, M. de la Broff, and Edward Tyson as to whether the orangutan was a great ape or a wild man, but himself added to the wild inaccuracies of the period.

16. [Notes on the State of Virginia. William Peden, ed. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1955.], 138.

17. Frederick-Town Herald, reprinted in the Richmond Recorder, September 29, 1802. See p. 352.

18. Julian Boyd summarized the letter and reproduced most of it in the original French, Papers, XIV, 426. The Missouri Historical Society kindly furnished me a copy.

19. Account book, 1788-89.

20. James A. Bear, Jr., who transcribed the account books at the University of Virginia, describes Madame Dupré in his index as “Sally Heming's Paris landlady.” The delay of a year in making the payment was not unusual for Jefferson.

21. Papers, Boyd, VI, viii.

22. Papers, Boyd, XII, 655n. One example of a letter to Patsy which exists in the original and in the press copy, May 21, 1787, may be seen in Papers, Boyd, XI, 370.

23. There are eleven letters from John Hemings to Jefferson presently in the University of Virginia Library.

24. According to Madison Hemings. See Appendix I.

25. Jefferson to Paul Bentalou, August 25, 1786, Papers, Boyd, X, 296.

26. Jefferson to Edward Bancroft, January 26, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 492-93, mistakenly dated 1788. It is a reply to Bancroft's letter of September 16, 1788.

27. Papers, Boyd, XI, 98n, 99n, 297-98.

28. See “Jefferson's Notes from Condorcet on Slavery,” January 1789, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 494-98; Jefferson to Brissot de Warville, February 11, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XII, 577-78.

29. See p. 290.

30. See Martha Jefferson to Jefferson, April 9, 1787, [The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson. Edwin M. Betts and James A. Bear, eds. Columbia, Mo., 1966], 37.

31. Martha Jefferson to Jefferson, March 25, 1787, Family Letters, 34.

32. Jefferson to Martha Jefferson, March 28, 1787, Family Letters, 35.

33. Jefferson to Martha Jefferson, May 21, 1787, Family Letters, 41-42.

34. Martha Jefferson to Jefferson, May 3, 1787, Family Letters, 39.

35. Ibid.

36. Papers, Boyd, XIV, xxxvi. Boyd reproduces the portrait made for Martha Jefferson in XIV, 328. The portraits made for Maria Cosway and Angelica Church are reproduced in X, 467.

37. The original source, Melville, John Carroll of Baltimore, gives the date of the Dugnani letter as July 5, 1787. But since he speaks of Jefferson's planning to take both daughters home, and gives Patsy's age as sixteen, the letter could have been written only in 1788. Polly did not arrive in Paris until July 15, 1787. See Papers, Boyd, XIV, 356n, who gives a portion of the original letter.

38. Randall, Jefferson, I, 538.

39. Martha Jefferson to Jefferson, April 9, 1787, Family Letters, 37-38. Martha may have been especially impressed by this story because her own father had been married just ten years.

40. Jefferson to Elizabeth Eppes, December 15, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 355.

41. See especially Peterson, [Peterson, Merrill D. Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation. New York, 1970.], 370-89, [Malone, Dumas. Jefferson and the Rights of Man. Boston, 1951.], 180-237.

42. Jefferson to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XIII, 151.

43. Jefferson to A. Donald, February 7, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XII, 572.

44. Papers, Boyd, XIII, 269.

45. Jefferson to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XIII, 152.

46. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, May 21, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 142-43.

47. See Papers, Boyd, XIV, 356n.

48. Randall, Jefferson, I, 538. Jefferson's account book for April 20, 1789, reads, “paid at Panthemont in full 625-15-2.”

49. Julian Boyd dates this charming portrait, which shows Martha Jefferson at seventeen, with reddish hair, blue eyes, and cream-colored dress, as having been made in the spring of 1789. There are no letters to Boze, and the account book indicates no payment to him. The portrait is reproduced by Boyd in Papers, XIV, 361. See also XIV, xli.

50. Sarah Randolph, [The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson. Malone, Dumas. ed. New York 1958.]

51. See Appendix I.

52. [Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson, with an Introductory Essay by Dumas Malone. Boston, 1948.], 108.

53. Jefferson to Madison, July 22, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 299-300.

54. Autobiography, 108.

55. Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Adams' son-in-law, November 13, 1787, Papers, Boyd, XII, 356.

56. Rumsey to Benjamin West, March 20, 1789, Rumsey to Charles Morrow, March 27, 1789, quoted in Papers, Boyd, XV, 81n, 82n.

57. See Jefferson to Lafayette, June 3, 1789, and his “Draft of a Charter of Rights,” Papers, Boyd, XV, 165-68.

58. Jefferson to William Carmichael, August 9, 1789; Jefferson to John Mason, July 17, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 338, 278.

59. Maria Cosway to Jefferson, December 23, 1788, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 372.

60. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, January 14, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 446.

61. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, May 21, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 143.

62. Jefferson to Maria Cosway, October 14, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 521.

63. Madison to Jefferson, May 27, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 153.

64. Jefferson to Madison, August 29, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 369.

65. “List of Baggage Shipped by Jefferson from France,” Papers, Boyd, XV, 375.

66. Jefferson to Trumbull, May 21, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 143-44.

67. Jefferson to Trumbull, September 9, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 407.

68. See Appendix I.

69. Jefferson to James Maurice, September 16, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 433.

70. Jefferson to Madison, January 13, 1821, Papers, Boyd, XIV, 359n. Mazzei, who had known Dr. Gem for thirty-two years, described him as “un des meilleurs hommes du monde et veritable philosophe,” Papers, Boyd, XV, 385n.

71. Peterson, Jefferson and the New Nation, 383-84.

72. Jefferson to Madison, September 6, 1789, Papers, Boyd, XV, 392-97. Actually Jefferson delayed sending it to Madison until January 9, 1790, at which time he made numerous small changes.

73. Jefferson to Lafayette, April 2, 1790, Papers, Boyd, XVI, 293.