by John Ferling
Jefferson’s happiness at escaping politics was readily apparent. Ten weeks after coming home he said that he had not seen a Philadelphia newspaper since he left the capital, and he had no wish to see one. Eight months into his retirement he was asked to serve as envoy extraordinary to Madrid. He declined, remarking that his only regret about retirement was that he had not entered into it years earlier. He added that every day increased his “inflexibility” about ever returning to public life. He did not write to Washington until he had been home for four months, and nearly the entirety of his letter was about farming, which he said he had embraced “with an ardour which I scarcely knew in my youth.” When he completed his initial year at home, Jefferson exclaimed that it had been the most tranquil of his life, one in which he had enjoyed excellent health, save for a brief but “violent attack of the Rheumatism.” At last, he was surrounded by his family. Maria, now fifteen, lived with him, and Martha, whose home was nearby, visited often, sometimes leaving her two children with their grandfather. Relatives and friends called, especially in the summer when the roads were more likely passable. Serenity “becomes daily more and more the object of my life,” he proclaimed. “Master of my own time,” he now “look[ed] back with wonder and regret over my useless waste of time” in politics. Even Jefferson’s correspondence fell to a fraction of what it once had been. “I put off answering my letters now, farmerlike, till a rainy day, and then find it sometimes postponed by other necessary occupations.”28
Jefferson portrayed himself as a committed farmer who lived a simple life, telling friends that he had become “too much attached to the plough,” had his “hands full” with farming, and was “the most ardent farmer in the state. I live on my horse.”29 There was considerable truth in what he said. He boasted of rising daily before the sun. After a light breakfast (hot bread and cold ham, along with coffee or tea), he spent much of each day riding about his far-ranging estate, vetting his crops and shops, and supervising his laborers. He also rode for exercise, and if the weather permitted, he tried to spend a couple of hours each day in the saddle. His focus on a healthy lifestyle extended into other areas. He did not smoke and he avoided hard liquor. He usually drank a glass or two of wine with dinner and, though not a vegetarian, he insisted that vegetables be the staple of his diet. Like many in his time, he took just two meals a day, sitting down to dinner at three thirty in the winter, at five during the longer days of summer. It seemed like an unadorned life, but Jefferson was a walking contradiction. While some of his tastes were simple, he owned a capacious mansion stuffed with richly upholstered European furniture, a vast collection of art, and perhaps the nation’s largest collection of natural history artifacts. He dined on food prepared by a trained chef—James Hemings until late in 1795 and thereafter a chef that he had tutored—was waited on by slaves, and, when indoors, was never more than a few steps from one of the largest libraries in North America.30
The one dark cloud that intruded on Jefferson’s unruffled existence was his mounting indebtedness. It exceeded £8,500 in 1795, roughly a 15 percent increase since his return from France, despite his sale of land and slaves during every year that he had been home. He had even been driven to leasing portions of his estate. But now that he was home, Jefferson believed he could resolve his problem through his personal management of operations at Monticello. He instituted numerous changes, gradually transforming the plantation into a small industrial village where nails, textiles, and charcoal were made, and tinsmiths and coopers labored. The nailery was the largest of those enterprises. It was tended by about a dozen young males who toiled long hours over the blazing forge, making upwards of ten thousand iron nails daily, from which Jefferson grossed $2,000 in 1796. The nails were sold mostly in Philadelphia and Richmond, and for a time Jefferson was able to boast that the nailery provided “completely for the maintenance of my family.” It generated sufficient profits every two months to pay for a year’s worth of luxury comestibles—coffee, tea, chocolate, sugar, molasses, rice, rum, and brandy—that he had shipped to Monticello.
But agriculture remained the heart of operations at Monticello. He largely replaced tobacco cultivation with more profitable grain production, especially wheat, which required only 20 percent of the labor needed by tobacco (he sold some of his surplus labor and reassigned the remainder to industrial pursuits). Jefferson devised a seven-year crop rotation plan that one visitor thought so innovative it could only have come from a “contemplative mind.” He began to offer a variety of incentives to improve the work habits of his laborers, and he micromanaged the annual harvest, not only mapping out the tasks for each of the roughly seventy chattel assigned to the fields but also seeking to create a festive atmosphere fueled in part by generous allotments of food and liquor.31
Jefferson might have provided incentives and sought to make the work more cheery, but the barbarity of slavery could not be hidden. Its existence ultimately depended on the use—or the threat of the use—of force. That was as true at Monticello as at any other plantation. One study concluded that “the Monticello machine operated on carefully calibrated violence,” but others have concluded that Jefferson mitigated violence or that his slaves were not treated badly according to the standards of the time. What is clear is that Jefferson diligently sought to apprehend runaway slaves, tolerated the flogging of his chattel, and sometimes ordered whippings. He also bought and sold slaves, fully aware that he was sundering families. Moreover, from the 1780s onward, Jefferson employed a score of overseers; some were not just harsh but also cruel, an unpleasant truth of which he was likely aware. Jefferson once remarked that he loathed “severity,” and there is no credible evidence that he ever personally whipped a slave. Indeed, one of his longest-serving overseers described him “always very kind and indulgent to his servants.” Yet, he was a slave owner, and a cold-blooded harshness was necessary for keeping people enslaved and exacting labor from them. What is more, by the 1790s his obsession with his debt problems may have led him to brook more stringent measures. It appears to be an unpleasant truth that Jefferson, as historian Henry Wiencek has written, was all too aware of the brutal nature of slavery and that he “distanced himself from the ugly reality of his system.”32
For all of Jefferson’s thought and work, and the severity that he tolerated, he remained only a marginally successful farmer. Droughts, floods, and unexpected early freezes took their toll, as did an infestation of Hessian fly, an insect that devastated wheat crops. Furthermore, Jefferson’s land was not the best. He lived and farmed in a mountain range, and the soil his laborers worked was not the rich, bottomland variety.33
If bad luck and poor land did nothing for Jefferson’s debt problem, his extravagant lifestyle exacerbated his plight. Addicted to home remodeling, Jefferson decided to tear down, and rebuild, the original Monticello. The structure had “never been more than half finished,” he claimed, and during his nearly unbroken absence between 1783 and 1794, it had “gone into almost total decay.” But there was more to it than that. He had he been inspired by architectural styles he had observed in Paris, probably wished for a dwelling that differed from the one he had shared with his late wife, and sought a larger house to accommodate his children, grandchildren, and visitors during his retirement years.34
Jefferson had probably decided to reconstruct his mansion before leaving France, and within two years of returning to the United States, he had conceived a plan for the new Monticello. The house was to be twice the size of the original dwelling, and it was designed to conform to Palladian principles, but with ample allowances made for convenience and privacy. More than a year before he resigned from Washington’s cabinet, Jefferson set his laborers to making bricks and hauling stone up the long hill to the site of the original Monticello. Construction began in earnest when he came home, leaving him to feel that he was “living in [a] brick-kiln” amid incessant “noise, confusion and discomfort.” Work proceeded very slowly. Thirty months after coming home, all the while living in
a small portion of the original structure, the cellars had been dug and work had begun on the foundation, but six long years passed before the house was under roof. Even then, scaffolding for the carpenters, plasterers, and painters stood in most rooms, leaving one visitor to describe the house as “grand & awful,” with an ever-present “general gloom.”35
Early in 1795, Jefferson heard from Maria Cosway, the first word from her since about the time he entered Washington’s cabinet. He had answered at once in 1790, telling her that should she come to Monticello it would be “all I could desire in the world,” adding that his greatest wish was “to enjoy the affections of my heart.” She had not responded. Years passed. Along the way, he heard that she had become a mother. Halfway through his final year in Philadelphia, Jefferson asked a mutual acquaintance for word about Maria, even intimating that he wished to resume his correspondence with her. Just before leaving the capital, he learned that Maria had entered a convent in Genoa. Stunned, he exclaimed that he thought she “would rather have sought the mountain-top.”36
Jefferson had been at home for a year when two letters from Maria arrived, a short one and a longer one penned about ten days apart. She had recently returned to London, she said, and had learned that Jefferson had inquired about her nearly a year earlier. She was pleased to learn that he had often mentioned her in his letters to Angelica Church, their mutual friend, but Maria’s tone was guarded and the language cryptic. Nevertheless, she made clear that through Angelica she knew that as late as 1793 Jefferson had seemed to suggest that he yet wished her to come to Monticello. Making no attempt to hide her melancholy feelings, she acknowledged her “wish to come” to that “smal spot unknown to Misery, trouble, and Confusion.” To that she asked: “Why Can I not come?”37
Jefferson did not respond for nine months, a sure sign that his feelings were not what they had once been. When he finally wrote, he spoke of his desire to travel with her through Italy, but did not invite her to Monticello. When “I think of you,” he said, “I am hurried off on the wings of imagination into regions where my fancy submits all things to our will.” Perhaps he was suggesting that while in Paris together, he wished they might have overcome the obstacles that kept them apart.38
Undeterred, Maria responded at once, writing with lyric sadness that she kept his picture in her bedroom. She would prefer to see him in person, she added, and again spoke of her desire to come to Monticello.39 Jefferson did not answer her letter.
When he had heard from Maria in 1795, eight years had passed since they had last seen each other. Much had changed. Indeed, when Jefferson responded to her letter that autumn, he was involved in an intimate relationship with another woman who was carrying his child. That woman was Sally Hemings, his chattel and the half-sister of his late wife, Martha.
Hemings subsequently attested that Jefferson had fathered children by her, and the preponderance of circumstantial evidence and recent DNA testing bear her out. She supposedly said that she had become Jefferson’s “concubine” while in Paris, and that he was the father not only of a child that she was carrying when she left France in the fall of 1789 but of the six additional children that she subsequently bore. That first child, she said, had been born soon after she returned to Virginia, but died shortly thereafter. She added that she had not wished to return to America with Jefferson, as “in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved.” However, Jefferson “induce[d]” her to come home with him by promising her “extraordinary privileges” and making the “solemn pledge” that all her children would be freed at age twenty-one.40 She told her story to one of her sons, Madison Hemings, but it is unlikely that she would have done so until he was at least well into adolescence, more than thirty years after 1789. Furthermore, Madison did not share her testimony with the world until about half a century after he heard it. Every word of the story that Madison told may have been true, though there are sufficient red flags to give pause to a circumspect scholar. One has to consider whether Madison Hemings, whose standing would have been enhanced by having been sired by a Founding Father, was motivated by a self-serving penchant. In addition, human memory is treacherous under the best of circumstances, and it is especially hazardous to give credence to every detail in a secondhand account provided by Madison Hemings some fifty years after he first heard his mother’s story.
Little in Hemings’s narrative can be verified. There is no way to prove that Jefferson and Sally were intimate while in Paris, or that he was the father of the child she was allegedly carrying in 1789, or even that she was pregnant when they sailed for America. Jefferson did not make an inventory of his chattel until 1794, and when he did, he did not record that Sally was the mother of a four-year-old. It is possible that her 1789 pregnancy was not carried to term; or the child may have died in infancy, as she supposedly said; or the child may have been freed by the time Jefferson first compiled a list of his slaves. Or, she may not have been pregnant in 1789. Her allegation that Jefferson wanted her to return to Virginia is doubtless true. He had an economic stake in her, and the experience and skills she had acquired in Paris would be useful at Monticello. He may even have envisaged a mature Sally Hemings taking on many of the responsibilities that ordinarily fell to the mistress of a large southern plantation. He probably wanted her to come home to Monticello so badly that he promised her preferential treatment.
Jefferson was a manipulative sort who, according to one scholar, had “a great ability, as genuinely smart and sensitive people do,” to disarm others in order to “bind them to himself.”41 He may well have employed his guile to coax this reluctant, sixteen-year-old girl to abandon freedom for a lifetime of slavery, even to become his mistress. On the other hand, little artfulness may have been required to persuade her to return to Virginia. It may never have occurred to her to go against Jefferson’s will. Not only was he one of the most powerful men in America, but also she may have thought herself utterly dependent on him. Or, aware that as the unmarried black mother of an infant she would likely have faced incredible hardships had she chosen to remain in Paris, she may have welcomed a return to Virginia. Her older brother James agreed to return to Virginia and he may have persuaded her not to stay in France. What is more, as her mother and siblings lived at Monticello, where she had been raised, she may have felt the tug to come home. It is even conceivable that she was the more cunning of the two. She may have utilized the threat of remaining in Paris to pry bountiful pledges from Jefferson. There are at least two additional explanations for her decision to sail for America with the Jeffersons. As Jefferson came home in 1789 expecting to be in Virginia only briefly, it is conceivable that Sally wished to visit relatives, after which she would return with him to Paris. Still another possibility is that she may have been so in love with Jefferson that she was eager to return home with him.
It is likely that Jefferson and Sally Hemings did not begin their intimate relationship until 1794, when he returned to Monticello following his departure from Washington’s cabinet. It was not until sometime in that period that his passion for Maria Cosway appears to have burned out. Furthermore, between March 1790 when he left Monticello to become secretary of state and January 1794 when he retired and came home, Jefferson and Hemings were seldom together. She was never in New York or Philadelphia with him, and he spent less than six of the forty-six months that he served in Washington’s cabinet at Monticello. When Jefferson resigned his cabinet post, he believed he would never again hold public office nor stray far from home. If fear of a scandal ruining his political ambitions had previously been a concern, that no longer was the case. Moreover, beginning in 1794 he rebuilt Monticello in such a way as to protect his privacy in a house that was frequently occupied by relatives and guests.
Sally Hemings was pregnant early in 1795 and in October gave birth to a daughter, Harriet. There can be little doubt that Jefferson was her father, or that he sired two other daughters (born in 1799 and 1801) and three sons (born in 1798, 1805, a
nd 1808). Madison Hemings was the child born in 1805. Jefferson was home at least nine months prior to the birth of each of these children, many visitors remarked on how the male children resembled him, and talk was rife in Charlottesville that Jefferson had a slave mistress who was bearing his children. He set these children free at a young age, as he supposedly had pledged to do. Though Jefferson owned some six hundred slaves during his long life, the children he sired with Sally, and two men from the Hemings family, were the only chattel he liberated.42
If their intimate relationship began in 1794, Jefferson would have been fifty-one and Hemings twenty-one at its inception. Jefferson’s feelings may be more easily fathomed. Abundant evidence indicates that Hemings not only was attractive, but that she bore a decided resemblance to her half-sister, Jefferson’s late wife. Furthermore, in his “head and heart” letter to Maria Cosway, Jefferson had intimated that he could never again surrender his heart to someone who could break it. That was highly unlikely to occur with Sally Hemings. As his slave, she was bound to him. In addition, given the excessive racism in Virginia, and indeed throughout the United States, she had little prospect of a better life than she had at Monticello. She was most unlikely to abandon him.
A world away from Monticello, Alexander Hamilton remained deeply involved in politics. In the summer of 1793, just before Jefferson told the president of his unequivocal plans to retire, Hamilton had informed Washington of his intention to leave the cabinet once he submitted some “propositions” to Congress. Hamilton wanted to stay on until he had removed all suspicions about his conduct as treasury secretary. He was doing just what Jefferson was at that moment. Jefferson feared that to step down in the summer of 1793 would leave the impression that he had been driven from office by Hamilton, who was whaling away at him in essays about Genêt and neutrality. Similarly, Hamilton worried that to retire in mid-1793 would cause some to suspect that he had fled office before Congressman Giles, with more “time for due examination,” could resume his inquiry into the treasury secretary’s possible misconduct. Taking the rarest of rare steps in American political history, Hamilton asked Congress to reopen Giles’s investigation, adding that “the more comprehensive it is, the more agreeable it will be to me.”43
