Friends Divided

by Gordon S. Wood

  He believed that husbands “expected to be pleased” by their wives who were “sedulous to please,” and his wife, Martha, seems to have more than fulfilled that expectation. In his autobiography Jefferson called her “the cherished companion of my life” with whom he had lived “in unchequered happiness.”74 Happy as he was, he never regarded his wife, any more than he did his daughters, as his intellectual equal. When the Marquis de Chastellux visited Monticello in 1782, he described everything about his host and the house in minute detail, but he scarcely mentioned Martha. This was never true of Abigail: foreign visitors to the Adams household always felt her intellectual presence.

  Jefferson was devoted to his wife, and the marriage was a happy one. The widowed Martha already had one child when she married Jefferson. She then gave birth to six children in ten years, with only two daughters reaching maturity. Her health was never strong, and four months after the birth of the last child she died, on September 6, 1782. Jefferson was devastated, and for six weeks he remained cut off from all society. Only in mid-October did he emerge from what he described to Chastellux as a “stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it.”75

  On her deathbed Martha apparently extracted a promise from Jefferson that he would never marry again, a remarkable pledge given that most eighteenth-century widowers quickly remarried.

  • • •

  JEFFERSON WAS ONLY THIRTY-NINE when his wife died, and he lived another forty-four years. Since he considered sexual desire to be “the strongest of all the human passions,” it is difficult to believe that he remained celibate the rest of his life.76 In 1802 journalist James Callender wrote that President Jefferson, “the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.”77

  This charge, which Jefferson never acknowledged and indirectly denied, has reverberated through the past two centuries. Many have doubted that he could have had any such relationship, some finding Jefferson’s liaison with a slave inconceivable, especially given his opposition to racial mixing. But DNA results showing that the Hemings children were fathered by someone in Jefferson’s male line, together with the powerful arguments of historian Annette Gordon-Reed, give ample reason to conclude that Jefferson indeed took Sally Hemings as a concubine and fathered six of her children. Certainly, Jefferson as an eighteenth-century slaveholding Virginia planter would not have been unusual in having a black concubine.

  In the 1850s a Richmond physician recalled that slave mistresses were “quite common in this city fifty years ago with gentlemen of the older time.” Jefferson’s neighbor General John Hartwell Cocke, who helped Jefferson establish the University of Virginia, said that “in Virginia this damnable practice prevails as much as any where.” He could, he declared, “enumerate a score of such cases in our beloved Ancient Dominion.” Indeed, Cocke, a prominent planter and politician, believed that “all Batchelors, or a large majority at least, keep as a substitute for a wife some individuals of their own slaves.” Perhaps the examples could be numbered in the “hundreds,” which was not “to be wondered at, when Mr. Jefferson’s notorious example is considered.”78

  Jefferson could not be blind to the extent of racial mixing in Virginia; in fact, he saw it all around him. Visitors to Monticello were impressed by the number of mulatto slaves in the household. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt noted that many of Jefferson’s slaves had “neither in their color nor features a single trace of their origin, but they are the sons of slave mothers and consequently slaves.” The Comte de Volney was surprised to see so many slaves at Monticello who were “as white as I am.”79 Yet Jefferson never accepted this racial mixing. As he said in 1814, the black slaves’ “amalgamation with the other colour produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”80 Presumably the fact that Sally, according to the testimony of another Monticello slave, was “mighty near white” with “straight hair down her back” made Jefferson’s “amalgamation” with an African American acceptable to him.81

  Jefferson had inherited many of the mulattos from his father-in-law. When John Wayles died in 1773, he had been living with Betty Hemings for over a decade. Betty already had four children, and with Wayles she had six more, the last being Sally. All the mulatto slaves who were the offspring of John Wayles and Betty Hemings were thus Martha Jefferson’s half siblings. Over the next half century more than eighty members of the family of Betty Hemings—five generations of slaves—lived and worked at Monticello. By the time of Jefferson’s death in 1826, one-third of the 130 slaves on his estate were members of the Hemings clan.82

  When Jefferson went to Paris in 1784, he was accompanied by his eldest daughter, Martha, and his nineteen-year-old slave James Hemings, the brother of Sally. Jefferson intended to have James trained in cooking French style and bring him back to America to be his chef at Monticello. When Jefferson learned of the death of his two-year-old daughter, Lucy, in Virginia, he determined to have his other remaining daughter, Mary—or Polly, as she was called—join him in France. After many exchanges of letters back and forth across the Atlantic, in 1787 the nine-year-old Polly was finally able to sail to Europe, accompanied by her fourteen-year-old maid, Sally Hemings. According to Abigail Adams, who met the pair in London, Sally was “quite a child” and “wants more care” than Polly and was “wholy incapable of looking properly after her.” Indeed, Mrs. Adams told Jefferson, the ship captain who brought the pair over thought that Polly’s maid would be of “so little Service that he had better carry her back with him.”83

  Apparently over the next few years Sally matured quickly, becoming an unusually attractive young woman with a sweet temperament. She was thirty years younger than Jefferson, but such differences in age between females and males in relationships were not uncommon in eighteenth-century Virginia. Jefferson’s father, Peter, had been in his early thirties when he married his wife of nineteen. The father of Jefferson’s son-in-law, Col. Thomas Mann Randolph, Sr., married, at age fifty, seventeen-year-old Gabriella Harvie. And thirty-two-year-old James Madison’s first engagement was with fifteen-year-old Kitty Floyd. Although the engagement eventually collapsed when Miss Floyd found someone else, no one thought it was a strange or unusual match. Jefferson’s attraction to Sally may have been helped by the fact that she was the half sister of his deceased wife, and Jefferson knew that; she may even have resembled Jefferson’s wife.84

  Since slavery had no place in French law, James Hemings and his sister Sally knew that they could gain their freedom at any time while in France. Jefferson knew that too, and consequently he treated both James and Sally in a special manner. The lives of the two Hemings siblings were clearly transformed by their experience in France. They learned French and were often on their own in Paris. With Martha and Polly away at school, James Hemings doing the cooking, and French servants running the household, Sally naturally assumed a more prominent position at Jefferson’s Parisian residence in the Hôtel de Langeac. Sally was particularly talented as a seamstress—a skill that Jefferson believed was one of the foundations of a woman’s domestic life, even more valuable for women than the ability to read.

  This Paris experience was bound to make the Hemings siblings think of themselves differently—not as typical Virginia slaves but as hired servants with special roles in the household. For some French friends of Patsy, Sally may not have even seemed to be a servant. One referred to Sally as “Mademoiselle Sally,” a title that no normal servant would have been given. Before long, Sally was given a regular salary and began acting as a chambermaid to Jefferson, a role that she would continue to play at Monticello upon returning to America. During this time in France, as Sally’s son Madison Hemings recalled, “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.”85

  When Jefferson planned his return to America in 1789, he was confront
ed with a problem. Sally Hemings was pregnant, and she did not want to go back to Virginia. According to her son Madison, in order to induce his mother to return, Jefferson “promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age twenty-one years.”86 At the same time James Hemings told Jefferson of his desire to remain in France and live off of his newly acquired skill as a chef. To induce him to return, Jefferson apparently promised James his freedom as soon as he trained another slave to cook in a French style.

  After returning to America with Jefferson, James Hemings did teach another slave how to cook French style and was freed by Jefferson as promised. Sally Hemings remained at Monticello, with, according to one witness, “a room to her own” within the house.87 She eventually gave birth to six or perhaps seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Two of them, Beverley and Harriet, left Monticello for freedom in 1822, apparently with Jefferson’s acquiescence, and the other two, Madison and Eston, were freed by Jefferson’s will along with three other Hemingses. Jefferson had kept his bargain with Sally. As octoroons, Jefferson and Sally’s children were legally white by Virginia law in the 1820s. Of the four, only Madison chose to remain in the black community.

  Jefferson mentioned Sally only a few times in his writings and then only in passing. Sally seems to have represented for him a medically necessary outlet for his sexual needs, and little more.88 Sally’s offspring were incidental to the relationship. Since Jefferson kept track of everything that went on at Monticello, he dutifully recorded in his farm book not only the new colts he acquired and the hogs he killed but the births of nearly all of his slaves as well, including Sally’s children—that is, his children. Some other Virginia slaveholders with concubines often gave presents to their offspring or even recognized them in their wills, but not Jefferson. He never acknowledged his slave children publicly or privately and never made any effort to prepare for their financial futures. Apparently he did not even bother to teach them to read; the Hemings children had to coax the white children in the household to help them to learn to read. Madison Hemings admitted that although Jefferson “was affectionate toward his white grandchildren,” he “was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us [Hemings] children.”89 Because Jefferson thought of all his slaves as children, all part of his extended “family,” perhaps he had no emotional need to single out his own offspring from the rest.90

  • • •

  WHILE IN FRANCE, Jefferson befriended, corresponded with, and sometimes flirted with a number of different women—French, English, and American—including Alexander Hamilton’s sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church. But his most intense relationship was with Maria Hadfield Cosway, a woman who had everything—beauty, charm, intelligence, wealth, social prominence, and artistic and musical talent; indeed, Mrs. Cosway was probably the most fascinating woman Thomas Jefferson ever met in his entire life.91

  Maria Cosway was born in Italy in 1760 of English expatriate parents. In 1781 she married Richard Cosway, a socially distinguished English miniaturist. She and her husband soon established one of the most fashionable salons in London. Cosway was an odd man who was almost twice her age and notoriously ugly, resembling a monkey, many said. He was foppish in manner with eccentric tastes in dress and companions. But Maria’s parents were hard-pressed for money, and her marriage was one of convenience. She had many disappointed suitors, one of whom scoffed that Mr. Cosway “at that time adored her, though she always despised him.” But another said that Maria’s “capacity for the eccentric . . . made her a fitting wife for a husband who mingled not a little of charlatanism with very real gifts as an artist.”92 Maria Cosway was a celebrated painter in her own right, exhibiting over thirty works at the Royal Academy in London.

  • • •

  BUT SHE WAS NOT THE ADAMSES’ kind of woman. In January 1786, months before Jefferson crossed paths with the Cosways, Abigail Adams and her daughter, Abigail—always known as Nabby—met Mrs. Cosway at a London party. Although Abigail never mentioned Mrs. Cosway in her correspondence, Nabby did, and she was not at all impressed by this brilliant young woman. In telling her brother John Quincy about the party, Nabby said that she and her group, which included her betrothed, William Stephens Smith, and her mother but not her father, had arrived late and had little choice of seats. She took one “next to a Mrs. Coswey, an Italian who is rather a singular Character.” She noted that Mrs. Cosway “paintts and her subjects are the most singular that one can imagine.” Nabby had seen some of Maria’s paintings at an exhibition during the previous year. “One was a Dream, another the deluge, the mos[t] extraordinary things, that imagination could form.” Mrs. Cosway, said Nabby, was reputed to speak English, Italian, and French “vastly well.” She also played and sang well too, but, wrote Nabby, she had “the foibles, which attend these accomplishments.” Sitting next to her for the whole evening was an ordeal, for Nabby had to witness “sollicidute from almost Every Person in the [room?],” all pleading with Mrs. Cosway “to Play and sing.” All this begging met with Mrs. Cosway’s “absolute refusal.” She claimed that she was sick with a cold and had not sung for weeks. “At last,” wrote Nabby, “after every one had given over their solicitude she, followed her own inclination and play[ed] and sang till she came away.”

  Nabby found this conduct inexcusable—unless the woman had “an ineshaustable fund of Wit and good Humour to display,” which “this Lady had not.” Maria Cosway struck her as “one of those soft gentle pretty Women, whose Compliance with the request of the company would please more than her Airs could possibly give her importance.” Supposedly, Cosway gave musical parties at her house on Monday evenings, but Nabby had never been invited to any.93

  Maria Cosway was twenty-five when she and her husband went to Paris in the summer of 1786. In September Jefferson was on an architectural excursion with John Trumbull, an aspiring young painter, when the two men ran into Richard and Maria Cosway. Trumbull knew the Cosways from London, and he introduced them to Jefferson. Unlike Nabby, Jefferson was immediately taken with Maria. She was coquettish, cultivated, and captivating, and straightaway she had Jefferson wrapped around her finger. For the next two weeks Jefferson and Maria wandered about Paris and its surroundings together.

  Historians have been fascinated by Jefferson’s relationship with Maria and have described it very differently.94 Some have seen it as a passionate love affair that brought together a lonely widower and a woman unhappy in her arranged marriage. Others have seen it as a romantic friendship that was all playful talk with no consummation. Still others have described Maria as a coquettish young woman who loved to flirt with men and enjoyed nothing more than having a flock of besotted male admirers circling about her. She respected Jefferson and his learning and was obviously flattered by his infatuation with her, but she never saw their relationship as romantically serious. She relished her rich social life in London and never thought a moment about giving it up. If Nabby Adams had known about the relationship, she would have been appalled that Jefferson had been ensnared by this beautiful but narcissistic temptress.

  Jefferson and Maria did not see each other in Paris for any great length of time; in fact, the relationship was much briefer than most historians have realized. Jefferson and Maria took their day trips and half-day trips around Paris on only ten or twelve days over several weeks. There were two more outings during the first week of October 1786, when Jefferson saw the Cosways for the last time just before their departure back to London. Jefferson and Maria’s excursions were usually not private but often took place in the company of several people, including Richard Cosway, John Trumbull, and Jefferson’s secretary, William Short. Historian Jon Kukla has persuasively concluded that the relationship was “a flirtatious friendship enhanced by shared cultural interests rather than a passionately erotic affair.”95

  After the Cosways went back to London, Jefferson and Maria kept in touch. Between 1786 and
1790 they exchanged three dozen letters with each other; then after a nearly five-year lapse they exchanged between 1794 and Jefferson’s death in 1826 another fifteen letters. Jefferson was obviously more romantically smitten with her than she was with him. Her letters, as Kukla points out, were always characterized by “friendship, rather than romantic love.”96 The most famous of Jefferson’s letters to Maria was one of twelve pages written shortly after the Cosways left Paris. He composed the letter as a dialogue between the Heart and the Head in which he expressed his feelings for her, reminded her of all the good times they had had together, and suggested a possible visit to America, “where strangers are better received, more hospitably treated, & with a more sacred respect.” The dialogue was a curiously indirect way of expressing his feelings, but since such dialogues were a common literary device in the eighteenth century, Jefferson no doubt hoped to impress Maria with his imaginative use of it.97 Abigail would not have been impressed.

  THREE

  THE IMPERIAL CRISIS

  AS JOHN ADAMS LAUNCHED his law practice in the 1760s, he began writing short pieces for Boston newspapers on a variety of topics. But 1765 changed everything for him and for the colonies. That was the year the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which levied a tax on legal documents, almanacs, newspapers, and nearly every form of paper used in the colonies. The tax sparked a firestorm of opposition in the colonies. The result, Adams told his diary, was to make 1765 “the most remarkable Year of my Life.” The attempts by Parliament to batter down all the rights and liberties of America, he wrote, had “raised and spread thro the whole Continent, a Spirit that will be recorded to our Honor, with all future Generations.” From Georgia to New Hampshire public resentment had forced the stamp agents to resign and had silenced everyone who had dared speak in favor of the Stamp Act. “The People, even to the lowest Ranks,” he said, “have become more attentive to their Liberties, more inquisitive about them, and more determined to defend them, than they ever before known or had occasion to be. . . . Our Presses have groaned, our Pulpits have thundered, our Legislatures have resolved, and our Towns have voted. The Crown Officers had every where trembled, and all their little Tools and Creatures, have been afraid to Speak and ashamed to be seen.”1