Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

Everything was made more complicated by the fact that I was enceinte during our travels — three and a half months by the end. I hoped that people would attribute the new puffiness of my cheeks and bosom to my having been too fond of French pastries, but anyone so disposed could easily have recognized my condition for what it was — and, of course, it would not be very long before I would be unable to hide the truth from anyone.

This latter fact was a particular source of discomfort to Mr. Jefferson. While he was never less than considerate with me, his uneasiness about what people would think grew more palpable every day, and it was equally clear that his ardor for me had diminished significantly. Gone were those breath-stopping glances filled with longing that had made the charade of our last months in Paris such a delight and a torture. The contrast was so striking that his merely friendly consideration seemed coldness to me.

Everything became worse upon our arrival in Norfolk, when Mr. Jefferson received General Washington’s letter asking him to be secretary of state in the new government. He proclaimed loudly that he would not accept the offer under any circumstances and that if he were to remain in this country (he had left France with the assumption that he would be returning once the revolution there was over), it would only be as a farmer; he was done with public life. And yet it was clear to everyone — himself included — that this was an honor he could not turn down. From then on, his brow was perpetually crimped with irritation, and he kept to himself, writing letters. During the entirety of the two weeks we stayed with Miss Maria’s dear Aunt and Uncle Eppes, with whom she and I had lived before her father sent for her from France, Mr. Jefferson confined himself to a dark room, suffering one of his periodical headaches.

We arrived at Monticello just before Christmas, and from that moment on, Mr. Jefferson became entirely absent from my life, once again locking himself in his chambers for most of every day and then spending the holidays with, as he put it to me, “my family.”

Given that I was carrying within my person the youngest member of that family, I could not help but take affront, even if none had been intended. And yet, at the same time, I was becoming more and more aware that my association with Mr. Jefferson was unnatural and untenable. I began to dwell, in particular, on a fact I had known since childhood: that when Mrs. Jefferson was on her deathbed, he had promised her he would never remarry. He had never mentioned this promise to me, but maybe that was because he knew there was no need — my mother had been right there in the room when he’d made it. In any event, during our first days home that promise came to seem the nail in the coffin of my association with Mr. Jefferson. I spent much of my time telling myself that I had been a fool to have imagined any other outcome, that whatever affection my celebrated master might have felt toward me had been only an artifact of our time abroad, and wrong from the beginning, and that I would be better and happier when it was behind me. I was, in short, looking for reasons to hate Mr. Jefferson, and so it was not long before fate answered my call.

One morning, after I had been home less than a week, I woke from a night riddled with grotesque dreams and bouts of feverish anxiety and decided to take a long walk, in the hope that it might restore my peace of mind. I had not gone more than a half mile before I came upon a gang of Negro men rebuilding a stretch of road that had fallen away in a mud slide. They were singing as they worked, a slow song that sounded like the very exhaustion I could see in their bent backs, in their hanging heads and in the wrists they dragged across their sweating brows.

This was the first time since my return from France that I had come across a work gang, and so, to a considerable extent, I saw this once-familiar sight with a foreigner’s eyes. During my three years in Paris, I never encountered another slave apart from my own brother — and, of course, he and I were not slaves either, at least from a legal point of view. More important, we dressed better and lived better than many of the French — including some shopkeepers and most of the people working barrows in the market squares. Although I never forgot that I was a slave during those years, for most of that time my enslavement was a mere detail, lacking urgency or the solidity of fact. And so, oddly perhaps, my unconscious assumption on first catching sight of these men bent over their shovels was that they were free — and thus my instantaneous correction hit me like a hammer blow, or like several in succession:

They were not free.

Neither was I.

We were all the victims of a grotesque crime perpetrated by white people — and by Mr. Jefferson in particular.

As I happened on the scene, an overseer was shoving one of the men — or, in fact, a boy who looked to be about fourteen, though most likely he was sixteen. He had huge brown eyes and bone-thin limbs and was clearly incapable of working like the other men. With every shove, and in the most repulsive and obscene language, the overseer asked the boy if he was a girl, an old woman, a lazy sod. And even as each shove nearly knocked him over, the boy kept trying to do his work but was too tired to scoop more than a handful of soil onto his shovel, and even that would be spilled by the overseer’s blows. What most shocked me was that none of the men did anything to help him. There were eight of them and only the one overseer, but they just kept shoveling and chanting as if completely oblivious. The overseer was unarmed, but he did have a cowskin coiled on his belt — a symbol so potent it seemed to entirely emasculate all of these tall and strong men.

And then something very strange happened. One moment I was wondering if Mr. Jefferson might actually have been the one to hire this overseer, and if he might even have placed that cowskin into the overseer’s hand, and in the next I was running back up the road in abject terror, feeling that I was being borne down upon by some doom so malevolent and vast as to be unimaginable. Only once the stable roof came into view over a copse of locust trees and my breaths began to burn in my lungs did I slow to a walk and think again and again that this man who had just appeared to me in so hateful a form was the very man whose child was growing within my body, the man who had run the back of his finger so tenderly along my cheek, looked so fondly into my eyes and told me that I was beautiful, that there had been a time when he had wanted to die, but that now, because of me, his life was a joy.

“Such a joy,” he had said so very tenderly. “Such a joy.”…

On Slavery (Private)

On January 26, 1789, only three months before the commencement of his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Edward Bancroft, “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.” Up until this point, Thomas Jefferson had advocated for the emancipation of slaves almost exclusively on the basis of their fundamental rights to equality, justice and freedom, but from now on, in his private letters, he would argue that captivity had so destroyed the independence of spirit and habits of industry in slaves that they could not be freed until these virtues had been reinculcated through training and more humane treatment.

Like many other forward-thinking white people in the north as well as the south, he also worried that were slaves freed en masse, their outrage at past treatment combined with the bigotry of whites would inevitably result in race war — a catastrophe avoidable only if emancipation were held off until a “probable & practicable retreat” could be found for newly freed slaves, possibly in Canada or Ohio but most likely in the West Indies, West Africa or Latin America, which were already inhabited by “people of their own race & colour” and had climates “congenial” to the African constitution.