Stephen O'Connor - Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings

“Well, you know how it is with men,” says Betty Hemings. “White men in particular.” She is sitting at the table, letting gravy soften her biscuit, sipping a glass of cider. “They only think with their little head. You know what I’m talking about? Right? You know what I mean. They say all kinds of things with their big head, but their little head makes all the decisions. Little head’s the master. So you can count on it; he ain’t done with you yet. You’ll see. Meanwhile you got it good. Most days you can go back to bed after breakfast, sleep till noon if you want. And when he comes back, the fact that he been so hard on himself most likely means he’ll go easy on you. Most masters act like God gave them you so they can do what they like. And if you object, they say you got the Devil in you and they got to punish you. Mr. Jefferson’s not like that. He treats you like a lady. So you lucky, and I wager you’ll be luckier when he come back. And meanwhile you get to live like a princess.”

On Slavery (Public)

In 1770, when he was twenty-seven years old, Thomas Jefferson served as a pro bono attorney in two suits for freedom by mulatto teenagers and argued in one of the cases, “Under the law of nature, all men are born free, everyone comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. This is what is called personal liberty, and is given him by the author of nature, because necessary for his own sustenance.” These sentences were Thomas Jefferson’s first public articulation of principles he would express so memorably six years later. He lost both cases.

In his instructions to the Virginia delegation to the first Continental Congress in 1774, he represented the abolition of slavery as one of the primary goals of the American colonies, and in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence he asserted that George III had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither.” This passage was struck from the final document in response to objections from representatives from the southern colonies.

Thomas Jefferson’s first draft of the Virginia constitution, which he wrote in Philadelphia just before the Declaration of Independence, stipulated, “No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever.” This draft arrived in Virginia too late to have an effect on the version of the constitution adopted on June 29, 1776—although it is doubtful that its antislavery provision would have been adopted even had it arrived in time, given that the constitution his fellow Virginians did approve denied slaves any guarantee of civil rights by declaring them not a part of civil society.

In 1777 Thomas Jefferson proposed a bill to prevent the importation of slaves to Virginia, which decreed that anyone brought into the state for the purpose of enslavement after the passage of the bill would “thenceforth become free and absolutely exempted from all slavery or bondage.” That bill was passed in 1781, during his term as governor.

In a new draft of the Virginia constitution, which he wrote in 1783, he extended his original ban on the enslavement to include not just those “coming into” the state after 1800 but anyone born in Virginia after that date, and once again this provision was struck from the document finally adopted.

In 1784, as a member of the Continental Congress, he developed a plan for the government of the western territories that declared, “After the year of 1800 of the Christian aera there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states,” but this provision met the same fate as its predecessors, and for the same reasons.

On December 2, 1806, during his second term as president, he denounced the international slave trade as a “violation of human rights” and called on Congress to make it illegal. The resulting law, which passed on March 2, 1807, and took effect on January 1, 1808 (the first day on which it was constitutionally possible to outlaw the slave trade), was the most unambiguously antislavery initiative of the federal government prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Unfortunately, the law was never adequately enforced, and over the course of the next fifty years (until the start of the Civil War) more than a quarter of a million Africans were brought to the United States and sold into slavery.

The blue of the sky before sunrise makes the earth blue. The air is cold, sharp on the tongue, but there is a dry-grass sweetness in it that tells Thomas Jefferson it will be warm by noon. Lots of sun. A good day for traveling, if the roads are not too muddy. He is seated in his landau, which, with the lanterns mounted on either side, is good for night travel. He hopes to make it to New York in less than a week. Jimmy is hunched against the cold on the box in front, and Bob is at his side, holding the whip upright, like a fishing pole.

Thomas Jefferson told everyone who would listen that Washington would have to throw him in irons to get him to serve in this administration, yet now he is looking forward to assuming his duties. Now he is wondering if government isn’t, in fact, the life that he was born for, and not farming. Yet no sooner does he resolve this question in the affirmative than a hollowness seems to open inside him.

He is passing the cabin where at this very moment Sally Hemings is asleep beside her mother and sister. She is angry at him, and the rift between them is what makes him feel so empty and alone. Still, it is better that he has concluded their intimate relationship. He hopes she will soon realize that her life will be happier this way. He wants nothing for her but her happiness. She is a good girl, and he will never be able to give her the happiness she deserves.

In Sally Hemings’s dream, she is wrestling a bear, although at first she does not know it is a bear. It seems like a wall of fur: dense, soft, warm and enveloping. But then she understands that what she is actually doing is trying to get the bear to put on a frock coat and a pointed hat. In the end it is the bear’s very astonishment that anyone should want to do such a thing that causes it to go still and let her manipulate its enormous paws down one sleeve and the other and then put a red hat — something like an elongated flowerpot — atop its head. And now, at this very moment when it would seem certain that she has succeeded in clothing the bear, she is suddenly unsure of what she has done. She knows that a crowd has gathered — a crowd of old women and men with the glossy, toothless mouths of infants — and they are all staring at something at the center of a cobbled square, and leering, and making low hooting noises that would seem to be laughter but that might just be something else. She doesn’t know what, but maybe something obscene.

For a long time after La Petite’s death, Sally Hemings has trouble staying asleep and so falls into the habit of leaving her bed at the faintest hint of pink in the eastern sky and going for a walk, partly to talk herself out of a roiling tangle of bitterness, sorrow and longing that come to her in a different configuration every day and partly to lose herself in the movement of her muscles, the sweet chill of the air in her throat and the thrum of the wind in bare branches.

There is a new building on Mulberry Row. The cockeyed, rain-grayed log cabin that everyone called the “toolshed” (in fact, it was where Thomas Jefferson and a team of workers lived while constructing the first section of the great house) has been replaced by a tall white clapboard building with a stout stone chimney on one side — a smithy.