Patriot Hearts: A Novel of the Founding Mothers

SALLY HEMINGS

In the course of putting this book together, I realized that no matter how I told the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, I was going to offend and anger someone.

And yet, in a book about the first First Ladies, to omit the issue would leave a gaping and obvious hole.

I have done the best I can, to re-create one possible version of a relationship whose actual nature is—in the words of Fawn Brodie’s romanticized biography—simply “nonrecoverable.”

Were Thomas Jefferson to be asked on Judgment Day whether he loved Sally Hemings, my personal opinion is that he would reply defensively that he loved all his slaves: which is not the same thing as saying that he thought they were of the same species as himself. Jefferson is the most elusive (some historians would say, “two-faced”) of the Founding Fathers, saying one thing and doing another so frequently that it is almost impossible to pin down what he actually thought or felt.

The Civil War, the polemical arguments for and against abolition of slavery, the bitterness of Reconstruction and the long disgrace of race relations which followed it have so altered modern perceptions of black and white that any re-creation of even a simple relationship would be difficult to achieve, and the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings was, I believe, far from simple.

One of the most striking features I have come across in my own studies of slave accounts of slavery has been the enormous degree to which the conditions of any individual slave’s life depended upon the individual slave-owner. Situations of what appear to be warm affection existed side by side with truly subhuman cruelty and jaw-dropping callousness. It all depended on who and where you were, each slave-owning household a microclimate from which, for a slave, there was no possibility of legal redress.

I have made the arbitrary decision, based on the good opinion of Jefferson held by his friends (and in the few recorded instances, by his slaves also—though the ones who didn’t like him probably wouldn’t have felt able to say so), that he wasn’t the kind of man who would force or coerce sex with an unwilling fifteen-year-old girl.

I have also made the arbitrary decision that there was more to the relationship than a bargain for sexual favors in exchange for protection, privilege, and freedom for Sally’s children.

Jefferson kept Sally as his concubine despite the scandal in 1802 (their youngest two children were born in 1805 and 1808), and after he took Sally as his concubine in 1788, there is not even speculation that he was involved with any other woman, white or black. Their older surviving sons, Tom and Beverly, simply vanish from the Monticello records; according to their son Madison Hemings in an interview in March of 1873, their daughter Harriet (the second daughter of that name, born in 1801) “married a white man in good standing in Washington City.” Madison and Eston, presumably because their features were too African to allow them to “pass,” were freed in Jefferson’s will.

I have chosen to follow Fawn Brodie (and James Callendar) in portraying Young Tom as alive and present at Monticello at least up to 1800, rather than simply accepting Madison Hemings’s assertion that his eldest brother “died soon after” birth. Either way, Young Tom was probably gone from Monticello before Madison Hemings was born.

It must be remembered that Jefferson—and Sally—both grew up in a society in which it was acceptable (among men, anyway) and fairly commonplace—though by no means universal—for men to have mistresses, and for Southern slaveholders to have sexual relations with the women they legally owned. I think it should also be borne in mind that Sally had known Jefferson literally all her life, and that the Hemings family formed a sort of sub-caste at Monticello, somewhere between ordinary slaves and the sort of shadow-families that in French Louisiana would have been free and informally acknowledged.

One can only speculate as to why Jefferson did not free Sally in his will. Patsy Randolph—who left her husband shortly after Jefferson’s death in 1826—freed her, and took great care to solemnly assure her sons that Sally Hemings’s children had been fathered by Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr. Sally went to live with her sons Madison and Eston in a house near Monticello, until her death in 1835.

Whether Sally knew anything about Gabriel Prosser’s attempted revolt or not—or what she would have chosen to do if she had known—I have not the slightest idea.

All writers of fiction about historical personages have to make choices about how to portray events and relationships for which there is little or no evidence. I have done my best to be true to the known facts, about Jefferson and Sally and about the world in which they lived. To those who feel I should have told the story otherwise—and to those who have been offended by my choices—I apologize.

I have used the word “concubine” in its original literal meaning, that of a servant or slave-woman who sleeps with the master on a regular or semiregular basis.