Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

Slavery was perhaps the only issue as emotionally and politically charged in Virginia as religion. Jefferson’s experience with the question of emancipation in the General Assembly affirmed the tragic view that he had come to when he had earlier failed to make progress against slavery in the House of Burgesses—a view further validated when the delegates to the Continental Congress had cut his attack on the slave trade from the Declaration of Independence. At the General Assembly, as part of the revisal of the laws, Jefferson and his allies prepared an amendment stipulating “the freedom of all [slaves] born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age”—deportation because it was inconceivable to Jefferson that free whites and free blacks could live together peaceably.

The financial and political difficulties facing the monarchy and the French nation were immense. Taxes were unequal and haphazardly collected; the heaviest burden of the cost of the Crown and its expensive ways and wars fell less on nobles or clergy, who were largely exempt, and more on commoners, creating understandable tension and popular hostility.

One suspects, though, that on the road Sally Hemings may have also figured in his imagination. In Düsseldorf, Jefferson was fascinated by a 1699 painting of Abraham taking the young servant Hagar to his bed, an image by the Dutch artist Adriaen van der Werff.75 The picture, Jefferson said, was “delicious.76 I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years.”

The French impulse for liberty—both in its laws against slavery and in the revolution against Louis XVI—tested Jefferson personally and politically in 1788 and 1789, threatening him in the most intimate of spheres and forcing him to confront the full implications of his philosophical creed. In this tempestuous time, Jefferson apparently began a sexual relationship with his late wife’s enslaved half sister.

The emotional content of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is a mystery. He may have loved her, and she him. It could have been, as some have argued, coercive, institutionalized rape. She might have just been doing what she had to do to survive an evil system, accepting sexual duty as an element of her enslavement and using what leverage she had to improve the lot of her children. Or each of these things may have been true at different times.

What little evidence we have strongly suggests that Sally Hemings was an intelligent, brave woman who did as much as she could with what little the world had given her. She began this phase of her life as she apparently intended to carry on: with strength and an instinct for survival. For in this opening hour, geography and culture—those things that had conspired to enslave her—were on her side. In France, enslaved persons could apply for their liberty and be granted it—and there was nothing their masters could do about it.12 Jefferson knew this well. As the American minister he had once advised a fellow slave owner on the system.13 And Sally Hemings was no lonely slave girl in Europe: Her big brother James was there with her, at the Hôtel de Langeac, and could have helped her win her freedom. According to their son Madison Hemings’s later account, Sally, who had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” was pregnant when Jefferson was preparing to return to the United States.14,15 “He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred,” Madison Hemings said.

So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.

Jefferson himself arrived at Monticello for a visit on Tuesday, July 11, 1797. Eight months and three weeks later, Sally Hemings gave birth to a son.64 The baby was named William Beverly, called Beverly.

His sister Mary’s husband, John Bolling, was apparently alcoholic and abusive. “Mr. B.’s habitual intoxication will destroy himself, his fortune and family,” he wrote to Polly.41 “Of all calamities this is the greatest.” Jefferson was practical, even cold, about the matter. “I wish my sister could bear his misconduct with more patience. It might lessen his attachment to the bottle, and at any rate would make her own time more tolerable. When we see ourselves in a situation which must be endured and gone through, it is best to make up our minds to it, meet it with firmness, and accommodate everything to it in the best way practicable.”

Indian tribes knew this well. Though he would not live to see the Trail of Tears of the 1830s, Jefferson was among the architects of Indian removal. He eagerly acquired lands from the tribes throughout the American interior—up to two hundred thousand square miles—and, as in the case of the Louisiana Purchase, did all he could to encourage white settlement ever farther west and south.56,57 In 1803, writing to William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory, Jefferson said that he believed the Indians “will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States or remove beyond the Mississippi.”58 He threatened to retaliate against any attacking tribes by “seizing … the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Mississippi, as the only condition of peace.”59

Jefferson coolly recorded the births of Hemings’s children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops.110 He was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they grew up in his midst. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison Hemings, who added that Jefferson was, however, “affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”111,112

It was past time, Jefferson said, for the political wars of the first decades of the republic to end.

Jefferson hoped that subjecting religious sensibilities to free inquiry would transform faith from a source of contention into a force for good, for he knew that religion in one form or another was a perpetual factor in the world.65 The wisest course, then, was not to rail against it but to encourage the application of reason to questions of faith. The more rational that men became about religion, Jefferson believed, the better lives they would lead; in turn the life of the nation would become more stable and virtuous.

To John Adams, Jefferson wrote: “The truth is that the greatest enemies to the doctrines of Jesus are those calling themselves the expositors of them, who have perverted them for the structure of a system of fancy absolutely incomprehensible, and without any foundation in his genuine words.66 And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away [with] all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.”

By his lights nothing other than a removal of blacks from the established United States would work—a removal that would have dwarfed even the removal of Indians from what was understood by Jefferson and so many of his contemporaries to be white America. Indians were to be unjustly driven across the Mississippi. Blacks would have to be dispatched not across a river but an ocean. “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.12 Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” A multiracial society was beyond his imagination, except it was not beyond his experience, since he had created just such a society at Monticello. Mixed-race children such as those he had with Sally Hemings—children whom he saw every day, in his house, alongside his white family—suffered, in his general view, from an intrinsic “degradation” produced by the “amalgamation” of white and black.

“I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President,” Jefferson said, according to Webster.51 “He is one of the most unfit men I know of for such a place. He has had very little respect for laws or constitutions, and is, in fact, an able military chief. His passions are terrible.”