Jefferson's Daughters Read online

  Maria composed herself so far as to primly assure her father that “I long to see you, and hope that you and sister Patsy are well.” But then she came to the point. “I am very sorry that you have sent for me. I don’t want to go to France, I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes.” She had a better idea: “that you and she will come very soon to see us.” And, still waiting, she continued to hope that her father “will send me a doll.” Jefferson had attempted to woo her across the Atlantic with firm attestations of his love and tantalizing promises of “as many dolls and playthings as you want for yourself, or to send to your cousins.” But so intractable was Maria’s resistance, Eliza Trist heard about it all the way up in Alexandria and presumed it would thwart Jefferson’s plans. A regular visitor to Eppington, James Currie also warned Jefferson from Richmond that Maria would not leave Elizabeth Eppes.

  Maria lived her last year at Eppington in an agony of dread. Francis Eppes had at last capitulated, and suspecting the change in tactics, Maria had made no secret of her increasing trepidation of the journey. As late as March 1787, she continued to insist that “I can not go to France.” Elizabeth Eppes told Jefferson that she too prayed daily for a last-minute reprieve, “countermanding your orders with regard to dear Polly.” But the mail failed to deliver, so Elizabeth Eppes knew that when the day arrived, Maria “must at last be dragged like a calf to the slaughter.” She attempted to ease the pain by planning the very sort of decoy Maria feared. Taking her to Osborne’s Wharf, on the James River near Richmond, “the children will spend a day or two on board the ship with her, which,” Eppes hoped, “would reconcile her to it.” She knew Martha Jefferson Carr, stranded at home without transportation, would be distressed because she could not be there for Maria’s leave-taking, but that could not be helped; Eppes could not spare a carriage to collect her.

  The pangs of grief and anxiety that emanate from their unhappy letters to Jefferson contrast markedly with the one he wrote to Francis Eppes the same month, cheerily expressing his pleasure in sending him some of the fabulous French wines he had been sampling during his travels. Jefferson’s sister Mary Bolling described utter dejection at Eppington, Martha Carr felt for Maria’s “sufferings at parting with…Mrs. Eppes from whom she has experienced the tenderness and fondness of a parent,” and Elizabeth Eppes’s wretchedness still echoes two centuries later in her plea: “For God’s sake give us the earliest intelligence of her arrival.” As Maria napped in her cabin, lulled to sleep by the lapping waves of the James, her relatives crept away, leaving her to awaken under sail and heading out to the Atlantic. The only familiar face on board was that of her slave.

  The captain of the Robert, Andrew Ramsay, was so unnerved by her “vexation and the affliction she underwent” when Maria awoke, he was afraid that she would make herself ill. To his relief, “she soon got over it and got so fond of me that she seldom parts with me without tears.” By dint of her “sweet disposition and good nature,” Maria secured his attention and, judging by what Abigail Adams observed on her arrival, a fair degree of free rein on the ship. After five weeks at sea in the company of men, Maria was “as rough as a little sailor,” Adams reported to Jefferson, and her clothes, “only proper for the sea,” were no longer wearable.

  After a storm-free passage, in accommodations that her relations thought exceedingly comfortable, Maria Jefferson arrived in London, where the process of decoy and detachment began once again. “She was so much attached to the Captain and he to her, that it was with no small regret that I separated her from him,” Abigail Adams told Jefferson in her letter announcing Maria’s safe arrival. Adams tried everything to distract her. She told Maria that she had never seen her elder sister cry once. But, Maria replied smartly, Martha “was older and ought to do better,” and “besides she had her pappa with her.” Adams showed Maria her father’s portrait. She did not recognize him. How could she when she didn’t know him? Maria asked Adams bluntly. A proposed trip to Sadler’s Wells, a popular amusement park, likewise failed to cheer. Maria would gladly trade “all the fun in the World” for “one moment” with Captain Ramsay. At the end of that long first day, a relieved Abigail Adams reported that the exhausted child, resolving to “try to be good and not cry,” had finally dried her tears and gone to bed.

  Ever wary of adults’ plans for her, Maria hovered over Adams’s desk the next morning, asking if she wrote every day to her father. But by the time Jefferson’s servant Adrien Petit arrived from Paris to collect her, Abigail had so won Maria’s affection that the little girl confided that it would be as hard to leave her as it had been to leave her aunt Eppes. Almost twenty years afterward, Abigail Adams could vividly remember how Maria had “slung around my neck, and wet my bosom with her tears, saying, ‘Oh, now I have learned to love you, why will they take me from you?’ ” But, resigned, the girl then climbed into the carriage that would take her to the coast for the last leg of her journey to France.

  This pattern of detachment, tears, resignation, and passionate attachment, repeated several times in young Maria’s life, certainly left a mark. “Polly had learned to get her way by alternately charming and raging,” one historian concluded. Some of the people who knew her later in her life followed Abigail Adams’s initial impulse to compare her unfavorably with her elder sister; she was never as brilliant, articulate, or outgoing as Martha. Others see her through the prism of Jefferson’s expectations and his constant reminders to her of her shortcomings as a correspondent, student, and attentive and obliging daughter. Thomas Jefferson’s biographer Dumas Malone, for example, regretted that Jefferson “did not succeed in molding his daughter in his own image.” But none of these approaches takes Maria Jefferson on her terms.

  Eighteenth-century children had no control over their lives, but the lack of stability in young Maria’s was staggering. As a tiny child, she was always moving and being moved: first from Monticello to Richmond, when her father became governor; then the wartime flights to Tuckahoe and back to Richmond; to Poplar Forest and then finally back to Monticello in safety, where her mother died just after her fourth birthday. Then followed the back and forth between Monticello and Eppington, until she was settled there when her father departed to take his seat in Congress, all but disappearing from her life for the next four years. (Recall, he had not been able to return to Virginia to say his goodbyes before he left for Europe.) If she was determined to hold on to the stable, loving family life she had with the Eppeses, that is not to be wondered at. Nor should we wonder that she used the only strategy available to an eight-year-old girl to effect her wishes: torrents of tears and grief that appeared to threaten her health.

  Painted in 1795, Abigail Adams appears here much as Maria Jefferson would have known her in Philadelphia. Adams was self-educated, but well traveled by this date, sharply observant, and an incisive thinker. The artist captures the no-nonsense confidence born of decades of active interest in political affairs, as well as the clear-eyed gaze that caused Maria to trust her.

  Maria Jefferson was no pushover. She was the daughter of Martha Jefferson, who, as historian Virginia Scharff has crisply observed, “could ride a horse through a mountain blizzard, give orders to scores of people, run several households at once and preside over the slaughter of a herd of hogs.” She was raised by an aunt who fought to keep her and was so thoroughly confident of the merit of her argument over the child’s father’s that she was convinced he could not yet have read it. Like them, Maria was a Wayles; she had their resolve and strength of character. When Petit arrived in London to claim Maria, presenting the fait accompli of paid reserved seats on the stagecoach, a defeated Abigail Adams had turned to Maria to persuade her to give up the fight. “If I must go I will,” Maria replied with a maturity beyond her years, “but I cannot help crying so pray don’t ask me to.” She would do as she was told, but she was also sure of the legitimacy of her feelings, her right to them, and the need for adults to pay attention to them.

  At Eppington, she had learned a different
way of understanding and expressing herself than did Martha at Panthemont. She learned how to endear herself to family and to those who had authority over her. That she learned perfectly these lessons of gentrified Virginia girlhood is lost completely if the standard is her sister’s five-year education program in Paris or Jefferson’s loving but persistent demands that she read her Spanish and write letters on schedule. Even in the one letter he wrote to her from across the Atlantic, intended to woo her, he warned her not “to go out without your bonnet because it will make you very ugly and then we should not love you so much.” The effusively warm Elizabeth Eppes never conditioned her love on Maria’s performance or looks. Instead the Eppes household schooled Maria in another way of being, and that is who she was when she arrived in Paris.

  Although affectionate, Maria Jefferson was also astute. She knew loving adults would trick her; she knew they didn’t always take seriously their promises to a child. There is no indication that she ever received the promised “baby” from her father. Rather than meeting her in London and using the trip to introduce her to himself and to all the beauties and delights of France, he sent his servant. He also took lightly the pledges that she gave. “She fancies she is to pay you the visit she promised,” the amused father told Abigail Adams two months after Maria’s arrival in Paris. If Maria developed a thicker skin than Martha and would, later in her life, make decisions according to her own priorities rather than Jefferson’s, it was because of the memory of her peripatetic childhood, punctuated by only brief periods of loving stability that came to sudden, unannounced ends.

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  HOWEVER MUCH MARIA JEFFERSON was outmaneuvered by her father, there is no question that her force of will had initially persuaded many adults that Jefferson’s plan was impossible, and all who wrote to Jefferson assumed that ultimately he would back down. That is to say, although eventually overruled, Maria Jefferson’s feelings still mattered to everyone in her family, even if to varying degrees. But Maria was not the only young girl wrenched from her family and sent across the sea. So too was Sally Hemings. She was fourteen years old when she was selected by Francis and Elizabeth Eppes to accompany Maria for an absence none of them could estimate. There are no records of tears, grief, resistance, or agonized leave-takings. Indeed, the record is so silent we do not even know how the choice was made. All we know is that Maria Jefferson awoke from her nap aboard the Robert to the only face she knew, that of Sally Hemings.

  This same cloud of silence envelops much of Sally Hemings’s life. The Pulitzer Prize–winning work of Annette Gordon-Reed has done much to dissipate it, yet a great deal still remains unknowable. That the Eppeses finally chose her to accompany their precious charge on a perilous trip when the older Isabel Hern, ill at Monticello, could not go permits several reasonable deductions. First, the choice of Sally Hemings suggests that she was on-site, that is, already living at Eppington. Ten-year-old Sally Hemings had probably been taken from her own mother at Monticello as companion-maid for little Maria when her father, heading north for his congressional term, settled her at Eppington in the fall of 1783. Five years older than Maria, Sally had been her playmate and maid, especially in their last year at Monticello before Martha Jefferson’s death. Indeed, Hemings family tradition had it that Sally was present at Martha Jefferson’s deathbed and received from her the ambiguous gift of a bell, the gift itself a reminder of their relationship as half sisters, the bell a reminder of their roles as mistress and slave.

  Given Elizabeth Eppes’s motherly considerations in trying to relieve Maria’s grief and homesickness, it stands to reason that she would want to give her comfort during what she knew would be a traumatic experience. Living with her at Eppington, Sally Hemings was no stranger to the tempests of Maria’s fears and grief. And we know from Abigail Adams’s reports to Jefferson that the girls were very fond of each other. Elizabeth could have had several reasons why she wanted Sally Hemings to go, but not least of them would have been to supply the comfort of a traveling companion Maria had known her whole life and on whose affection and forbearance (as a slave, that was Sally Hemings’s job) she could count. And if, as is reasonable to assume, Jefferson himself had permitted Sally Hemings to accompany Maria to Eppington for her solace and convenience, Elizabeth Eppes could be confident that he would also approve their decision to send her across the Atlantic for the same reason.

  Abigail Adams, however, did not approve. When the girls arrived in London, one barely older than the other and both in clothes in dire need of replacement, Adams’s dismay was evident. Surprised that “the old Nurse who you expected to have attended her” was instead replaced by a “girl about 15 or 16,” she viewed Sally Hemings as “quite a child,” and concurred with Captain Ramsay’s opinion that she would be of so little use it would be better for her to return to Virginia. Ten days after their arrival, Adams was still insisting that “the girl she has with her, wants more care than the child, and is wholy incapable of looking properly after her.” Adams’s insistence on Sally Hemings’s immaturity is curious, given the confidence of the Eppeses, who knew her much better and who clearly thought her responsible enough to send. It may be explained, in part, by Adams’s overestimation of her age, or by her discomfiture with meeting a slave girl who may have borne a Wayles family resemblance, clearly apparent in the face of Maria Jefferson as well.

  Whatever the cause of Abigail Adams’s explicit disapproval, it did not bode well for the enslaved girl’s reception into her household. Not once did Adams refer to Sally Hemings by name, although she wrote specifically about her three times. For two weeks, Hemings had to endure Adams’s frostiness, so starkly different from the warmth with which she embraced Maria. At the end of an Atlantic voyage, Maria Jefferson had adults striving to please and comfort her; Captain Ramsay had even offered to personally escort her to Paris. Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl thousands of miles away from her family, knew no such attentions. It is doubtful that Elizabeth and Francis Eppes considered the impact of separation on Sally’s family life; their calculations were all centered around Maria. Hemings certainly did not provoke Ramsay’s anxiety for her “vexation and affliction” as had Maria; his report was utterly mute about her maid. (Maria’s letter to Elizabeth Eppes, the only inkling we might have had about the girls’ trip, is lost to us.) Abigail Adams discounted Sally Hemings entirely when she recommended that Jefferson bring Martha with him to London so that Maria would have someone “accustomed to her.” Indeed, in Abigail Adams’s view, Sally Hemings did not even merit the dignity of her name.

  Sally Hemings’s only comfort was her brother James, waiting at the end of the line in Paris. As she witnessed all the deliberations at Eppington about Polly’s prospective trip, it is possible that Sally may have even looked forward to the prospect of visiting him. Certainly as a slave she had no leverage to influence the Eppeses’ decision and had to go if sent. Yet at the same time, she would not have served Elizabeth Eppes’s purposes if she had been as frightened and tearful as her younger charge. It required courage to cross the ocean, and the anticipation of her own family reunion could well have fortified her through challenges that none of the free white adults, who were ostensibly in control of her, thought to make easier for her.

  James Hemings had accompanied the Jeffersons to Paris in the summer of 1784. Unless he stopped at Eppington when he received Jefferson’s summons, he had not seen Sally for almost four years. She would have changed mightily from age ten, recognizable to him only because of the company with whom she arrived. Like Maria, she would have been wearing the new clothes Abigail Adams had made up for her, although her workaday calico would not compare with Maria’s dresses, made from the finest linen that money could buy. For Sally’s part, James, eight years older than she, was already an adult when they last saw each other, and the difference in aspect may not have been all that dramatic. But she may have detected something different in his manner and bearing, a new confidence and sense of self born of his three years in France. As Ma
rtha did for Maria, so too could James Hemings orient his younger sister to the sights, sounds, wonders, and dregs of daily life in Paris.

  James had been training as a chef in French cuisine for about eighteen months, first serving an apprenticeship with Jefferson’s caterer before advancing to French pastry-making under the direction of the chef of Prince Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, a member of the royal family. When his sister arrived in 1787, James was only six months short of his promotion to chef de cuisine, when he would become responsible for running Jefferson’s kitchen. He was a paid employee in a society that recognized the existence of slavery in its colonial territories but was not invested in protecting it at home. Jefferson had made a point of evading the French legal requirement of registering slaves upon entry into the country, willing to risk a substantial fine in order to minimize the visibility of James Hemings’s enslavement. Nor did he register Sally Hemings. And on Paris streets in a revolutionary age, James Hemings would have learned that a trip to a French court in pursuit of freedom would support his case, rather than his master’s. In short, in three years James Hemings had learned a valuable craft but, more important, had seen that a different way of life was possible than existed in Virginia and that it could be his.

  This was the world to which he introduced his younger sister. Of course, Sally Hemings would not be trained as a chef. Indeed, precisely what Sally Hemings’s role would be was a question, as Abigail Adams foresaw. There is no indication that she was packed off with Maria, a week after their arrival, to Panthemont, although many students brought maids with them. Rather, Jefferson was first concerned to have Sally Hemings inoculated against smallpox, a requirement he had specified to Francis Eppes for Maria’s travel companion. That fall, within a few months of her arrival, he paid dearly—240 livres (about one thousand dollars today)—to Dr. Sutton, whose procedures he had followed so carefully with his own daughters immediately after his wife’s death. There followed several weeks of isolation, pain, fever, and undoubtedly fear and loneliness, as Sally Hemings was forced to endure this process alone, albeit under the best medical care money could buy. Yet, as the historian Gordon-Reed has pointed out, it also “may have been the first time she had ever been attended to by white people.” With no work required of her, Sally Hemings had time to think about what she would like her life to be.