A great deal had taken place during Hemings’s stay in Paris, both within the Hôtel de Langeac and outside it. France had witnessed the fall of the Bastille in July 1789, which is often seen as the beginning of the French Revolution. In truth, much had been happening on that front since Hemings’s arrival. The signs of discord in the society were everywhere. Demonstrators amassed in the neighborhood where Hemings lived, outside her residence, actually, shouting about the new world that was to come. Paris was on fire with talk of politics among men and women of all classes.
Hemings’s neighborhood was a relatively new one, and though the overall number of Black people in Paris was small, the section of Paris where the Hôtel de Langeac was located had the city’s largest concentration of people of color. It was an active community whose members kept tabs on one another’s fortunes, alerting each other to developments that were taking place in their community.
Perhaps people kept tabs on the fate of Sally Hemings. As her son Madison Hemings explained, during her time in Paris she had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.” It is not known when this occurred, but the evidence indicates that it was near the end of her time in the city. In fact, it is very likely that by August 1789, sixteen-year-old Hemings was either newly pregnant or about to become pregnant.
Jefferson had been planning a leave of absence to return his daughters and, most likely, Hemings to Virginia. He was set to come back to Paris and finish his time as minister. When Hemings learned of Jefferson’s plans, she balked. She was not alone; none of the young people who were living at the hotel—Jefferson’s daughters and his protégé William Short, who had come from Virginia to be Jefferson’s secretary—wanted to leave. James Hemings could expect to return with Jefferson.
The Hemings siblings knew that the law in France gave them an easy shot at freedom. Jefferson knew this, too, and was defensive about it, which is probably why he paid both Hemings siblings wages, and paid them well. James was the chef de cuisine at the Hôtel de Langeac, and Sally was lady’s maid to Jefferson’s daughters and likely Jefferson’s chambermaid.
It was a heady time for both brother and sister. They were nominally free, receiving wages near the top of the scale for French servants, and living in the midst of a revolution that promised a new world for people on the bottom of the social scale. Hemings had her own money, but Jefferson had started buying her clothing, and there is reason to think she was attending balls with Patsy Jefferson as an attendant.
Both Hemings siblings would have had every reason to think they had a chance to make it in the new society being born. James hired a tutor to teach him proper French. It is not known whether Sally was included, though her son mentioned her facility with the language. Most important, Sally Hemings did not want to be enslaved again. Jefferson wanted to bring her back to Virginia, and when he met with her resistance, he promised her that if she came home with him, she would live a life of privilege, and that any children they had would be free upon reaching the age of twenty-one. Madison Hemings said that his mother “implicitly relied” on Jefferson’s promises and decided to return to Virginia.
Hemings, her brother James, and the Jeffersons set sail for the United States in October 1789. They landed in Norfolk, Virginia, in November. After visiting relatives, the group arrived at Monticello just before Christmas. The next reference to Sally Hemings in Jefferson’s records is a letter written around September 1790, saying that at some point in the spring, she had been too ill to make a trip. Other letters from that time make clear that Hemings’s status had changed: she ceased to be a lady’s maid for Jefferson’s daughters once they returned to the United States. It is not known when Hemings gave birth, but the child she had upon her return to Virginia apparently did not survive infancy.
As things turned out, Jefferson did not return to Paris. He accepted President Washington’s invitation to serve as U.S. secretary of state and left for New York, then the nation’s capital, in March 1790. James Hemings, who continued to be paid regular wages, accompanied him. They were soon joined by Robert Hemings, the eldest of the Hemings-Wayles children. Sally Hemings remained at Monticello and disappears from Jefferson family records. When the capital moved to Philadelphia temporarily, starting in 1791, the Hemings brothers continued to work for Jefferson. Jefferson referred to Sally Hemings in a letter instructing that she was to be sent the bedding she used while in France.
Jefferson’s position as secretary of state kept him away from Monticello a great deal from 1790 until his retirement in 1794. In fact, during that four-year period, he was at Monticello a total of only about five nonconsecutive months. Hemings conceived no children during this time. She likely spent this period with her mother and the rest of her family. She did not become pregnant again until Jefferson retired from Washington’s cabinet and returned home at the end of 1794. Hemings conceived her second child in January 1795. She would, in the word of a visitor to Monticello, “cohabit” with Jefferson for thirty-seven years, bearing seven children, four of whom lived to adulthood, all of whom were freed when they became adults.
1794–1799
THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT
Deirdre Cooper Owens
In 1788 a new Western nation established itself as a fledgling republic that privileged the democratic process for its most respected citizens: white male property owners over twenty-one years old. At the cornerstone of its democratic process was the vote. Overwhelmingly, white male voters created clauses in the U.S. Constitution that attended to slavery, one of the new nation’s most pressing political issues. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution not only protected slavery as an American institution but also protected slave owners whose human property liberated themselves into either free states or territories.
In 1789 voters elected their first president, the former general and Revolutionary War hero George Washington. He was one of the wealthiest and most politically connected slave owners in the United States, whose presence eventually established the presidency as a position that was amenable to men who made up what would later be known as the slaveocracy—the slave-owning ruling class that ran the country. It comes as no surprise that from 1789, when Washington was elected, until 1877, when General Ulysses Grant ended his presidency under Reconstruction, more American presidents (twelve) owned slaves than those who did not (six). As a result of the seemingly enduring and lucrative industry based on human bondage, the United States gave birth to a small but politically mighty abolitionist movement.
During the early 1790s, powerful slave owners put more teeth into Article IV of the Constitution to protect their assets, enslaved people. In 1793 Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, which deemed it a federal crime to aid any fugitive from slavery:
And be it further enacted, That any person who shall knowingly and willingly obstruct or hinder such claimant, his agent, or attorney, in so seizing or arresting such fugitive from labor, or shall rescue such fugitive from such claimant, his agent or attorney, when so arrested pursuant to the authority herein given and declared; or shall harbor or conceal such person after notice that he or she was a fugitive from labor, as aforesaid, shall, for either of the said offences, forfeit and pay the sum of five hundred dollars. Which penalty may be recovered by and for the benefit of such claimant, by action of debt, in any Court proper to try the same, saving moreover to the person claiming such labor or service his right of action for or on account of the said injuries, or either of them.