Sally Heming (33 page)

That night, I asked him why he had allowed John Trumbull,
whom he had adored in Paris, to leave his house and his table angry. My master
showed no surprise that I had listened in on the dinner.

"I didn't feel like being diplomatic," he said to
me. "I'm finished with politics. I have no more need to be polite."

"But why let people think you don't believe in
God?"

"I don't care what people think anymore," he said
bitterly. This was more than the disappointment of three years in Philadelphia!

"What is it?" I asked in alarm.

He was trembling. "It's nothing. It reminded me of a
mistake I once made. Early in my political career, I gave up what I most deeply
believed in for the sake of not provoking people. I vowed never to do it
again."

He turned toward me. "Why shouldn't Giles have said
what he thought? At least he had the courage to say what he means, which is
more than most people in the world do...." He looked at me. "What is
it?" His pale sapphire eyes had turned their strange night-blue color.

"You. You were three years old then. Your brother
Robert was with me in Philadelphia."

I turned toward him instinctively.

"They had given me the Declaration of Independence to
draft. At thirty-three! I was very young and very passionate," he said
slowly. "I poured my soul onto sheet after sheet. I wanted to place before
mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and so firm as to be
undeniable. After all, I was fighting for our lives and those of our family, and
the families of all the other rebels—because that's what we were then, rebels,
insurrectionists. We all stood to be hung and quartered and it was up to me to
explain ourselves to the world.... I set to work on it in a little brick house
at the southwest corner of Market Street and Seventh. After a week or so of
work, I copied offa rough draft and took it to Dr. Franklin and John Adams.
John Adams liked it. Dr. Franklin had more than forty corrections, but he
softened it with his story about the hatter...." My master smiled.
"That was mild compared to what happened in the Continental Congress. It
was the third of July. My declaration was ready for a hearing by the gentlemen
in Congress. The secretary, Mr. Thompson, began to read my draft aloud. At
first everything went well. Several of the members nodded. I was congratulated
on my felicity of language. They got to the end of page one. Some delegates
were deeply moved. Franklin leaned over and said, 'I wish I had written it
myself!' Then the secretary began to read the facts, the nearly thirty
accusations against George III. Thompson came to the last charge. I had left it
to climax the list of grievances.... The delegates had criticized certain
phrases.... 'King' was used in place of 'Tyrant,' and so on. Every change
hurt." He smiled. "I was young. I sat in the back of the room with my
thermometer on the windowsill outside. I was next to Dr. Franklin, who dozed
off every now and then. There was little time to lose. We had to sign the
Declaration. The revolution was already in motion. Your brother Robert waited
for me outside. I was much worried about my own standing at the Virginia
Convention. I feared to be knifed out of Congress. Martha was expecting our
child, and I had not heard from her in three weeks. My mother had gone to her
grave only three months before. I sent Robert twice a day for the mail, but
there was never anything. Not a word since I had left Virginia.... The
secretary read the last charge against the king, which was that he had waged a
cruel war against human nature ... the enslavement of the Negro people."

I held my breath.

"With the exception of South Carolina and Georgia,
everyone was in principle opposed to slavery. Benjamin Franklin was the
president of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery." His
voice broke then and took on that charred husky tone of real defense.

" 'I think it too passionate,' somebody said.

" 'Turgid.'

" 'Irrational.'

" 'A tirade.'

" 'Completely irrelevant.'

" 'Too strong for such a dignified document,' said
another. 'It's a philippic,' said somebody else. The Reverend Witherspoon
questioned its accuracy. 'After all,' he said, 'the traffic existed long before
George the Third was born.' Then Edward Rutledge of South Carolina said that
the question of slavery should be determined by the states themselves. The
Virginia delegate said, 'It concerns not only the importing states, it concerns
the whole union.' 'What enriches a part enriches the whole,' said Rutledge.

"At that all bedlam broke loose.

" 'It is dishonorable,' put in the Maryland delegate.

" 'Honor has nothing to do with it,' said the South
Carolina delegate.

" 'In time,' said Lynch, the delegate from Georgia,
'it will disappear of its own accord.'

" 'Neither morality nor wisdom have anything to do with
this,' Rutledge declared. 'Interest and interest alone is the governing
principle of nations. If the gentlemen from New England will consult their own
interest, they will not oppose the importation of slaves. New England is the
chief carrier! Who builds the ships? Who sails them?'

"John Adams was mortified, because he knew this was
true. So did Samuel Adams. The arguments ran back and forth. Robert was waiting
outside with the package of new gloves I had bought for Martha. I had bought
her seven pairs. The two Adamses descended on me.

" 'The whole passage will have to be cut or South
Carolina will never agree to the declaration,' they said.

"Benjamin Franklin opened his eyes long enough to
agree with them, and to say the passage would destroy our still precarious
unity.

"I was so young. I listened to the debate swirl around
this resolution in silence. I never once defended it. I didn't think it was
proper for me to defend my own declaration. I was upset. I had submitted my
draft... if the Congress chose to mutilate it...

"I had taken no part in the debate and had tried to
keep calm. I prayed the passage would not be cut. The temperature at three
o'clock was seventy-six degrees." He brushed his hand across his face.
"To preoccupy myself, I took my new thermometer out of its box for another
reading, but my hands were shaking so, I dropped it. It fell and broke on the
floor. I covered the fragments with my handkerchief. Dr. Franklin had been
observing me under his half-closed eyelids. I suppose he took pity on me. 'Come
to my house tonight,' he said. 'Sally's making a wonderful dinner.'

"Those were his last words I remember. Sally was his
daughter.

"You were three years old ...

"The next day I took my seat again in the last row. I
kept my eye on the Southern delegation: Rutledge, Middleton, Lynch, Gwinnett,
Hall.... Washington was named commander-in-chief of the American armies that
morning. Dr. Franklin kept pressing upon me the need for an agreement on the
declaration. I wished mightily for George Wythe ... any ally—but he had been
detained in Williamsburg. He would arrive when it was all over," he said
bitterly.

"The Congress skipped over the passage on slavery and
read the closing portions. I sat and marked the mutilations on my own copy.
After the final paragraph had been read and revised, they took up the passage
on slavery again. I listened in silence to the appeal to God, to reason, to
humanity, to future generations.

" 'National sins will be punished by national
calamities,' somebody said.

"All through the afternoon they droned on. Everybody
was restless. The flies from the stables across the street tormented us. The
declaration could not be postponed. The news from New York was bad. Washington
was in trouble. Staten Island was taken. The declaration was vital. Nothing
should jeopardize the main design or delay it further. If the passage in
question blocked the road to unity, it would have to be cut.

"The honorable gentlemen from the North were confused.
'Compromise,' 'Yield,' 'Hope for the best,' 'Concensus,' 'Delay,' 'Fight the
war first,' 'Time,' 'Shipping interest.'

"Where was majority rule? I thought. But I was silent.
Franklin was silent. Sherman was silent. Adams was silent. And Rutledge held
the trump card: secession from the not even formed union....John Adams looked
at his watch. I looked around me. Everything in the room, the smell of sweat
and tobacco, the heat, the flies, the Northerners, the Southerners, Adams,
Hancock, Franklin, said, 'Let's worry about slavery another day ... let's get
out of here." He smiled.

"I remember everything hurt. My eyes. My neck, my
head, my stomach hurt." He paused. "The clause reprobating the
enslaving of the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South
Carolina and Georgia," he said quietly, but his voice shook. He passed his
hand in front of his face again, as if to wipe out the last weary arguments.

"What an incomprehensible machine is man! Here we
were, rebels, all of us, depriving one-sixth of our population of the same
liberty we were fighting and risking our heads for!"

"But you think black and white can never live in peace
and equality here."

"I would have sent them home."

I sat stunned. I tried to embrace the immensity of what he
had just told me. I grasped at the easiest thing to understand: that three
years after I was born, he had tried to rescue me. He had truly tried.

"I have often thought," he whispered, "if my
declaration had been adopted as I had written it... you would not be here, for
there would be no slavery in America, no slaves."

In the terrible silence that followed, how I loved him.

Then I did look at him. He had turned on his side. His
voice was muffled.

"From that day I vowed never never to put myself in
that jeopardy again. I vowed never to raise my voice in defense of myself or my
principles—especially about
that.
I washed my hands of it! I vowed to let the Almighty, if there is one,
do his own work!"

There was only silence in the room. His brow, his cheeks,
his lips were relaxed. He had fallen asleep.

I snuffed out the candle.

We would never speak of Philadelphia again.

CHAPTER 26

CHRISTMAS
1795

On what consists the greatness of a despot? In his own
intrinsic merits? No, in the degradation of the multitude who surround him.
What feeds the vanity of a patrician? The consciousness of any virtue that he
inherits with his blood? The list of his senseless progenitors would probably
soon cease to command his respect if it did not enable him to command that of
his fellow creatures.

F
rances wright,
Views of Society and Manners in America, 1
821

Perhaps the condition of women affords, in all countries,
the best criterion by which to judge the character of man. Where we find the
weaker sex burdened with hard labour, we may ascribe to the stronger something
of the savage, and where we see the former deprived of free agency, we shall
find in the latter much of the sensualist.

F
rances wright,
Views of Society and Manners in America,
1821

Holding the great
iron ring which
housed all the Monticello keys, Elizabeth Hemings hurried down the whitewashed
breezeway between the kitchen and the main house. The keys, her badge of
authority, jangled in rhythm with her brisk step. The cooking odors of her
domain followed her halfway down the main hall. There was only one thought in
her mind: her son James was to be set free the next day, Christmas
1795,
more than five years since his return from France. He had
served his master while he had been President Washington's secretary of state,
she thought. And that Thomas Jefferson was at last living up to that piece of
paper James had made him sign ... now that his young brother Peter knew all
about the art of French cooking.

Elizabeth Hemings nodded in satisfaction. Two freed, she
thought, and five to go.... Five only because she knew her daughter had surrendered
to her love for Thomas Jefferson with such abandon. But he was as faithful to
her daughter as a bridegroom, thought Elizabeth Hemings. Martha Wayles
Jefferson had been dead thirteen years now and the master gave no indication of
replacing her with another white wife. Thank the Lord. Not that they weren't
after him, poor man.