Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham Page A

well—lay in negotiating the questions of blood, sex, and dominion that bound white and enslaved families in largely unspoken ways.
    The Forest was rife with such issues. Around 1735, a man named Hemings, the white English captain of a trading ship, fathered a daughter with a “full-blooded African” woman. The African woman’s child was named Elizabeth, also known as Betty. (The details come from the account of Madison Hemings, a great-grandson of Captain Hemings and of the African woman.) Mother and daughter ended up as slaves of the Eppes family of Bermuda Hundred—the Eppes family from which John Wayles would take his first bride, Martha, who died in childbirth. By 1746—the year Wayles married Martha Eppes—Elizabeth Hemings, then about eleven years old, became Wayles’s property and moved to the Forest. There, beginning at age eighteen, she gave birth to several children.
    Wayles, meanwhile, outlived his daughter’s two stepmothers. After the third Mrs. Wayles died in February 1761, Elizabeth Hemings, now twenty-six years old, was “taken by the widower Wayles as his concubine,” said Madison Hemings. Beginning in 1762, Elizabeth Hemings bore five children to Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law: Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Peter. In 1773 came a sixth: Sarah, who was to be known by the nickname Sally.
    Such arrangements were not uncommon in slave-owning Virginia. In the nineteenth century, South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chestnut noted something about white women that was equally true in the eighteenth: “Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own. Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.”
    It was a world of desire and denial. Sex across the color line—sex between owner and property—was pervasive yet rarely directly addressed or alluded to. The strange intermingling of blood and affection and silence suffused the world of the Forest that Jefferson came to know in 1770, the year he turned up as one of the candidates for Patty’s hand. It was to suffuse Monticello, too, in the fullness of time.
    J efferson’s success in wooing the Widow Skelton was not assured, which may have made him work all the harder. By the first months of 1771, Jefferson was in full pursuit. He wrote a “romantic, poetical” description of her to a correspondent in Williamsburg named Mrs. Drummond, an elderly woman who was friendly with the George Wythes. “No pen but yours could surely so beautifully describe” Patty, wrote Mrs. Drummond, who praised Jefferson’s (now lost) “Miltonic” lines and said she did not know whether Patty’s heart was “engaged already.”
    How to capture her? Music was one means, books another. In family lore, Jefferson and Patty were destined for each other. A pair of competing suitors once arrived at the Forest, where they heard Patty and Jefferson playing and singing beautifully together. Looking at each other, the two callers were said to have recognized the inevitable and departed without announcing themselves.
    As always, music was Jefferson’s ally. To him singing or the playing of the violin or the pianoforte was more than entertainment, more than the means of passing the hours when time grew heavy. Music, rather, offered a window into a man’s soul—or into a woman’s. In his literary commonplace book Jefferson transcribed these lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice :
    The Man who has not Music in his Soul,
    Or is not touch’d with Concord of sweet Sounds,
    Is fit for Treason, Stratagems, and Spoils,
    The Motions of his Mind are dull as Night,
    And his Affections dark as Erebus:
    Let no such man be trusted.
    Jefferson’s mind was considering the defining human themes, always returning to the central question of politics: How is a man, as an intrinsically social animal, to live in relative