JEFFERSON's DAUGHTERS by CATHERINE KERRISON GIVES US VITAL INSIGHT INTO SALLY HEMING'S and HER DAUGHTER HARRIET

Back in July 2018 I dedicated a month to Sally Hemings, the mistress of Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding Fathers of the United States and our 3rd American President who built the estate called Monticello in Virginia:

SALLY HEMINGS - WAS SHE A WILLING MISTRESS of THOMAS JEFFERSON or A RAPED SLAVE?

There has been a debate about the relationship between Thomas and Sally because she was a slave from birth, went to Paris where she was a maid to his daughters as a teenager, and became pregnant by Jefferson at that time.

In France, Sally and her older brother, who was learning to be a gourmet French chef, were not slaves. They could have stayed there, though how they would do in Paris is a question. When they returned to Virginia with Jefferson they were again enslaved. It would be easy to think that Sally would be willing to be left behind and proceed to support herself somehow, but return to the home and life she knew is what she did. The question is if the long relationship between Thomas and Sally, which likely produced several children, was akin to marriage or a master raping his slave woman...

I picked  up this book, published in 2018, as a whim and ended up loving it and recommending it to everyone. It's the result of excellent scholarship and I'm now more in favor of the notion that Sally and Thomas were of their time but also in loving long term relationship.

It was not legal for him to marry her, though she was significantly of the White race, because slavery was passed on by a persons mother's condition as a slave. Now that I know that he would have been defying the law of the land, I see that it was not all about personal choice for him either.

Here are some of my notes from portions of the book:

The summer of 1789 brought an enormous transition in the life of Sally Hemings as well. It is difficult to reconstruct her life at the Hotel de Langeac (this is the townhouse that Jefferson and his family lived in, in Paris, which was also used as a place the public could come to as an official residence of a diplomat...)  We do know she left the house for five weeks...  Annette Gordon - Reed has suggested that Hemings' stay with Dupre (*a boarding house) overlapped with the Jefferson's girls' illness (which was typhus) when Maria *(the younger daughter) was at her lowest ebb (she could have died.) Perhaps Jefferson sent Sally Hemings away to prevent her from contracting the disease, easily spread through body lice, after seeing the harrowing effects on Maria.  (Notes from page 112)  

When the girls returned in April (From their exclusive boarding school in Paris) Sally Hemings' duties may have changed as well. The care of Martha Jefferson's new silk gowns may have fallen to her, as well as dressing her hair, mending, running errands, and generally attending to the girl's requirements of a lady's maid. But Jefferson's expenditures rose for Sally as well, as she more frequently accompanied them in public...

But if anyone was confused about Sally Hemings' place in the Jefferson household, with knowing French discretion, they refrained from asking their wealthier connections ... nor were sexual predations of masters on their female servants unusual either. The young but worldly wise Botidoux*** took the unusual household configuration in stride, diplomatically using the honorific 'mademoiselle' (which normally was never used to address servants) to signal her acceptance of Martha's lead that Hemings was not an ordinary servant. (Notes from page 113)

That was just one of many ways in which Hemings learned something about her position in French society. Whatever her status in Virginia, as far as Parisians were concerned Sally was not a slave in France. Sally Hemings saw a great deal of aristocratic Paris in her attendance on Martha Jefferson. She ate fine French cooking (her brother was a master chef after all) she chatted with Martha's aristocratic friends, and she learned about French social mores from overhearing their talk. Thus, Paris had taught Sally Hemings a great deal about society, rank, presentation, dress, and language in addition to her skills as femme de chambre by the time Jefferson decided to return to Virginia.

Although of course both James and Sally Hemings returned to slavery. Although France's revolution was just beginning, the American Revolution was over, concluded with the Treaty of Paris in 1783. But the changes it had effected for enslaved Americans was severely limited.  Jefferson's own attempt to condemn slavery in the Declaration of Independence had been defeated by the Continental Congress. ...

***This is of interest:  https://history.cass.anu.edu.au/events/mysteries-mademoiselle-de-botidoux  Botidoux was a faithful letter-writing correspondent to Jefferson's daughter Martha.

Also of great interest is what happened to Harriet, who was born as a slave to Sally, but was only one-sixteenth Black. You will want to read this book for the tremendous research that author Catherine Kerrison did in attempt to find her.  Harriet was trained to be a weaver and left her home of Monticello with her older brother as Thomas had promised Sally he would free all her children when they reached adulthood. It is possible she passed as White and married in Washington, D.C.

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MARY PINCHOT MEYER : WAS SHE THE PRESIDENT'S TRUE SOUL MATE? WAS SHE ASSASSINATED BY THE C.I.A?

Image from Wikipedia

MARY PINCHOT MEYER

(October 14, 1920 to October 12, 1964)

Like other women in the life of promiscuous womanizer John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before and during his marriage and his Presidency of the United States in the early 1960's, Mary Pinchot - Meyer knew she was involved in an affair with a married man. The comparison of her to other known Mistresses of J.F.K. stops there.

Unlike Judith Campbell Exner or Mimi Alford, two other of his Mistresses who have been featured over the last couple months here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, Mary came from J.F.K's. same set of people - preppies.  She associated with people who went to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the best women's colleges called "The Seven Sisters." She was "age appropriate" being only about three years younger than he.  They first met at a 1936 prep school dance, when she was fifteen. Like him she had grown up in a wealthy eastern seaboard family with social clout.  She'd been a debutant and expected to marry well. She had married well, mothered three sons, and divorced within that set, to a man named Cord Meyer, a World War II veteran and hero, like J.F.K. who'd come home injured. Often the men served in World War II and joined the CIA like Cord.  She was considered to be well off, not in need of his money.

But wait.  As conservative as all these people seemed to be, there is also the possibility that they considered themselves sophisticates with a rather "European" mentality when it came to having sexual adventures. The men had World War II macho but were they really wife swappers?  It's possible that Mary and the President were kind of like secret hippies, trying marijuana and a hallucigen - some say L.S.D. other psychedelic mushrooms, together.

So much will never be known.

But hey, have you ever seen the television drama series called Mad Men?  Because that was the era, pre-hippies, when even gentleman tried L.S.D.  Some people smoked pot or cigarettes at work, especially creatives.  L.S.D. was used in psychiatric offices as a mind expander. According to author Peter Janney, whose book is the prime reference for this month's posts on Mary Pinchot Meyer, our Mistress of the Month, she knew L.S.D. guru Timothy Leary - this was before it was illegal.  He was a professor at Harvard ; J.F.K's school. She went up there to talk to him about it.  Was turning public officials on to hallucinogenic trips the latest craze among her set?

He came back into her life socially in the late 1950's. Some say a genuine friendship turned into a flirtation and then into an affair.

Maybe what was really radical, so to speak, was that Mary, with her sons off to college and living apart from her ex, was getting involved in the movement for world peace.  She may have influenced J.F.K. to get the United States out of possible war in Viet Nam,  to sign nuclear treaties, to end the Cold War with Russia. If only he had lived.

Only a handful of people knew she was the President's Mistress and many think he really was going to divorce Jackie and marry Mary, his soul mate. This included her sister Tony and her husband, Ben. Or so she thought.

As part of the Georgetown elite, many of their friends and neighbors, people who came to her funeral after she was murdered shortly before her 44th birthday, were likely spies.  Her murderer might have been there among the mourners.  Was someone just angry because she had an affair - say an ex husband or someone getting revenge for Jackie's sake?  according to one interview of author Janney that I listened to, on his death bed Cord Meyer, her ex husband said the same people who killed J.F.K. killed Mary.

Peter Janney, who wrote a book called Mary's Mosaic, calls it, assassinated, just like J.F.K. had been eleven months before! One bullet at close range to the brain, the next to the heart. A professional job, maybe even with a plan to find a dupe who could be accused of murder.

What did she know? Was she set up? Who could be so heartless? Her murder remains unsolved just like Nicole Brown Simpson's is. 

What could have caused this attractive and idealistic woman, who had become an artist, a painter whose work had been exhibited at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, to be murdered on a walking path near a canal, a path she walked daily for exercise after a morning of painting in her garage studio over at her sister's house.

Though a love letter from the President asking her to show up where he was going was found years later, and went up for auction, during their affair Mary showed up at White House dinners with a man named William Walton, who had run J.F.K. Presidential campaign for New York, as her companion. She signed in to the log.  She wasn't brought in through a back way.

Her sister Tony was married to Ben Bradlee, an important newsman. They too had dined at the White House with Jack and Jackie Kennedy. They knew there was supposed to be a secret diary about the affair and so hours after Mary's body was identified, they went to her house and then her art studio looking for it.  Each time they encountered a man named James Jesus Angleton, who had managed to enter before them or was trying to pick the locks.  Serious business.  Mary had said that she got the feeling at times that someone had been in her house when she was gone. This man was the chief of the C.I.A. Counterintelligence from 1954-1975.  

The diary may still exist today. A small artists diary with a few notes that had been found was turned over to Egleton.  Some say, no that was not the diary full of details about the affair.  It may have been burned by Toni and Ben.

Repeatedly I've read that this particular affair was the serious one that could have lead to marriage, if and when Jack divorced Jackie.

This month we'll learn more about this interesting woman who didn't deserve the fate she got.

If interested, in November 2015 I devoted the month to Nicole Brown Simpson, the most famous unsolved murder victim, wife of O.J. Simpson and Mistress to him before their marriage.  You may also want to check other months dedicated to those surrounding the Kennedys, such as Kick Kennedy, J.F.K's sister, Little Edie Bouvier, Jackie Kennedy's cousin, or just run a search for Presidential Mistresses.

My archives are in Pages or you can use the search feature embedded in the blog.

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LADY LIBERTY and THE GREAT AMERICAN FLAG : UNITED STATES PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION DAY

PBS SPECIAL ABOUT PRESIDENT WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON : MONICA LEWINSKY

"Monica Lewinsky has attempted to keep a low-profile after her role in President Bill Clinton's impeachment scandal made her name the butt of many late-night jokes. But she's likely to become a topic of discussion again when PBS airs its much anticipated two-part, four-hour documentary on the former president, titled "Clinton."

The documentary, which premieres on PBS as part of its "American Experience" series on Monday, will shed new light on Clinton's Oval Office affair with his 23-year-old intern through interviews with some of Clinton's closest advisors, some of whom are speaking publicly about the affair for the first time."

Linking here to the Los Angeles Times article about the special.

I don't like to reveal who I'm posting on ahead of time but March 2012 will be dedicated to Monica Lewinsky...

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : SPENDTHRIFTY GOLD DIGGER : MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : SPENDTHRIFTY GOLD DIGGER : MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

EMMA MARGUERITE "PEGGY" UPTON

First posted on April 5th 2010

PEGGY was THE MOST PUBLICIZED MISTRESS - COURTESAN OF THE 1920's and 1030's. She was introduced to Florenz Ziegfeld, who owned the famous showgirl venue New Amsterdam Theatre, by a dressmaker to fashionable ladies, Madame Frances, and her career began. She was a heartbreaker and international celebrity, perhaps the first famous to be famous woman of the 20th century. She was known for her spendthrifty ways as well as a steamy sex life. Was Peggy ruthless and sociopathic? Or did she simply decide at a young age that she would do well, beyond her childhood as the daughter of a Norfolk barber?

She had three multimillionaire husbands. And a great number of generous patrons. She came to own one of the largest blue diamonds known to the world in her time.

 
I'll be quoting from the book GOLD DIGGER by Constance Rosenblum, on this blog. The link to the New York Times book review is at the title above.

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