David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  On mountain, or in valley

  A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,

  As Monticellian Sally.

  Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?

  What wife were half so handy?

  To breed a flock of slaves for stock,

  A blackamoor’s a dandy.

  The Aurora and the rest of the Republican press remained conspicuously silent on the subject, taking their lead from the President. Jefferson, who made it a “rule of life” not to respond to newspaper attacks, neither denounced Callender nor denied or admitted a connection with Sally Hemings.

  That Callender was a malicious scoundrel was undeniable and more than enough for many people to dismiss his charges out of hand. There was no evidence, and further, the story seemed preposterously out of character for a man of such refinement and intellect, not to say for the President of the United States. To Republicans it was but one more act of Federalist villainy.

  What was actually known of “Monticellian Sally” amounted to little, and for all the rumors, all that was written then and later, relatively little would ever be known. She was the daughter of a slave woman named Betty Hemings, who had belonged to Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, who reputedly was Sally’s father. If true, this made her the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife Martha, and it was said that she resembled Martha Jefferson and was fair-skinned and “decidedly good looking.” An aged former Monticello slave, Isaac Jefferson, would later remember Sally as “very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” To what degree she had benefited from her years in France, whether she could read or write, or anything about her disposition or abilities are matters of speculation.

  It was true, as Callender reported, that by 1802 Sally had given birth to five children, but two had died in infancy. According to surviving records, she had seven children, all born at Monticello, two of whom came later, Madison in 1805 and Easton in 1808. From Jefferson’s own records, it is clear that he was at home at Monticello at least nine months before the birth of each of her children, and that she never conceived when he was not there. Her children were all light-skinned and several, as gossiped then, looked astonishingly like Jefferson.

  More than half a century later, Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the son of Jefferson’s daughter Martha, would declare that the real father of Sally Hemings’s children was Jefferson’s nephew, Peter Carr, which was said to explain the striking Jefferson resemblance in the Hemings children.

  Sally Hemings’s son Madison would say his mother told him that his father was Jefferson. According to Madison’s account, given long afterward, her relationship with Jefferson began in Paris, and she was pregnant with her first child when she returned to Monticello.

  How the Adamses felt about the Callender accusations would not come to light until much later and in private correspondence only. Of the two, Adams would have less to say, and unlike Abigail, he did not confront Jefferson with his ire.

  Considering all that Adams had suffered at the hand of Callender, it would have been quite understandable had he lashed out at Jefferson for his hypocrisy and immorality. Adams could well have gloated over the spectacle of Jefferson under fire. But he did not.

  It was not until 1810 — not until Jefferson’s presidency was over — that Adams, in a letter to a friend, took up the subject of Callender, Jefferson, and Sally Hemings, privately offering several opinions and suggesting at the close of the letter, “You may burn it if you please.”

  For Callender, Adams had no use whatever. “I believe nothing that Callender said any more than if it had been said by an infernal spirit. I would not convict a dog of killing a sheep upon the testimony of two such witnesses,” Adams wrote with characteristic verve, indicating that he did not believe Callender’s accusations about Jefferson. Jefferson’s “charities” to Callender, however, were a “disgrace.” “I give him up to censure for this and I have a better right to do so, because my conscience bears me witness that I never wrote a line against my enemies nor contributed one farthing to any writer for vindicating me or accusing my enemies.” But continuing on, Adams clearly implied that, in fact, he did believe Callender. An unnamed “great lady” who knew the South, he wrote, had said “she did not believe there was a planter in Virginia who could not reckon among his slaves a number of children.”

  Then Adams put the issue squarely where it belonged, saying, in essence, that all such stories of slave masters and their slave women were metaphors for the overriding sin of slavery itself.

  Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character. The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.

  ABIGAIL, to judge by her correspondence, had no wish to say anything on the subject, or to have any contact with Jefferson. She did not consider him a great man, she had told Thomas earlier. She pitied his “weakness” and took much that he professed to be “hollow.” Still, she wrote, there was “a little corner of my heart where once he sat . . . [and] from whence I find it hard wholly to discard him.”

  But in the spring of 1804, nearly two years after the Callender accusations, Abigail learned of the death of Jefferson’s daughter, Mary Jefferson Eppes, the Polly for whom she had felt such affection during the child’s stay with her in London. Deeply touched, Abigail wrote Jefferson to express her heartache and sympathy. Until then, she had not written a word to him in seventeen years, not since London. Reasons of “various kinds” had withheld her pen, she explained, “until the powerful feelings of my heart have burst through the restraint. . . . The attachment which I formed for her, when you committed her to my care, has remained with me to this hour.” Yet she signed herself not in friendship, or as his friend, but as one “who once took pleasure in subscribing herself your friend.”

  Her letter profoundly moved him, Jefferson wrote from the President’s House. He would ever remember her kindness to Polly, he said, at the same time expressing regret that “circumstances should have arisen which seemed to draw a line between us.” He wished to be friends still:

  The friendship with which you honored me has ever been valued and fully reciprocated; and although events have been passing which might be trying to some minds, I never believed yours to be of that kind, nor felt that my own was. Neither my estimate of your character, nor the esteem founded in that, have ever been lessened for a single moment.

  Reflecting on his friendship with Adams, he recalled how it had accompanied them “through long and important scenes,” and that while their differences of opinion, resulting from “honest conviction,” might make them seem rivals in the minds of their fellow citizens, they were not in their own minds. “We never stood in one another’s way.”

  There Jefferson might well have ended the letter, and the extraordinary exchange that followed with Abigail would never have happened. But he had a wound to air.

  I can say with truth that one act of Mr. Adams’s life, and only one ever gave me a moment’s personal displeasure. I did consider his last appointments to office as personally unkind. . . . It seemed but common justice to leave a successor free to act by instruments of his own choice.

  Affirming his “high respect” for her husband, he closed saying, “I have thus, my dear madam, opened myself to you without reserve, which I have long wished an opportunity of doing; and, without knowing how it will be received, I feel relief from being unbosomed.”

  Abigail left little doubt of her anger in what she wrote in reply. He had no right to complain of his predecessor’s appointments, she lectured Jefferson. The Constitution empowered the president to fill offices when they were vacant and “Mr. Adams” had chosen well. Besides, she argued inaccurately, he made his choices before it was known whether he, Jefferson, or Burr would be President, and so Jefferson had no cause to take personal offense.

  Then, mincing no words, she got to what for her was the heart of the matter. However smoothly he w
rote of past differences being only those resulting from “honest conviction,” she refused to let him slide by. “And now, sir, I will freely disclose to you what has severed the bonds of former friendship and placed you in a light very different from what I once viewed you in.”

  She was outraged by his dealings with Callender, and particularly as revealed in the letters Callender had published. Of the accusations concerning Sally Hemings she said nothing. The issue to her was Callender, who by then was dead. He had been found on a Sunday in June 1803, in Richmond, floating by the shore of the James River in three feet of water. He had been seen earlier wandering the town in a drunken state, but the circumstances of his death were unknown.

  Abigail mistakenly understood that Jefferson had liberated the “wretch” Callender from jail, and this to her was totally unacceptable, after the attacks Callender had made on Adams, a man, she reminded Jefferson, “for whom you professed the highest esteem and friendship.” Was he not, as President, she asked, answerable for the influence of his example upon the manners and morals of the nation? She had tried, she said, to believe him innocent of any part in Callender’s slanderous attacks.

  Until I read Callender’s seventh letter, containing your compliment to him as a writer and your reward of 50 dollars, I could not be made to believe that such measures could have been resorted to: to stab the fair fame and upright intentions of one who, to use your language, “was acting from an honest conviction in his own mind that he was right.” This, sir, I considered as a personal injury. This was the sword that cut asunder the Gordian knot which could not be untied by all the efforts of party spirit, by rivalship, by jealousy, or any other malignant fiend.

  The serpent you cherished and warmed, bit the hand that nourished him, and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents, his gratitude, his justice, and his truth. When such vipers are let loose upon society, all distinction between virtue and vice are leveled, all respect for character is lost.

  Her letter, she assured him, was written in confidence. She had shown it to no one. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” she concluded, quoting Proverbs. “I bear no malice, I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if I could — nay more in the true spirit of Christian charity, I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.”

  Jefferson protested. He was being falsely accused. “My charities to him [Callender] were no more meant as encouragements to his scurrilities than those I give to the beggar at my door are meant as rewards for the vices of his life, and to make them chargeable to myself.” He had never suspected Adams of being party to the “atrocities” committed against him by Fenno and Porcupine, so why should he be suspected? He himself had “ever borne testimony to Mr. Adams’s personal wrath,” he assured her.

  It was all quite disingenuous, as doubtless Abigail knew. Jefferson had indeed encouraged and paid Callender for his efforts, and he had spoken of Adams in quite unflattering terms on a number of occasions.

  Altogether seven letters passed between Abigail and the President, in the course of which she brought up one further matter that, to her mind, had put great strain on the past friendship. A district judge had earlier appointed John Quincy a commissioner of bankruptcy in Boston, a petty federal office involving petty fees, but that had made a difference to him in his first lean year in Boston. When, under Jefferson, John Quincy was suddenly replaced, Abigail had taken it as an act of personal reprisal by Jefferson himself, which it was not, as he managed now to convince her.

  “I conclude with sincere prayers for your health and happiness, that yourself and Mr. Adams may long enjoy the tranquility you desire and merit,” Jefferson wrote, bringing to a conclusion his part in the exchange.

  Abigail wished him well in his responsibilities and promised to intrude on his time no more. But his part as a “rewarder and encourager” of Callender, “a libeler whom you could not but detest and despise,” she could not and would not forget. Once she had felt both affection and esteem for him, she wrote. “Affection still lingers in the bosom, even after esteem has taken flight.”

  This, her last letter, was written on October 25, 1804. On November 19, Adams wrote the following at the bottom of her letter-book copy:

  The whole of this correspondence was begun and conducted without my knowledge or suspicion. Last evening and this morning at the desire of Mrs. Adams, I read them whole. I have no remarks to make upon it at this time and in this place.

  III

  THE PROSPECT OF WRITING an autobiography had never really appealed to Adams. Writing history was difficult at best, he knew, and if personal history, it could be most discomforting. “It is a delicate thing to write from memory,” he told John Quincy. “To me the undertaking would be too painful. I cannot but reflect upon scenes I have beheld.” So having barely begun his projected memoir in the fall of 1802, he let it drop.

  For more than a year he wrote little at all, devoting the greater part of his time to the farm. As always, he read much of every day — old favorites in Latin, Greek, and French, English poetry and history, journals such as the Edinburgh Review, and newspapers to the point he feared he might become a newspaper (as “button-maker becomes button at last”). He saw a few old friends, went on long walks with Richard Cranch, attended church, and hugely enjoyed the company of his grandchildren.

  But his days on the move, on the road, were truly over. Only on rare occasions did he go even to Boston or Cambridge, to attend a Harvard commencement or a dinner of the American Academy of Sciences. At Fourth of July celebrations in Boston he would join Robert Treat Paine and Elbridge Gerry “in the place of honor” as surviving signers of the Declaration of Independence. But at the most now, the radius of his world was about fifteen miles.

  Like Abigail, he worried about Thomas, who seemed incapable of taking hold in Philadelphia and suffered spells of gloom and loneliness, his “blue devils,” and with Abigail he rejoiced when Thomas quit Philadelphia and moved back to Quincy to try a fresh start. Thomas’s presence, the pleasure of his company in the evenings, helped compensate for the large vacant place in the Adamses’ life since the departure of John Quincy for Washington. For her part, Abigail told John Quincy to eat well, not work too hard, and mind his appearance.

  I do not wish a Senator to dress like a beau, but I want him to conform so far as to the fashion as not to incur the character of singularity, nor give occasion to the world to ask what kind of mother he had or to charge upon a wife negligence and inattention when she is guiltless. The neatest man, observed a lady the other day, wants his wife to pull up his collar and mind that his coat is brushed.

  John Quincy took his seat in the Senate in time to give Jefferson support in the biggest accomplishment of his presidency, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory. With the acquisition of Louisiana from Spain, Napoleon Bonaparte had begun planning a French empire in North America. But when the army he sent to crush the slave revolt in San Domingo was wiped out by war and yellow fever, Bonaparte abandoned his plans and suddenly, in 1803, offered to sell the United States all of the vast, unexplored territory of Louisiana. It was an astounding turn of events and one that probably would not have come to pass had the Quasi-War burst into something larger. Were it not for John Adams making peace with France, there might never have been a Louisiana Purchase.

  Federalists in Congress argued that under the Constitution the powers of the President did not include buying foreign territory. Jefferson, who had for so long advocated less, not more, power in the executive, chose to take a larger view now, given the opportunity he had to double the size of the nation at a stroke. John Quincy crossed party lines to support the purchase, which his father, too, strongly favored. “’Curse the stripling, how he apes his sire,’” declared one irate Massachusetts Federalist.

  When John Quincy joined in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the spread of slavery into Louisiana, he found it harder than pulling a “jaw tooth,” he told his father. “This is now in general the great art of legislation at this place,” h
e continued, venting his frustration. “To do a thing by assuming the appearance of preventing it. To prevent a thing by assuming that of doing it.”

  In the summer of 1804, on the banks of the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey, Alexander Hamilton was fatally wounded in a duel with Vice President Aaron Burr. Carried back across the river to New York, Hamilton died the next day, July 12.

  When the Vice President returned to Washington to preside over the Senate, he was looked upon by many, including young Senator Adams, as no better than a murderer. John Adams would write that though he had forgiven his “arch enemy,” Hamilton, Hamilton’s “villainy” was not forgotten. Nor did he feel obliged “to suffer my character to lie under infamous calumnies because the author of them with a pistol bullet in his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

  In the election of 1804, Jefferson and George Clinton of New York, the vice-presidential candidate for the Republicans, won by an overwhelming margin. Even Massachusetts went for Jefferson.

  Much that John Quincy wrote to his parents from the Capitol had a familiar ring. “Hitherto my conduct has given satisfaction to neither side,” he observed, “and both are offended at what they consider a vain and foolish presumption of singularity, or an ambition of taking a lead different from the views of either. All this I cannot help.”

  John Quincy and Louisa Catherine had dined at the President’s House, and would again several times, finding Jefferson no less engaging than ever, but overly fond of extravagant claims and “large stories.” One evening, John Quincy listened in amazement as Jefferson described how, during one of his winters in Paris, the temperature had dropped to twenty below zero for six weeks. It was a preposterous claim. Nothing of the sort had ever happened, as John Quincy knew from having been there. “He knows better than all this, but loves to excite wonder.” At another point, commenting on the French Revolution, Jefferson said it seemed all to have been a dream. John Quincy, as he reported to his father, could hardly believe his ears.