74. Jefferson to Eppes, Dec. 21, 1799, in 31 PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 274 (2004).
75. GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 178–79. See also, THE FAMILY LETTERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 231–32 (Edwin Morris Betts & James Adam Bear, Jr. eds. 1966).
76. There is also a written “Memorandum” Jefferson gave to overseer Edmund Bacon before departing for Washington, in which he notes that “Mrs. Randolph [Jefferson’s daughter Martha] always chooses the clothing for the house servants; that is to say, for Peter Hemings, Burwell, Edwin, Critta, and Sally.” Reprinted in JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 54. It is unclear whether this list is in any special order; however, Peter and Burwell were both very important slaves and Sally was Betty Hemings’ youngest child.
77. Thomas Jefferson, Memorandum for Nicholas Lewis, undated [ca. Nov. 7, 1790], in 18 PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 29 (1971).
78. Id.
79. Before the Hemings arrived at Monticello, the two most privileged slaves were “King George” (aka “Great George”) and “Queen Ursula,” the parents of blacksmith Isaac whose story was taken down in Memoirs of a Monticello Slave. See JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 3. Bacon notes that Ursula was Martha Jefferson’s nurse and “took charge of all the children that were not in school.” Id. at 101. According to Isaac, when Governor Jefferson fled Richmond just ahead of the pursuing British in 1781, George stayed behind and hid Jefferson’s silver. As a reward, Isaac says George was given his freedom, but “continued to sarve [sic] Mr. Jefferson” and both he and Ursula were thereafter paid a lifetime wage. Id. at 8. Former Monticello Resident Director James Bear adds: “I have seen no evidence to substantiate Isaac’s claim concerning the freeing of his father, George. However, among TJ’s ‘taxable property in Albemarle’ in 1782 were ‘129 slaves, 2 free.’ (Account Book, April 15, 1782). Since the freed ones are not identified, perhaps George was one of them.” Id. at 124 n.27. Professor Jack McLaughlin notes that Jefferson left no record of having formally freed George or Ursula and included them on his slave rolls in future years, but notes their special status at Monticello and speculates they may have been offered manumission and elected instead to continue serving Mr. Jefferson. He notes the remarkable independence given Great George as “an overseer at Monticello.” JACK MCLAUGHLIN, JEFFERSON AND MONTICELLO: THE BIOGRAPHY OF A BUILDER 103–05 (1988). Professor Ellis adds: “Great George and his wife, Ursula, referred to as King George (a joke on George III) and Queen Ursula, were slaves in name only and effectively exercised control over management of the household.” ELLIS, AMERICAN SPHINX 179. Indeed, according to Jefferson’s records, George and Ursula often received more favorable treatment than even Betty Hemings and her family in the distribution of food and clothing. THE GARDEN AND FARM BOOKS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 264, 284, 286, 290.
80. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, May 8, 1791, in 20 PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 381 (1982).
81. Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Rationalizations, 57 WM. & MARY Q. 183 (Jan. 2000).
82. See, e.g., Monticello Report, Appendix F at 2; and STANTON, FREE SOME DAY 114.
83. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE GARDEN AND FARM BOOKS 248.
84. Martha Jefferson Randolph to Thomas Jefferson, Jan. 22, 1798, in THE FAMILY LETTERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 153–54 (Edwin Morris Betts & James Adam Bear, Jr., eds. 1966).
85. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE GARDEN AND FARM BOOKS 382. See also, id. at 246, 301.
86. See pages 91–93.
87. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE GARDEN AND FARM BOOKS 382.
88. Jefferson records Madison only as having been born during the month of January 1805, but the date of January 19 is provided in the account attributed to Madison Hemings by Samuel Wetmore discussed in Chapter Four.
89. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE GARDEN AND FARM BOOKS 386. The number “22” may refer to the year in which Harriet left (1822).
90. JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 102.
91. THOMAS JEFFERSON: THE GARDEN AND FARM BOOKS 386.
92. Bacon does not say that he put only Harriet on the stage, and Lucia Stanton has suggested to me they may have left together because women did not travel alone in that era; but one might have thought Bacon would have added “with her brother” if both had been involved.
93. Ellen Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, reprinted in Monticello Report, Appendix E.
94. Id.
95. 2 JEFFERSON’S MEMORANDUM BOOKS 1299 (receiving twenty-five cents for expenses from Jefferson in April 1814).
96. The second child named Harriet is mentioned in a footnote by the editors explaining a two-dollar expenditure by Jefferson for a midwife for Sally when Harriet was born in 1801. Id. at 1053 n. 15.
97. 2 JEFFERSON’S MEMORANDUM BOOKS 1408.
98. Id. at 1391 (“10. [November 1822] Pd. Israel for 100. Cabbages 2.D.”)
99. See, e.g., WILLIAM HOWARD ADAMS, THE PARIS YEARS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 323 n.32 (1997).
100. BRODIE, THOMAS JEFFERSON 233.
101. Id. at 235.
102. Id. at 291.
103. STANTON, FREE SOME DAY 117.
104. David Brion Davis, Preface, in STANTON, FREE SOME DAY 11.
105. See Chapter Three.
106. For example, we know that Thomas Jefferson invited his widower brother, Randolph, to visit Monticello shortly before Eston was conceived, and we know that Randolph had five sons, at least four of whom were between the ages of 18 and 27 and thus presumably far more likely fathers of a child than the sixty-four-year-old President. (Since we only have years for the births of Randolph’s children—and some of these are only estimates—there is no way to know their precise age on any given date.)
107. See, e.g., Monticello Report at 9 (“During these eighteen years at least twenty-five adult male descendants of Jefferson’s grandfather Thomas Jefferson (1677–1731) lived in Virginia.”).
108. Id.
109. Quoted in Rothman, in SALLY HEMINGS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON 95.
110. See, e.g., GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 171.
111. Monticello Report, Appendix E at 43.
112. BRODIE, THOMAS JEFFERSON 229.
113. Monticello Report, Appendix E at 31. See also, JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 26 n.1.
114. Helen F. M. Leary, Sally Hemings’s Children, 89(3) JEFFERSON-HEMINGS: A SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE NATIONAL GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY 197 (Sept. 2001).
115. JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 88.
116. Id. at 102.
117. See Chapter Ten.
118. Monticello Report at 7.
119. Bear, The Hemings Family of Monticello 85. Accord, BRODIE, THOMAS JEFFERSON 468; GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 209.
120. Monticello Report, Appendix H at 5.
121. Id. Cynthia Burton asserts that this “Betsy Hemings” was the wife of Peter Hemings.
122. “‘Giving time’ was an informal method of emancipation that avoided the effects of the 1806 removal law. … ” Monticello Report, Appendix H at 5.
123. STANTON, FREE SOME DAY 107.
124. Monticello Report, Appendix H at 5.
125. Id.
126. ELIZABETH LANGHORNE, MONTICELLO: A FAMILY STORY 258 (1987).
127. BRODIE, THOMAS JEFFERSON 209.
128. GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 209.
129. Monticello Report, Appendix H at 10.
130. A 1988 international conference on lactation infertility in Bellagio, Italy, concluded: “Demographic data indicate that in many developing countries, the protection from pregnancy provided by breastfeeding alone is greater than that given by all other reversible means of family planning combined.” Kathy I. Kennedy, Roberto Rivera, & Alan S. McNeilly, Consensus Statement on the Use of Breastfeeding As a Family Planning Method, 39(5) CONTRACEPTION 478, 485 (May 1989). I am indebted to Cynthia Burton both for suggesting this point and providing the source.
131. Once the Slave of Thomas Jefferson: The Rev. Mr. Fossett, of Cincinnati, Recalls the Sage of Monticello”—Reminiscences of Jefferson, Lafa
yette, Madison and Monroe, THE WORLD (New York), Jan. 30, 1898, at 33.
132. Mary Jefferson Eppes to Thomas Jefferson, Nov. 6, 1801, in THE FAMILY LETTERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 211 (Edwin Morris Betts & James Adam Bear, Jr., eds. 1966).
133. On September 27, 1801, Jefferson recorded spending $3.00 “for Mrs. Sneed for Sally,” believed to have been a midwife fee for the birth of Harriet Hemings. 2 JEFFERSON’S MEMORANDUM BOOKS 1053 (James A. Bear, Jr. & Lucia C. Stanton, eds. 1997).
3
James Thomson Callender and the Origins of the 1802 Jefferson-Hemings Scandal
* * *
The allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings first came to the attention of the American people in September, 1802, when a journalist named James Thomson Callender made the accusation as part of a series of vicious attacks on the President. These were quickly picked up and reprinted by Jefferson’s enemies in the Federalist press, and publicized as well by Jefferson’s enemies as far away as England. Assessing the probability of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings becomes easier once one understands the origins of the allegation.
The report of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee on this issue included only a single sentence of background on Callender and then provided copies and edited transcripts of some of his articles. That sentence reads:
1802. Journalist James T. Callender, although his account is obviously sensationalized, stated that he was repeating what he had heard from others; he included some details that can be verified, and others that cannot.1
Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, in her 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, argues: “James Callender’s statement in 1802 that Sally Hemings had five children is extrinsic evidence that corroborates Madison Hemings’s claim that Sally Hemings had a child upon her return to the United States from France.”2
Both accounts would seem to be a bit gentle with the author of this allegation, given what is known about James Thomson Callender. To begin with, if one is to believe Federalist newspaper accounts published only days before the allegation that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings was first printed, James Callender was a self-confessed liar. An article printed on the front page of the Columbian Centinel Massachusetts Federalist on August 28, 1802, entitled “Origin of the dispute between Callender and the President,” quotes Callender, who was angrily demanding a government job, as shouting out in front of the White House after having been turned away by a servant, “Sir, you know that by LYING I made you President. … ”3
Writing in The New-England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1896, Worthington Chauncey Ford (brother of Paul Leicester Ford, who edited two multi-volume sets of Jefferson’s Writings) began: “Of all the foreigners who were connected with journalism in the United States at the beginning of the century, James Thomson Callender was easily first in the worst qualities of mind and character.”4
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Dumas Malone refers to Callender as “one of the most notorious scandalmongers and character assassins in American history,”5 and notes that one of his attacks on Jefferson alleged that it “would have been advantageous to his reputation if his head had been cut off five minutes before he began his inaugural speech.”6 (By most accounts, the address was a masterpiece.7) Professor Joseph J. Ellis, in American Sphinx, writes: “Callender’s motives, all historians agree, were scurrilous and vengeful. He probably heard the rumors about miscegenation at Monticello while imprisoned in Richmond …and felt no compunction about reporting the gossip as fact.”8
Another recent scholar, who, like Professor Ellis, believes that Thomas Jefferson did father children by Sally Hemings, provides this account: “James Callender was an angry, bitter, and cynical man who made a career by specializing in invective and character assassination. He ruthlessly, viciously, and often crudely ravaged anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in his journalistic sights. … ”9 He quotes historian John Chester Miller as writing: “Callender made his charges against Jefferson without fear and without research. …He never made the slightest effort to verify the ‘facts’ he so stridently proclaimed. It was ‘journalism’ at its most reckless, wildly irresponsible, and scurrilous. Callender was not an investigative journalist; he never bothered to investigate anything.”10
Callender came to the United States in 1793 from Scotland, where he claimed to have played some role11 in writing a controversial book, The Political Progress of Britain, and was vulnerable to arrest for sedition. He settled in Philadelphia, and soon set his pen to work by attacking George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams,12 the leaders of the Federalist Party.13 Professor Ellis notes that, in a pamphlet entitled The Prospect Before Us, Callender described Adams as “a mentally unstable monarchist who, if re-elected, intended to declare himself king and his son, John Quincy, his royal successor.”14 Callender’s work soon came to the attention of Thomas Jefferson, who viewed him as an able writer and political ally and on several occasions provided financial support for his work.
Jefferson’s assistance to Callender particularly offended his once-close friends John and Abigail Adams. In a candid letter, Mrs. Adams charged:
One of the first acts of your administration was to liberate a wretch who was suffering the just punishment of his crimes for publishing the basest libel, the lowest and vilest slander, which malice could invent or calumny exhibit, against the character and reputation of your predecessor; of him, for whom you professed a friendship and esteem, and whom you certainly knew incapable of such complicated baseness. The remission of Callender’s fine was a public approbation of his conduct.15
Jefferson responded with a summary of his relationship with Callender:
As early, I think, as 1796, I was told in Philadelphia that Callender, the author of the Political Progress of Britain, was in that city, a fugitive from persecution for having written that book, and in distress. I had read and approved the book; I considered him as a man of genius, unjustly persecuted. I knew nothing of his private character, and immediately expressed my readiness to contribute to his relief, and to serve him. It was a considerable time after, that, on application from a person who thought of him as I did, I contributed to his relief, and afterwards repeated the contribution. Himself I did not see till long after, nor ever more than two or three times. When he first began to write, he told some useful truths in his coarse way; but nobody sooner disapproved of his writing than I did, or wished more that he would be silent. My charities to him 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.16
Jefferson obviously benefited politically from Callender’s attacks on Washington, Hamilton, and especially Adams, to whom Jefferson had lost the presidential election of 1796 and against whom he was expected to run in 1800. Callender also falsely accused Jefferson’s rival Alexander Hamilton of forgery and treasury fraud; and, in order to defend his public behavior, Hamilton found it necessary to disclose that he had been romantically involved with a married woman. But while Jefferson may secretly have welcomed these attacks on his political rivals, it is clear that he also soon realized the sordid side of James Callender; and when Callender hinted that he would like to move to Albemarle County to join Jefferson’s community of friends like Madison and Monroe, Jefferson ignored his letters. When Callender was jailed for violating the Alien and Sedition Laws, he blamed Jefferson for not coming quickly to his aid; and even after Jefferson won the election of 1800 and pardoned Callender and all other victims of the controversial laws, Callender blamed Jefferson for delays in the return of his fine and other alleged grievances.
According to Michael Durey, author of the Callender biography, With the Hammer of Truth, the mercurial journalist wrote of his attacks on Jefferson: “chastisement was promised, and the promise has been kept with the most rigid punctuality.”17 Alleg
ing that Jefferson was behind the attacks on him by Republican editors, Callender characterized his response as “ten thousand fold vengeance” upon Jefferson.18
The primary basis for Callender’s bitterness may well have been that he had realized that Jefferson and his Republican friends neither liked nor respected him.19 Callender seems to have believed that his attacks on John Adams were responsible for Jefferson’s electoral victory, and he was outraged at the ingratitude of Jefferson and his friends. At any rate, Callender sent word that an appropriate reward for his contribution to Jefferson’s victory would be appointment as Postmaster of Richmond, a position worth $1,500 a year.20 When Jefferson turned him down, Callender resorted to blackmail, sending word that if the appointment was not forthcoming he would publish a series of articles that would destroy the President. To his credit, Jefferson refused to give in.
In a letter dated May 29, 1801, Jefferson provided this account to James Monroe:
Since mine of the 26th Callender is arrived here. He did not call on me; but understanding he was in distress I sent Captain Lewis to him with 50. D. to inform him we were making some inquiries as to his fine which would take a little time, and lest he should suffer in the meantime I had sent him &c. His language to Captain Lewis was very high-toned. He intimated that he was in possession of things which he could and would make use of in a certain case: that he received the 50. D. not as a charity but a due, in fact as hush money; that I knew what he expected, viz. a certain office, and more to this effect. Such a misconstruction of my charities puts an end to them forever. You will therefore be so good as to make no use of the order I enclosed you. He knows nothing of me which I am not willing to declare to the world myself. I knew him first as the author of the Political Progress of Britain, a work I had read with great satisfaction, and as a fugitive from persecution for this very work. I gave to him from time to time such aids as I could afford, merely as a man of genius suffering under persecution, and not as a writer in our politics. It is long since I wished he would cease writing on them, as doing more harm than good.21
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