More than a year later, but still well before Callender wrote about Sally Hemings, President Jefferson wrote again to Monroe, giving more details on his relationship with the controversial journalist:
I am really mortified at the base ingratitude of Callender. It presents human nature in a hideous form. It gives me concern because I perceive that relief, which was afforded him on mere motives of charity, may be viewed under the aspect of employing him as a writer. When the [P]olitical [P]rogress of Britain first appeared in this country it was in a periodical publication called the [B]ee, where I saw it. I was speaking of it in terms of strong approbation to a friend in Philadelphia, when he asked me if I knew that the author was then in the city, a fugitive from prosecution on account of that work, and in want of employ for his subsistence. This was the first of my learning that Callender was author of the work. I considered him as a man of science fled from persecution, and assured my friend of my readiness to do whatever could serve him. It was long after this before I saw him, probably not till 1798. He had in the mean time written a 2nd part of the political progress much inferior to the first, and his history of the U.S. In 1798, I think I was applied to by Mr. Leiper to contribute to his relief. I did so. In 1799, I think S. T. Mason applied for him, I contributed again. …But I discouraged his coming into my neighborhood. His first writings here had fallen far short of his original [P]olitical [P]rogress and the scurrilities of his subsequent ones began evidently to do mischief. As to myself no man wished more to see his pen stopped: but I considered him still as a proper object of benevolence. The succeeding year he again wanted money to buy paper for another volume. I made his letter, as before, the occasion of giving him another 50 D. He considers these as proofs of my approbation of his writings, when they were mere charities, yielded under a strong conviction that he was injuring us by his writing. It is known to many that the sums given to him were such and even smaller than I was in the habit of giving to others in distress of the federal as well as the republican party without attention to political principles.22
Jefferson then turned to the more immediate cause of Callender’s anger towards him:
Soon after I was elected to the government, Callender came on here [Washington, D.C.] wishing to be made postmaster at Richmond. I knew him to be totally unfit for it: and however ready I was to aid him with my own charities (and I then gave him 50. D.) I did not think the public offices confided to me to give away as charities. He took it in mortal offence, and from that moment has been hauling off to his former enemies the federalists. …This is the true state of what has passed between him and me. I do not know that it can be used without committing me in controversy as it were with one too little respected by the public to merit that notice. I leave to your judgment what use can be made of these facts. Perhaps it will be better judged of when we see what use the tories will endeavour to make of their new friend.23
Upon being notified that Jefferson would not help him, Callender may have traveled to Albemarle County to search for information he could use in his vendetta.24 He also may have obtained information while imprisoned in Richmond, where the U.S. Marshal, David Meade Randolph, was a Jefferson relative with a strong dislike for the new President.25
Fawn Brodie provides this account:
After his release from jail he was annoyed because of a delay in the repayment of the fine, but still more embittered by what seemed a growing hostility of Jefferson toward him. He would complain to Madison that Jefferson “had on various occasions, treated me with such ostentatious coolness and indifference, that I could hardly say that I was able to love or trust him.” If his hero had feet of clay he must know it at all costs. Sometime before April 1801 he set out for Charlottesville to question Jefferson’s neighbors, and it was here that he learned in surprisingly accurate detail a great deal about Sally Hemings.26
James Callender was not the first to raise questions about the presence of light-skinned slaves at Monticello—they predated the arrival of Sally Hemings’ children. Nor was he even the first journalist to hint that Jefferson might be their father.
Brodie wrote that “As early as June 23, 1800, [Federalist editor W. A.] Rind had written that he had ‘damning proofs’ of Jefferson’s ‘depravity.’”27 The article in question actually seems to have appeared on June 28 and was a reprint of an article from the Boston Commercial Gazette, and it made no specific reference to sexual impropriety.28 However, on September 14, 1801—just under a year before Callender raised the “Black Sal” story—the Washington Federalist wrote:
[I]t has long been currently reported, that a man very high in office, has a number of yellow children, and that he is addicted to golden affections. It is natural to suppose it possible that personal or political enemies of Mr. J. might raise such reports, when they were wholly unfounded—and on the other side it is observed that, what every body says must be true. Certainly such reports, and others of a more delicate nature, tho paler complexion, are current. If they are false and malicious they ought to be contradicted.29
This report may well have been premised simply upon the widespread knowledge that there were a number of light-skinned slaves at Monticello.
Although he never visited Monticello,30 Callender may have visited Charlottesville (there seems to be no record of such a visit), apparently spoke with some of Jefferson’s enemies, and heard about Sally Hemings. On September 1, 1802, he added the Hemings allegation to his campaign of “slanderous stories”31 designed to destroy Thomas Jefferson:
THE PRESIDENT AGAIN
It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!32
Callender may well have selected this particular line of attack because of his own virulent racism. Joshua Rothman writes:
Callender detested African Americans and found the notion of sex across the color line repulsive. …Once he reported the Jefferson-Hemings story, he described Hemings herself in the most racist terms, calling her a “wench” and “a slut as common as the pavement,” accusing her of having “fifteen, or thirty” different lovers “of all colours,” and referring to her children as a “yellow litter.”33
In another article dated September 22, 1802, Callender made clear his objective of politically destroying Thomas Jefferson:
Unless the republicans cast him overboard, the universal horror of mankind will sink their vessel. It is at present something more than two years till the next election for president. …The timely disruption of this unhappy secret gives room for the republicans to desert their chieftain, and to rally round the standard of a more decent leader. …I do not believe that at the next election of 1804 Jefferson could obtain two votes on the Eastern side of the Susquehanna; and, I think hardly four votes upon this side of it. He will, therefore, be laid aside.34
History shows that Callender’s prediction was wrong. Although Callender drowned in the James River in a drunken stupor long before the election of 1804, Jefferson was reelected in a landslide electoral vote (162–14) and the Republicans gained in Congress as well. Callender’s reputation was such that few who knew about him appear to have believed much that he wrote.35 Indeed, Jefferson’s biggest problem was explaining to people why he had ever given money to this despicable man.36
Looking back, what does the Callender story tell us about the likelihood that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings? First, we know that the story originated as a part of a personal vendetta conducted by a vengeful and unprincipled man searching for allegations to injure President Jeffe
rson. We know that Callender based his stories on rumors and gossip, which in turn were based not upon reliable evidence but merely upon the fact that there were light-skinned slaves at Monticello—a reality that predated Sally Hemings’ years as a mother. Light-skinned slave children suggested that someone was having sex with the servants, and that someone could have been Thomas Jefferson. Not only did James Callender not have a scintilla of hard evidence that such a relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings actually existed, but nearly two centuries later there is still no persuasive evidence.37
Callender’s allegations were based largely upon the reported existence of a ten- to twelve-year-old son of Sally Hemings, bearing a strong physical resemblance to Thomas Jefferson and named “Tom.” The fact that none of Jefferson’s defenders suggested, in their many counterattacks on Callender, that no “Tom Hemings” existed, is itself interesting. Callender’s description might easily fit a young slave named Thomas Woodson, allegedly born around 1790, whose descendants have for nearly two centuries believed he was the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. There is no evidence of any other “Tom” at Monticello who comes close to fitting Callender’s description.
This brings us to perhaps the most interesting results of Dr. Eugene Foster’s DNA tests, reported in the journal Nature on November 5, 1998, and discussed in Chapter One, that “Thomas Woodson was not Thomas Jefferson’s son.”38 The presence of a ten- to twelve-year-old slave child named “Tom” was at the heart of Callender’s case. We don’t know whether or not Thomas Woodson was that “Tom,” but we do know that, if he was, Callender’s allegation that “Tom” was the son of President Thomas Jefferson was false. Without the slightest indication that there was another “Tom” at Monticello in 1802 who came close to Callender’s description, little is left of the allegation that started the entire controversy more than two centuries ago.
James Thomson Callender’s allegations against Thomas Jefferson in 1802 lacked credibility and were uniformly rejected by major Jefferson scholars for more than 170 years. During the latter part of the twentieth century, Professors Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed attempted to restore life to them. Their most credible argument was that Thomas Woodson was the child of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, conceived in Paris and born at Monticello in 1790. Thanks to the DNA tests, we now know that is not true. If there was ever any doubt about it, it should be clear now that Callender’s allegations were clear fabrications based solely upon the kernel of truth that there were light-skinned slave children at Monticello.
Obviously, it is possible that Callender fabricated a story that happened to be true. It is also theoretically possible that, after having been subjected to Callender’s scurrilous attacks in 1802, Thomas Jefferson for some strange reason might have decided to begin a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings that produced Eston Hemings in 1808—and perhaps other children. But in examining the totality of the evidence, it is useful to remember that the original charge was clearly a politically-motivated falsehood. The DNA tests have shown that Thomas Jefferson did not father a child by Sally Hemings in Paris named Tom as Callender alleged. The story passed down by generations of descendants of Thomas Woodson—presumably by honorable people acting in good faith at every repetition of the story—is clearly false.
Finally, if one takes the allegations of James T. Callender as serious evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings, and concludes that Callender “was not usually a liar”39 and was “concerned with accuracy”40—or, as Professor Gordon-Reed puts it: “Exaggeration, rather than fabrication, was Callender’s chief journalistic flaw”41—then what are we to make of Callender’s allegations about Sally “[r]omping with half a dozen black fellows,”42 and “[h]aving fifteen, or thirty gallants of all colours,”43 or being “a slut as common as the pavement?”44 Professor Gordon-Reed grossly misstates the reality when she alleges that Callendar would merely “exaggerate matters to make a better story.”45
James Thomson Callender was in reality an unprincipled drunkard and a vile racist, who spent his decade in America defaming each of the first five men to become President of the United States. The problem, of course, is to distinguish between his many lies and the kernels of truth upon which they were sometimes based; and it is more than a little problematic for champions of the Sally story to rely upon Callender as a probative witness when he supports their case and then ignore his factual allegations that do not.
* * *
Footnotes
1. Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee, Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, January 2000 [hereinafter cited as “Monticello Report”], at 4.
2. ANNETTE GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 215 (1997).
3. Origin of the dispute between CALLENDER and THE PRESIDENT, COLUMBIAN CENTINEL MASSACHUSETTS FEDERALIST, Aug. 28, 1802 at 1 (italics and small caps in original) (identified as having been reprinted from the New-York Commercial Advertiser, n.d.). Original copy in author’s personal library.
4. Worthington Chauncey Ford, Thomas Jefferson and James Thomson Callender, 50 NEW-ENGLAND HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL REGISTER (No. 199, July 1896) at 321.
5. DUMAS MALONE, JEFFERSON THE PRESIDENT: FIRST TERM, 1801–1805 at 212 (1970).
6. Id. at 211, citing RECORDER (Richmond), Sept. 15, 1802.
7. During a National Public Radio (NPR) interview on January 16, 2001, Professor Joseph Ellis referred to Jefferson’s first inaugural address as “probably one of the two or three great inaugural addresses in American history.” NPR Morning Edition with Bob Edwards, Jan. 16, 2001, 11:00–12:00 AM. In 1966, Daniel J. Boorstin edited An American Primer, pulling together in 900 pages the great speeches and documents that have survived through time as “a kind of American catechism,” beginning with The Mayflower Compact (1620) through Lyndon Johnson’s 1966 Address on Voting Rights. Two documents from Thomas Jefferson made the volume, The Declaration of Independence and his First Inaugural Address. AN AMERICAN PRIMER xiii, 65, 211 (Daniel J. Boorstin, ed. 1966).
8. JOSEPH J. ELLIS, AMERICAN SPHINX 364 (1998).
9. Joshua D. Rothman, James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia, in SALLY HEMINGS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON 88 (Jan Ellen Lewis & Peter S. Onuf, eds. 1999).
10. Quoted in id. at 89.
11. Given the poorer quality of much of his later work, it is not unreasonable to raise questions about Callender’s contribution to this earlier volume. It is unnecessary to examine that issue for present purposes. It is clear that Jefferson and most others involved believed that Callender was the primary author.
12. In an 1813 letter to Jefferson, John Adams accused Callender of “terrorism” for his unprincipled and libelous attacks. Adams to Jefferson, June 30, 1813, in 2 THE ADAMS-JEFFERSON LETTERS: THE COMPLETE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN THOMAS JEFFERSON AND ABIGAIL AND JOHN ADAMS 346, 347 (1959).
13. ELLIS, AMERICAN SPHINX 282. See also, id. at 259.
14. Joseph J. Ellis, The First Democrats, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP’T, Aug. 21, 2000, at 38.
15. Abagail Adams to Jefferson, July 1, 1804, in 10 WORKS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 86–88 n.1 (Paul Leicester Ford, ed. 1905).
16. 11 THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 42–43 (Mem. ed. 1903).
17. MICHAEL DUREY, “WITH THE HAMMER OF TRUTH” 159 (1990).
18. Id.
19. “Before this election year, Jefferson was pleased with Callender’s writings and approvingly sent the ragged writer small sums of money. He did not, however, wish to become any closer to a man whom most readers would soon recognize as a bitter, ranting mercenary.” ANDREW BURSTEIN, THE INNER JEFFERSON 227 (1995).
20. 3 HENRY S. RANDALL, THE LIFE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 17–20 (1858).
21. Jefferson to Monroe, May 29, 1801, 9 WORKS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 262–63.
22. Jefferson to Monroe, July 15, 1802, in 9 WORKS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 387–89 (1905).
23. Id. at 389–90.
24. It seems
clear that Callender spoke with people from Albemarle County, but there is no clear evidence he personally traveled there. Cynthia Burton informs me that much of his information may have come from meeting with Albemarle Clerk John Nicholas in Richmond. The issue is not in my view critical to our discussion.
25. The most detailed discussion of the possible role of David Meade Randolph in this controversy I have seen is: REBECCA L. MCMURRY & JAMES F. MCMURRY, JR., ANATOMY OF A SCANDAL: THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE SALLY STORY (2002).
26. FAWN BRODIE, THOMAS JEFFERSON 323 (1974).
27. Id.
28. After praising John Adams and describing Jefferson as “a philosophical infidel” and a “heretick,” later in the article the writer—using the pseudonym Attilius Regulas—asserted: “While those who have the damning proofs of human depravity, are too apt to indulge their fears that so black and foul and large a current cannot be turned.” Attilius Regulus, From Russell’s Commercial Gazette to the PEOPLE of the United States, VIRGINIA FEDERALIST, vol. II, no. 115, June 28, 1800. I am indebted to Christopher Posteraro for searching through old copies of the Virginia Federalist in the Harvard Library to find this article for me. This was apparently the basis for Callender’s assertion that “[s]ome years ago this story had once or twice been hinted at in Rind’s Federalist.” [Callender,] The President Again, THE RECORDER (Richmond, VA), Sept. 1, 1802.
29. WASHINGTON FEDERALIST, Sept. 14, 1801.
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