Then there is this sentence attributed by Wetmore to Madison: “When Mr. Jefferson went to France Martha was a young woman grown, my mother was about her age, and Maria was just budding into womanhood.”85 This might well have come from Madison Hemings, as he was not born until more than two decades after Jefferson went to France. But, in reality, when Jefferson went to France Martha was only eleven and younger sister Maria was only five—hardly likely to have been “budding into womanhood.”
The errors are not material to our inquiry, except that they establish that Madison Hemings’ knowledge of events prior to his birth was, at best, imperfect. Such obvious factual mistakes may call into question the reliability of other statements about that era attributed to Madison Hemings in the Wetmore article. So Professor Gordon-Reed solved the problem of her witness’ credibility by simply altering the text of the Wetmore article once again, so in her appendix it reads: “When Mr. Jefferson went to France Martha was just budding into womanhood.”86 Unlike her alteration of the Coolidge letter, where, in addition to deleting words, others had to be moved around to produce a coherent sentence with the opposite meaning, in this case all she had to do was to delete a few words. (Well, a dozen words.) And as a comparison of the two documents demonstrates (see Figure 2 on page 35), the deletions cannot be explained as merely “skipping a line” during the transcription.
There are other errors in the Gordon-Reed transcription as well. Indeed, several of these are identical to errors that were made in transcribing the same document for the appendix of Fawn Brodie’s volume, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. For example, Brodie inexplicably transcribed the wrong date for Madison’s marriage and his age at that time. Interestingly, Professor Gordon-Reed made precisely the same errors, substituting 1834 for 1831 and 28 for 23.87
However, in her substantive “correction,” Professor Brodie properly used brackets to indicate her alteration of “grandmother” to “[great-] grandmother” in the original Wetmore article. That’s what scholars who alter text are supposed to do, but it does not solve the problem that “flagging” the error in the statement attributed to Madison undermines its credibility. Surely Madison knew the difference between his grandmother and his great-grandmother, but perhaps Samuel Wetmore did not. The story becomes more credible if the brackets are deleted and Madison is portrayed as getting more of his facts right.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem asserts that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time would eventually type Hamlet. It is theoretically possible that Professor Gordon-Reed just inadvertently happened to delete the precise words necessary to correct Madison Hemings’ error about a five-year-old girl “budding into womanhood” while maintaining a coherent sentence. If one is prepared to accept those convenient “errors” as innocent (keeping in mind that Professor Gordon-Reed was a member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review), then the rather dramatic alterations to the Coolidge letter (see Figures 3 and 4 on pages 36 and 37) are but another step down the ladder of credulity.
The Statement Attributed to Israel Jefferson
Nine months after the Madison Hemings story was published, Samuel Wetmore sought to corroborate it with an interview with another former Monticello slave, Israel Jefferson. It was clear—assuming for the moment once again that Wetmore reported accurately—that Israel shared Madison’s bitterness,88 and he made some of the same factual mistakes that appeared in the earlier piece.89
Shortly after Israel’s story was published, a copy was apparently sent to Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who wrote a scathing six-page letter to the editor in response.90 Citing Jefferson’s handwritten records, he convincingly points out error after error in the article. Whereas Israel had written of witnessing the excitement as Jefferson “and other members of his family” prepared to leave for Washington to assume the duties of president of the United States,91 the president’s grandson responded:
Israel is made to say that he recollects distinctly, the departure of Mr. J and family for Washington D.C. when he went to assume the duties of President. Mr. Jefferson left home alone, taking not even a servant with him Dec. 1st. 1800 to preside over the Senate as Vice President where he was March 3 1801. Israel, by the record was born Dec. 28 1800. He is thus made to recollect distinctly events occurring a month before his birth.
He is made to say that he commenced the duties of life as waiter at Monticello and attendant on Mr. J’s person at the commencement of his second term March 1805. He was then at the mature age of four years and his whole family on the list of slaves on the farm leased to Mr. Craven 1801 to 1809.92
Israel (or Wetmore) appears to be the source of the popular myth that Thomas Jefferson freed Sally Hemings and her four children in his will. He writes:
Mr. Jefferson died on the 4th day of July, 1826, when I was upwards of 29 years of age. His death was an affair of great moment and uncertainty to us slaves, for Mr. Jefferson provided for the freedom of 7 servants only: Sally, his chambermaid, who took the name of Hemings, her four children—Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston—John Hemmings [sic], brother to Sally, and Burrell Colburn [sic], an old and faithful body servant.93
In reality, as will be discussed in Chapter Six, Sally Hemings was not freed in Thomas Jefferson’s will; and of the five members of the Hemings family who were, only two were descendants of Sally Hemings—and they were treated far less favorably than Sally’s brother John or the freed sons of her sisters Mary and Bett.94
Another difference concerns whether Israel had been responsible for kindling Thomas Jefferson’s fire each morning and waiting on his person—which Israel presumably had mentioned to add credence to his claim to have “intimate” knowledge of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings.95 He is reported by Wetmore to have said:
The private life of Thomas Jefferson, from my earliest remembrances, in 1804, till the day of his death, was very familiar to me. For fourteen years I made the fire in his bedroom and private chamber, cleaned his office, dusted his books, run of errands and attended him about home. …I also know that his servant, Sally Hemmings [sic] …was employed as his chamber-maid, and that Mr. Jefferson was on the most intimate terms with her, that, in fact, she was his concubine. This I know from my intimacy with both parties, and when Madison Hemmings [sic] declares that he is a natural son of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and that his brothers Beverly and Eston and sister Harriet are of the same parentage, I can as conscientiously confirm his statement as any other fact which I believe from circumstances but do not positively know.96
In response, Thomas Jefferson Randolph asserted that “Jefferson rose at dawn and always kindled his own fire,” and alleged: “Israel was never employed in any post of trust or confidence about the house at Monticello.”97
What is one to make of this “he said, she said” scenario? Can we ever really know the truth? In this controversy—that occurred nearly half-a-century after his death—Thomas Jefferson comes to our rescue by way of his remarkable record-keeping behavior. We can confirm with reasonable certainty—from records made in Thomas Jefferson’s own hand decades before this dispute occurred—that Israel was wrong about his date of birth98 and thus could not have witnessed Jefferson’s departure for Washington. We know from numerous sources that Sally Hemings’ nephew, Burwell Colbert, not Israel, was Thomas Jefferson’s personal servant.99 (Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence besides these two stories in the Pike County Republican that Sally Hemings was ever Thomas Jefferson’s “chambermaid.”100) There was one exception: for a brief period during 1819—long after Sally Hemings stopped having children—Burwell Colbert fell ill and Israel Gillette did temporarily serve as the chief waiter at Jefferson’s Poplar Forest estate about 70 miles from Monticello.101
We can also confirm Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s statement that Israel did not even live at Monticello until he was more than eight years old, which was long after Sally Hemi
ngs’ last child was born.102 This point is acknowledged by the senior historian at Monticello.103
What about Israel Jefferson’s claim that he kindled Thomas Jefferson’s fire? Fifteen years before that statement was made, historian Henry Randall included as an appendix to volume three of his Life of Thomas Jefferson a letter from Thomas Jefferson Randolph which stated “He always made his own fire.”104 Four years later, another book published this statement by former Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon: “He never had a servant make a fire in his room in the morning, or at any other time, when he was at home. He always had a box filled with nice dry wood in his room, and when he wanted fire he would open it and put on the wood.”105 There is, however, evidence that Israel Gillette was responsible for taking firewood to the Monticello kitchen.106
Two things might be offered in Israel Jefferson’s defense. First, he was seventy-three years old when the interview was published, and he was recalling events that occurred, in at least one instance, even before he was born. More important, the record we have to examine is presumably not the statement of Israel Jefferson, but rather an article by an anti-Jefferson political activist who would have us believe that he is accurately conveying Israel Jefferson’s recollections. We cannot with great confidence sort out the details of what may have happened more than a century ago. Perhaps Israel Jefferson embellished his background to help his friend, or perhaps his comments were reported inaccurately to support Wetmore’s personal agenda. We can recognize that the statement attributed to Israel Jefferson is filled with errors—and probably falsehoods107—and give it no greater consideration than it deserves.
Conclusions
What can be concluded from the 1873 Pike County Republican “memoirs” of Madison Hemings? It is difficult to quarrel with the conclusion of Professor Gordon-Reed that “not every word in Hemings’s statement is a lie.”108 Indeed, that may understate the case for his veracity. Perhaps Madison Hemings believed every word of his statement—if, in fact, the article reflected his views in the first place. There is really no need to question his character or truthfulness, as it is for our purposes unimportant whether the many errors in the article constitute intentional falsehoods on his part or instead reflect misinformation provided to him by others—perhaps compounded by the normal problems associated with attempting to recall details that occurred a half-century earlier.
It does not matter whether Madison Hemings was a bitter ex-slave who conspired with Samuel Wetmore or an innocent victim of Wetmore’s clear anti-Jefferson political agenda. The end product is the same—an unreliable piece of political propaganda, largely founded at best on unsourced hearsay, and peppered with clear factual errors and incredible accounts about which Madison Hemings clearly had no personal knowledge. It was not racism, but sound professional judgment, that led past generations of historians to rely instead upon the eyewitness testimony of Edmund Bacon, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and Ellen Randolph Coolidge.
It has been suggested109 that the primary reason prominent Jefferson historians over the years have concluded that Edmund Bacon’s eyewitness testimony was more credible than the statement attributed to Madison Hemings was that Madison was black and the historians were white. Ignoring for the moment the reality that all of Sally Hemings’ children were apparently seven-eighths white, it is obvious that the tendency of many people to embellish their own histories transcends racial lines.
Indeed, the sad reality is that people of all colors and races occasionally find it desirable to falsify their background. This fact was recently brought into focus brilliantly in the book Stolen Valor,110 which discusses hundreds of cases in which American men falsified claims involving alleged military service in Vietnam. Rich, poor, black, brown, and white, the perpetrators included judges, legislators, teachers, and convicted felons. Their only common feature was an apparent belief that pretending to be a combat veteran of the Vietnam War would benefit them. And for similar reasons, people of all colors and economic circumstances have been claiming famous ancestry throughout history.
Addendum:
The Ellis Revelations
As will be discussed in the Postscript at the end of this volume, a few weeks after our report was made public the history profession was shocked by the revelation by the Boston Globe that Professor Joseph Ellis—who played such a critical role in reversing the conventional wisdom about the Jefferson-Hemings controversy and had just won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in History—had a long history of telling untruths to his students and others dating back decades. Among other falsehoods, he told his students he served in combat in Vietnam as a paratrooper, whereas the record shows he spent his entire military service teaching history at West Point. He told stories of catching the winning touchdown in a homecoming football game, whereas his high school yearbook showed his only foray onto the gridiron was as a member of the band. Claims of having been a civil rights activist in Alabama and an anti-war activist at Yale also proved to be false. Many of his supporters emphasized that there was no suggestion that his dishonesty influenced his professional writings, but a review of his repeated misstatement of the facts in the DNA story—at a time when Ellis was known to be involved in the effort to stop the impeachment of President Clinton for sexual improprieties—raises serious questions about that assumption.
This issue will be addressed in greater detail in the Postscript.
* * *
Footnotes
1. Obviously there was a “Jefferson-Hemings relationship”—the issue is whether it was exclusively a master-slave relationship or also a sexual one.
2. Eric S. Lander & Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Father, 396 NATURE 13 (Nov. 5, 1998).
3. Annette Gordon-Reed, Why Jefferson Scholars Were the Last to Know, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 3, 1998 at A27.
4. The relevant text of the article reads: “Soon after their arrival [from Paris], she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them.” Professor Ellis made the same error in American Sphinx. JOSEPH J. ELLIS, AMERICAN SPHINX 364 (1996). In fairness, the great Jefferson scholar Dumas Malone made the same error in reporting that Sally Hemings was Madison’s source. See DUMAS MALONE, JEFFERSON THE PRESIDENT: FIRST TERM 498 (1970). The Monticello research committee correctly noted that Madison “did not specifically mention when or how he learned the identity of his father.” Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee, Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Jan. 2000 (hereinafter referred to as Monticello Report) Appendix F at 2.
5. Obviously Madison had no personal knowledge of his own conception or that of his elder siblings, and he would have only been two years old when Sally’s last known child, Eston, was conceived.
6. I have in mind here not only the observation by Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon that as he arrived for work early in the morning he often saw a man who was not Thomas Jefferson leave Sally’s room, but also the fact that not one of the hundreds if not thousands of visitors who were present at Monticello over the years left a known record of having witnessed anything that would suggest a sexual relationship existed between President Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
7. See, e.g., ANNETTE GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS at 10–11, 224–28 (1997); Annette Gordon-Reed, Why Jefferson Scholars Were the Last to Know, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 3, 1998 at A27; Annette Gordon-Reed, “The Memories of a Few Negroes,” in JAN ELLEN LEWIS & PETER S. ONUF, SALLY HEMINGS AND THOMAS JEFFERSON 236–52 (1999); and Annette Gordon-Reed, When the Past Speaks to the Present: A Cautionary Tale about Evidence, HISTORY NOW (Dec. 2004), available at http://www.historynow.org/12_2004/print/historian4.html (“[A] bias led historians to give more weight to the [Jefferson] grandchildren’s accounts than to the account of Madison Hemings, despite the fact that the grandchildren’s accounts were themselves contradictory. No doubt the high esteem in which Thomas Jefferson was held by the public and by the historians contributed to the acceptanc
e of the grandchildren’s claim that Jefferson did not father the Hemings children. But no doubt racism—sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious—played a role in privileging the grandchildren’s claims over the claims of Madison Hemings.”).
8. Until his death on September 23, 2009, at the age of 88, Professor Merrill Peterson was almost certainly the world’s leading Jefferson historian as the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia. Suggestions that Professor Peterson might have been motivated by racism are particularly unwarranted. A Washington Post obituary observed: “Dr. Peterson was noted for recruiting African-American faculty members and made a memorable 1965 speech at the university’s central building, the Rotunda, called ‘Sympathy for Selma.’ He saw the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights marches in Selma, Ala., and across the South as a ‘link in the heritage of American liberty.’’’ Matt Schudel, Merrill Peterson, 88; wrote on role of Jefferson, Lincoln, WASH. POST, Oct. 2, 2009, available at http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/10/02/ merrill_peterson_88_wrote_on_role_of_jefferson_lincoln/.
9. GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 13.
10. Id. at 149.
11. FAWN BRODIE, THOMAS JEFFERSON: AN INTIMATE HISTORY 438 (1874). See also, Lucia Stanton, The Other End of the Telescope, 57 WILLIAM & MARY QUARTERLY 142 (Jan. 2000).
12. See, e.g., MEMOIRS OF A MONTICELLO SLAVE 10 (1951). (“Sally mighty near white,” “Folks said that these Hemingses was old Mr. Wayles’ children.”)
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