It is also clear that Madison Hemings was not given his freedom when he turned twenty-one years of age. On the contrary, he was nearly six months past his twenty-first birthday when Thomas Jefferson died, and Madison did not actually receive his freedom for another year—when he was roughly twenty-two and one-half.21 Had Jefferson survived another few years, there is no reason to believe that Madison would have been freed even at age twenty-two (although we cannot be sure either way).
Presumably, if Madison Hemings was the President’s own son whom Jefferson had pledged to free when Madison turned twenty-one, Jefferson would have realized when he wrote his will that Madison had already passed that landmark. If he had forgotten the age of his son, would not Sally or Madison have reminded him of his promise long before the will was written? Jefferson was a good enough lawyer to know that tacking on another year to Madison’s slavery would violate any “treaty” with Sally. While we can rationalize that he was too honorable to totally ignore his alleged “son” and his “solemn word” to his lover, but too afraid that freeing Madison as allegedly promised would be seen as confirming the Callender allegations, a far simpler explanation is that there was no “treaty” and Madison and Eston Hemings were freed in the will along with all but two of the other remaining sons and grandsons of Betty Hemings.
Furthermore, Sally Hemings herself was neither freed during Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime nor mentioned in his will. Nor, as the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation has acknowledged, is there any known document suggesting that Sally’s ultimate freedom was at Thomas Jefferson’s request.22
Now it is true that the oral memoir23 attributed to Madison Hemings by Samuel Wetmore in 1873 did not allege that Sally’s “treaty” with Thomas Jefferson provided that she, too, would gain freedom. Madison reportedly said that in Paris Sally was only concerned about the freedom of any children they might produce. Since Sally was not freed by Thomas Jefferson, for Madison to have alleged more would have undercut his case. But by suggesting that Sally really was not concerned with obtaining her own freedom, do we not undercut the theory that the reason a “treaty” was negotiated in the first place was that Sally was willing to abandon her home, her family, and her alleged “lover” to secure her own immediate freedom as an expatriate in France?
In retrospect, the absence of any provision to look out for Sally makes the existence of the alleged “treaty” all the more difficult to accept. Assuming they were lovers, does it pass the “straight-face test” for either Sally Hemings or Thomas Jefferson to enter into such a “treaty” without any consideration at all for Sally’s future?
Surely, if the allegations of a love affair were true, and if Sally were so prescient as to anticipate a need to provide for the future welfare of children she would not start conceiving until 1795,24 she would have realized that her three-decades-older lover was likely to die before she did. Both of them certainly would have realized that if Sally became the property of someone else before Thomas Jefferson actually died at the age of 83, an event that could easily have occurred decades before it did given the life expectancy of the era, the handsome young slave woman might well have found herself in a horribly abusive environment of sexual exploitation. Surely, even if Sally had not raised the issue, had she been his true love, Thomas Jefferson would have wanted to provide for her eventual freedom as well as that of their children. We might add that if Thomas Jefferson was anxious to provide for the welfare of his children, why did he subsequently totally ignore them? The pieces simply do not fit together.
One might expect the alleged “lovers” to anticipate that Thomas Jefferson’s daughters (and their future husbands, who might someday become the executors of Jefferson’s estate) would learn of their relationship and might well resent Sally—particularly if the relationship became known to the general public and harmed their famous father’s reputation. But by Madison’s account we must assume that they were indifferent to the possibility of the beloved Sally being sold into sexual slavery, and—treaty or no treaty—in the end Thomas Jefferson made no provisions for Sally Hemings in his will and apparently left her future to the discretion of his daughter Martha. The questions we need to consider are: (1) whether it is believable that Sally would be so careful to provide for the future freedom of children that were not to be born for more than half a decade, but would have paid no attention to her own future; and (2) whether Thomas Jefferson, if Sally Hemings were really the secret love of his life and his life’s companion for decades, as some would have us believe, would have totally ignored Sally at the time of his death?
There is not the slightest bit of evidence that Sally Hemings received “extraordinary privileges” of any kind upon returning to Virginia. She seems to have been largely ignored by Thomas Jefferson, and was apparently treated no more favorably than most of her sisters. If the language “freed at the age of twenty-one years” means that her children would be legally granted their freedom upon turning twenty-one, that clearly did not happen either—despite claims to the contrary by senior Monticello scholars and others.25
But even if Jefferson had freed Sally, and had legally manumitted each of her children on their twenty-first birthday,26 that still would not come close to proving that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. There were other, much simpler, explanations for any special treatment they received—including the fact that they were legally white27 and may have been blood relatives of both Thomas Jefferson28 and his beloved wife.29 They were also more skilled30 than other Monticello slaves, and thus more likely than most to be able to succeed on their own if freed. To allege in such a setting that the only possible reason Thomas Jefferson would show special consideration for Sally Hemings’ children was because he was their father is silly. He gave far better treatment to several of Betty Hemings’ other descendants who could not even arguably have been his children.
If anything, Jefferson’s actual treatment of Sally’s children is powerful circumstantial evidence for the fact that they were not his children. Madison was clearly bitter at having been totally ignored by the man he claimed to believe was his father, and noted in contrast Jefferson’s great fondness and open displays of affection for what he termed Jefferson’s “white” grandchildren.31 But, based upon their racial mix (seven-eighths white), Madison and Eston were also “white”; and even if he felt a need to be discreet around visitors, there is no reason to assume Thomas Jefferson would not have been privately affectionate if Sally’s boys had actually been his natural sons.
Alternatively, if one assumes they would have been sources of great embarrassment to him, how does one explain the fact that he did not simply send them away as young children (as he allegedly did with Tom Woodson as soon as the scandal broke). If he did not care about them and viewed them as sources of embarrassment, why did he free them in his will? The most likely answer is that we will never know the full truth, but the revisionist interpretation (linking Jefferson and Sally Hemings romantically) is very difficult to reconcile with the realities of his behavior. On the other hand, if we assume that Sally and her children were simply descendants of Betty Hemings, their treatment makes total sense.
In two volumes of more than 1400 pages of Jefferson’s Memorandum Books, containing more than fifty years of brief notations and financial records—including numerous references to each of the more popular Hemings family members (see Figure 7 on the next page)—there is but a single entry pertaining to Madison or Eston Hemings. On December 11, 1824, Jefferson made a notation that he “Pd. Madison and Eston for 100. Cabbages 2.D.”32 That was exactly the price he paid Israel Gillette (another Monticello slave who is seldom mentioned in Jefferson’s records33) for the same quantity of cabbages on November 10, 1822; but less than a month later Israel was able to extract three cents per head of cabbage from the Monticello sage—a fifty percent increase over the two cents a head price Jefferson paid earlier to Israel and later to his alleged “sons,” Madison and Eston.
Figure 7.
Numbers of References to Members of the Hemings’ Family in Thomas Jefferson’s Memorandum Books
Notes: Sally’s daughters Harriet I and II are not mentioned at all. Eldest son Beverly is mentioned once (April 19, 1814: “Beverly ferrge. To Poplar forest .25—pd. for fish .75—for 6 do. 2.50.).
The Real Explanation for “Special Treatment”
The greatest fallacy in the “special treatment” argument is that it ignores the real connection that fully explains Jefferson’s behavior. Long before Sally sailed for Paris or began producing children, Thomas Jefferson was showing favorable treatment to slaves at Monticello named Hemings. The reason Madison and Eston Hemings were freed in Thomas Jefferson’s will is presumably the same reason Jefferson freed Sally’s brother, John,34 and sons of her sisters Mary35 and Bett36—not to mention having freed Sally’s brothers Robert and James nearly three decades earlier. He believed they could succeed on their own because of their skills and light skin tone.
It is worth noting that, of the five Hemings men freed pursuant to the March 27, 1826, codicil to Jefferson’s will, Sally’s sons received by far the least favorable treatment. The relevant provisions of the codicil stated:
I give to my good, affectionate, and faithful servant Burwell his freedom, and the sum of three hundred Dollars to buy necessaries to commence his trade of painter and glazier, or to use otherwise as he pleases. I give also to my good servants John Hemings and Joe Fosset, their freedom at the end of one year after my death: and to each of them respectively all the tools of their respective shops or callings: and it is my will that a comfortable log-house be built for each of the three servants so emancipated on some part of my lands convenient to them with respect to the residence of their wives, and to Charlottesville and the University, where they will be mostly employed, and reasonably convenient also to the interests of the proprietor of the lands; of which houses I give the use of one, with a curtilage of an acre to each, during his life or personal occupation thereof.
I give also to John Hemings the service of his two apprentices, Madison and Eston Hemings, until their respective ages of twenty one years, at which period respectively, I give them their freedom.37
It might be worth noting that the reason Jefferson did not free more of his slaves in his will is that Virginia law at the time would have effectively prevented it. Although Section 53 of the Revised Code of Virginia of 1819 did expressly permit slaveholders to “emancipate and set free his or her slaves” in their last will and testament, Section 54 added “[t]hat all slaves so emancipated shall be liable to be taken by execution, to satisfy any debt contracted by the person emancipating them, before such emancipation is made.”38 Thomas Jefferson died with debts exceeding $100,000, and—while, out of respect for the great patriot, his creditors permitted the emancipation of the five men named in his will—had Jefferson attempted further to alienate this “chattel property” (as slaves sadly were considered at the time) they would certainly have protected their financial interests.
Professor Gordon-Reed—after noting that Beverly and Harriet Hemings had already “left Monticello,” leaving behind Madison and Eston—asserts: “Both of these young men were freed by Thomas Jefferson’s will of March 1826, the only public example of Jefferson’s preferential treatment of any of the Hemings children.”39 On the contrary, the facts clearly demonstrate that “preferential treatment” was the norm with the children and grandchildren of Betty Hemings at Monticello. Professor Winthrop Jordan, in his National Book Award-winning masterpiece, White Over Black, notes that the “entire [Betty] Hemings family seems to have received favorable treatment.”40
In an appendix to the fourth volume of his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Jefferson, Dumas Malone—widely regarded as the preeminent Jefferson scholar of all times—addressed what he termed “The Miscegenation Legend”:
Any special favors the Master may have shown the artisans—including Betty’s son John Hemings and her grandsons Joe Fosset and Burwell—may be attributed to their recognized merit; and when Jefferson provided in his will for their emancipation, he had reason to believe they could maintain themselves as freemen by their skills.
More talk was occasioned by Jefferson’s continuing solicitude for other descendants of Betty Hemings whose color was light enough to be remarked upon. The particular reference is to the six youngest of the children she brought to Monticello, of whom Sally was the last. Two of her sons in this group, Bob and James, were freed by their master in the 1790’s, apparently without exciting any special comment. This action of Jefferson’s met another test: he was confident at the time that as freedmen they could take care of themselves. Betty’s daughter Thenia was sold to James Monroe, who could be expected to be kind to her. Two others, Critta and Sally, remained at Monticello as household servants and were apparently treated with indulgence, but this was the rule rather than the exception there. …In his will, Jefferson provided for the emancipation of Sally’s sons Madison and Eston when they should reach the age of twenty-one. …This action, again, was in line with the policy Jefferson followed with respect to other men slaves he freed.
A rational explanation can be given for his actions in all these cases, but his concern, in life and death, for the descendants of Betty Hemings could hardly have failed to excite some local comment and thus to have laid some foundation, albeit unsubstantial, for the legend that arose and grew.41
The fallacy that Sally Hemings’ children were given preferential treatment in comparison to other descendants of Betty Hemings at Monticello becomes evident when one examines how her male descendants were treated at the time of Jefferson’s death. Betty Hemings had five sons and sixteen known grandsons (including Madison and Eston) when Thomas Jefferson died in 1826. But only seven of these twenty-one males are believed to have still been Thomas Jefferson’s property. (See Figure 8 on the next page.) Five of those were formally freed in his will, and the remaining two are known to have achieved their freedom within a year or two:
Figure 8. Sons and Grandsons of Betty Hemings Manumitted by Thomas
Jefferson or Known to Have Been at Monticello at the Time of His Death
Boldface type indicates those who were manumitted by Thomas Jefferson
during his life or in his will.
Sally’s sister Mary gave birth to three boys, only one of whom, Joe Fossett, was known to have been present at Monticello at the time of Jefferson’s death, and he was freed in Jefferson’s will.42
Sally’s brother Martin had no known children and apparently died by 1807.43
Sally’s sister Bett (aka “Betty Brown”) had two sons who were known to have lived at Monticello until 1826.44 One of these was Burwell Colbert, Jefferson’s most trusted servant,45 who was born in 178346 and was to be immediately freed in Jefferson’s will and given the most preferable treatment of the five Hemings males who were freed at that time. The other, Wormley Hughes, a gardener, was not freed in Jefferson’s will—but was freed soon thereafter. He will be discussed below.47
Sally’s sister Nance had one son, Billy, who appears to have died in the 1790s.
Sally’s brother Robert was manumitted by Thomas Jefferson in 1794.48
Sally’s brother James was manumitted by Thomas Jefferson in 1796.49
Sally’s sister Thenia was sold to James Monroe in 1794.
Sally’s sister Critta had a son, Jamey, who ran away in 1804.
Sally’s brother Peter reportedly had a wife and five children, but no details (names, gender, etc.) are known. By 1830, he was listed as a free man living in Charlottesville. It appears that Peter Hemings was sold at auction following Thomas Jefferson’s death for one dollar to his nephew, Mary Hemings’ son Daniel, who then gave him his freedom.50 Whether the Jeffersons knew this was going to happen is unknown.
Sally’s brother John was freed in Thomas Jefferson’s will. There is no information in the surviving records about whether or not he had male children.
Sally’s sister Lucy died in 1786 at the
age of nine.
Thus, of the seven sons and grandsons of Betty Hemings known to have been at Monticello at the time of Thomas Jefferson’s death, five (more than seventy percent) were freed. In addition, two of Betty Hemings’ other male descendants had been legally manumitted in the 1790s—bringing the total percentage freed to 78 percent. Being included within this group was thus not particularly remarkable, and it is even less “special” when we realize that of the seven Hemings males legally manumitted by Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings’ sons Madison and Eston received by far the least favorable treatment.
Among Sally Hemings and her siblings, Thomas Jefferson freed all of Mary and Sally’s male children and all but one of Bett’s. Of the seven remaining male descendants of Betty Hemings still at Monticello when Jefferson died, Sally’s sons ranked fourth and fifth—slightly below average—in terms of favorable treatment.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 26