On August 13, 1800, Jefferson wrote to Uriah McGregory of Connecticut. Referring to “the fatherless calumnies…which no man will affirm on his own knowledge, or ever saw one who would,” Jefferson wrote:
From the moment that a portion of my fellow-citizens looked towards me with a view to one of their highest offices, the floodgates of calumny have been opened upon me; not where I am personally known, where their slanders would be instantly judged and suppressed, from a general sense of their falsehood; but in the remote parts of the Union, where the means of detection are not at hand, and the trouble of an inquiry is greater than would suit the hearers to undertake. I know that I might have filled the courts of the United States with actions for these slanders, and have ruined, perhaps, many persons who are not innocent. But this would be no equivalent to the loss of character. I leave them, therefore, to the reproof of their own consciences. If these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day when the false witness will meet a Judge who had not slept over his slanders.57
However, with respect to the charges involving Sally Hemings, Jefferson did deny them privately, and most Jefferson scholars58—including some who now believe the allegations that he fathered children by Sally Hemings59—have acknowledged this.60 The July 1804 letter to Philip Mazzei appears to be one such denial, but there was another the following year that was far less ambiguous.
Consider the facts. Professor Brodie tells us:
The publicity [over the Callender charges] Jefferson hoped was buried surfaced again in 1805, when the New England Palladium dragged up all the old charges, saying that Jefferson was “a coward, a calumniator, a plagiarist, a tame, spiritless animal,” a man who had “taken to his bosom a sable damsel,” and had “assaulted the domestic happiness of Mrs. W_____.” …A Virginian named Thomas Turner added to the fires by restating all the old charges in the Boston Repertory of May 31, 1805.61
There appears to be little information about this “Thomas Turner,” the byline used when Callender’s old charges were repeated in 1805. Thomas Paine then came to Jefferson’s defense, in the process asking “if any body knows him” [Turner], and adding: “Who he is the Lord knows, for his name is not known in the list of patriots.”62
On July 1, 1805, President Jefferson wrote Navy Secretary Robert Smith a cover letter (see Figure 10 on the next page) attaching a longer letter sent to Attorney General Levi Lincoln. The Lincoln letter has not been found, but in the cover letter Jefferson wrote: “You will perceive that I plead guilty to one of their [Federalist] charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady [Elizabeth Walker]. I acknolege [sic] its incorrectness. [I]t is the only one founded in truth among all their allegations against me.”63
Professor Gordon-Reed provides this commentary on Jefferson’s denial:
It was Brodie’s position that because Jefferson wrote the letter to Lincoln and Smith to provide satisfaction to John Walker, he would have had no reason to bring up the Sally Hemings charge, for it had nothing to do with that dispute. In addition because Walker and the other individuals who had taken up his cause had made multiple allegations of bad acts on the part of Jefferson in his dealings with the Walkers, Brodie believed that Jefferson’s reference to “all their allegations against me” was not clearly a denial of a liaison with Hemings. …If Jefferson wrote the letter as a way of giving John Walker satisfaction, why would he take the opportunity to raise an issue beyond the scope of their dispute in a letter that already must have been galling for him to have to write?64
Had the Hemings issue not just resurfaced, there might be some merit to this reasoning. Jefferson was writing to provide satisfaction to the husband of a woman toward whom he had behaved poorly decades earlier, and there was certainly no obligation on his part to address the Callender charges. But he clearly elected to do so. Saying “the allegations that have been made against me are false” might have been ambiguous. In the wake of the revival of the Callender charges concerning Sally Hemings, saying that the Walker incident “is the only one founded in truth among all their allegations against me”65 is not. Jefferson may, of course, have been lying. But he clearly was denying the charges concerning Sally Hemings. This point is conceded by Professor Ellis.66
Figure 10. 1805 Letter from President Jefferson to Navy Secretary Robert Smith denying all but one of the Federalist charges against him. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Nor, for that matter, is this Jefferson’s only denial of the Callender charges. Writing through the “safe channel”67 of a hand-carried letter to Robert Livingston in Paris, Jefferson discussed the Callender charges a few weeks after they first surfaced in 1802:
You will have seen by our newspapers, that with the aid of a lying renegade from republicanism, the federalists have opened all their sluices of calumny. They say we lied them out of power, and openly avow they will do the same by us. But it was not lies or arguments on our part which dethroned them, but their own foolish acts, sedition laws, alien laws, taxes, extravagances and heresies. Porcupine, their friend, wrote them down. Callendar [sic], their new recruit, will do the same. Every decent man among them revolts at his filth. …68
Two weeks later, Jefferson said of the Federalists in a letter to Attorney General Lincoln:
Their bitterness increases with their desperation. They are trying slanders now which nothing could prompt but a gall which blinds their judgments as well as their consciences. I shall take no other revenge, than, by a steady pursuit of economy and peace, and by the establishment of republican principles in substance and in form, to sink federalism into an abyss from which there shall be no resurrection for it.69
Perhaps the greatest of all Jefferson scholars, the late Dumas Malone, summed up Jefferson’s response to the Callender charges and provided his own assessment of their veracity:
The obscenity and vulgarity of these extracts, from Callender and others, serve to illustrate the low taste of the journalism of the era, but in our time the pertinent question is whether there was any validity whatever in the tale he told. A trifold answer can be given to this. (1) The charges are suspect in the first place because they issued from the vengeful pen of an unscrupulous man and were promulgated in a spirit of bitter partisanship. (2) They cannot be proved and certain of the alleged facts were obviously erroneous. (3) They are distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards and habitual conduct. To say this is not to claim that he was a plaster saint and incapable of moral lapses. But his major weaknesses were not of this sort; and while he might have occasionally fallen from grace, as so many men have done so often, it is virtually inconceivable that this fastidious gentleman whose devotion to his dead wife’s memory and to the happiness of his daughters and grandchildren bordered on the excessive could have carried on through a period of years a vulgar liaison which his own family could not have failed to detect. It would be as absurd as to charge this consistently temperate man with being, through a long period, a secret drunkard.
He himself said, after his retirement, that he never wished slanders of him by political enemies to be answered by anything but the tenor of his life. “I should have fancied myself half guilty,” he said, “had I condescended to put pen to paper in refutation of their falsehoods, or drawn to them respect by any notice from myself.” This was nearly always his policy with respect to attacks on his public conduct, and it appears to have been almost invariable in matters that he regarded as strictly private. He ignored attacks on his religion and morals, relying on the good sense of the public and believing that his assailants would defeat their ends by their own excesses.70
The internal quotation is from a letter to Dr. George Logan dated June 20, 1816, in which Jefferson also asserted that, “the man who fears no truths has nothing to fear from lies.”71 During his own lifetime, Jefferson’s strategy of letting his reputation respond to his critics seemed to work. As Professors Lander and Ellis note: “Nor
did the scandal affect Jefferson’s popularity. He won the 1804 election by a landslide. … ”72
Ohio Census, Rumors, and Newspaper Allegations
The Monticello Report also seeks to find “evidence” that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Madison and Eston Hemings (as well as Thomas Woodson) in a series of newspaper articles and a note by an Ohio census taker. Thus, on pages five and six of Appendix F to the Monticello Report, we read:
1840. Thomas C. Woodson was described in a newspaper as “the son of his master” (The Colored American, 31 Oct. 1840).
1870. Madison Hemings was described as Jefferson’s son by an Ohio census taker (U.S. Census, Ross County, Ohio, 1870).
1887 and 1902 recollections. Citizens of Chillicothe, Ohio, recalled that Eston Hemings resembled Jefferson and was reported to be his son. …
1908. A letter to the editor by a private citizen from Milwaukee on the death of Beverly Jefferson, son of Eston Hemings Jefferson, described him as “a grandson of President Thomas Jefferson” (Chicago Tribune, Nov. 1908).
1916. Thomas Wesley Woodson was described as the great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson in the Centennial Encyclopedia of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1916).73
The probative value of any of this is not readily apparent. We know from Dr. Foster’s extensive DNA testing of the Woodson family that Thomas Jefferson could not have been the father of Thomas Woodson (which in turn precludes his being the great-grandfather of any of Woodson’s descendants).74 The census taker was obviously not engaged in paternity testing, but presumably merely recorded the assertion of Madison Hemings, whose claim was voiced in greater detail three years later and has been addressed in Chapter Four. The Callender charges were well publicized, and could easily have accounted for both the “rumors” in Ohio and the reference to Thomas Jefferson in the 1908 letter to the editor. We can speculate at length about how each of these stories might have come about,75 but the relevant point is that there is no suggestion that any of the statements were founded on a serious investigation of, or direct knowledge of, the facts. Such accounts are no more probative of the truth than would be a collection of names of people with no personal knowledge of the facts who, after reading James Callender’s 1802 allegations, reported that they “believed” Thomas Jefferson had fathered children by a slave named “Sally.”
Thomas Jefferson as Music Teacher to His Slaves
Professor Gordon-Reed asserts: “The records show that all three of Hemings’s sons played the same instrument associated with Thomas Jefferson, the violin.”76 From this, she reasons: “This raises the possibility that Jefferson may have stimulated their interest in the violin, given them their instruments, and provided lessons or taught them himself.”77 Speculation in the total absence of facts may be fun. Since many Monticello slaves played the fiddle, the same reasoning could be used to suggest that someone other than Thomas Jefferson must have written the Declaration of Independence, as Jefferson himself would have been far too busy fathering illegitimate children and then teaching them to play the fiddle, perhaps taking odd jobs to earn enough money to provide them with scores of musical instruments. (Then again, this might help explain his tremendous debt throughout his life.)
If one ventures back to reality for a moment, a major shortcoming in the “violin proof” surfaces. In his 2000 study, Thomas Jefferson: Musician & Violinist, Sandor Salgo, Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Stanford University, notes that in September 1786, Thomas Jefferson’s ability to play the violin “was devastated by a crippling compound fracture of his right wrist,” which “more or less permanently disabled his right wrist. … ”78 After consultation with a violinist who was also a physician, Professor Salgo concludes that Jefferson probably “suffered significant discomfort from this injury for the rest of his life,” and “had a much-restricted range of motion that almost certainly attenuated performance on his beloved instrument.”79 This injury occurred more than a decade before Sally’s sons who would eventually play the violin were even born, and subsequently Thomas Jefferson did not often play his beloved violin.80
One need not totally abandon Professor Gordon-Reed’s creative speculation. Perhaps it was Uncle Randolph, and not the President, who taught his (Randolph’s) sons Beverly, Madison, and Eston to play the violin—as we know that Randolph was instructed by the same man (Francis Alberti) who taught his better known elder brother to play the instrument, and Randolph was known to have been fond of playing his fiddle among Monticello slaves.81 Such farfetched, speculative arguments are not entitled to serious consideration, as there were many Monticello slaves as well as European craftsmen who might have taught Sally’s children. Nor is the assertion that Thomas Jefferson and Eston Hemings each played the same piece of music probative of very much.82
Did Jefferson “Train” Sally’s Children to Marry Whites?
Also in the “farfetched” category is Professor Gordon-Reed’s suggestion that Thomas Jefferson may have trained Sally Hemings’ children so that they would be able to marry white partners when they became adults:
There is a lockstep quality to the progression of Hemings’s sons through childhood that suggests that Jefferson singled them out for a particular reason. …
Beverly and Harriet, Hemings’s two oldest children, passed for white and married white people. The youngest married a black woman who was white enough to pass for white and, at a later point in life, changed his racial designation. Madison Hemings described the families that his two older siblings married into as being “in good standing,” and “in good circumstances.” Hemings was not necessarily saying that these families were rich or prominent, but clearly he meant that they were respectable people. The Hemings children’s ability to deal with white spouses and in-laws suggests that they may have been prepared as young people to take on this role.83
If a Caucasian scholar had suggested that it was inconceivable that a former slave could marry a “respectable” white person without special, life-long training, they would most likely have difficulty finding employment in today’s academic community. In addition to being offensive, the paragraph ignores the reality that, as Monticello house slaves, Sally’s children would have had considerable exposure to the behavior of “respectable” white people day after day as friends and visitors journeyed to Monticello to experience the company of Thomas Jefferson. Finally, the suggestion that Sally’s children were given such personal attention was expressly denied in the report attributed to Madison Hemings.84
In fairness to Professor Gordon-Reed, her bizarre arguments are often mirrored and even exceeded by Professor Brodie. For example, on page 435 of her book, Brodie quotes Madison Hemings’ statement that Beverly married a white woman whose family “were people of good circumstances” and then adds: “All of which suggests that Beverly had schooling along with Jefferson’s white grandchildren as well as training as a carpenter, and that he may also have had financial aid.”85
The Alleged “Closeness” of Sally’s Children
In an effort to prove that Sally Hemings was monogamous, the Monticello Report says: “Full-sibling relationships are further supported by the closeness of the family, as evidenced by documentation of siblings living together and naming children after each other.”86 One might, for convenience, group with this argument the assertion by Professor Gordon-Reed that both Sally Hemings and her son Madison named their children after Thomas Jefferson’s relatives.87
Since Cain and Abel, history is replete with examples of siblings who did not get along; and anyone with significant experience with broken homes knows of cases where the bonds of half-siblings equal or even exceed those of the children of more traditional families. For that matter, there is no evidence that Sally Hemings’ children would have known with any certainty their full biological relationships. I am personally familiar with examples where children live for many years in a family without realizing that an older brother or sister had a different father.
Even if the underlying assumptions behind
this argument were correct—that full siblings are more likely to bond closely than children with different fathers—there are serious questions about the alleged “closeness” of Sally Hemings’ children. We know very little about them, just as we know almost nothing about Sally Hemings. But certainly Madison Hemings’ 1873 account does not suggest unusual “closeness” among the Hemings children. As his recollections were reported by the newspaper editor who printed them, he had not had any contact with sister Harriet in ten years, he did not seem to know with certainty whether his brother Beverly was dead or alive, and he did not even seem to know quite when brother Eston had died.88
Nor, for that matter, is the choice of names for children very probative of issues of paternity. For example, my own seventeen-year-old son is named “Thomas”—specifically in honor of Thomas Jefferson—but neither he nor I would pretend that this makes him a direct descendant of our third President.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 34