I am indebted to former Monticello Resident Director James Bear for a copy of an undated letter from Martha Randolph to her daughter Ellen—believed to have been written during the latter half of 1826, a few months after the death of her famous father—in which she discusses her father’s character and concludes:
[I]n the course of my life I can not call to mind one solitary action that I would censure. …What can I say my Dear Ellen that have so long basked in the sun shine of his affections, and been the witness to his private virtue, that will not look like partiality? But if I speak at all I must speak the truth, and so doing can utter nothing but praise.33
Jefferson’s secretary William Short, who lived with him in Paris, perceived some jealousy on Patsy’s (Martha’s) part towards both Maria Cosway and Angelica Church, two of her father’s lady friends in Paris.34 Would she not have felt even more displeasure had she learned that he was sexually involved with a servant younger than herself? Would she have repeatedly brought her children to Monticello if she believed this alleged relationship was going on? To accept the story, we have to discard not only much of what we think we know about Thomas Jefferson’s character,35 but that of Martha Jefferson Randolph as well.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, and
the Carr Brothers
We have other statements attributed to Jeff Randolph that support Thomas Jefferson’s innocence—at least with respect to some of Sally Hemings’ children.36 For example, in this same 1868 letter to James Parton, we find this account by Henry Randall:
Colonel Randolph said that a visitor at Monticello dropped a newspaper from his pocket or accidentally left it. After he was gone, he (Colonel Randolph) opened the paper and found some very insulting remarks about Mr. Jefferson’s mulatto children. The Colonel said he felt provoked. Peter and Samuel Carr were lying not far off under a shade tree. He took the paper and put it in Peter’s hands, pointing out the article. Peter read it, tears coursing down his cheeks, and then handed it to Samuel. Samuel also shed tears. Peter exclaimed “Ar’nt you and I a couple of ______ pretty fellows to bring this disgrace on poor old uncle who has always fed us! We ought to be ________, by _______.”37
Again, this is multiple hearsay, but Jeff Randolph’s account does not read like a typical “coverup.” Indeed, he is perhaps the primary source for one of the three strongest arguments usually made by revisionist scholars, that at least some of Sally Hemings’ children bore a physical resemblance to the President. Consider Randall’s account:
Walking about mouldering Monticello one day with Col. T. J. Randolph (Mr. Jefferson’s oldest grandson) he showed me a smoke blackened and sooty room in one of the colon[n]ades, and informed me it was Sally Hemings’ room. He asked me if I knew how the story of Mr. Jefferson’s connection with her originated. I told him I did not. “There was a better excuse for it,[”] said he, [“]than you might think; she had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.” He said in one case the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might have been mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.38
This does not sound like the opening statement of Thomas Jefferson’s lawyer in a paternity case, and other than James Callender’s allegation that the slave child “Tom” resembled the President, there is little reason to believe that Jeff Randolph would have expected his audience to be aware of this physical resemblance. It is the kind of “admission against interest” that tends to make testimony credible, although clever liars sometimes include such statements to precisely that end.
Furthermore, the assertion that Jeff Randolph claimed that the Carr brothers had admitted paternity of at least some of Sally’s children finds corroboration in a letter written by his sister, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, to her husband, Joseph, on October 24, 1858. The primary purpose of the letter (already discussed in my Introduction and Chapter Two) was to give her husband information on the subject to pass on to a Mr. Bulfinch. It was in this letter that she enumerated various reasons why the Callender charges could not be true, including the assertion that no female domestic servant was ever allowed in Jefferson’s room when he was present, and none could have gone there without being visible to others in the house. This was one of the sentences that was altered in Professor Gordon-Reed’s appendix with the result that its meaning was materially changed.39
Among the other arguments Ellen makes in the letter, which was first made public in full by Dumas Malone in 1974,40 are these:
The house at Monticello was a long time in building and was principally built by Irish workmen. These men were known to have had children of whom the mothers were black women. But these women were much better pleased to have it supposed that such children were their master’s. …There were dissipated young men in the neighborhood who sought the society of the mulattresses and they in like manner were not anxious to establish any claim of paternity in the results of such associations.
One woman known to Mr. J. Q. Adams and others as “dusky Sally” was pretty notoriously the mistress of a married man, a near relation of Mr. Jefferson’s, and there can be small question that her children were his.41
After several pages of such arguments clearly designed to be shared with others, Ellen added the following comment, on a separate page, apparently intending that it not be communicated further:
I have written thus far thinking you might chuse [sic] to communicate my letter to Mr. Bulfinch. Now I will tell you in confidence what Jefferson [her brother Thomas Jefferson Randolph] told me under the like condition. Mr. Southall and himself young men together, heard Mr. Peter Carr say with a laugh, that “the old gentleman has to bear the blame for his and Sam’s (Col. Carr) misdeeds.”
There is a general impression that the four children of Sally Hemmings [sic] were all the children of Col. Carr, the most notorious good-natured Turk that every was master of a black seraglio kept at other men’s expense. …42
The “like condition” in the second sentence presumably meant that the information was not to be communicated further. It was a confidential exchange between Ellen and her husband. And while the 1998 DNA tests clearly established that Samuel Carr was not the father of Sally’s youngest child, Eston, they tell us nothing about his possible paternity of Beverly, either of the Harriets, or Madison (or Thenia if she was in fact Sally Hemings’ child).
Of the Jefferson/Randolph family members, I have found Ellen to be among the most candid and credible in her comments. Professor Brodie notes that Margaret Bayard Smith described Ellen Randolph as “one of the finest and most intelligent children I have ever met”43; and of all of his children and grandchildren Ellen was probably the most intellectual.44 She clearly loved her grandfather dearly, but she was willing to disclose “family secrets,” including weaknesses of her own father.45 This document has additional credibility because she was communicating to her own husband in the apparent expectation that he would keep the information confidential. So I am inclined to believe her account that Jeff Randolph told her this story; but, of course, that does not establish that her brother was telling the truth. We have two generally credible sources asserting that, on separate occasions, Jeff Randolph alleged that Peter Carr confessed that he and his brother Sam had fathered children by Sally Hemings. But note in one instance Jeff reportedly said Peter laughed and in the other that he cried during the confession.
There is another account attributed to Jeff Randolph that warrants our attention. In his 1868 letter to Parton, Henry Randall writes:
I asked Col. [Jeff] Randolph why on earth Mr. Jefferson did [not46] put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight by sending them to his Befond [sic—Bedford] estate or elsewhere,—He said Mr. Jefferson never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance—and although he (Col. Randolph) had no doubt his mother would have been very glad to have them thus removed, that both and all venerated Mr. Jefferson too deeply to broach such a
topic to him. What suited him, satisfied them. Mr. Jefferson was deeply attached to the Carrs—especially to Peter. He was extremely indulgent to them and the idea of watching them for faults or vices probably never occurred to him.
Do you ask why I did not state, or at least hint the above facts in my Life of Jefferson? I wanted to do so. But Colonel Randolph, in this solitary case alone, prohibited me from using at my discretion the information he furnished me with. When I rather pressed him on the point, he said, pointing to the family graveyard, “You are not bound to prove a negation. If I should allow you to take Peter Carr’s corpse into Court and plead guilty over it to shelter Mr. Jefferson, I should not dare again to walk by his grave: he would rise and spurn me.”47
So what are we to make of such “evidence”? Two respectable sources independently report that Jeff Randolph told them that one or both of the Carr brothers had confessed to fathering children by Sally Hemings, and both assert he pledged them to secrecy on the matter. We can easily understand why Jeff Randolph might fabricate such a story to protect his grandfather’s reputation, but would he tell such a lie to his sister? Perhaps, but if he was prepared to deceive her why would he bar her from recounting the story to mislead people he presumably cared less about and who might have been able to use it to defend his grandfather’s reputation?
Randall certainly could have fabricated his account, but had he been so inclined there is the question of why he did not include this information in his three-volume Life of Thomas Jefferson instead of in a private letter to a professional colleague? He told Parton that he had clearly made the correct decision in honoring Randolph’s demand for secrecy, arguing that Jefferson’s reputation did not need to be defended on this point. Implicit in this may be that Randall did not expect Parton to publish his letter, although that is not absolutely clear.
If Jefferson Randolph fabricated both stories about the Carr brothers admitting paternity for the purpose of defending his grandfather’s reputation among the public, he behaved rather bizarrely in demanding that the information be kept confidential. Further, his apparent desire to protect the reputation of the Carr brothers (or at least someone) was manifested again in his letter to the Pike County Republican responding to the allegations of Israel Jefferson. It certainly would have been more persuasive to say “Samuel and Peter Carr admitted they were the fathers of Sally Hemings’ children” than to write, as he did, that “To my own knowledge and that of others 60 years ago the paternity of these parties were admitted by others.”48 Even the reference to “others” knowing the truth is consistent with Ellen Coolidge’s statement made more than fifteen years earlier that Jeff told her a Mr. Southall had also overheard the Carr confessions.
We cannot conclude with certainty that any of this is true. But the pieces “fit together” well; Jeff Randolph, while perhaps not a man of the highest intellect, does generally appear to have been an honorable man.49 Furthermore, for the story to be a complete fabrication would require a conspiracy involving several apparently honorable people. Certainly the simplest explanation is that the Carr brothers (or perhaps only Peter, with Samuel remaining quiet) did confess to the belief50 that they had fathered one or more of Sally Hemings’ children.
Peter Carr was born on January 2, 1770, and thus was at least three years older than Sally Hemings. He began a Charlottesville law practice in 1793, and in 1801 began serving in the state legislature and simultaneously as an Albemarle magistrate. He appears to have been in Albemarle County and at least near Monticello around the conception periods for Harriet I, Beverly, Harriet II, Madison, and Eston Hemings (although DNA tests have established he could not have fathered Eston). However, we cannot place him at Monticello with certainty during these entire periods.51 Visits by Jefferson’s favorite nephews were presumably common enough so as not to warrant recording in most settings.
Samuel Carr was born October 9, 1771, and was largely raised by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. He settled in the Charlottesville area permanently in mid-1802, and is known to have been in the vicinity of Monticello about the time Harriet I and Eston were conceived.52 We have no information about his location when Sally Hemings’ other children were conceived. There are reports that he fathered children by a “mulatto concubine who lived next door to him” whose descendants are recognized as relatives by white descendants of Samuel Carr.53 We can neither prove he was present nor rule him out as a suspect with respect to any child but Eston, who Dr. Foster’s DNA tests proved could not have been fathered by a Carr.
Thomas Mann Randolph and the Rest of the Family
The Monticello Report asserts that “Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph and two of her children denied the story to friends and family members.”54 The record strongly suggests that none of the Jefferson family members believed the charges. Thus, granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge stated and pointedly asked:
[Thomas Jefferson] had a large family of grandchildren of all ages, older & younger. Young men and young girls. He lived, whenever he was at Monticello, and entirely for the last seventeen years of his life, in the midst of these young people, surrounded by them, his intercourse with them of the freest and most affectionate kind. How comes it that his immoralities were never suspected by his own family—that his daughter and her children rejected with horror and contempt the charges brought against him[?]55
We cannot know for certain that this statement is true, but there is not the slightest bit of evidence to contradict it. And if any of the grandchildren had believed the paternity story and mentioned that belief to others, it would seem to be significant enough news to have been recorded in some manner. Given Ellen Coolidge’s remarkable candor in admitting family “secrets,”56 I am inclined to believe her on this point.
Governor Thomas Mann Randolph,57 Thomas Jefferson’s son-in-law and husband to Martha, was a frequent presence at Monticello and thus, inevitably, an eyewitness to much that was going on. He has been largely ignored during this debate, but he did write at least one letter making it clear that he did not believe the allegations involving Sally Hemings against his father-in-law. About four months after Callender’s original charge, in a December 24, 1802, letter to his attorney, he wrote:
As I could not be with you to read to you what I had written I leave it for you. My conversation with gentlemen here has made me think lighter of those infamous stories than I did: Therefore, I have not sent it to the gazette as I intended: it being necessary to put my name to a paragraph such as it would be. I had no thought of any thing but demanding a certificate from Callender that I was not one he could prove believed the story until I spoke to you the day Mr. Hay beat him, which occurrence prevented for obvious reasons my going to him. Adieu.58
This note also challenges the popular allegation that “everyone” believed the Callender stories. Although it is somewhat ambiguous, Randolph seems to be referring to having concluded the charges were not doing serious harm to the President’s reputation after talking with various “gentlemen” in Charlottesville or perhaps Richmond.
The Assessment of Sally Hemings by Abigail Adams
and Andrew Ramsay
There is a remarkable difference between the “Sally Hemings” envisioned by Professors Brodie and Gordon-Reed—and still further embellished by Hollywood—and the only existing eyewitness accounts of her talents. Since there are no surviving descriptions of Sally’s behavior in Paris, perhaps it is not surprising that both scholars and Hollywood writers have felt free to speculate and even fantasize about what her life might have been like. From Isaac Jefferson’s account that Sally was “handsome,”59 and Jeff Randolph’s comment that she and her niece Betsy were “decidedly good looking,” Sally is presented to us as a sophisticated temptress likely to turn the head of any virile male. American Heritage senior editor and author E. M. Halliday—a great admirer of Fawn Brodie—goes so far as to assure us that as a young teen Sally had “well-developed breasts.”60
Conceivably some of this is true, but there
is no basis for such speculation save from the pens of James Callender and Federalist editors who had never set eyes on the woman. The only eyewitness accounts we have about Sally Hemings beyond references to her “handsome” good looks came from the summer of 1787, when she was a child of thirteen or fourteen years.61 The source for both observations—one repeated as hearsay—was the highly intelligent62 and perceptive Abigail Adams, wife of the U.S. minister to Great Britain and later President, John Adams. Her first testimony simply relayed the observations of Captain Andrew Ramsay, on whose ship Maria (Polly) Jefferson and Sally Hemings had spent five weeks en route to London. We know little of Captain Ramsay beyond that Thomas Jefferson and Abigail Adams both seemed highly impressed with him and little Polly became so attached to him during the voyage that she had to be tricked into parting with him after arriving in England.63 Professor Brodie tells us that Polly and Sally “must certainly have been treated like special pets, for Polly came to adore the captain. She clung desperately to him upon arrival and had to be decoyed away in order to effect separation.”64 When Abigail Adams tried to calm Polly with a promised trip to Sadler’s Wells, Polly responded “I had rather …see Captain Rams[a]y one moment, than all the fun in the world.”65
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 38