Nevertheless, it is not true that Randolph’s name has never come up in connection with Sally’s children. To begin with, there are oral history accounts of families from the Monticello area asserting that Randolph fathered Sally Hemings’ children. Rebecca Lee McMurry, whose ancestors grew up near Monticello and purchased pieces of china at the “great sale” following Jefferson’s death that have been handed down through the generations, has sworn in an affidavit103 that when Professor Brodie’s book appeared in 1974, she (McMurry) was told by her mother that the “yellow people” at Monticello were the offspring of Randolph Jefferson. This, at least was the oral tradition of her family.
A similar account was reportedly provided by a caller named “Diane” on a February 23, 1999, radio call-in program. “Diane” asserted that she was “skeptical” about the DNA reports, because “my father is an amateur historian who grew up by Monticello, and my father told me right off the bat, that it was not Jefferson, it was his brother.”104
Like all allegations based upon oral tradition, these statements do not come close to conclusively establishing the facts alleged. However, in one sense,105 it can be argued that these accounts may be inherently more reliable than the oral traditions of families who have a vested interest in portraying their own ancestors in a positive light. At any rate, they are not offered here to “prove” that Randolph Jefferson fathered any of Sally Hemings’ children, but to suggest that the allegation is not merely a desperate, last-minute, afterthought effort of Jefferson apologists to mislead the jury.
One of the most interesting discussions of Randolph’s possible paternity is found in a 1958 letter from Pearl Graham to Professor Julian Boyd, at the time the editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson being published at Princeton University. Long before Professor Fawn Brodie’s book was published, Ms. Graham was convinced that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ children; and she had clearly done some serious research on the issue—including, allegedly, interviewing two granddaughters of Harriet Hemings. (Ms. Graham was instrumental in getting the Hemings family to donate a bell to Howard University that was allegedly given by Martha Wayles Jefferson, on her deathbed, to one of the Hemings girls.106) Noting the reported physical resemblance of Hemings’ children to Thomas Jefferson, Graham discussed alternative theories that might explain this result:
Among his paternal relatives, the possibilities could be narrowed down to three,—his brother, Randolph, and two nephews, Samuel and Dabney Carr. A study of the known facts about these three convinced me that, while some one of them might have fathered one of Sally’s children, a liaison advering [sic] well over ten years was not in the realm of possibility,—and Jefferson’s staunchest defenders have never charged that Sally was promiscuous. A further item would seem to eliminate Randolph Jefferson: one of Harriet’s granddaughters had told me that Jefferson’s younger brother “also” had colored children. Had it been the younger, instead of the elder, brother, who was her own ancestor, she would probably have known of some tradition to that effect. Moreover, if ‘Tom’ was not a figment of Callender’s imagination, no one save Jefferson could possibly have been the father.107
I do not know how reliable this information is. At minimum, it clearly shows that Randolph Jefferson was being discussed as a serious alternative to Thomas Jefferson for the paternity of Sally Hemings’ children four decades before the DNA tests were made public, even by a source who was clearly persuaded that the President was the father. It may be noteworthy that Randolph Jefferson was mentioned before two of the three Carr brothers (for some reason Peter Carr was not mentioned), and given a more extensive consideration in the process. One cannot help but note the irony in her suggestion that if [Uncle] Randolph were the father there would probably be “some tradition to that effect.”
It is also unclear to me whether Pearl Graham’s “source” for the allegation that Randolph Jefferson had “colored children” by his own slaves (a woman named “Kenny” who claimed to be a descendant of Sally’s daughter Harriet) was who she claimed to be; but Lucia Stanton of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation informs me that she finds Ms. Graham’s “work on the Hemings descendants in the 1940s” to be “very very interesting,” and concludes that “there seems no reason to doubt the Kenny sisters’ connection somehow with Monticello, and probably to the Hemings family.”108 The charge—attributed to Hemings family descendants—that Randolph Jefferson had “colored children” of his own is noteworthy, as Ms. Graham and the Kenny sisters did seem to have a great deal of information about the matter, and one of their apparent goals was to convince people that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ children. While certainly not “proven,” the allegation that Randolph had “colored children” seems as strong as much if not most of the “evidence” being relied upon by the revisionists. It arguably makes Randolph Jefferson an even stronger candidate for Eston’s paternity.
Monticello’s Lucia Stanton asserts that the Kennys “were raised as part of the Charlottesville African-American community,” and since Madison Hemings alleged that Harriet had settled into a white community, Ms. Graham may have erred in her conclusions about their ancestry. Ms. Stanton concluded this discussion by writing: “[M]y view is that Pearl Graham did some very good work, but sometimes got carried away by her enthusiasms. Her papers at Howard and at Alderman have been of great use to us in our work at Monticello.”109
There is at least one other very interesting pre-DNA-test assertion that Randolph Jefferson might have been the father of Sally Hemings’ children. Writing in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, Professor Gordon-Reed suggested that the truth about Thomas Jefferson would be more likely to emerge from artists than from scholars:
In the end, it will probably be left to novelists, playwrights, and poets, unencumbered by the need for footnotes, to get at the ultimate meaning of this story. That effort, done in the right way, will yield universal truths as important and real as any to be found in history books.110
There is more than a little irony to this comment, as an award-winning playwright and producer in North Carolina addressed this issue in her play Saturday’s Children.111 Professor Karyn Traut (wife of Scholars Commission member Professor Thomas Traut) first became interested in writing a play about “Tom” Jefferson, the slave child made famous by James Callender, after reading and being deeply moved by Professor Fawn Brodie’s 1974 book, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. Assuming the story of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship to be true, she spent seven years researching Jefferson in preparation for writing her play, which was first produced in 1988.112
As she explains in a narrative prepared at my request and (also at my urging) appended to the Individual Views of Professor Thomas Traut that appear later in this volume, Professor Karyn Traut concluded from her research that Professor Brodie had “thrown out the pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit her model. … ”113 She concluded that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of Sally’s children, and found the most likely suspect to be brother Randolph.
I would add only that Professor Traut—a Berkeley-educated transplant from California—is no “conservative” bent on upholding the image of Thomas Jefferson or other dead white males at all costs. She happily confesses to being a “liberal Democrat,” and indeed attributes her ability to revise her initial judgment to her open-minded liberalism. I have not seen her play, but from the script and contemporary press clippings, it was clearly anything but “conservative” in its “four-dimensional” approach. Ms. Traut made use of sculpture, puppetry, and a musical mix combining African drums with harpsichord. One of the two actors portraying Thomas Jefferson was an African-American (which earned playwright Traut recognition in the 1992 Aetna Calendar of Black History).
Again, the point here is not that Karyn Traut’s play was inevitably correct in its conclusions (although it has been praised by historians for its accuracy), but rather to demonstrate that the suggestion that Randolph Jefferson might have fathered one or more of Sa
lly Hemings’ children did not originate in response to the 1998 DNA studies.
Why Randolph Jefferson Is a Good Candidate for Paternity of Eston Hemings
It is not my position that Randolph Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings. We simply do not know who Eston’s father was, and I suspect we never will with any certainty. But several pieces of evidence about Randolph make him highly relevant to our inquiry—and in my view make him a much stronger candidate for the paternity of Eston Hemings than President Thomas Jefferson from among the roughly two dozen other possible candidates.
First, we have the issue of opportunity. Was Randolph near Sally Hemings when Eston was likely conceived? While it is generally assumed that Randolph was a regular visitor to Monticello, such routine visits by close relatives were apparently not thought remarkable enough by Thomas Jefferson to make note of them in his various record books.114 Indeed, throughout his life, although Randolph may well have made the twenty-mile trip to see his brother and other family members at Monticello several times each year,115 there are only four visits actually documented in Thomas Jefferson’s surviving records—each of these because of some business that was transacted in connection with the visit.116 This is not “proof” that Randolph and his family only visited every five or ten years, but rather an indication that his visits were considered so routine as to not be noteworthy.
In part because a fire at his Snowden home destroyed virtually all of Randolph Jefferson’s papers, there are few surviving letters between Randolph and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, for the period 1792 to 1808, during which Sally Hemings conceived all of her known children at Monticello,117 there remain only three letters, all from the year 1807.118 However, one of those letters is ironically of great importance to the present inquiry.
On Wednesday, August 12, 1807, Thomas Jefferson concluded a letter to Randolph (see Figure 11 on the next page) by noting: “Our sister Marks arrived here last night and we shall be happy to see you also.”119 This was a reference to the arrival at Monticello of Randolph’s twin sister, Anna Scott Marks. We know that Randolph was a frequent visitor to Monticello, that he was fond of his twin sister, and also that he tended to be very deferential to his famous brother and to follow his guidance on most matters.120 August was also a good time for him to visit because the fields would have been plowed and the crops would have been planted, but it was not yet harvest time.121
We simply do not have surviving records to know with certainty whether or not Randolph made the trip in August 1807. Indeed, the language “we shall be happy to see you also” is sufficiently ambiguous to be either an invitation to visit or merely notice that his sister had arrived so that an already agreed-upon trip could be made. We do know that Randolph had promised to deliver grass seed to Monticello about this time.122 Given Randolph’s known love for his sister and his established deference to his older brother, in the absence of some reason to assume he did not make the trip, it would seem reasonable to treat the surviving letter as shifting the presumption in favor of such a visit—especially since there is no letter of “regret” informing Thomas Jefferson that for some reason Randolph could not make the short trip.
Let us speculate (in the absence of solid evidence) that it took two days for the letter to make the twenty-mile trip, and Randolph received it around Friday, August 14. Or perhaps it arrived on Monday, August 17. Perhaps Randolph (and, presumably, his family) departed immediately, or perhaps they needed a day or more to prepare for the trip—which took less than a day. Give or take ten days or so each way, it is estimated that Eston Hemings was conceived around August 27 or 28.123 It was common for such visits to last weeks at a time, and thus, if Randolph made the trip, he (and his sons) would likely have been at Monticello during most and perhaps all of the “conception window” for Eston Hemings.
Figure 11. President Jefferson invited his younger brother Randolph to visit Monticello about ten days before the only Hemings child linked by DNA to a Jefferson father was conceived. Randolph and his five sons would have carried the same Y chromosome detected in 1998 DNA tests of a descendant of Eston Hemings, and Randolph was documented by former Monticello slave Isaac Jefferson to have spent his evenings at Monticello dancing “half the night” with his brother’s slaves. See page 228. Reproduced courtesy of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
Does this letter of invitation constitute “proof” that Randolph Jefferson was at Monticello when Eston Hemings was conceived? Certainly not. But Thomas Jefferson’s other surviving letter to Randolph from 1807 expressed the hope of seeing his brother at Monticello during his spring visit,124 and the Monticello Report concedes that similar invitations were presumably extended in previous years.125 In this instance, Randolph had not only the enticement of being able to see his older brother but also his visiting twin sister. Again, given his known fondness for his sister and his propensity to follow his brother’s advice, the existence of the letter ought to create a presumption that Randolph Jefferson probably was at Monticello during at least part of the time when Eston was likely conceived.
The Monticello Report takes a different tack, noting (correctly) that “A search of visitors’ accounts, memorandum books, and Jefferson’s published and unpublished correspondence provided no indication that Randolph did, in fact, come at this time.”126 Of course, relying on this approach would lead us to believe that Thomas Jefferson’s brother, who was clearly both fond of and highly dependent127 upon the President, only made the twenty-mile trip from Snowden to Monticello four times in his entire life.
The Monticello Report adds that the correspondence between the Jefferson brothers “also suggests that Randolph Jefferson may not always have acted on these invitations.”128 That is almost correct. In June of 1810, Randolph explained that “I should of bin over before this but have bin very much put to it to git Iron to make an axiltree to my Gigg and have not got any yet[.]”129 So Randolph clearly was explaining why he had not visited, but it is not at all clear this was in response to a specific invitation he had recently130 received.
In September of 1811, Thomas Jefferson wrote to tell Randolph that their sister Martha, the widow of Dabney Carr and mother of Peter, Samuel, and Dabney, had passed away and had been buried beside her husband.131 The letter made no specific reference to Randolph visiting. A month later, Randolph replied to express his extreme sorrow at the death of their sibling, and added “Would of bin over but it was not raly in My power,” explaining “I have Just Got over a very severe tack of the Gravil”132—presumably referring to kidney stones.133 Here again, this is presumably not really declining an invitation to visit Monticello, but rather a sua sponte explanation of why he had not visited in the recent past.
The final example occurred early in 1812, when, on January 14, Thomas Jefferson wrote to inform Randolph of the demise of their brother-in-law, Hastings Marks, and to let him know that his twin sister, Anna Scott Marks, was now living at Monticello, “but in very low health indeed, and scarcely able to walk about the house.”134 Unlike the 1807 letter referring to their sister, Jefferson made no specific reference to hoping Randolph would soon visit—quite possibly because January was the middle of winter. At any rate, on February 8, Randolph replied:
As soon as the roads gits in good order we Will come over I expect it will be the last of next Month or the first of april, I am Very sorry to hear of My sister Marks low state of health, but hope she Will recover after a little time after the weather Gits a little Warmer, if My health should continue to keep as it is I will endeavour to come over next Month.135
So, in none of these examples did Randolph Jefferson clearly decline a specific invitation from Thomas Jefferson to visit Monticello in the immediate future. More importantly, not a single one of the surviving letters from Randolph Jefferson to his brother even arguably constitutes an “acceptance” of an invitation to visit. True, as Randolph got older, his health was bad, or winter weather made travel difficult, he did mention these things to explain why he had not
recently visited and might not be able to do so for a while longer. This strongly suggests, among other things, that Randolph was normally a regular visitor to Monticello and that he may not have formally “accepted” invitations to visit in writing when he was able to make the trip without significant delay.
Note also Randolph’s use of the plural we in the sentence that includes “we Will come over. … ” This suggests the (already logical) conclusion that when Randolph Jefferson visited Monticello, his normal practice was to bring his family. This is significant, because if he did so at the time Sally Hemings conceived Eston, it would likely have added another four Jefferson males to the scene who, if for no other reason than the fact they were in the prime of their sexuality, must be considered more likely to have fathered a child than the sixty-four-year-old Thomas Jefferson. This will be discussed in a moment.
How should we interpret the lack of a written response from Randolph following Thomas Jefferson’s invitation to visit Monticello of August 12, 1807? Again, there is not a single example of Randolph ever writing when he was coming to Monticello in response to such an invitation.136 There were no telephones, the mails could be slow, and the simplest response to such an invitation would have been to pack up the family and travel to Monticello. However, especially knowing that his sister was there and presumably hoping to see him, there would be far more logic in sending a “regrets” note if he could not make the August 1807 visit. Ultimately, the absence of information in this situation does not “prove” anything—especially since there may once have been a reply that has not been preserved. But the most probable explanation if Randolph did not write is that he packed up the family and traveled to Monticello—probably completing the short trip well before a posted letter would have arrived to announce his intentions.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 40