The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

by Robert F Turner

  the improbable assumptions one must accept in order to conclude that the allegations are true.

  The Missing Evidence that Ought to Exist

  First is the issue of what I call the “silent dogs.” Just as Sherlock Holmes found it “curious” that the stable dog did not bark in the night when a stranger allegedly caused a great commotion, if a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship lasted for decades, as we are asked to believe, we ought to find evidence from at least one of the hundreds if not thousands of visitors who were in a position over the years to observe happenings in Paris and at Monticello. The Callender accusations first published on September 1, 1802, spread quickly around much of the United States and eventually to Europe as well. Surely, many of the visitors to Monticello had heard the charges and would be alert to any evidence of such a relationship. Anyone who had observed suggestive behavior in Paris might also have been prompted by the Callender stories to record it.

  There Is Not a Single Credible Eyewitness Account from Paris or Monticello of a Jefferson-Hemings Sexual Relationship

  University of Alabama Professor Joshua Rothman, a believer in the Jefferson-Hemings story, writes:

  [T]he evidence of racial mixing at Monticello must have been quite obvious, and no matter how discreet he was, Jefferson could not have hidden it from guests. The children of his relationship with Sally Hemings also would be visible to visitors. As a member of the Virginia gentry, Jefferson knew of similar affairs carried out in supposed secrecy and likely understood that he could never hide every clue or quash every rumor.1

  Professor Rothman, who wrote his Ph.D. on race relations in antebellum Virginia, is certainly right. It is extremely unlikely that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings could have carried on a love affair for decades without anyone being suspicious. Both in Paris and when Thomas Jefferson was home at Monticello, he normally was surrounded by visitors. And yet, beyond fantasies about the intended recipient of an inexpensive locket2 and comparable silliness, there is no contemporary evidence from the period 1787 through Jefferson’s death in 1826 recording a single witness alleging having observed so much as a suggestive glance, a passing caress, or even close proximity at an unusual hour, between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.

  Is It Reasonable to Assume that Thomas Jefferson Could Have Carried on a Decades-Long Sexual Relationship with Sally Hemings without Leaving a Single Witness or Piece of Contemporary Evidence?

  Given the circumstances of his life, it is very difficult to reconcile this total absence of such evidence with the allegations of a long-term sexual relationship. Both in Paris and at Monticello, Jefferson was usually surrounded by very intelligent people—many of them virtual strangers, who had no apparent reason to cover up things they might have seen that might otherwise be considered newsworthy gossip—and it is inconceivable that this relationship occurred without a single one of them witnessing a single thing to suggest that it was going on.

  Thomas Jefferson Had Little Privacy in Paris, and Sally Was Probably Not Living with Him

  In The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, historian William Howard Adams tells us that Thomas Jefferson’s residence in Paris had “a steady but unpredictable stream of guests,” and “served as a boardinghouse for visiting Americans.”3

  Professor Adams discusses the Sally Hemings story and his own assessment of the likelihood of the affair:

  Despite the attention she has received from historians, Sally Hemings remains a shadowy presence in the envoy’s life. …Apart from nine notations in Jefferson’s Memorandum Book recording purchases of clothing, her servant’s pay, and a fee for smallpox vaccination, Sally Hemings is completely absent from the Paris record. We know nothing of her living arrangements or duties at the rue de Berri. …Given her lack of training and education, it is difficult to imagine how Sally fitted into the arcane hierarchy of French servants, although she did manage to learn some French. She was known to at least one of Polly Jefferson’s classmates at the convent, and there has been reasonable speculation that she acted as maid for Jefferson’s girls while they were in school. …

  On purely practical grounds, it is difficult to see how Jefferson could have kept an affair with Sally Hemings secret. The Hôtel de Langeac was a relatively small, semipublic establishment always open to visitors: the second floor had only two bedrooms in addition to the large oval room where the minister worked and slept. William Short was a full-time resident, houseguests regularly put up, and Patsy and Polly also lived at the rue de Berri during their last six months in Paris. The daily traffic of visitors, tutors, guests, and servants has not left a single shred of evidence of the putative liaison.4

  Like Sherlock Holmes’ silent dog, if Thomas Jefferson and an immature teenaged servant were in fact regularly engaging in a sexual liaison in the fishbowl existence of his life, there ought to be at least some eyewitness evidence. There is none.

  There is also a serious issue of opportunity here. Revisionists from Brodie to Gordon-Reed simply assume that when Sally came to Paris she remained at the Hôtel de Langeac with Thomas Jefferson when the two young girls she was supposed to be waiting upon went off to the convent. Other than the fact that classmates at the convent knew Sally, there is no clear evidence one way or the other. But that does not mean the odds become fifty-fifty. Is it logical that Patsy’s and Polly’s maid would not bother to accompany them to a boarding school that was well equipped to house servants? The presumption would normally be that the maid would follow her mistresses, but that makes it much more difficult to support Madison Hemings’ and James Callender’s allegations against Thomas Jefferson.

  When Thomas Jefferson Was Home Monticello Was Usually

  Crawling with Potential Witnesses

  As noted in Chapter Ten, when Randolph Jefferson visited Monticello he was fond of spending his evenings among the slaves, playing his fiddle and dancing half the night. That presumably gave him considerable opportunity for sexual encounters as well.

  In contrast, as has already been noted in Chapter Five, “It was his [Jefferson’s] wont throughout his life to entertain large numbers of guests, and a constant stream of visitors made its way to Albemarle County to call whenever he was at Monticello.”5 The question necessarily arises, if this relationship continued over a period of decades at Monticello, why did not a single person leave behind so much as a scrap of paper recording some observation supporting the relationship?

  Grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph wrote that at Monticello Jefferson was “surrounded” by his family, “who saw him in all the unguarded privacy of private life” and “believed him to be the purest of men.”6 Edmund Bacon’s account of the “swarms of visitors that well-nigh ate up all his substance and consumed his life”7 at Monticello led James Bear to wonder whether Jefferson “ever dined alone.”8 Slave Isaac Jefferson, in Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, speaks of the “great many carriages at Monticello at a time. … ”9 Professor Gordon-Reed acknowledges that Jefferson “entertained lavishly” at Monticello, “receiving, housing, and feeding dozens of guests at a time” in a “home that was being run like a hotel.”10

  Jefferson’s personal physician wrote, “I had the curiosity to ask Mrs. Randolph what was the largest number of persons for whom she had been called upon unexpectedly to prepare accommodations for the night, and she replied fifty!”11 Ellen Randolph Coolidge complained to her famous grandfather about “how much you are harassed and oppressed by the crowd of strangers who think themselves privileged to waste and misuse your time, intruding upon you at all hours, and sacrificing your comfort, and even health without reflection and without remorse. … ”12

  The Reverend Peter Fossett, son of freed Monticello slave Joe Fossett, told a writer from the New York World in 1898 that at “Monticello, we always had the house full of company. Not only did Jefferson’s own countrymen visit him, but people from all parts of Europe came to see his wonderful home.”13

  Jefferson was a conscientious host, and he would have been unlikely to le
ave dinner companions to fend for themselves while he slipped down to Sally’s room for a little after-dinner romance. While brother Randolph was fiddling and dancing with slaves, Thomas Jefferson would be entertaining his numerous visitors with stories of political intrigue in Washington or perhaps stories from his years in Paris. Could he have slipped out after others had gone to bed, or had Sally sneak into his room? That is certainly possible, but, given the lack of privacy at Monticello, it is highly unlikely this could have gone on night after night, year after year, decade after decade, without a single person discovering one of them sneaking through the corridors at an odd hour.

  There were occasions when Jefferson demanded privacy, and nearly every day he retreated to his study to read, think, and keep up his immense correspondence. Isaac recalled: “When he was a-writin’ he wouldn’t suffer nobody to come in his room.”14 But there were reportedly exceptions, as Edmund Bacon writes:

  All the time I was with him I had full permission to visit his room whenever I thought it necessary to see him on any business. I knew how to get into his room at any time of day or night. I have sometimes gone into his room when he was in bed. …

  Mrs. Randolph. …was always busy. …She used to sit in Mr. Jefferson’s room a great deal and sew, or read, or talk, as he would be busy about something else.15

  Thomas Jefferson Randolph wrote of his grandfather: “His private apartments were open to me at all times. I saw him under all circumstances.”16 Describing a conversation with Jeff Randolph, Henry Randall wrote to James Parton:

  He said Mr. Jefferson never locked the door of his room by day: and that he (Col. Randolph) slept within sound of his breathing at night. He said he had never seen a motion, or a look, or a circumstance which led him to suspect for an instant that there was a particle more of familiarity between Mr. Jefferson and Sally Hemmings [sic] than between him and the most repulsive servant in the establishment—and that no person ever living at Monticello dreamed of such a thing.17

  Consider also the more recent assessment of Dr. Daniel Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, in an interview for the Ken Burns film on Jefferson that aired on Public Broadcasting in 1997:

  He was also totally devoted to his family and he had eleven grandchildren living with him. And one of the granddaughters lived essentially directly above him. She heard everything. She heard him when he got up in the morning and sang Scottish airs and the like. …There are no secrets on a plantation, certainly not at Monticello. And his family, to whom he was totally devoted, completely discounted this possibility [that he was sexually involved with Sally Hemings].18

  One cannot rule out the possibility that all of these people were lying, but that is not the simplest or most reasonable explanation. Given the very little privacy that Thomas Jefferson had during most of his adult life, it is noteworthy that not a single friend or visitor left any hint of having seen anything to support the Callender allegations. Were they true, we should have a wealth of eyewitness accounts at least hinting at the relationship from the thousands of people who passed through Jefferson’s home in Paris and at Monticello over the decades. The absence of such evidence is not conclusive of anything, but it does provide support for the proposition that James Callender was not telling the truth and that the “relationship” between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was nothing more than master and slave.

  Problems with Some Implicit Assumptions

  of Revisionist Scholars

  To accept the revisionist argument that Thomas Jefferson had a decades-long sexual relationship with Sally Hemings that began in Paris and produced one or more children, we must make certain assumptions about Thomas Jefferson—assumptions that are in many cases very much at odds with the information we do have about our third President.

  Jefferson’s Character

  Foremost among these, in the eyes of many Jefferson scholars over the years, has been the belief that Thomas Jefferson was a man of remarkably high character.19 He was a human being, and like all human beings he was imperfect and prone to error—a reality he readily acknowledged.20 But many have long believed that he was far better than most of us in living up to the strong moral standards he repeatedly expressed to his daughters and others.

  For example, when Dr. Jordan was interviewed for the Ken Burns video, he asserted that the alleged sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings would be “totally out of character” for Jefferson,21 and concluded that it was “morally impossible for that relationship to have occurred.”

  Similarly, Professor Winthrop Jordan, in his landmark 1968 volume, White Over Black—winner of the 1969 National Book Award, the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University—provided this assessment of Jefferson’s character and the Callender charges:

  In 1802 James T. Callender charged in the Richmond Recorder that it was “well known” that Jefferson kept Sally, one of his slaves, as concubine and had fathered children by her. The features of “Tom,” the eldest offspring, were “said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself.” Callender was a notorious professional scandalmonger who had turned upon Jefferson when the president had disappointed his hope for federal office. Despite the utter disreputability of the source, the charge has been dragged after Jefferson like a dead cat through the pages of formal and informal history, tied to him by its attractiveness to a wide variety of interested persons and by the apparent impossibility of utterly refuting it. Ever since Callender’s day it has served the varied purposes of those seeking to degrade Jefferson for political or ideological reasons, of abolitionists, defamers of Virginia, the South, and even America in general, and both defenders and opponents of racial segregation. Jefferson’s conduct has been attacked from several angles, for in fact the charge of concubinage with Sally Hemings constitutes not one accusation but three, simultaneously accusing Jefferson of fathering bastards, of miscegenation, and of crassly taking advantage of a helpless young slave (for Sally was probably twenty-two when she first conceived). The last of these, insofar as it implies forced attentions on an unwilling girl, may be summarily dismissed. …Jefferson was simply not capable of violating every rule of honor and kindness, to say nothing of his convictions concerning the master-slave relationship.22

  Consider also the account attributed to Jefferson’s personal physician, Dr. Robley Dunglison, by historian Henry Randall in 1856:

  You ask me what where [sic] his private virtues that appeared conspicuous to all acquaintances?. …He was kind, courteous, hospitable to all; sincerely attached to the excellent family that were clustered around him; sympathizing with them in their pleasures, deeply distressed in their afflictions. I mentioned to you the scene I witnessed on the approaching death of a grand-daughter, Mrs. Bankhead. I knew nothing of any private vice of any kind, and never heard from him a loose or indecorous speech. I would say in your own language, that he was always in my observation “peculiarly decorous, modest, and decent in all things.” …

  In sum, I had the most exalted opinion of him. I believed him essentially a philanthropist, anxious for the greatest good to the greatest number; a distinguished patriot, whose love of country was not limited by any considerations of self; who was eminently virtuous, with fixed and honorable principles of action not to be trammeled by any unworthy considerations; and whose reputation must shine brighter and brighter, as he is more and more justly judged and estimated.23

  Writing in 1995, Andrew Burstein adds:

  Knowing what we do about Jefferson’s Heart and Head, that the first made him generous and the second ruled his actions, it seems highly unlikely that because light-skinned Sally Hemings bore light-skinned children at Monticello, they necessarily were fathered by Monticello’s master. Moreover, Jefferson would have been uncharacteristically imprudent to be responsible for giving Sally Hemings the two children that she bore in the years after the charges surfaced, while he remain
ed President.24

  With the release of the DNA evidence, Burstein became a revisionist. But even then, he acknowledged that “[t]o today’s historian, Jefferson’s writings and action are irreconcilable. … ”25

  The most prominent post-DNA convert to revisionism was Professor Joseph Ellis, who had previously noted that “the alleged relationship with Sally Hemings …defies the dominant patterns of his personality.”26 He wrote that Jefferson’s “idealization of domestic bliss as the ultimate source of his personal happiness was certainly sincere,”27 and that after the death of his wife he would “rather be lonely than vulnerable.”28 In Professor Ellis’ view, “[i]n the long run the head prevails”29 for Thomas Jefferson.

  Even after the DNA evidence had been released and Professor Ellis had shifted to a leadership position of the revisionist movement, he acknowledged that the Hemings story could not easily be reconciled with the known information about Jefferson’s character. He found an explanation by drawing a comparison between Thomas Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton. As reported by the New York Times:

  “I thought it would have been unduly reckless of Jefferson to have continued the relationship when under scrutiny,” Dr. Ellis said, “but we recently have had reason to recognize that Presidents of the United States are perfectly capable of that degree of recklessness.”