The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy
Page 45
Dr. Ellis also noted that the character of Jefferson as it emerges from his voluminous correspondence makes it extremely hard for readers to believe he would have had an illicit relationship of any kind.
“The more you immerse yourself in the Jefferson papers,” Dr. Ellis said, “the more difficult it becomes to imagine a liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It’s ironic, the more grounded you are, the more likely you are to get this wrong.”30
Professor Brodie also acknowledges Jefferson’s remarkable self-control and his apparent unwillingness or inability to display emotions he thought coarse. She wrote:
Callender’s praise had an intellectual quality that Jefferson must particularly have enjoyed when it was directed toward himself, but his vituperation had a kind of demonic brilliance that may have attracted Jefferson even more. So rigorous was his own self-discipline, he probably found in Callender’s explosions of hate vicarious relief from the rages he could not himself express. Callender printed about his enemies that which he could not himself say even in private and which he may not have permitted himself even to think.31
Indeed, a reading of Jefferson’s “love letters” from some of the several women he clearly found attractive in Paris and thereafter strongly suggests that his “self-discipline” was a source of occasional frustration to them, as his gentlemanly manners may have precluded more intimate relationships they would have welcomed. Many have speculated about the nature of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Maria Cosway, Angelica Church, and others following the death of his wife Martha; but there is no persuasive evidence that any of them went beyond warm friendship, mutual affection, and elaborate flirtation.32 Discussing Jefferson’s views on extramarital sex as of 1789 (the year that Sally Hemings is alleged to have conceived “Tom”), William Howard Adams writes in The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson:
To Jefferson, such extramarital affairs were a sign of moral decay, a blot on the otherwise near-perfect vertu of French society. Like a frontier preacher from the Piedmont, he was constantly taking the higher ground in letters to American friends. “Intrigues of love occupy the young, and those of ambition, the elder part of the great,” he wrote disapprovingly to Carlo Bellini, professor of modern languages at William & Mary College. “Conjugal love having no existence among them, domestic happiness of which that is the basis, is utterly unknown.”33
Returning to this theme again in a later chapter, Adams writes that:
Temptation was an inescapable part of the glamorous, libidinous society of Paris. For the French in the late eighteenth century, adultery was a class issue, hardly a political or social problem. To Jefferson, however, such moral lapses reflected the corruptions of despotism and privilege; even marital infidelity could be traced to France’s odious system of government rather than to any innate human flaw. …Lacking what a later age would call firm family values, Parisians cultivated “pursuits which nourish and invigorate our bad passions, and which offer only moments of ecstasy amidst days and months of restlessness and torment.”34
Consider also this account by Monticello President Daniel Jordan, from his interview for the 1997 Ken Burns film:
I think ultimately with Maria Cosway and in so many other instances, the Head prevails [with Jefferson]. There’s a rationality and a kind of a controlled reason with Jefferson that, more times than not, would win out over raw emotion. He was a man of great discipline and great self-control.”35
It might be added that Jefferson was a remarkably forgiving man. Discussing Jefferson’s final years, grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph asserted:
In speaking of the calumnies which his enemies had uttered against his public and private character with such unmitigated and untiring bitterness, he said that he had not considered them as abusing him; that they had never known him. They had created an imaginary being clothed with odious attributes, to whom they had given his name; and it was against that creature of their imaginations they had leveled their anathemas.36
Perhaps Thomas Jefferson’s character and self-restraint were not nearly so strong as most contemporary accounts, and the assessments of most Jefferson scholars until very recently, would have us believe. Sadly, it is no longer difficult for Americans to believe that an American President could succumb to the temptations of the flesh with a much younger woman. But even if we assume that was the case, and that Thomas Jefferson, like so many other men, could not resist sexual temptation, as the intriguing and popular American minister to France he was clearly in great demand socially; and, equally obviously, he could have had his pick of some of the most beautiful and talented women in France. As a bachelor, little obvious approbation would have attached had Thomas Jefferson been seen in the company of almost any unmarried adult woman in Paris. To find sexual release, Jefferson did not have to violate his strongly held principles against the sexual exploitation of slave women or to place at risk his reputation with his daughters and friends. And that raises a related but also distinct issue.
Jefferson’s Investment in His Reputation
The revisionists not only ask us to accept the Callender charges, but also to recognize that Thomas Jefferson was not nearly so special as we have long liked to believe. He was, they tell us, not only a hypocrite, but “just a typical southern slave owner” in the words of Professor Gordon-Reed.37
So let us assume, for the sake of discussion, that Thomas Jefferson was essentially an evil, self-centered, hypocrite. Whether that is true or not, it cannot be denied that, apparently unlike some of his contemporaries,38 he was incredibly invested in promoting and preserving a reputation as being among the most honorable of men. My distinguished Scholars Commission colleague Professor Paul Rahe, who is far more critical of Thomas Jefferson than are some of us, writes in his Dissenting Views that Thomas Jefferson “cared far more about his future reputation than about anything else. … ”39 I suspect this may overstate the case slightly, and that Jefferson’s love of his family and his country may have exceeded his desire to be remembered fondly by future generations. But one cannot doubt that his concern for his public image was immense—to the point that modern psychiatrists might well label it a serious character flaw if not a personality disorder.40
In January 1793, while serving as Secretary of State in Washington’s cabinet, Jefferson wrote to his daughter Martha that he had planned on retiring and returning to Monticello, but that he had come under some public criticism and several friends had urged him not to leave. He wrote:
Among these [arguments] it was urged that my return just when I had been attacked in the public papers, would injure me in the eyes of the public, who would suppose I either withdrew from investigation, or because I had not tone of mind sufficient to meet slander. The only reward I ever wished on my retirement was to carry with me nothing like a disapprobation of the public.41
In a letter to Henry Randall, Thomas Jefferson Randolph made it clear that his grandfather was aware of the consequences that his desire to uphold his public reputation might have for his family:
He [Jefferson] returned to [Monticello] in his old age to be hunted down by the reputation he had won in the service of his country. Twelve years before his death, he remarked to me, in conversation, that if he lived long enough he would beggar his family—that the number of persons he was compelled to entertain would devour his estate; many bringing letters from his ancient friends, and all coming with respectful feelings, he could not shut his door in their faces.42
Jefferson biographer Samuel Schmucker wrote in 1857 that “[t]he chief fault of this illustrious man was a pusillanimous and morbid terror of popular censure, and an insatiable thirsting after popular praise.”43 In 1903, Henry Adams added that Jefferson “yearned for love and praise as no other great American ever did.”44
This is not a point of dispute by most revisionists. Professor Brodie notes that, as Jefferson’s increasing indebtedness drove him closer and closer to bankruptcy, “[t]here were certain expenditures Jefferson would not reduce, esp
ecially the costs of hospitality.” She adds that:
Even in Paris, when he had written diffidently to Madison about asking Congress to provide him more money so that he could properly meet the social duties of a minister, he would not let Madison press the matter to the point of angering the congressmen. “I had rather be ruined in fortune,” he wrote, “than in their esteem.”45
Professor Ellis, among the most distinguished of the modern revisionists, notes that “Jefferson felt every criticism personally,”46 and indeed had a “hypersensitivity to criticism.”47 Or in the words of Thomas Jefferson himself—writing from Paris in 1789, when he was allegedly in the early stages of a decades-long affair that would have been almost certain to place at risk his reputation among the public and his own family—“I find the pain of a little censure, even when it is unfounded, is more acute than the pleasure of much praise.”48
Accepting Thomas Jefferson’s tremendous investment in his reputation—even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that his true character was deeply flawed—we must ask whether such a man would jeopardize that reputation by commencing a sexual relationship with an immature slave child?
The concern expressed here is not about “race.” To begin with, by all accounts, Sally Hemings was almost white in appearance, and legally was as close to being white as she could be without actually being classifiable as white. Indeed, after she was “given her time” and began living free in Charlottesville, the census taker classified Sally Hemings as a white woman.
The concern rather is the inherently coercive nature of the master-slave relationship, plus the fact that Sally was (again by all surviving accounts) very much a “child” when she went to Paris, while Thomas Jefferson was well into his forties. It is true that females married younger on average in that era than today, and the age of consent was twelve, but—keeping in mind that days before Sally Hemings arrived in Paris, the highly respected Abigail Adams remarked that Sally Hemings was incapable of caring even for herself and wanted more “care” than Jefferson’s eight-year-old daughter—is it reasonable to assume that a man so deeply invested in his public image would entrust that reputation to the discretion of such a child? Is there a single other incident in Jefferson’s widowhood that suggests he was prone to reckless sexual indiscretions? Not to my knowledge.
Assuming that the relationship did begin in Paris as alleged, and was exposed to the world by Callender, would a man so invested in his reputation have continued the affair thereafter—essentially flouting the public and broadcasting his indiscretion to every Monticello resident and visitor? Consider the assessment by Professor Ellis, offered just two years before the DNA evidence led him to reverse his position. After concluding that the truth of the scandal could not likely be proven by either side in a court of law, and noting “the flimsy and wholly circumstantial character of the evidence,” Professor Ellis concludes that “after five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote.” He explains:
Two pieces of circumstantial evidence strike me as telling: First, Sally’s last two children, Madison and Eston, were born after Callender’s charges created the public scandal in 1802, and it is difficult to believe that Jefferson would have persisted in producing progeny with Sally once the secret had been exposed and the Federalist press was poised to report it; second, among Jefferson’s contemporaries neither Alexander Hamilton nor John Adams, both of whom were political enemies who undoubtedly enjoyed the sight of their chief adversary being stigmatized by the kind of innuendo he had spread against them, found it possible to believe that Callender’s accusations were true. Nor, for that matter, did Henry Adams, whose critical appraisal of Jefferson’s character established the scholarly standard for ironic dissection.49
It is very difficult to accept the Callender story, in any of its subsequent versions, without first having to reject everything we know about Thomas Jefferson’s remarkable craving for public approval.
Jefferson’s Love for His Daughters
In a similar vein, in order to accept the story that Thomas Jefferson became sexually involved with Sally Hemings in Paris, we must either abandon the abundant evidence we have that he was a man of remarkable intellect, or question the very evident love he had for his daughters and his desire to maintain their love and respect. After all, if the Callender story is to be believed, one of the most offensive aspects of Jefferson’s conduct in Paris was his carrying on with Sally Hemings “before the eyes of two young ladies.”50 Even had he wished to keep such a relationship discreet, was he foolish enough to assume that such an immature child would, or could, resist the temptation to disclose her special new role to Patsy or Polly?
Thomas Jefferson’s letters are filled with expressions of love for his family. In 1788, allegedly in the early stages of his sexual liaison with Sally Hemings, Jefferson wrote: “I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family, and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post that any human power can give.”51 And early the following year, still from Paris, he wrote his brother Randolph that “no society is so precious as that of one’s own family.”52
The classic statement of this dilemma is that of Ellen Randolph Coolidge, who asked:
[I]s it likely that so fond, so anxious a father, whose letters to his daughters are replete with tenderness and with good counsels for their conduct, should (when there were so many other objects upon whom to fix his illicit attentions) have selected the female attendant of his own pure children to become his paramour? The thing will not bear telling. There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.53
If such a relationship had taken place in Jefferson’s “cabinet” (bedroom/study), Ellen would likely have learned of it as a child, as her bedroom at Monticello was immediately above his. She wrote of hearing him frequently singing in the morning hours. Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn, who served for many years as a Monticello guide, has told me that when in the room (now an office) immediately above Jefferson’s chamber he could easily hear the voice of a tour guide in the room below. Thomas Jefferson Foundation President Daniel Jordan has confirmed this point to me as well.54 And these observations were made after Monticello was air conditioned and the windows kept closed.
We know that Thomas Jefferson was philosophically strongly opposed to sexual commerce (intercourse) between master and slave—especially when carried out in a setting where children might be exposed to it. Among his passionate denunciations of the institution of slavery in his Notes on the State of Virginia, written on the eve of his travels to Paris, Jefferson wrote:
The whole [sexual55] commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. …If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present.56
It is virtually inconceivable that Thomas Jefferson would have intentionally exposed his children and grandchildren to such a relationship, as it would reveal the hypocrisy of all of his moral teachings to them throughout their lives. Certainly, if he found himself for some reason unable to resist the charms of young Sally, he would have sought to insulate their relationship from his family. But he did not. On the ship back from Paris, he insisted that Sally’s room be convenient to that of his daughters—a reasonable choice if his purpose was to provide a nearby servant for his daughters, but a horrible choice if he hoped to sneak into her cabin after dark and make passionate love with her, or simply rape her.
As president, even before Callender first wrote of her, Thomas Jefferson did not take Sally Hemings to Washington.
He did visit Monticello once and usually twice every year, and during some of these visits, Sally Hemings promptly became pregnant. But for each visit he asked his daughter Martha to bring her family—including nearly a dozen curious grandchildren—to Monticello to be with him.
Writing in Jefferson: A Revealing Biography, historian Page Smith (at the time one of the relatively rare historians to accept the Sally Hemings story) alleged that, because of his relationship with Sally, Jefferson was relieved when his daughter Martha got married and moved away from Monticello:
Jefferson’s enthusiasm for Martha’s marriage was certainly not unrelated to the role of Sally Hemings in his life. He doubtless felt the weight of Martha’s silent disapproval and was glad to have her out of the house, especially in view of the birth of Sally Hemings’s son not long after the return to Monticello.57
If the story of a sexual relationship were true, this reaction would seem so intuitive as to not even warrant comment. But, as with many other parts of this volume, Professor Smith has totally missed his mark. Not only has the DNA evidence disproved the legend that Thomas Woodson was the son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but Professor Smith’s assumption that Jefferson did not want his daughter Martha around Monticello reflects a remarkable ignorance of well-established facts to the contrary.