He freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter; she was _____’s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother’s room many a morning, when I went up to Monticello very early. When she was nearly grown, by Mr. Jefferson’s direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars.
The girl was certainly Harriet Hemings, Sally’s daughter. The father was named by Bacon but protected by the reporter, a preacher in Kentucky.
All of Sally Hemings’ children who lived to adulthood did achieve their freedom, either de facto or de jure, and it is often said that they were the only nuclear family of Monticello who did. What, finally, of that? Well, contrary to the terms of the “treaty” as Madison Hemings described it, Sally Hemings did not receive extraordinary privileges at Monticello. There may be few uncontestable facts in this matter. But it is quite clear that Jefferson fed, clothed, housed, and treated Sally Hemings pretty much indistinguishably from his other household servants, recorded her life and childbirths in much the same way, and left her as part of his estate. There is nothing in Jefferson’s records that would identify Sally as especially significant among the household servants, nothing that makes her distinguishable in her treatment or duties from her sister or her Hemings cousins. By Madison Hemings’ own account, moreover, Jefferson showed no particular affection for her children and reared them much as he did other household slaves. Beverley ran away, probably at age 24, and Jefferson did not attempt to catch him. Harriet fled into white society, probably with Jefferson’s assistance to the amount of fifty dollars and a stagecoach ticket. And Madison and Eston received the least favored treatment of the 5 skilled slaves—all members of the broader family of Sally’s mother, Betty, who were freed in Jefferson’s will. By the terms of this document, Burwell Colbert, Joe Fosset, and John Hemings were granted their freedom, various amounts of money, tools, cabins, and land. A codicil to the will, written less than three months before his death, also gave John Hemings the services of his apprentices, his two nephews, until age 21, when they would also receive their freedom, though none of the other gifts granted to the older servants. But until then, if we are to believe this story, another statement by Thomas Jefferson Randolph would suggest that his thin-skinned grandfather, always concerned for contemporary and historical regard, would not only have continued the affair with Sally long after it became a public scandal—and still without arousing the suspicion of his family—he would have been so brazen about it as to have a slave whose resemblance to him was absolutely startling serve his foreign guests at dinner.
Strange things happen where sex is concerned, not to mention slavery and race. Racial mixing between masters and servants happened all the time in the Old South. It does not tax us highly to imagine how perfectly ordinary it was, or what a range of conduct it encompassed: from boys and girls coming into adolescence together in the familiarity of a plantation and playing games more adult, to deep affection, to the tyranny in which it was as easy for a master so inclined to order a woman to his bed as it was to order her to do the laundry or tend the crop. As Jefferson himself told us, “the man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved” within such a system.
Was Jefferson such a man? Did he, though a slaveholder, retain his morals relatively undepraved? The honest answer, to my mind, is that we simply do not know and may never possess the evidence that could answer the question absolutely. Parts of the argument for his paternity of Sally Hemings’ children are hard to overcome. But this does not seem any harder, to my mind, than swallowing the lengthy list of radical implausibilities we have to swallow to accept that the story is true. It’s a close call: a hard case, as the lawyers would say. But there are surely grounds for strong, continuing doubts. Count me, then, in the minority who seem to think that the proper verdict, at this moment, has to be “not proven.”
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Footnotes
* Editor’s Note: Sadly, Professor Banning passed away January 31, 2006, at the age of sixty-four. The world lost an outstanding human being and an exceptionally able scholar at that time. He was a mainstay of our inquiry and a man of remarkable insight and intellectual courage. We shall miss him.
1. See www.monticello.org, www.tjheritage.org, and www.angelfire.com/va/TJTruth.
2. For example, it does not seem true that Dolley Madison was present at Madison’s birth, and it would seem highly unlikely in the aftermath of Callender’s accusations that she would have begged to name the baby after her husband. All of Sally’s children were not freed at age 21. Sally did not receive “extraordinary privileges” at Monticello. There is great room to doubt that Sally became pregnant in Paris. Etc.
3. The use of the word “concubine” to describe Sally’s relationship with Jefferson, together with other language in the “Memoir,” strongly suggests that Hemings or the reporter, Samuel Wetmore, had read James Thomson Callender’s original 1802 accusation. Both accounts misspell “Wayles” as “Wales.”
4. Joe Fosset, whose descendents apparently preserve an equally strong oral tradition of descent from TJ, was clearly not the son of either.
5. They do not, however, suggest this as strongly as is argued in Fraser Neiman’s Monte-Carlo study, which is severely flawed by the assumption that the presence of other potential fathers at Monticello would have been random.
6. French historians tell me that (leaving diplomatic immunity aside) it is by no means certain that contemporary French law would have freed SH, who, if she thought it would, could more certainly have secured freedom for herself as well as any future children by staying in France. It seems rather hard, in any case, to envision the 45-year-old diplomat pleading with an illiterate slave girl to return to America with him and the 16-year-old girl contracting a bargain with her master.
7. In the latter, some citizens of Chillicothe who knew Eston had seen a statue of Jefferson that looked very like him. They asked him if Jefferson was his father. Eston might have had an interest in saying yes. He replied, however, that his mother was single and had belonged to TJ. The only corroboration of Madison Hemings’ account came in an interview with the same Ohio newspaper of former slave Israel Jefferson, which is so replete with provable misrepresentations as to be the only relevant source that I consider completely untrustworthy. Contrast this with the recorded memories of Isaac Jefferson, who, unlike Israel, actually did have duties around the house. Isaac mentioned and described Sally Hemings, but did not so much as hint that there was any special relationship between her and TJ.
8. Similarly, the strongest statements we have about the physical resemblance between Jefferson and some of his slaves, are those made to historian Henry Randall by Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.
Individual Views of
Professor Robert H. Ferrell
14
Individual Views of Professor Robert H. Ferrell
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512 South Hawthorne
Bloomington, IN 47401
March 25, 2001
Dear Professor Turner:
You asked if I might have any further observations to add to your commentaries on the Hemings controversy. I do want to say, again, my complete support of your committee’s position, the unalloyed support of the president. It does seem to me so ridiculous that the accusations of Callender of so long ago should have such a recent public airing.
And let me add a few recent experiences of my own, to illustrate what seems to be a virtual climate of accusation that is flourishing in our own time. A few years ago, seeking to investigate the illness and death of President Warren G. Harding—this after having published a general book about presidential illness from Grover Cleveland through the administration of the first President Bush, I began to see, as my research developed, that in the case of Harding there had occurred a virtual smearing
of his reputation, this after his death in 1923. And so I undertook a book with the title of The Strange Deaths of President Harding, a play on the title of the old Gaston B. Means book of 1930, in which I wrote of Harding’s physical death and the subsequent death of his reputation through slander and innuendo. In the course of it I wrote at length of the accusations of the late Nan Britton (d. 1991), which were without foundation but widely believed.
A year or two ago I undertook a long taping here in Bloomington for a CBS hour-long account of “sex in the White House,” in which I spoke unrestrainedly of the way that Harding had been maligned and made the point, I thought, that the same thing had happened to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Someone at CBS, who, so far as I know, has no standing as an historian, interpreted what I said—interpreted it into the exact opposite of what I said. I of course protested to the CBS studio, after viewing the resultant film, and had a smart-aleck letter back from some vice president relating how helpful I had been to the production.
Lastly an experience of very recent date. The Journal of American History, published at my university for the generality of American historians across the country, ran a lead article in its December issue entitled “What Happened to Sex Scandals: Political Peccadilloes from Jefferson to Kennedy.” Its author is a graduate student in American history at the University of Rochester presently teaching at Harvard. Quite apart from the smarty title the article was a compendium of innuendo and surmise, and the author wrote flat-out that President Harding’s mistress was Nan Britton and that President Roosevelt’s mistresses were Mrs. Rutherfurd and Ms. LeHand. I asked the editor of the journal to print an apology, and in response to her suggestion that I instead write a letter to the editor I did so, in collaboration with Warren G. Harding III of Cincinnati. The letter has not yet been printed, awaiting a response by the offending author.
Sincerely,
Robert H. Ferrell
Individual Views of
Professor David N. Mayer
15
The Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings Myth and the Politicization of American History*
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Introduction
I concur in the Scholars Commission’s conclusion that the allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by his slave Sally Hemings is “by no means proven.” My own view is that the allegation is not at all plausible. Moreover, I unreservedly join Robert F. Turner in his Individual Views, which I regard as the most complete and objective analysis yet written of all the evidence relevant to the Jefferson-Hemings allegation. I write my own separate report to state my views on the matter and to discuss the Jefferson-Hemings controversy in a broader context. As I see it, belief in the paternity allegation—which, to me, is quite literally a myth—is a symptom of a disturbing trend in the history profession in recent years, discussed below.
It is primarily out of my concern for the history profession, and far less so out of my concern for Jefferson’s legacy, that I agreed to serve on the Commission and that I am writing this essay. Let me make clear from the outset what has motivated me, and what has not motivated me, in this endeavor.
I freely admit that I am an admirer of Thomas Jefferson; but my admiration for Jefferson always has focused on his ideas, principally his ideas about government, and not on Jefferson as a man. For over 25 years—since I first began my formal studies of Jefferson’s political and constitutional thought as an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan—I have been fascinated with Jefferson’s philosophy. My own studies have focused particularly on Jefferson’s ideas about limits on governmental power, the subject of my book The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson.1 While I necessarily learned a great deal about Jefferson’s life and times while doing the research for this book and my other writings on Jefferson’s thought, I always have found the substance of his ideas far more interesting than the circumstances of his life. Moreover, I believe that Jefferson’s place in American history—his central role in our nation’s founding and the evolution of its system of government—justly derives from his ideas. As I see it, genealogy is irrelevant: the true “children” of Jefferson today are those who understand his ideas and work to keep them alive. His true legacy is the body of ideas he has given us, ideas still quite relevant today, to the perennial problems of protecting individual rights and limiting the powers of government. The attributes of Jefferson the man—his character and the circumstances of his life—are essentially irrelevant to that legacy. Indeed, as I noted in my comments at the University of Virginia on the 250th anniversary of his birth (April 13, 1993), it saddens me that Americans today seem to have done a better job preserving Jefferson’s legacy in bricks and mortar (having in mind the splendid restorations of Jefferson’s “academical village” in the University as well as his two homes, Monticello and Poplar Forest) than we have in preserving his legacy of ideas.
Frankly, I regard Jefferson’s personal life as neither interesting nor important. What troubles me most about the controversy over Jefferson’s alleged relationship with Sally Hemings is that this matter unjustifiably has overshadowed Jefferson’s true significance. I do not join with those who regard the Hemings paternity allegation as a per se libel of Jefferson’s character; as discussed below, belief in that allegation has served to advance the interests of a number of partisans, some of them detractors of Jefferson but others genuine admirers of Jefferson, who use the story of a relationship with Sally Hemings to transform Jefferson into either a villain or a hero to advance their own agendas.
I agreed to serve on the Scholars Commission because I became increasingly concerned about the way both the admirers and the detractors of Jefferson were willing to use the Hemings story for their own purposes without regard to historical truth or to objective, well-recognized standards of good historical scholarship. I was particularly troubled by the fact that many eminent scholars have so readily abandoned professional standards in seizing upon the 1998 DNA study—and, in the process, either blithely ignoring or deliberately misrepresenting the findings of that study—as so-called “proof” of the paternity allegation, again to advance their own partisan agendas.
Evolution of the Myth
Throughout American history, the Jefferson-Hemings paternity allegation has been used for partisan purposes. That certainly was the case with the allegation’s early history, during Jefferson’s own lifetime. It originated in an 1802 Richmond, Virginia newspaper story by the hatchet journalist James Thomson Callender, a disappointed job-seeker who felt he had been betrayed by the new President and whose bitterness toward Jefferson was quite evident throughout the piece. The allegation was nothing more than unsubstantiated rumor, for there is no evidence that Callender had any first-hand knowledge of Monticello. The allegation then was spread by Jefferson’s political enemies in the bitterly partisan Federalist press, particularly in the fall of 1802. Significantly, however, after Americans gave President Jefferson and his party an overwhelming vote of confidence by bolstering Republican majorities in both the House and Senate in the mid-term Congressional elections, the Hemings allegation seemed to die. “Little was said about Hemings, for example, in the months before [Jefferson’s] 1804 landslide re-election, and only infrequently during the remainder of Jefferson’s lifetime did references to the alleged affair appear in print,” concluded the scholar who has most thoroughly studied the Hemings story in the context of Jefferson’s reputation during his lifetime.2 The Hemings paternity allegation resurfaced again in New England—the last bastion of the Federalist party—in 1805, occasioning Jefferson’s letter to friends denying the “charges” made against him, except for the truthful allegation of his youthful affair with the wife of his neighbor John Walker, an allegation which at the time probably was taken far more seriously than the Hemings story.3
In the decades following Jefferson’s death, both before and after the Civil War, the Hemings paternity allegation—together with other miscegenation stories linked to Jefferson—surfaced
from time to time as partisans of North and South, Whigs (or Republicans) and Democrats, and anti-slavery political activists and pro-slavery Southern apologists, all used the “Jefferson image” to help further their own cause. As Merrill D. Peterson has noted, the story was revived and retold especially by abolitionists in the antebellum period. “The most common version of the story in anti-slavery circles was the one related in 1838 by Dr. Levi Gaylord, of New York. He had heard, he said, from the lips of a Southern gentleman: ‘I saw for myself, the DAUGHTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON sold in New Orleans, for one thousand dollars.’ Gaylord wanted this ‘sounded longer and louder through the length and breadth of the land’ until a virtuous indignation should wipe out slavery. Goodell’s Friend of Man printed Gaylord’s story, whence it spread to other newspapers.”4 After the anonymous poem “Jefferson’s Daughter” appeared in the abolitionist newspaper Liberator, other anti-slavery activists—principally the black writer and abolitionist William Wells Brown—popularized the story. “Upon the flimsy basis of oral tradition, anecdote, and satire, the most intelligent and upright abolitionists avowed their belief in Jefferson’s miscegenation,” Peterson reports.5
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 50