Although the underlying motives changed, 19th-century exponents of the Hemings story and other Jefferson miscegenation legends continued to use the allegations for partisan purposes. “Unlike the Federalists, the abolitionists were smearing the South’s peculiar institution, not Jefferson or democracy. They dwelled less on Jefferson’s ‘African brothel’ than on his alleged mulatto offspring.”6 Peterson also notes that one other group contributed to the revival of the legend in the second quarter of the 19th century: British aristocrats who, in their commentary on America found Jefferson—the symbol of American democracy—“a convenient target for their criticism.”7 After the Civil War, the legend continued to be used for partisan purposes, by Republican Party activists (many of them former abolitionists) who took Jefferson as a symbol for both the defeated Confederate cause and for the Democratic Party.
It is in the context of this 19th-century manipulation of the “Jefferson image” that we must place the so-called “memoirs” of Madison Hemings, published on March 13, 1873 as the first of a series of interviews with former slaves entitled “Life Among the Lowly,” in the Pike County (Ohio) Republican, a partisan newspaper edited by Samuel F. Wetmore, a Republican Party activist. As Professor Turner notes in his individual views, there are many good reasons to be highly skeptical of this 1873 newspaper article. One reason is that we are not sure the statements attributed to Madison Hemings really were his and not the words of the editor, Wetmore. Even if the statements were indeed Hemings’, they are clearly hearsay, for Madison Hemings had no first-hand knowledge of a relationship between Jefferson and his mother. Indeed, given that there is no evidence that Sally Hemings herself claimed Jefferson as the father of any of her children, as well as the fact that Madison Hemings’ statements so closely resemble the Callender allegations from 1802, it is possible that Hemings based his story on Callender’s.8 Whatever the source of the words attributed to Madison Hemings, they clearly reflect a deep bitterness toward Jefferson—a bitterness that is fully understandable if Madison Hemings genuinely believed he was Thomas Jefferson’s son, for all the available evidence indicates Jefferson essentially ignored him. (The significance of the lack of any evidence showing Jefferson’s affection toward Madison Hemings, or any of Sally Hemings’ other children, in refuting the paternity allegation is discussed more fully below.)
The unreliability of Madison Hemings’ story as reported in the 1873 Pike County Republican is further highlighted by Wetmore’s follow-up interview in his “Life Among the Lowly” series with another former Monticello slave, Israel Jefferson, which Samuel Wetmore published in his newspaper several months later (on December 25, 1873) in an effort to corroborate Hemings’ story. As Professor Turner notes in his individual views, Israel Jefferson’s statements are even less credible than Madison Hemings’. Shortly after Israel’s story was published, Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, wrote a scathing six-page letter to the editor in response, pointing out many factual errors in Israel’s account and, of course, denying the “calumny” of the Hemings paternity allegation. Randolph added, “To my knowledge and that of others 60 years ago the paternity of these parties were admitted by others.”9
The “others” to whom Randolph referred were Peter and Samuel Carr, nephews of Thomas Jefferson (the sons of his sister Martha and his childhood friend Dabney Carr, whom he raised as if they were his own sons). James Parton, in his 1874 biography of Jefferson, quoted Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph as telling fellow Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall that “there was not the shadow of suspicion that Mr. Jefferson in this or any other instance had commerce with female slaves.” T. J. (Jeff) Randolph alleged that Sally Hemings was the mistress of Peter Carr, while Sally’s sister Betsey Hemings was the mistress of Peter’s brother, Samuel.10 Jeff Randolph also told Randall that he once confronted Peter and Samuel Carr over the matter (after a visitor at Monticello had left a newspaper with “insulting remarks about Mr. Jefferson’s mulatto children”), and that the Carr brothers tearfully confessed their guilt, with Peter saying, “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 _____.”11
Randall explained that he did not include the allegation against the Carr brothers in his Life of Jefferson because Jeff Randolph prohibited him from doing so, saying “You are not bound to prove a negative. 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.” Randall added, again citing Jeff Randolph, that 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.”12
Randolph’s sister, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, claimed that the father of Sally Hemings’ children rather was Samuel Carr, “the most good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio kept at other men’s expense.”13 Ellen Coolidge further claimed that her brother had overheard Peter Carr “say with a laugh, that ‘the old gentleman had to bear the blame of his and Sam’s (Col. Carr) misdeeds.’”14
One other direct observer of happenings at Monticello offered his testimony denying the Hemings paternity allegation against Jefferson. Edmund Bacon, who was Jefferson’s slave overseer for many years, in a reminiscence first recorded in 1862, denied that Sally Hemings’ daughter (presumably Harriet) was Jefferson’s 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.”15
Notwithstanding the denial of the Hemings paternity allegation by members of Jefferson’s family and eyewitnesses to life at Monticello, the allegation survived in the oral traditions of several American families who claimed descent from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, including the descendants of Madison Hemings as well as the descendants of Thomas Woodson, who claimed to be the child Callender had identified as “Tom.” (These oral traditions are discussed more fully in the next section, below.) The Hemings allegation also remained alive in the writings of many black American political activists and scholars, including W. E. B. DuBois.16 But the allegation was given new life when the claims made in Madison Hemings’ “memoir” were resurrected in a bestselling biography of Jefferson published in the 1970s.
In her book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, the late Fawn M. Brodie resurrected the story attributed to Madison Hemings, as well as the original 1802 Callender allegation, that while in France, Jefferson took as his “concubine” the teenaged Sally Hemings.17 Jefferson scholars have long rejected Ms. Brodie’s flimsy “psychological evidence” of a Jefferson-Hemings affair in France—and with good reason, for Brodie’s “psycho-history” was not only implausible but also failed to fit the facts. As Jefferson biographer Willard Sterne Randall writes:18
[Brodie] suggested that, when Jefferson traveled through France and Germany and eight times described soil as mulatto in his twenty-five sheets of notes, he was not referring, as he labeled the appropriate column of his charts, to yellowish soil in the hills and valleys he traveled through but was really thinking of the contours of Sally’s body. And when he was taking notes on a new kind of mold-board plow that he invented shortly after the journey, he was really thinking of plowing the fertile Sally as soon as he returned to Paris. But mulatto is a precise term describing yellowish-brown soil. And when Jefferson used the term mulatto to describe soil during his French travels, Sally was still on a ship with Polly, accompanying her to France. If he had ever noticed her or remembered her at all, Sally had been only ten years old when Jefferson last visited Monticello hurriedly in 1784 to pack [Sally’s brother] James Hemings off to France with him. She was only eight when Jefferson last resided at Monticello and was mourning his wife’s death. Unless Brodie was suggesting that Jefferson consoled himself by having an affair with an eight-year-old child, the whol
e chain of suppositions is preposterous.
Despite its obvious shortcomings, Fawn Brodie’s account of a sexual liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, beginning in France and continuing at Monticello following their return to the United States, captured the imagination of many people and became a part of American popular culture in the last quarter of the 20th century. From scholarly treatments such as Winthrop Jordan’s book Black over White (1968) to imaginative recreations such as Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings (1979) or the Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris (1995), the story of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship became widely accepted by many Americans. Thus, when Annette Gordon-Reed, an African-American associate professor of law at New York Law School, sought to vindicate Madison Hemings’ claims in her book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), she found a ready audience. (The flawed case for Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’ children presented in Professor Gordon-Reed’s book is further discussed below.) Although historian Joseph J. Ellis, in his book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (1997), had joined other Jefferson biographers in doubting the story of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings, he had read the manuscript of Gordon-Reed’s book—which was going to print just as his own book was published—and declared in a blurb for its inside cover, “Short of digging up Jefferson and doing DNA testing on him and Hemings’ descendants, Gordon-Reed’s account gets us as close to the truth as the available evidence allows.”
Without having to disturb Jefferson’s corpse, Dr. Eugene A. Foster was able to conduct DNA tests, which compared the Y chromosome haplotypes of 14 individuals: five living male-line descendants of two sons of Field Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle), five living male-line descendants of two sons of Thomas Woodson, three living male-line descendants of three sons of John Carr (paternal grandfather of Samuel and Peter Carr), and one living male-line descendant of Eston Hemings. The results showed a match between Eston Hemings’ descendant and the descendants of Field Jefferson. The tests found no match, however, between the Jefferson male DNA and that of Thomas Woodson’s descendants. Nor did the tests find a match between the Eston Hemings descendant and the Carr descendants. As historian (and fellow Scholars Commission member) Lance Banning succinctly puts it in his paper “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: Case Closed?”: “Although they implicate a Jefferson, not a Carr, as Eston Hemings’ father, the DNA results cannot exclude the Carrs as possible fathers of Sally Hemings’ earlier children. Neither can they show, in and of themselves, that Thomas Jefferson was any more likely to have been Eston’s father than any of Thomas’s male-line relatives who might have had relations with Sally Hemings at the relevant times.”19 In fact, Jefferson was one of at least 25 adult male Jeffersons (male-line descendants of his paternal uncle, Field Jefferson) who might have fathered Eston Hemings, passing on to him the Y chromosome with the distinctive Jeffersonian characteristics. Indeed, eight of these 25 Jefferson males lived within 20 miles (a half-day’s ride) of Monticello—including Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph Jefferson, and Randolph’s five sons, who ranged in age from about 17 to 26 at the time of Eston’s birth.
The results of Dr. Foster’s DNA tests were reported in the November 5, 1998 issue of the British journal Nature, in an article bearing the misleading headline, “Jefferson fathered slave’s last child.” (A more accurate headline, of course, would have been “A Jefferson—not necessarily Thomas Jefferson—fathered” Sally Hemings’ youngest child.) The article on the DNA test results was accompanied by an article “Founding father,” co-authored by Professor Ellis, which proclaimed that the DNA analysis “confirms that Jefferson was indeed the father of at least one of Hemings’ children.”
Thus began the “spin” on the DNA test results—and the most recent telling of the Jefferson-Hemings story. No doubt referring to his own book which portrayed Jefferson as an enigmatic “sphinx,” Professor Ellis wrote, “Recent work has also emphasized his massive personal contradictions and his dexterity at playing hide-and-seek within himself. The new evidence only deepens the paradoxes.” And, further evidencing new uses for the Jefferson image in modern American politics, Professor Ellis concluded, “Our heroes—and especially presidents—are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all the frailties and imperfections that this entails.”20
The timing of the Nature article’s publication—on the eve of the November 1998 Congressional elections and just weeks before the U.S. House of Representatives’ vote to impeach President Bill Clinton—was not purely coincidental. Professor Ellis’ accompanying article also noted, quite frankly, “Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role.” In television interviews following release of the article, Professor Ellis elaborated on this theme; and Clinton’s apologists made part of their defense the notion that every President—even Jefferson—had his “sexual indiscretions.” (It should be added that Ellis was among the so-called “Historians in Defense of the Constitution” who signed an October 1998 ad in the New York Times opposing Clinton’s impeachment.)
Others besides Clinton apologists seized upon the alleged DNA “proof” of Jefferson paternity to advance their own ideological agendas. British journalists and commentators used the story much as they had in the 19th century, to denigrate American Revolutionaries by associating them with slaveholding. Thus, for example, Christopher Hitchens suggested in The Nation that Jefferson henceforth be described as “the slave-owning serial flogger, sex addict, and kinsman to ax murderers.” (One is reminded of reviews in the British press of the Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot,” last summer. The Express noted that the real Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” on whom Gibson’s Benjamin Martin character was based, “raped his slaves and hunted Red Indians for sport.”) And for many scholars of race and race relations in America, the Jefferson-Hemings story and reactions to it (particularly by those who continued to be skeptics) provided further evidence of the racism they say permeates American society. Indeed, for many, acceptance of the paternity thesis has become a kind of litmus test for “politically correct” views: those of us who continue to question it have been denounced as racially insensitive, if not racist. (For more on this, see the discussion of Annette Gordon-Reed’s views, below.)
The Jefferson-Hemings story is useful symbolism for people of various political persuasions today: to those on the left, for example, it can serve as a metaphor for racism in America; to those on the right, a metaphor for immorality. Not just leftists, but conservatives too, have used the Hemings story to denigrate Jefferson and, with him, two of the cardinal values of his life, reason and individualism. As Timothy Sandefur notes in his essay “Anti-Jefferson, Left and Right,” “What damns Thomas Jefferson in conservative and multiculturalist eyes alike is his appeal ‘to all men and at all times,’ and not to the considerations of race, class, and sex, of which the left approves, or to the ‘whispers of dead men’ that the conservative hears.”21 The Hemings story permits some to see Jefferson’s whole political philosophy as “bound up in the sexual exploitation of a slave,” Sandefur adds. “Jefferson’s position as the Enlightenment figure in America can thus be seen as inseparable from his ownership and exploitation of slaves, and the Enlightenment can be dismissed accordingly. Conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza describes a conversation he had with some thoroughly indoctrinated college students: ‘On Jefferson, the three were agreed: he was, in various descriptions, a ‘hypocrite,’ a ‘rapist’ . . . , and a ‘total racist.’ Jeffersonian principles of individualism, reason, science, and private property, all become tainted.”22
It is not just the enemies of the Enlightenment in America today who find symbolism in the Hemings story. Libertarians, too, find the story a useful vehicle for advancing their agendas, whether they are detractors or admirers of Jefferson. Some want to believe the story because they ar
e anxious to pull him off his pedestal, to show in Jefferson’s hypocrisy “the need to be a nation of laws and not of men,” as an editor of Reason magazine put it.23 Others, who genuinely admire Jefferson, hope that “this new, racially-conflicted Jefferson,” who some now imagine as having had a long-term monogamous relationship with a mulatto woman, might be “more authentically libertarian” than “the old, much more ‘racist’ Jefferson,” as one libertarian scholar suggested to me in private correspondence. This last comment suggests that some admirers of Jefferson, whatever their political persuasion, find in the Hemings story a new way to “humanize” Jefferson, to make him less aloof. Indeed, for some who idolize Jefferson, the Hemings story provides proof that Jefferson was able to transcend the racial attitudes of his time. They are, frankly, engaged in wishful thinking, idealizing Jefferson into a 20th- (or even 21st-) century individualist comfortable with interracial relationships—which, sadly, he was not (as his retirement-years writings on race matters show).
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 51