The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy
Page 57
In the late 1970s, I read the Book of the Month club selection, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, by Fawn M. Brodie.1 It was enormously popular at the time and much was written about it. Important to our discussion, Brodie was said to have presented a unique picture of Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings as a love story rather than as sexual abuse of a slave. It was a compelling theory, which the nation took to heart. It appeared to be a successful attempt to soften the anger that many African Americans held against Thomas Jefferson for this purported relationship. Brodie was said also to have defended her interpretation by saying that the All White Male establishment of American historians simply could not believe that Thomas Jefferson could have had an affair with a slave and so dismissed it out of hand. Thus, she dismissed their dismissal with an ad homonym argument.
Being inclined to believe Brodie’s story, I read the book, embraced it and became fascinated with the character of “Tom Hemings.” Tom Hemings, Brodie claimed, was conceived in France and born to Sally Hemings shortly after her return to Virginia. Brodie further suggests that “Tom” grew to adulthood and passed into white society, disappearing from historical records.
When her [Sally Hemings’] son Tom left Monticello is unknown. It is likely, as we have said, that he was one of the four “yellow” children” at Monticello, described by Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge as “white enough to pass for white” who were permitted to leave under the euphemism of “running away.”2
This “Tom” also supposedly looked like Thomas Jefferson. Brodie leads the reader to believe “Tom” was an actual person and that we have a possible image of him:
We do not know if it was Tom or Madison or Eston Hemings that Jefferson’s grandson was describing when he talked to Henry Randall: “ …in one case the resemblance was so close that at some distance …the slave, dressed in the same way, might have been mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.”3
Note here that Thomas Jefferson Randolph is describing a resemblance from a distance. This would imply that the resemblance [of most possibly Eston, Sally Hemings’ last son who is linked with the male Jefferson line by the DNA study] to Thomas Jefferson was one of skin tone, height and weight, not necessarily facial features. This would explain the difference in contemporary points of view between African Americans who say that Eston looked like Thomas Jefferson and Euro-Americans who say he did not. Many African Americans distinguish looks on the basis of skin tone whereas Euro Americans tend to distinguish looks on the basis of facial features, hair color and texture.
Here was my character for a play. A son born to the most compelling American Founding Father, who in a fully free country would have been an obvious candidate for president (as was John Adams’ son John Quincy Adams), but because of slavery and the law against miscegenation (which was struck down in Virginia only in 1967 by the Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia),4 could only at best “pass” into oblivion.
I began work. I mulled the play and talked it over with my colleagues, among whom were many African Americans. There was much fascination and excitement. The conversations were deep and poignant.
In 1978, actively imaging the play about “Thomas Hemings,” I moved with my husband and two teenage sons from Los Angeles to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I joined a book reading group and again read Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson for their selection. One of the women in the group was a social worker married to an historian. She said her husband said the book was complete “nonsense” (I’m not sure of the exact word, but it was along this line) and more of an historical novel than a work of history. I asked her what she herself thought. She said that she loved it. All in the group loved it. My project continued.
In this same year, 1978, the permanent residents of Chapel Hill, as contrasted with the student population, were largely faculty or connected to the University in some way. Our neighborhood held several historians who became our friends. When I told the idea of my project to one of them he gently informed me that “no one” in the historical community believed the Jefferson-Hemings liaison. I couldn’t dismiss his statement with Brodie’s defense that white men alone opposed her theory because his wife was also an historian.
My undergraduate education in English at the University of California at Berkeley was rigorous regarding the importance of checking sources. From my early years there I’d adhered to the belief that it was imperative to let the research determine the model rather than the model determine the research. To honor my neighbors’ expertise, and also to be able to hold my play up to them, I decided to check Brodie’s sources.
It was a sunny day when I took my work outside to read through the footnotes and appendages from Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. As I read Madison Hemings’ account, a storm brewed in my mind despite the luxuriant weather. Madison’s account tells of the child supposedly conceived by Sally Hemings in France to be one who died in infancy. Further, Madison’s account gives the child no name.
…She [Sally Hemings] returned with him [Thomas Jefferson] to Virginia. Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time.5
Fawn Brodie had thrown out the pieces of the puzzle that didn’t fit her model. Where she then left holes, she simply filled in with conjecture using often the word “innuendo” to defend her position. Even further, there was no evidence that the historical character I had centered my play upon had ever existed. There was no record of such a birth in the Monticello ledger. If he had existed, he wasn’t necessarily named Tom and he might have died in infancy. I suddenly had no play.
By this time Thomas Jefferson himself had taken hold of me. I began to entertain the idea of his being a central character, but wondered how I could take on such a huge symbol. I wanted my play to be historically accurate, but if Thomas Jefferson himself were to be the central character I would have to do much more research than I’d originally planned. Fortunately I was in an academic community with an excellent library. I decided to take six months off from my day job to do the research, not knowing at this point where it would lead.
I spent months in the stacks and at the card catalogue of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I found sections on early Charlottesville records which enabled me to get a sense of the “feeling” of the times; I read not only personal materials on Thomas Jefferson, looking always for the person behind the figure, but writings of others at the times in order to flesh out the 18th and early 19th centuries in Virginia and Paris. I visited Monticello. I took on several “Jefferson” activities to “get inside,” as theater people say, “the character.” I concentrated on long letter writing, long walks, idealistic government, innovations in the home, and discovered for the first time blessings of the 20th century not known in the 18th and 19th: We didn’t have to deal with plagues such as yellow fever that could sweep through a city while one was visiting. We also expected each child to live to adulthood. The grief that the wealthiest people suffered as common occurrences in the 18th and 19th centuries is known only among the poorest of today’s population. Thomas Jefferson and his wife lost, including her son from her first marriage, five children in infancy. Mrs. Jefferson herself died in her early 30s. The burden of these losses was so great that, when their daughter, Lucy, died while he was in France, Jefferson became profoundly intent on bringing his last surviving daughter in America, Polly, to join him in Paris. An ocean voyage for his daughter, with all its dangers, was apparently less ominous to him than the possibility of death by disease during separation. A ‘servant’ who was in attendance to Polly would have been less significant to him than the presence of Polly herself, the third in his family now reduced to three: Himself, his daughter Martha, and she. His concern for Polly’s health would also make it most likely that the servant would have continued to attend Polly in the convent where Polly spent most of her time in France. As Jefferson reported two weeks after Polly arrived in Paris: “She [
Polly] is now established in the convent, perfectly happy.”6
Polly’s character was a delight for a playwright to encounter. From her letters she appears to have been more independent than her older sister Martha. An expressive child, she did not want to go to France and told her father of these wishes succinctly in several letters. Mrs. Eppes, with whom Polly was staying while Jefferson and his daughter Martha were in France, wrote to Jefferson in March, 1787, regarding the difficulty of persuading Polly to join them in Paris:
We have made use of every stratagem to prevail on her to consent to visit you without effect. She is more averse to it than I could have supposed; either of my children would with pleasure take her place for the number of good things she is promised.7
It is my acknowledged conjecture—based on my knowledge of children, having both raised and taught them—that Polly is the one who did not want to leave for France unless her young companion (perhaps even friend) Sally went with her. In her own letters, as well as the above from Mrs. Eppes, Polly resisted the trip:
[ca. 22 May 1786?]
Dear Papa – I long to see you, and hope that you and sister Patsy are well …and hope that you and she will come very soon to see us. …I am very sorry that you have sent for me. I don’t want to go to France. I had rather stay with Aunt Eppes. …Your most happy and dutiful daughter. Polly Jefferson8
My six months of planned research had stretched into seven years. I realized I could spend my life researching Jefferson. I’d also discovered, as Brodie before me, an intense dislike of Thomas Jefferson among African American colleagues. This dislike was curious to me because I’d been riveted by his lifelong attempts to end slavery. Even though unable to end it himself, his hopes for its eventual end never ceased. For example: When the Missouri compromise was reached his anguish was articulated in a letter to John Holmes:
Monticello, April 22, 1820
This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed, indeed, for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper …there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach, in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property, for so it is misnamed, is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if, in that way, a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected; and, gradually, and with due sacrifices, I think it might be. …
I regret that I am now to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves of the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by unwise and unworthy passions of their sons and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it. If they would but dispassionately weigh the blessings they will throw away, against an abstract principle more likely to be effected by union than by scission, they would pause before they would perpetrate this act of suicide on themselves, and of treason against the hopes of the world.9
It became clear to me that slave owners were as enslaved in the slave system as were the slaves themselves. (Albeit in a materially preferred life, but a life morally repugnant to any who could not blind themselves to their condition.) Thus I found the central conflict for my character: The man who wrote the text of the Declaration of Independence struggling throughout his life to free himself and his country of slavery. I did not have a fitting answer to the puzzle of the paternity of Sally Hemings’ children until late in my research.
Regarding Sally Hemings and the children of unnamed paternity, I went back and forth for years. Clearly there was no evidence of a child conceived by Sally in France. No listing in the Monticello register, no first hand stories of this child as seen or witnessed at Monticello by anyone who lived or worked on the premises.
The Woodson family oral history claims were not public in the early 80s when I was doing the research for my play, which became Saturday’s Children. The DNA now proves there is no connection between the Woodson male line and the Jefferson male line. If the Woodson oral history had been available to me at the time I would have discounted it because I was looking only at reports by witnesses of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Second and third hand stories were too easily embellished. For this reason I dismissed the Carr brothers as possible fathers of Sally Hemings’ children. The only stories of the Carr brothers available to me at the time were second and third hand.
The Woodson family bibles are compelling family treasures but could not have been recorded by witnesses because Thomas Woodson himself could not have witnessed events and people during the time of his own conception. After his twelfth year Thomas Woodson would have lived only among non-relatives. Finally, Madison Hemings’ account makes no reference to a Thomas who was sent to another plantation:
According to the Woodson family descendants, who now hold regular reunions, Thomas Woodson was secretly ushered from Monticello at the age of 12 after rumors began spreading about a relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Angered that his father would disown him, he took the surname of the family he lived with after leaving Monticello.
Woodson wound up in southern Ohio, living 20 miles east of his brothers Madison and Eston. All of Woodson’s children became educators, ministers or both.10
If Woodson knew Madison and Eston were his brothers and only 20 miles east of him in Ohio, why did Madison not seem to know of his existence? Even if there had been a child conceived in France, why a child of obviously white paternity would be proof of Thomas Jefferson’s seed eluded me. Most of the men living in France at the time were white—including the servants.
The “fit” just wasn’t there. There were thirty years difference in age between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It was inconsistent with his character to be attracted to maidens. His wife was a widow, Maria Cosway. The recipient of the famed letter from Thomas Jefferson known as ‘Dialogue between my Head and my Heart’ was married, and the flirtation he admitted to having had in his bachelor days was also to a married woman, Mrs. Walker. 11
Then again Sally Hemings was possibly his wife’s half sister. Could he have seen the features of his wife in her face? If so, how could he have remained a racist to the end of his life?
Could he have found similar character traits of one he loved intensely beyond the grave? But if so, why would it not soften the intensity of his feelings for his deceased wife? Sarah N. Randolph records:
Years afterwards (after Mrs. Jefferson’s death) he wrote the following epitaph for his wife’s tomb: “Torn from him by death/Sept. 6, 1782:/This Monument of his Love is inscribed.
If in the melancholy shades below
The flames of friends and lovers cease to glow,
Yet mine shall sacred last; mine undecayed
Burn on through death and animate my shade*
*These four lines Mr. Jefferson left in the Greek in the original epitaph.12
It was clear that he was against slavery but for separation of the races—“Beyond the reach of mixture. … ”13 How could he have fathered children into both slavery which he found abominable and dark skin which he found inferior? If they were his children, why did he not dote on them as he did his grandchildren? In Madison’s account—he was uniformly kind to all. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children. …He was affectionate toward his white grandchildren. … ”14 Surely if he were the father of Sally Hemings’ children, he was in no way behaving as her lover.
Could it have been that Fawn Brodie was right about the sexual aspect of the relationship, if not the romantic? Was it possible that a human physical need was so strong that he went against all his beliefs and inclinations, taking advantage of a slave for purely physical reasons? Surely other slave owners did. But
few other slave owners had the same convictions against slavery as Thomas Jefferson.
When I came across his calculations of how much intermarriage with whites it would take to “clear” the black blood,15 I asked myself: Could it have been that he actually saw himself as doing a favor to Sally Hemings and her children by infusing her offspring with “white blood?” It was an appalling thought, but I entertained it so as to cover all possibilities.
The witnesses deny any sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. His grandson, T.J. Randolph, told the biographer Henry S. Randall that he himself slept within hearing of his grandfather’s breathing and never heard a disturbance in his sleep.16 Captain Bacon, the overseer at Monticello, said that he’d seen someone, whose name the editor blanked out, come out of Sally Hemings’ room “many a morning”17: