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.18
Three aspects of the above comment convinced me it was likely to be true: 1) That he’d seen an obvious lover of Sally’s leaving her room on “many a morning,” which implied that she had this particular lover for some time (suggesting a monogamous relationship) and therefore this person was likely the father of Harriet Hemings and Sally’s other children as well …even if Harriet had been born before Capt. Bacon’s time as overseer. 2) It is also likely that a lover would stay until morning. A morning departure suggests a welcome and not particularly hidden visitor. An abuser would more likely have used the cover of night for comings and goings. 3) That the editor blanked out the name given by Capt. Bacon indicated to me that the man named was being protected or hidden. Because the Carr brothers were often named at the time as possible fathers for both Sally and Betty Hemings’ children, the editor’s act suggested to me that there was someone other than a Carr brother.
The coincidence of the residencies of Thomas Jefferson and the conceptions of Sally Hemings is not extraordinary when one realizes that Jefferson stayed for several weeks at a time and there were abundant visitors whenever he was in residence. By residency alone, it was as likely that a visitor was parenting Sally Hemings’ children as Thomas Jefferson himself. Referring to 1809 and times after, Sara Randolph writes:
No one could have been more hospitable than he was, and no one ever gave a more heartfelt or more cordial welcome to friends than he did: but the visits of those who were led by curiosity to Monticello was an annoyance which at times was almost painful to one of as retiring a disposition as he was. These visitors came at all hours and all season, and when unable to catch a glimpse of him in any way, they not unfrequently begged to be allowed to sit in the hall. …On one occasion a female visitor, who was peering around the house, punched her parasol through a window pane to get a better view of him.19
The crowds at Monticello increased after his retirement, but visitors were the norm throughout his years in public office. A guide to Boone Farm outside Charleston, S.C. remarked on tour in 1999 that when visitors came in the 19th century, they didn’t stay for a day or a week, they stayed for a month or two.
Even if visitors made shorter stays, the time required to father a child is registered in minutes, not months. I spent time making charts with the births of Sally and Betty Hemings’ children. I wondered why, if Sally’s sister Betty Hemings (called Bett) was also having light-skinned children, Sally alone is rumored to have had a liaison with Thomas Jefferson.
Although Cyndi Burton has suggested what I too saw at the time of my initial research, that Sally was elevated in the eyes of her peers by having gone to France,20 I saw another possibility. Sally had one daughter who lived to maturity. When Jefferson freed Harriet was when, as Capt. Bacon says: “People said he freed her because she was his own daughter.”21 Jefferson and his times were sexist beyond our imagination today. A woman of any race had no right to property once she married. Any or all inheritance became her husband’s to do with as he willed. (Note in the codicil to Jefferson’s will he requests that an exception be made for his daughter Martha, rather than her husband, Thomas Mann Randolph, to inherit his estate.)22 I imagined that the neighbors would have been stunned when Thomas Jefferson freed a girl, as he did Harriet Hemings, Sally’s daughter. Neither Sally nor Bett were freed in his will, as were their brothers. In my opinion, the neighbors imputed paternity where generosity stood.
Madison’s account is not a witness account, but rather an “as told to” account. Further, because the story that “comes down to me” as reported in the document23 happened before he was born, he himself is not a witness but rather the recipient of possible first generation oral history, which can be embellished by the individual teller. Nor does he in the “as told to” account say that his mother herself told him the story, but again that it is the story that “comes down to me.” Such a phrase could mean that he read about it in the James Callendar account. What he was witness to is consistent with what others wrote about Thomas Jefferson:
[Jefferson] was uniformly kind to all about him. He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children. [Himself and his brother Eston implied.] He was affectionate toward his white grandchildren, of whom he had fourteen.24
There is no indication of a special relationship between Madison Hemings as a child and Thomas Jefferson, contrasted with the special relationship Madison himself observed between Thomas Jefferson and his grandchildren.
If not Thomas Jefferson, I asked myself, then who? At Monticello I purchased a book titled Thomas Jefferson and Music,25 as well as a record and booklet of sheet music used by Thomas Jefferson.26 I wanted music in my play, but also felt the way to know a man’s heart was through music he loved. In the book I discovered a comment about his brother. Until that time I had not known that he had a brother. Thomas paid for Randolph’s violin lessons, but Randolph used his skill to play not the art music that Jefferson loved, but folk music with the “servants”:
Thomas, assuming guardianship of Randolph and the other younger children after their father’s death, sent Randolph to the College of William and Mary from 1771 to 1773, and noted at least one payment of slightly over six pounds to the violin teacher Alberti for Randolph’s violin lessons. It is quite obvious, however, from later letters, that Randolph was not inclined to be scholarly. He settled near Scottsville, Virginia, married “a Jade of genuine bottom,” and seems to have used his musical experience only for country fiddling—“Used to come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.”27
What would it have been like to have been Thomas Jefferson’s brother, twelve years his junior, and married to a “jade of genuine bottom”28 as the family thought of his wife? I was fascinated. I began to see Randolph as possibly a rebel to his older more famous and authoritative brother.29
Turning the piece around in my hand one more time I decided to try another angle. What if everyone was telling the truth? What if Thomas Jefferson’s family, Capt. Bacon, and Madison Hemings were all telling the truth? What if Madison Hemings truly believed Thomas Jefferson was his father? What if perhaps Sally Hemings had herself told Madison? She most likely wouldn’t have referred him as “Thomas Jefferson,” but as the more widely used appellation: “Mr. Jefferson.” There were two Mr. Jeffersons. Suddenly it bubbled up from within me …it was the brother.
Randolph Jefferson lived within visiting range and had his own estate at Snowdon. With his own estate, he would also have been a “Mr. Jefferson.” Randolph, by dancing with the “servants,” seemed to be living within the times rather than, as his brother was, trying to change them. Randolph was uninterested in political matters. “Paris, January 11th, 1789,” Jefferson wrote: “Dear Brother - The occurrences of this part of the globe are of a nature to interest you so little that I have never made them the subject of a letter to you.” 30 Given the date, the occurrences he refers to are the events leading up to the French Revolution. Imagine, I thought, a brother of Thomas Jefferson’s not being interested in the French Revolution.
Randolph was twelve years younger than Thomas, closer to Sally’s age and therefore a more likely candidate for sexual attraction. He married twice, so was not as compelled to be true to a love beyond death as was Thomas Jefferson. (Thomas may have had a love affair with Maria Cosway in Paris, but of course, never married her even after she was, years later, widowed.) Randolph, as a piece to the Jefferson puzzle, slipped into place, a perfect fit for the possible father of Sally Hemings’ children. My effort to get the facts right, to my surprise, had given me an original answer to an historical question.
&nbs
p; When my play, Saturday’s Children, was produced in 1988, one historian who came said to a member of the company that it was the first historically accurate play about Jefferson he’d ever seen. I was highly complimented that my efforts to write a play that would hold up to the scrutiny of historians had paid off. Partially funded by the North Carolina Arts Council, it gained, to my surprise, an additional honor by being listed in the 1992 Aetna Calendar of Black History for having cast a black actor in the role of Thomas Jefferson in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1988. (The actor who plays the character of Thomas Jefferson is scripted as: African American, while the “Real Jefferson” is to be played by a white actor. “The “Real Jefferson” reads only from Jefferson’s writings on another platform of the “spiral” that is history. The character who plays Jefferson within the play acts out conjectures on the part of the contemporary characters.) Writing a play about Thomas Jefferson had become a larger experience than I’d ever imagined. We had made history.
When news of the DNA study hit the press in 1998, I was surprised at the distortion in several articles and astonished that the existence of Randolph Jefferson was left off the Jefferson family tree in the Foster et al. article in the journal, Nature.31
However, before the Nature article was available (the American press had scooped the story) I wrote a letter to the News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C. in which I pointed out that there were two Mr. Jeffersons. That letter found its way through the Internet to Mr. Herbert Barger, a Jefferson family historian who contacted me by phone. Barger, I learned, also held Randolph to be the possible father of Sally Hemings’ children. His source was the Jefferson family oral tradition. He had additional information on Randolph, which also fit the puzzle. Randolph, he informed me, was widowed before Sally’s first child was born and then married after her last child was born. All her children conceived in America were born between Randolph’s marriages.
Cynthia H. Burton, in her book Jefferson Vindicated, corrects this. In personal correspondence with me she wrote: “Randolph Jefferson’s first wife had to have died after giving birth to a son around 1797. Whether she died during childbirth or years later, I don’t really know. I do know that Randolph was single in 1807–08. However, he was married when Sally Hemings conceived Harriet I and also possibly when Beverly was conceived.”32
Based on Burton’s research, if Randolph Jefferson was the father of all Sally’s children, he was promiscuous in the early years of their relationship. If he was the father of Madison and Eston when he was a widower, and was not promiscuous earlier, then Sally had more than one lover. In either event, Sally stopped having children after Randolph remarried and Thomas Jefferson retired, remaining in residence most of the time at Monticello, even though Sally Hemings was then only thirty-five years of age.
The other piece of information that Mr. Barger brought to me was that there were several male Jeffersons in and around Monticello of age to parent Sally Hemings’ children conceived in America. I had not known earlier of Randolph’s sons and other Jeffersons except George Jefferson, a cousin, who was a correspondent of Thomas Jefferson’s and did not appear to be in the vicinity of Monticello on a regular basis.
Per Mr. Barger’s request, I spent most of a week in April of 2000 perusing the Nicholas Trist Collection at the University of North Carolina. Because I also held an appointment as an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Social Medicine, in which I taught in the courses Theater and Medicine and Performance, Culture, Art and Healing, I had access to the Wilson Library’s reserved collection on the UNC-CH campus. The collection consists of original letters, notes and occasional drawings in Nicholas Trist’s possession during his life. Though not able to read every item registered during the pertinent years of Jefferson’s life and the lives of his children and grandchildren, I was able to read over a hundred letters of the tiny flawless handwriting of Jefferson family members (all writing with quill pens!) and peruse a hundred more. I did not find a letter, which Barger thought might be in the collection, referencing a “Sally” who possibly went to work with Ellen Coolidge (Jefferson’s granddaughter) in Boston during Jefferson’s lifetime. Such a letter would have disproved a life-long romance between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. I did however find rich material on the character of these people and their times. They were a deeply feeling people. The letters are rich with emotional expression and none of it angry in any way at their “beloved grandpapa.” It is hard to believe that a “grandpapa” raising his own blood in slavery would have been referred to consistently without “innuendo” as Brodie would have it.
The most scandalous activity I found in the Trist collection alluded to Thomas Jefferson’s desire to visit Charlottesville to hear a Unitarian minister. Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter, Virginia, writing her husband, Nicholas Trist, says that the Unitarian outing will depend upon “Grandpapa’s” wishes. “Mama” (Martha Jefferson Randolph) objected to hearing the Unitarian minister “because she thinks it will scandalize our neighbors with whom we already stand suspected.” 33
An interesting note suggests that John Hemings, Sally’s brother, was almost a “free” agent. “Sept. 4, 1825: The carriage is broken and cannot be repaired until John Hemmings [sic] returns from Bedford.”34
Cynthia Burton wrote by e-mail July 2007: “The Trist letter concerning John Hemings’ return from Bedford refers to when Jefferson sent Hemings to Bedford with his two aids [sic] (prob. Eston and Madison) to make repairs caused by a fire at Poplar Forest.”35
By “free agent” I intended to suggest John Hemings was able to come and go on his own, not that he could choose whether or not to come or go. Although on a mission of business for Thomas Jefferson, John Hemings does not appear to have had a chaperone. Such would indicate that Jefferson treated him as he would a trusted employee.
The letters were not private because at that time the mail was not secure. Martha Jefferson Randolph was careful to have, whenever possible, letters that were not for others’ eyes hand delivered. The feelings she secreted however were not regarding her father but rather her husband, whom she would like to have divorced. In a letter from Cambridge, August 2, 1827, from Martha J. Randolph to Nicholas Trist she writes: “As soon as you have read this, burn this.”36 She writes of the torment of her travails, mostly economic, with her husband and her fear that if she separated from him legally he would keep her from ever seeing her two youngest children again.
Surely if there was a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings, Nicholas Trist—who spent so much time at Monticello in his youth, who married Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter Virginia, and became executor of Thomas Jefferson’s will—would have mentioned something in some letter. Since he didn’t burn the letter about Thomas Mann Randolph as requested, it’s not likely that he feared historical exposure of family secrets.
In December of 2000, I found a note I made while researching the Trist collection:
Is that the way of human nature? That those we call “great,” those who have the vision to drive us toward needed changes and magnificence are surrounded by those who are embarrassed by those very acts and others who are encouraged by them so much that 200 years later people still want to destroy the passion of their memory?
I leave this quotation unedited as it stands, a surprise to me having forgotten that I wrote it on an unseasonably cold Spring morning of the kind that can surprise us in central North Carolina. There is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson had any relationship with Sally Hemings other than in his way of treating slaves with a kind of respect as if they were, in the European tradition, old family servants rather than bonded and vulnerable to sale. His writings throughout indicate a fervent hope that the future would find a way out of the slave system he both loathed but lived within his entire life. There is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson himself abused this system, even though others clearly did. The system itself was abuse enough. Yet it can be argued that Jefferson’s forward thinking, as evidenced in his writings, laid down a m
oral foundation for slavery’s eventual demise.
The DNA study confirms that the descendants of Sally Hemings’ last son Eston are cousins of the descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s uncle, Field Jefferson. The descendants of Sally Hemings’ son Eston are also cousins of the descendants of her son Madison. Black and White are cousins. Whether Thomas Jefferson was a great, great, …grandfather, uncle, or cousin can be disputed as long as people are inclined, but the family connection is clear. By his character, Randolph is the most likely paternal possibility for Sally Hemings’ last child. Thomas Jefferson is most likely an innocent member of this family doing the best he knew how in an unjust system, to free a relative’s, possibly even his brother’s, children. Regardless, it is time to embrace the familial relationship of these two lines and in so doing embrace the bi-racial nature of our American Heritage.
Additional Sources
In researching my play I made use of the following:
Early Charlottesville; Recollections of James Alexander 1828–1874; Albemarle County Historical Society; edited by Mary Rawlings.
Jefferson Himself; Edited by Bernard Mayo; University Press of Virginia, 1970.
Jefferson and Monticello; by Paul Wilstach; Doubleday, Page and Co.; New York, 1925.
Green Mountain Boy at Monticello: A talk with Jefferson in 1822 by Daniel Pierce Thompson; The Book Cellar; Brattleboro, VT, 1962.
The Virginia Almanac “For the year of our lord 1800/ being the fourth after Leap Year:”
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville; edited and abridged by Richard D. Heffner; A Mentor Book, The New American Library; New York and Toronto, 1956.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 58