The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy
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Thomas Jefferson and American Democracy; Max Beloff; Collier Books, New York, 1962.
The Promise of American Life; Herbert Croly; Capricorn Books, New York, 1964.
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, The Definitive Edition; 20 Volumes; The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association; Washington D.C., 1907.
Thomas Jefferson’s Paris, Howard Rice, Jr.; Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1976, 3rd printing 1991.
Up From Slavery; Booker T. Washington, Introduction by Louis Lomax; Laurel Leaf Library; 1966
In addition to the above books that I studied, there were numerous magazine articles, trips to the Natural Bridge, Monticello, and even Paris in which I walked the old quarters, imagining the carriages coming in and out of the mammoth doors to the courtyards of the dwellings.
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Footnotes
* Editor’s Note: Upon learning that Scholars Commission member Professor Thomas Traut’s playwright spouse had researched Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in preparation for a play she produced in the 1980s, we urged him to bring her with him to our December 2000 meetings near Dulles Airport. We found her account of her own efforts to find the truth in this matter fascinating, and urged her to prepare the following essay for inclusion as an annex to her husband’s Individual Views in our final report. I commend it to anyone interested in the search for the truth in this matter, and especially to those who believe that Randolph Jefferson was never considered a paternity suspect until after the 1998 DNA tests ruled out the Carr brothers as possible fathers of Eston Hemings.
1. Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History; Fawn M. Brodie; Bantam Books, New York, 1974.
2. Ibid. p. 479; Brodie’s reference is: Ellen Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Jr. October 24, 1858, manuscript owned by Harold Jefferson Coolidge.
3. Ibid.; Quoting Randall quoting Thomas Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph; p. 322.
4. Supreme Court of the United States, Loving et Ux. V. Virginia, 1967.
5. Madison Hemings, “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1,” Pike County Ohio Republican, March 13, 1873 (“Reminiscences of Madison Hemings” Appendix I, Part I; Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Brodie, p. 639.).
6. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Mrs. Eppes, Paris, July 28, 1787 in The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson by S. N. Randolph, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation; The University Press of Virginia, 1978; p.127.
7. The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson; S.N. Randolph; p. 124.
8. The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson; Edited by Edwin Morris Betts and James Adam Bear, Jr.; University of Missouri Press; Columbia, MO, 1986; p. 31.
9. Letter to John Holmes from Thomas Jefferson; The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson; edited by Adrienne Koch and William Peden, The Modern Library, Random House, Inc., New York, 1944, pp. 698–99.
10. “Researchers focus on descendants of Jefferson’s slaves” by Ian Zack; Daily Progress, (date unknown), photocopy provided to me by relative of historian at the University of Southern California, circa mid-1990s.
11. The Wolf by the Ears; Thomas Jefferson and Slavery; John Chester Miller; The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc.; New York, 1977; p. 197.
12. The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson; S.N. Randolph; p. 64.
13. The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson; edited by Adrienne Koch and William Peden; p. 262.
14. Reminiscences of Madison Hemings; “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1.” Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Brodie; p. 642.
15. Jefferson to Francis C. Gray, March 4, 1815, Volume XIV p. 267, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson; definitive edition, Albert Ellery Bergh, Editor, The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1907.
16. James Parton: The Father of Modern Biography, Milton E. Flower, Durham, N.C. 1951, pp. 236–39.
17. Jefferson at Monticello: The Private Life of Thomas Jefferson by Rev. Hamilton Wilcox Pierson. Edited by James A. Bear, Jr.; University Press of Virginia, 1971; p.102.
18. Ibid.
19. The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson; S.N. Randolph; pp. 400–01.
20. E-mail correspondence with Cynthia H. Burton, July 2007, author of Jefferson Vindicated; Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Genealogical Search, 2005, Keswick, Virginia, Cynthia H. Burton.
21. The Private Life of Thomas Jefferson by Rev. Hamilton Wilcox Pierson. Ed. J.A. Bear, Jr.; pp 102–03.
22. Jefferson’s Will, Facsimile of the Original Document in the Circuit Court, Albemarle, Va., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Volume XIX, TJ Memorial Association, 1903; p. x.
23. Madison Hemings; “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1,” Brodie; p. 638.
24. Ibid.
25. Thomas Jefferson and Music; Helen Cripe; University Press of Virginia, 1979.
26. Mr. Jefferson’s Favorite Tunes; selected and compiled by Sarah L. Yancey; copyright 1978 by Sarah L. Yancey.
27. Thomas Jefferson and Music; Helen Cripe; p. 13 cites: Bernard Mayo, Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, in Jefferson at Monticello, James A. Bear, Jr.; p. 22.
28. Ibid.
29. Cynthia Burton suggests recently that ‘the jade’ was most likely Randolph’s second wife. I had no knowledge of which wife that might have been in my early research. The important thing to me was that the family depiction of Randolph’s choices of music, social activity and wife, clearly presented a character very different from his older brother, Thomas.
30. The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson; S.N. Randolph; Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation; The University Press of Virginia, 1978 pp. 136–37.
31. “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child”; Foster, E., et al.; Nature 396, 27–28, 1998.
32. E-mail correspondence with Cynthia H. Burton.
33. Nicholas Trist Papers; Trist Family Collection; Special Collections, University of North Carolina; Wilson Library, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599. Virginia to Nicholas Trist, Jan. 9th, 1824, Monticello.
34. Ibid. (Virginia (at Monticello) to Nicholas Trist, who was at the Springs for his health.)
35. E-mail correspondence with Cynthia H. Burton.
36. Nicholas Trist Papers; Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC.
Minority Views of
Professor Paul A. Rahe
19
Minority Views of Professor Paul A. Rahe
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Regarding the relations that existed between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, lies were told long ago, and today, some two centuries after it was first suggested in print that the author of the Declaration of Independence fathered children with one of his slaves, we still cannot be certain as to who told the truth. On 1 September 1802, James T. Callender, an investigative journalist with a taste for scandal, a gift for invective, and a grudge against Jefferson, published an article in a Richmond paper called The Recorder; or Lady’s and Gentleman’s Miscellany, charging that it was “well known” that the man then holding office as President of the United States “for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves.” He identified this slave as “Sally” and “her eldest son” as “Tom,” and he reported that the latter was “ten or twelve years of age” and that “his features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself.” “By this wench Sally,” he added, “our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story.”1
It was not Jefferson’s practice to countenance charges of this sort by responding directly to them, but in a letter of July, 1805, now lost, directed to “particular friends,” he appears to have denied “all” of the various “allegations” directed against him in the press apart from one referring to a youthful indiscretion involving indelicate behavior on his part towards a married woman. His friends tended to regard the story told by Callender as preposterous. James Madison told its author “that he had known Mr. Jefferson for the greater part of his life; and that he kn
ew so much about the excellence of his heart, as to make this allegation incredible.”2 But there were those tolerably well-acquainted with Jefferson who came to think otherwise. His friend John Hartwell Cocke referred in his diary in late January, 1853 to “Mr. Jeffersons notorious example” in a context in which he was discussing the fact that it was commonplace for slave owners to father children with their slaves. “In Virginia,” he wrote more than six years thereafter, “this damnable practice prevails as much as anywhere—and probably more—as Mr. Jefferson’s example can be [cited?] for its defence.”
On her deathbed, Jefferson’s daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph, who had long resided with her father at Monticello, is said fiercely to have denied the charge and to have drawn the attention of her two sons to the fact that one of Sally Hemings’s children—“the slave,” her elder son later noted, “who most resembled” her father in appearance—was born at a time when her father and Sally Hemings had been “far distant from each other” for some “fifteen months.” Years later, Henry S. Randall, the historian to whom Martha’s son Thomas Jefferson Randolph related this story, reported to a correspondent that he was able “from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation” when he came across the pertinent slave’s date of birth in “an old account book” belonging to Thomas Jefferson.
Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who had charge of Monticello at the time that a number of Sally Hemings’s children were born, acknowledged to Randall that “she had children which resembled” his grandfather “so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.” Their paternity, however, he attributed not to Jefferson himself but to Peter Carr, one of the sons of Jefferson’s sister and his close friend, her late husband Dabney Carr. Peter Carr’s connection with Sally Hemings was, he averred, “perfectly notorious at Monticello,” “scarcely disguised,” “never disavowed,” and on one occasion in his presence openly confessed.
There need be no doubt that Jefferson’s grandson told Randall that one of the two Carr brothers was responsible.3 In October, 1858, when his younger sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge came to visit, he told her much the same tale. “There is a general impression,” she wrote her husband, “that the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of Col. [Samuel] Carr, the most notorious good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio kept at other men’s expense.” To believe the calumnies spread concerning her grandfather, she observed, one must be willing to suppose that “he must have been carrying on his intrigues in the midst of his daughters family and insulting the sanctity of the home by his profligacy. But he had a large family of grandchildren of all ages, older & younger. Young men and young girls. He lived, whenever he was at Monticello, and entirely for the last fifteen years of his life, in the midst of these young people, surrounded by them, his intercourse with them of the freest and most affectionate kind. How comes it that his immoralities were never suspected by his own family—that his daughter and her children rejected with horror and contempt the charges brought against him. That my brother, then a young man certain to know all that was going on behind the scenes, positively declares his indignant belief in the imputation and solemnly affirms that he never saw or heard the smallest thing which could lead him to suspect that his grandfather’s life was other than perfectly pure. His apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze. But again I put it to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable to his domestic character as Mr. Jefferson, so devoted to his daughters and their children, so fond of their society, so tender, considerate, refined in his intercourse with them, so watchful over them in all respects, would be likely to rear a race of half-breeds under their eyes and carry on his low amours in the circle of his family.”4
The claims advanced by Thomas Jefferson Randolph and his sister are confirmed in part by the testimony of Edmund Bacon, who served Jefferson for a time as overseer. Years after his departure from Monticello, he told a minister of the Gospel in Kentucky that Jefferson was not the father of Harriet Hemings, whom he himself had put on a stagecoach for Philadelphia “when she was nearly grown” and to whom he had given, on Jefferson’s instructions, fifty dollars to start her on her way. “She was as white as anybody,” he reported, “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.”
In 1873, however, Sally Hemings’s penultimate son Madison, then a man of advanced age, told the editor of the Pike County Republican in Ohio that his mother had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine” in Paris where, for eighteen months, she served as “body servant” to his daughter Maria. When Jefferson was summoned home, Madison Hemings reported, his mother was already pregnant by him. “He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him 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. She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself), and Eston—three sons and one daughter. We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born.”
Madison Hemings’s fellow former Monticello slave Israel (Gillette) Jefferson later gave an interview to the editor of the same newspaper and confirmed, in part, his friend’s story—that Madison Hemings’s mother was Jefferson’s “concubine” and that Jefferson was the father of Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings. The former claim he knew as a house servant from his “intimacy with both parties”; the latter he could “as conscientiously confirm …as any other fact which I believe from circumstances but do not positively know.”
Until quite recently, historians were inclined to dismiss the allegations of James Callender as irresponsible journalism, to discount the story told by Madison Hemings and confirmed in part by Israel Jefferson as self-serving, and to credit Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s assertion that one of the Carr brothers fathered the children of Sally Hemings.5 It seemed inconceivable that a man of Thomas Jefferson’s character would have been guilty as charged.
In 1968, in his book White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan did observe, if only in passing, that Jefferson’s account books failed to bear out the testimony of Martha Jefferson Randolph, her son Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and Herman S. Randall. In fact, he noted, Thomas Jefferson was present at Monticello on each and every occasion when Sally Hemings is known to have conceived, and he could therefore have been the father of all her known children, as Madison Hemings alleged.6 Apart, however, from psycho-biographer Fawn Brodie, no one seems until quite recently to have reflected in print on the implications of Jordan’s discovery, and her highly speculative approach to Jefferson’s psychology did not recommend her book to academic historians.7
It was only in 1997, when law professor Annette Gordon-Reed published her Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, that the tide began to turn. By that time, students of slavery were almost all inclined to acknowledge that slave concubinage was as common as John Hartwell Cocke had supposed and that public silence regarding one’s follies in this regard was part of the unwritten social code of the slaveholding class. Only those who lived openly with their concubines were subject to stern disapproval.8 It also helped a great deal that Gordon-Reed’s reassessment of the evidence was caref
ul, thorough, and, for the most part, dispassionate.9
In consequence, when the storm broke in 1998 with the publication of a DNA study by a Charlottesville physician showing that Eston Hemings was a direct male descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather, the great majority of historians were quick to conclude that Madison Hemings’s testimony was largely true. I know whereof I speak, for I was one such—inclined, like most of my brethren, to suppose Callender’s charges improbable; stunned by the DNA data, and more than willing, in the immediate aftermath, to believe Madison Hemings’s claims. Only since consenting to review the evidence for the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission have I begun to wonder whether the indictment against Thomas Jefferson is really true. I am still inclined, on balance, to think it more likely than not that he was the father of Eston Hemings, but I can now understand why honest and reasonable human beings can be deeply skeptical. On the available evidence, the charge remains unproven. The question of the relations of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is an historical puzzle of considerable complexity, and in the end we are forced to resort to educated guesswork.
Before resorting to such guesswork, I want to acknowledge a very considerable debt to Annette Gordon-Reed, whose book makes for compelling reading; to Dan Jordan and the staff of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation who have gathered and analyzed the available evidence in a manner that is highly professional, generally cautious, and exceedingly helpful to anyone wanting to review it for the purpose of making up his own mind; and to Professor Robert F. Turner of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, who organized the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission and led its members in a reassessment of the available evidence item by item.