As should be clear from the material presented above, virtually every piece of available testimony on this subject can be impeached; virtually everyone who commented had an interest in saying what he or she said. James Callender believed that Jefferson had betrayed him and wanted revenge. Madison Hemings wanted to make himself more important by tracing his paternity to a famous man, and Israel Jefferson came to the support of a friend. Such are the charges that can be made. By the same token, it could be said that Martha Jefferson Randolph and her children were eager to protect the reputation of her father. They certainly had a personal stake in doing so, and it was not uncommon for members of their class to try to cover up the sort of misdeed with which Thomas Jefferson was charged. Something of the sort can be said concerning Jefferson’s onetime overseer Edmund Bacon, who could and did dine out on his connection with the great man. As for Herman S. Randall, he was among the initiators of the Jefferson cult. The value of his biography of the statesman depended on his compatriots’ estimation of Thomas Jefferson’s accomplishments and character. In the aftermath of the Civil War, southerners were looking for a useable history, and it made more sense to dwell on Jefferson’s apparently unimpeachable example than to credit the charges once made against him. Monticello, as visitors are wont to comment, is a very small place. To believe that Thomas Jefferson carried on an extended affair with one of his slaves under the noses of his grandchildren would require that we rethink from the ground up our inherited image of the man.
I find two pieces of evidence impressive—first, the fact that the beginning of Sally Hemings’s pregnancies coincided with Thomas Jefferson’s sojourns at Monticello, and, second, the fact that at least one of her children was fathered by a direct male descendant of Jefferson’s grandfather.
It is, of course, possible that Hemings was elsewhere during one or more of the pertinent visits by her master, but, in the absence of contrary evidence, it is unreasonable to think her anywhere other than her home. In a recent article in The William & Mary Quarterly, Monticello archaeologist Fraser D. Neiman has sought to demonstrate statistically, on the basis of Jefferson’s presence each time she conceived, that he must have been the father.10 This he has failed to achieve. What he has accomplished, however, is to show the very high likelihood that Sally Hemings’s pregnancies are somehow due to Jefferson’s presence. One can go even further. Given that she tended to get pregnant in the first month after his arrival, Neiman has established a correlation between Jefferson’s homecomings and her pregnancies.
The most economical explanation would be that Jefferson himself sought her out on such occasions, but we must keep in mind that there is no good reason to believe that she had only one sexual partner. For what it is worth, the gossip reported by James Callender suggests the contrary.11 On this question, in any case, we must keep an open mind. Slaves were generally not in a position to refuse when approached by white men. There is, then, a real possibility that some, if not all of Sally Hemings’s pregnancies were a consequence of social calls made on Jefferson by his friends and relatives on the occasions of these homecomings. We know that visits to Monticello were rare in his absence and frequent when he was present. Among those whom Jefferson could expect to make such a social call shortly after he came home was his brother Randolph, who lived twenty miles away and had four or five sons. At the time of Eston Hemings’s birth, Thomas Jefferson was 64; his brother Randolph was 52; and Randolph’s sons ranged in age from about 17 to 26. All carried the tell-tale Y chromosome. Any one of them could have been Eston Hemings’s father.
As it happens, we know that, at the very time that Sally Hemings became pregnant with her son Eston, Thomas Jefferson’s brother Randolph was expressly invited to come to Monticello on the occasion of a visit by his twin sister. The surviving correspondence, limited as it is, suggests that he was a frequent visitor to Monticello and that ordinarily he did not come alone: we can, in fact, presume that he was usually accompanied by one or more of his sons. Furthermore, we have reason to suspect that his son Thomas may have been in residence at Monticello when Harriet Hemings was conceived and that his son Robert Lewis may have been present when Eston Hemings was conceived. We know also, from the testimony of Isaac Jefferson, a slave at Monticello, that, when he did visit, Randolph Jefferson “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” We know that Thomas Jefferson’s children and grandchildren referred to Randolph Jefferson as “Uncle Randolph”; we know that there was a somewhat confused tradition in the family that traced its descent back to Eston Hemings that they were descended from Thomas Jefferson’s uncle or cousin;12 and there is evidence of the existence of an oral tradition in more than one Albemarle County family that Randolph Jefferson had African-American offspring.13 None of this proves that either Randolph Jefferson or one of his sons was Eston Hemings’s father, but it does give one pause. And nothing in the available evidence rules out our wondering whether the charge lodged by Thomas Jefferson Randolph against the Carr brothers was not at least partially true. Despite what can be learned from the DNA evidence and what can be inferred from the apparent connection between Thomas Jefferson’s sojourns at Monticello and Sally Hemings’s pregnancies, the mystery remains unsolved.
Further light may one day be shed on this question. Sally Hemings’s eldest son Beverly Hemings ran away from Monticello when he was in his early twenties and was never found. He apparently made his way to Washington, D. C., married, and started a family, and there is reason to believe that he passed as white. Someday one of his direct male descendants may turn up and may be willing to undergo a DNA test. Furthermore, in the U. S. Military Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas, lie the remains of Madison Hemings’s son William Beverly Hemings, who has no known descendants. It may be possible to exhume his body and collect a DNA sample. If it could be shown that the son of Madison Hemings or a descendant of his elder brother Beverly was a Jefferson, we could be more confident that Thomas Jefferson Randolph had lied to Herman S. Randall and to his sister concerning the brothers Carr, and the only plausible explanation for lying on his part would be the knowledge that his grandfather was, in fact, the father of Sally Hemings’s children.
There is also the mysterious “Tom” mentioned by James Callender. Madison Hemings knew nothing of him: he was told of a child born to his mother at about the time that this Tom would have been born, but this child supposedly died in early infancy. In the records at Monticello, no such Tom appears.14 These records are scanty in the period stretching from 1783 to 1794, when Callender’s “Tom” would have been born, but they are more fulsome thereafter when Thomas Jefferson resumed his earlier practice of making notations in his Farm Book. The absence of any mention of the pertinent Tom therein suggests that Callender may have, in this particular, been misinformed. It is, nonetheless, true that none of Jefferson’s defenders rose to Callender’s challenge by denying the existence of his “Tom”; and when the Federalist editor of Virginia’s Frederick-Town Herald looked into the matter, he claims to have discovered what he termed “circumstances of confirmation,” reporting that there was a “Sally” and that she worked as a “seamstress” within the Jefferson household; observing that “she is an industrious and orderly creature”; and noting that “her son, whom Callender calls President Tom,” did, indeed, bear “a strong likeness to Mr. Jefferson.”15
There is, moreover, a family which traces its ancestry to a freedman named Thomas C. Woodson, and in its various branches the members of this family have preserved an oral tradition that this Tom Woodson was the son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. In this case, the DNA evidence rules out paternity on the part of any Jefferson (or, for that matter, any Carr).16 If Thomas C. Woodson was, nonetheless, a son of Sally Hemings, the “Tom” mentioned by Callender, she had more than one lover in the course of her life, and Callender was wrong about the paternity of the slave who looked so much like the President. It is also possible that further investigation will turn up another can
didate more likely to have been Callender’s “Tom” and that he has direct male descendants whose DNA can be compared with the samples already collected.
As things stand, however, it all comes down to what we think of Thomas Jefferson. Was he capable of doing what Ellen Randolph Coolidge considered unthinkable—of “carrying on his intrigues in the midst of his daughters family and insulting the sanctity of the home by his profligacy?” As professional historians, Douglass Adair once noted, we have been “taught to be extremely skeptical of any purported episode in a man’s career that completely contradicts the whole tenor of his life and that requires belief in a total reversal of character.”17 As human beings, however, we are nonetheless acutely, even painfully aware of our own capacity for self-deception, hypocrisy, and outright deceit. If in one part of his life, Thomas Jefferson behaved in a manner at odds with the dictates of respectability that, almost without exception, he faithfully honored in the rest of his life, would it be terribly surprising?
I have long been persuaded that we do not know Thomas Jefferson at all well; that virtually all of the surviving letters written after he had entered on the public stage were composed not only for their particular correspondents but for posterity; that he donned a mask at a very early age and very rarely let it slip; that he cared far more about his future reputation than about anything else; that his conduct in public life was less than honest and forthcoming; that he was more prone to vanity and hypocrisy than figures such as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison; and that, in contrast with John Adams, introspection was decidedly his short suit.18 I do not find it particularly hard to imagine that a lonely widower, who had sworn to his dying wife that he would not remarry and subject their daughters to a stepmother, should have found a beautiful young woman such as his deceased wife’s slave half-sister a temptation more than he could bear. And once he had given way to lust, what was there to prevent him, even if he sought to exercise an iron self-control, from slipping again? He was, after all, a man subject to temptation like other men, and he must have known that his family would do what it could to hide whatever dark secrets he may have harbored.
In 1781–82, prior to his extended sojourn in Paris, Thomas Jefferson remarked in his Notes on the State of Virginia that “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” and he then added that “the man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”19 Was the proprietor of Monticello such a prodigy? There were, we know, others within the slaveholding class who were, and they were more numerous than we might be inclined to think. In the end, one’s judgment really does depend on what one thinks of the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence, wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty, founded the University of Virginia, denounced slavery in unequivocal terms, and yet gave sanction in his Notes on the State of Virginia to the pseudo-scientific racial doctrines that were later used to justify slavery as a positive good.20 To be frank, I know not what to think. Regarding the relations that existed between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, lies were told long ago, and today, even with the help of DNA analysis, we still cannot be certain as to who told the truth.
What we do know, however, is damning enough. Despite the distaste that he expressed for the propensity of slaveholders to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man.
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Footnotes
1. Unless otherwise specified, here and hereafter, I quote from the documentary evidence collected in the appendices to Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee, Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, January, 2000, which can be accessed on the Internet.
2. The Recorder (Richmond), 29 September 1802.
3. As will become clear, there is some confusion in the record as to which of the two brothers—Peter or Samuel—Jefferson’s grandson implicated.
4. Using the facisimile copy of this letter provided in the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee’s Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, I have corrected the committee’s transcription of it.
5. The best statement of this case was made in an essay written in 1960 by Douglass Adair. See Adair, “The Jefferson Scandals,” Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (New York: Norton, 1974) 160–91.
6. See Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968) 465–68. See, now, Jordan, “Hemings and Jefferson: Redux,” in Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999) 35–51.
7. See Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: Norton, 1974).
8. In this connection, see Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c. 1700–1820,” and Joshua D. Rothman, “James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia,” in Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson 52–84, 87–113.
9. See Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
10. Fraser D. Neiman, “Coincidence or Causal Connection? The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson’s Visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings’s Conceptions,” The William & Mary Quarterly 57 (January, 2000): 198–210.
11. See The Recorder, 22 and 29 September, 5 November, and 1 December 1802. In this connection, see Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 61–62.
12. See Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family,” in Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson 161–83 (at 174). Stanton and Swann-Wright are, I think, too quick to discount this evidence.
13. See Chapter Eleven of Professor Turner’s Individual View.
14. For a thorough discussion of what can be gleaned from these records and from the other evidence with regard to Sally’s mother Elizabeth Hemings and her many descendants, see Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello (Monticello: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2000) 102–40.
15. Frederick-Town Herald, reprinted in The Recorder, 8 December 1802. See Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 63–64.
16. Any attempt to salvage the Woodson family claim to Jeffersonian descent on the presumption that at some point there was an unacknowledged interruption in the line of paternity founders on the fact that three such lines of descent from Thomas C. Woodson have now been tested. To think the Woodson family claim plausible in this particular, one would have to presume that Thomas C. Woodson was cuckolded thrice. Cf. Joseph J. Ellis, “Jefferson: Post-DNA,” William & Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 125–38 (126–27).
17. Adair, “The Jefferson Scandals,” 181.
18. See Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) 617–772. In this last connection, consider what Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: Knopf, 2000) and Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (forthcoming in October, 2001), have to say about Jefferson’s political modus operandi. Note also Andrew Burstein, “Jefferson’s Rationalizations,” William & Mary Quarterly 57 (2000): 183–97.
19. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954) Query XVIII.
20. Jean Yarbrough, “Race and the Moral Foundations of the American Republic: Another Look at the Declaration and the Notes on Virginia,�
� The Journal of Politics 53 (1991): 90–105.
Editor’s Postscript:
Reactions to the Scholars Commission Report
Professor Robert F. Turner
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Editor’s Postscript: Reactions to the Scholars Commission Report
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The comments that follow are not a part of the formal report of the Scholars Commission and represent only the views of the editor. They are included in this volume with the thought that some readers may find them of interest. However, they have not been shared in advance with all members of the Commission, and responsibility for the accuracy of facts and judgments expressed in this chapter is the editor’s alone.
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Ten years have passed since the Scholars Commission Report was released. As the revised and expanded book version is finally going to press1 it seems useful to note some of the initial reactions and subsequent developments, and to respond to some of the criticisms of our report that have come to my attention. I cannot justify the delay, which is my fault alone. But perhaps I should try to explain it.
I had promised the final version of the Scholars Commission Report to Carolina Academic Press by November 2001. But my “day job” involves legal scholarship about terrorism and related national security issues, and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, left me no choice but to set this project aside. The demands of my work simply left me with no spare time.
At the same time, the events of that historic date made it all the more important that the record be set straight, because—perhaps more than any other human being in history—Thomas Jefferson is the antithesis to the bigotry and intolerance of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist followers. Indeed, in a letter to the editor of the New York Times published in late 2001, science writer Steven T. Corneliussen argued: “History may well remember Osama bin Laden as the anti-Jefferson, the benighted opponent of inalienable human rights, religion-respecting secular democracy and progress based on reason. …Jefferson’s vision of history is now more vital than ever.”2 As we seek to deal with these new threats from abroad, all Americans should cherish the traditions of human freedom Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries bequeathed to us.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 60