Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies)

by Thomas A. Foster

  The reaction of many Americans was to ignore the issue entirely. For his three-volume account published in the 1850s, Randall interviewed Jefferson's family and chose to leave aside old scandals, including Herrings. He "boasted privately to Sparks" that he had learned from the family that Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr was the father of Hemings's children 96 Randall does refer to Callender, calling him a "blackguard" but little else. In the preface, he explains that he would not just repeat charges from partisan newspapers because to do so would just give them more voice. Some Victorian biographers, such as Morse, allude to the controversy, but none airs the specific charges or takes the story at face value. Morse refers to it as "the pitiful story of Callender's malicious defamation" without mentioning Herrings by name. And Morse defensively does not explicitly address the story: "His many tales were scandalous and revolting to the last degree. Naturally, these slanders will not bear repetition here; for they were worse than mere charges of simple amours."»

  As scholars have shown, by most Americans the Herrings story remained either ignored or coolly noted 98 There has been great resistance to the story of Jefferson's fathering children with Herrings-far greater than any resistance to the characterizations of his other romantic relationships (all of which are equally lacking in strong documentary evidence). Oftentimes the story would simply be alluded to with no explicit mention of Herrings at all. His being emotionally withdrawn, one turn-of-the-twentieth-century biographer explains, came only "after he had been through the fiery ordeal of politics, had been beat upon as fierce a storm of abuse and slander as ever assailed a statesmen so essentially pure, so absolutely patriotic, so consistently unselfish and benevolent."99 A chapter entitled "Moral and Religious Views" notes the Callender newspaper charges but describes Callender as personally and politically begrudged and dismisses Madison Hemings's claim that he was Jefferson's son. The author quips, "In early days, and up to a recent period, nearly every mulatto by the name of Jefferson in Albemarle County, and they were numerous, claimed descent from the Sage of Monticello, which gratified their pride but seriously damaged his reputation.""' For the author, the justification of his dismissal was not based on Jefferson's character but rather alleged documentary evidence that Jefferson had at one point produced a birth record that showed that Madison Herrings could not be his son and implied that the overseer was the father by his confession to a clergyman. One early-twentieth-century biographer who writes that the individual who broke the story, Callender, engaged in a "campaign of calumny" places this information in a footnote: "A low class Richmond paper, edited by Callender, throve for a time on the circumstantial lies which he circulated against Jefferson's private life and character"-again, not mentioning Hemings by name.10'

  By mid-century, the story of Jefferson's enslaved children was being used by both friend and foe of integration. Some did not deny the story but rather used it as an object lesson in the dangers of "racial mixing." Others used the story as a reminder of a long history of exploitation at the hands of white slave-owners."' In the 1950s, the Herrings story gained traction during the African American civil rights movement, appearing in Ebony magazine in 1954.103 The article, entitled "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren," depicts Jefferson as the father of all the slaves whom he had freed in his will, including five who were the children of "several comely slave concubines who were great favorites at his Monticello house.""'

  But many others, however, explicitly reference the relationship only to dismiss it. Typical of those who reject the veracity of the scandal is a heavy finger pointing directly at the "unscrupulous hack" Callender, who in 1802 published the first words in print about Jefferson and Herrings in the Richmond Recorder: "Federalist newspapers all over the country gleefully circulated the libel, and the legend was born. It has been resurfacing ever since.""' Similarly, a mid-twentieth-century biographer explains, "Among other accusations Callender declared that Jefferson, when appointed minister to France, had taken to Paris with him in 1784 a black woman named Sarah or Sally, and that her son, Tom, bore `a striking though sable resemblance' to the President." The author explains in a footnote that "Sarah or Sally" "was a bright mulatto girl whose father, according to Monticello gossip, was an unknown white man. She escorted Maria Jefferson to Paris."106 The 1964 book on the "romantic side" of the Founding Fathers includes an extensive discussion of the Walker scandal and the Cosway affair. Yet in discussing Callender, the author includes only one sentence on Herrings. After describing Callender as a "notorious scandalmonger," he adds, "He added a variation concerning Jefferson's conduct with one of his attractive slave women. 11117 Another biographer in typical fashion describes Callender as an "unattractive human" and explains that "most of the scandalous sto ties about Jefferson that have circulated through the years go back to this wretched journalist, and almost without exception they were false. The story of a slave mistress is the most notorious, and it is wholly without foundation in fact.""' In another example, "to drag the President in his own mire, Callender added industrious circulation of all the malicious stories about Jefferson's personal life that he could pick up or invent, including the vilest of all the canards-one about intimate relations with a female slave.""'

  In addition to singling out the political motives of Callender, a second prong of the defense hinges on Jefferson's character: "In light of overwhelming evidence that Jefferson was a loving and solicitous father, the claim that he seduced a sixteen-year-old slave girl and traveled in the intimate company of his two young daughters with her in an advanced state of pregnancy cannot be believed." 110 Similarly, one 1970s biographer writes, "If this account can be believed, Jefferson emerges as the seducer of a young, innocent, attractive colored girl, hardly out of puberty, who yearned only to be free and to remain in a country where she would not be despised as a `Negress' and humiliated as a slave." This account captures the typical view in a comprehensive manner:

  For Jefferson to have conducted a clandestine love affair with a slave woman and to have raised his children as slaves is completely at variance with his character, insofar as it can be determined by his acts and words, the strict moral code by which he professed to live and which he constantly enjoined upon others, especially young men and women, and his conception of women and their place in society. He was not a womanizer; in his relations with the opposite sex he was temperate to the point of continence. On the occasion when he was tempted to transgress the bounds of discretion and propriety, he curbed his sexual desire-with the result that the love affair did not go beyond a romantic friendship. After the death of his wife, his "affairs of the heart" did not usually involve more than his affections.

  Individuals who avoid or deny the Herrings relationship also emphasize the love between Cosway and Jefferson while he was in Paris. This account manages to accomplish both goals with one line: "The woman with whom Jefferson conducted his most intimate romantic liaison in Paris met, in most respects, the exacting standards he always maintained in affairs of the heart."

  For many biographers who reject the relationship yet acknowledge that a relative of Jefferson was the culprit, the allegation indicates a distinct lack of proper masculine authority so expected in a Founding Father like Jefferson. At best, one who notes that Jefferson was likely not engaged in the relationship points out, "If Jefferson can convincingly be absolved of the charge of being the father of five mulatto children, the fact remains that at Monticello he presided over a scene of miscegenation.""'

  Some biographers revert to the earlier depiction of Jefferson as able to control his sexual passions-essentially, the view of him as chaste widower. As John C.Miller writes (in an exhaustive list), "Almost certainly, after his wife's death, he sublimated the sexual drive in such activities as music-`the favorite passion of my soul'; architecture-building Monticello took over thirty years; gardening and farming; exercise (he spent one to three hours a day on horseback); reading science, and philosophy; his love for his daughters and grandchildren and delight in the co
mpany of his friends.""'

  In the late twentieth century, as popular depictions of Herrings and Jefferson as lovers gained mainstream traction, Jefferson image makers would become more vehement in their denial of the possibility of a HemingsJefferson relationship. This 1970s account explains, "It was impossible for Jefferson to carry on a romance or even a friendship without constant letterwriting." The author continues, "Jefferson's real love-letters were written to his daughters and to his wife, Martha, not to Sally Herrings or to any other woman." And, he reiterates, "The ten years of unalloyed happiness with Martha had made it impossible for him really to love another woman."4

  Over the course of several decades at the end of the twentieth century, popular and academic blockbusters would reintroduce the American public to the Hemings Jefferson relationship. The most influential popular depictions of Jefferson as Hemings's lover begin in 1975 with Professor Fawn Brodie's best-selling psychological biography, re-released in 2010 with an introduction by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed. That same year, Ebony carried a feature on Jefferson that depicts him as a man of contradictions who "fell in love with" Hemings. The article also asserts that Jefferson "had other concubines" and includes a photo of a Chicago woman who descended from one of those relationships.115 This was followed quickly by a best-selling novel, Sally Hemings."6 The academy was slower than the public to warm to the story. Historian Jordan's 1968 White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 is one of the first to take the possible relationship seriously. The book won a National Book Award in 1969 and was widely sold as a Penguin Books paperback."7 But the academic ice on the issue of paternity would not truly begin to melt until Gordon-Reed's careful examination of the persistent academic resistance, which she shows has largely relied on assumptions about Jefferson's character and has tossed historical inquiry aside in deference to his stature as a Founding Father.

  What has also propelled the story forward is the depiction of romantic love between the two. In the absence of documentation, chroniclers have differed on how to characterize the relationship. The earliest nineteenthcentury accounts meant to damage the reputation of Jefferson portray this affair as tending toward rape of an enslaved child, a description that works in the hands of both Jefferson's political enemies and later abolitionists who focused on the horrors of enslavement. Yet beginning in the 1970s, those seeking to make the Herrings story accepted by mainstream audiences broke with this interpretation to argue that a genuine bond of affection existed between the two. This portrayal also holds appeal for recognizing the agency of Herrings in the affair rather than depicting her as a helpless victim of Jefferson's lust."' Brodie, for example, writes, "If the story of the Sally Herrings liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery with an innocent slave victim, as the Federalists and later the abolitionists insisted, but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.""9

  Taking his cues from Brodie's book, which argues that love bonded Jefferson and Herrings, one 1970s biography by a professor of literature asserts that the relationship was "a most touching and tender association." The "gentleman" and the "lovely girl" who "fell in love" in France, he explains, "lived together, in the face of all social prohibitions in their time and place, for nearly four decades, in common law marriage." Depicting them as trailblazers, he concludes, "The difficulties of such a life, though great, were endured with each other's support, even in slavery-ridden Virginia. It was after all, their secret pursuit of happiness."20 This depiction of Jefferson and Herrings as lovers across a forbidden color line is generally the one currently employed in popular memory, making its way from biography to cinema. In such films as Jefferson in Paris (1995), for example, Herrings lives with Jefferson, romantically sneaking in and out of his bedroom so as to avoid the condemnation of their less enlightened family and friends.

  In contrast to the decades of resistance in both popular and academic writings, it has become more commonplace for this story to be mentioned as established fact-and for both the rich and complex Jefferson personal life and legacy and the Herrings family story to be reduced to the JeffersonHemings relationship, which has captivated public imagination. Thus, Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello has received popular and academic praise, garnering a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The Washington Post named it one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008, and although its major accomplishment is the brilliant piecing together of the history of the Herrings family, the blurb describing the recommended title zeroes in on only Herrings and Jefferson, noting that Gordon-Reed "convincingly argues that Thomas Jefferson cohabited for more than 30 years with an African-American woman with whom he conceived seven children." 121 Public response to the book reveals that long before its publication, the JeffersonHemings relationship was increasingly accepted. When Gordon-Reed was on the popular political call-in show Washington journal on C-SPAN, for example, she received no calls to challenge the basics of the story. Indeed, on a program that is known for argument, including racial controversy, this segment was noteworthy for its absence. Doubt about the Herrings story has been largely overcome, with many Americans having accepted the new Jefferson in place of the old. In his review of The Hemingses of Monticello, Morgan writes, "Sally Herrings bore Jefferson six children. That is established as fact, though it has been the subject of hot dispute."122

  How did the story go from being almost entirely rejected to being generally accepted by mainstream audiences? In part, the increased attention to Jefferson's romances and the developing characterization of him as a passionate man laid the groundwork for several other factors. First, the relatively recent scholarship on the history of sexuality in early America established for the academy what had been an open secret-the historical prevalence of both interracial relations, and specifically master-servant and master-slave sexual relations."' Thus, although in Virginia sexual contact between master and slave would not have been as openly discussed as in the lower South and in the West Indies, it was nonetheless not an uncommon facet of that slave society. Sexual contact ran the gamut, ranging from brutal violent rape to tender displays of affection. An intimacy of some sort between slave-owner Jefferson and his slave Herrings therefore fits a classic feature of early American life. Second, the 1873 newspaper account attributed to Sally Hemings's son Madison began to be taken more seriously by scholars who felt it had been unreasonably dismissed as untrustworthy by generations of earlier scholars more interested in "protecting" Jefferson's image than in establishing the truth of the relationship. Finally, the DNA testing in 1998 that established that a Jefferson had fathered at least one of Hemings's children-and, almost more importantly, that a Carr (Jefferson's nephew) had not fathered at least one of the children-persuaded many to accept the romantic versions fully. The Carr brothers had long been held up as one of the most likely fathers by those who argued against the possibility of Jefferson as Hemings's lover.

  Media reporting on DNA testing to determine the paternity of Hemings's own children helped almost as much as the testing itself, given that many media outlets, including the original account, exaggerated the findings. The story broke in Nature magazine with the headline "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." It did not matter that the test did not conclusively prove this fact. In effect, the headline both captures and propels the image of Jefferson as positively linked to Herrings. Popular biographer Ellis writes that the DNA finding "constituted conclusive evidence that Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally's children." For Ellis, the DNA test "in conjunction with the preexistent circumstantial evidence" makes it "highly probable that a long-term sexual relationship existed between them." Despite the weakness of the evidence for either interpretation, Ellis declares, "Now we also know that he fathered several children by one of those slaves while claiming to regard racial amalgamation as a horrific prospect and a central reason why slavery itself could not be easily ended."24 Some a
lleged that the timing of the DNA story and scholarly reports on it were motivated by Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. Radical conservatives went as far as to accuse historians of distorting history so as to provide cover for the president by providing a historical example of a similarly brilliant, if flawed, leader."' As biographer Joseph Ellis, who was one target of the criticism, notes, this was accomplished "presumably by demonstrating that illicit liaisons with younger women had a distinguished presidential pedigree."26

  For popular audiences, the story has been made plausible and appealing over the course of several decades at the end of the twentieth century, because in film and in print, these tellings of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship emphasize love and compatibility-indeed, romance. This detail makes the story palatable. One need not lose an American hero to gain a sense of finally seeing the "truth" in early American history. Americans could have their cake and eat it, too. In 2000, in the wake of the media coverage of the DNA testing, Sally Hemings (based on the novel) aired on CBS. Shown on the night before Valentine's Day, the film emphasizes romance across the color line. The film's DVD cover touts "the true story of the controversial romance between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings" (italics mine). Academic historians, of course, generally take a more nuanced and historical approach to understanding their relationship. Professor Virginia Scharff's book on the women whom Jefferson loved uses both a historical approach and an expansive interpretation of the concept of love to include Hemings. Love in Jefferson's time, she explains, "did not imply equal power or responsibility between people." Employing an abstract definition of love, she also assert, "Love is never, ever simple. Love can be exploitative and terribly cruel," noting that Jefferson was thirty years older than Hemings and stating that "his conduct toward her was predatory and exploitative." The space that this approach opens is, of course, a dangerous one that flirts with favoring Jefferson by portraying his emotional orientation as one of "love" toward Hemings.117