Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

  “HARRIET MARRIED A WHITE MAN” TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/harriet-hemings (accessED 2012).

  MADISON WAS FREED IN JEFFERSON’S WILL TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/sally-hemings (accesSED 2012).

  MOVED TO OHIO IBiD.

  SETTLED IN WISCONSIN IBiD.

  CHANGED HIS NAME IBId.

  DECLARED HIMSELF TO BE WHITE IBID.

  BOTH WERE CARPENTERS AND FARMERS IbID.

  IN HIS WILL JEFFERSON ALSO FREED Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of MonticELlO, 647.

  NO OTHER SLAVES IBID., 657.

  SOON MOVED TO CHARLOTTESVILLE IbID., 659.

  JEFFERSON DID NOT NAME HER IN HIS WILL IbID., 657.

  THERE IS EVIDENCE Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 657. “Sally Hemings’s situation was convoluted and mysterious, as it had been since her return to America, but one can piece together what happened,” wrote Gordon-Reed. “Many years later, in 1873, Israel Gillette stated that Jefferson had freed seven slaves, including Sally Hemings and all her children. Of course, he only freed five people in his will. Beverly and Harriet Hemings simply left Monticello as white people with no formal emancipation. Who were the other two? Jefferson evidently made oral bequests of freedom as well. Members of his family told Henry Randall that Jefferson had directed his daughter to free forty-five-year-old Wormley Hughes, if he wanted to be free. For very obvious reasons, no one in the family would report to a historian an oral instruction from Jefferson to free Sally Hemings if she wanted it. Eight years after her father’s death, Martha Randolph directed that two of her father’s slaves, Sally Hemings and Wormley Hughes, and one of her own Randolph slaves, Betsy, the wife of Peter Hemings, be given ‘their time,’ even though all had been living as free people since Jefferson’s death.” (IbID.)

  GAVE SALLY HEMINGS “HER TIME” Ibid. “ ‘Giving time’ was a customary way of emancipation that avoided having to make a request to the legislature or county court to allow the enslaved person to remain in the state,” wrote Gordon-ReeD. (IbID.)

  MADE SALLY HEMINGS’S EMANCIPATION IBID., 243.

  SHE BEQUEATHED SOME SOUVENIRS IbID., 653.

  THE LOTTERY HE HAD HOPED JHT, VI, 496.

  BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $2 MILLION TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/debt (accessED 2012).

  MONTICELLO AND HIS SLAVES HAD TO BE SOLD Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, 655–62. (Gordon-Reed rightly describes the post-Jefferson Monticello as “the final catastrophe.” [Ibid., 655.]) See also Randall, Jefferson, III, 561–63; JHT, VI, 504–14; and Crawford, Twilight at Monticello, 247–61. For an account of the fate of the Monticello mansion itself, see Marc Leepson, Saving Monticello: The Levy Family’s Epic Quest to Rescue the House That Jefferson Built (New YorK, 2001).

  “VISIBLE AND PALPABLE MARKS” Diary of John Quincy ADAMs, 360.

  ONE MORNING BEFORE BREAKFAST Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York, 1997), 263. Webster described how he wrote the speech to Millard Fillmore. (IBID.)

  ON A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN BOSTON IbiD., 264.

  “ON OUR FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY” The Works of Daniel Webster, I, 113.

  “THOMAS JEFFERSON SURVIVES” McCullough, John Adams, 646. The manuscript source is Susan Boylston Adams Clark to Abigail Louisa Smith Adams Johnson, July 9, 1826, A. B. Johnson Papers, Massachusetts HistoricaL SOCIETy.

  EPILOGUE · ALL HONOR TO JEFFERSON

  “JEFFERSON’S PRINCIPLES ARE SOURCES OF LIGHT” Woodrow Wilson, College and State Educational Literary and Political Papers (1875–1913), II, ed. Ray Stannard Baker and William E. Dodd (New York, 1925), 428.

  HE SURVIVES AS HE LIVED Jack N. Rakove, “Our Jefferson” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, 210. “Jefferson remains alive for us—‘us’ being both scholars and the public—to an extent and with an attractive power that none of his contemporaries can rival: not Madison, with his more deeply probing intellect; not Washington, struggling with the importance of being George; not even Franklin, the other self-fashioned sage whose inner life rivals Jefferson’s in its elusiveness.” (Ibid., 210.)

  “TO HAVE BEEN THE INSTRUMENT” Edward Everett, An Address Delivered at Charlestown, August 1, 1826, In Commemoration of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Boston, 1826), 134.

  “MR. JEFFERSON MEANT” Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Charlottesville, Va., 1998), 284.

  ELLEN WAYLES COOLIDGE WAS EN ROUTE Ellen Wayles Coolidge to Henry S. Randall, May 16, 1857, University of Virginia. Extract published at Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Digital Archive, www.monticello.org/familyletters (accesseD 2012).

  “IF JEFFERSON WAS WRONG” Parton, LiFE, iii.

  “MAN … FEELS THAT” TJ to Joseph C. Cabell, February 2, 1816, University of Virginia. Extract published at Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Digital Archive, http://retirementseries.dataformat.com (accesseD 2012).

  “THE LEADERSHIP HE SOUGHT” Henry Adams, HistoRY, 363.

  “THE PRINCIPLES OF JEFFERSON” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, III, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953–55), 375–76. The letter is dated April 6, 1859.

  “ALL HONOR TO JEFFERSON” IbiD., 376.

  “IT IS NOT NECESSARY FOR US” Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at Jefferson Day Dinner in St. Paul, Minnesota,” April 18, 1932, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=88409 (accessEd 2012).

  IN SEPTEMBER 1948, AT THE BONHAM HIGH SCHOOL Harry S. Truman, “Address at Bonham, Texas,” September 27, 1948, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13021 (accessed 2012).

  “I HAVE A PROFOUND FAITH” IBId.

  SALUTING JEFFERSON’S “TRANSFORMING GENIUS” Ronald Reagan, “Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,” December 16, 1988, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=35272 (accesseD 2012).

  “PRESIDENTS KNOW ABOUT THIS” IBId.

  “HE KNEW HOW” IBID.

  ACHIEVEMENTS HE ORDERED CARVED TJ, undated memorandum on epitaph, Thomas Jefferson PapeRS, LOC.

  “AND I HAVE OBSERVED” TJ to William Ludlow, September 6, 1824 (LOC). Extract published at Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Digital Archive, www.monticello.org/familyletters (accesSEd 2012).

  HE WAS BORNE Bear, “Last Few Days in the Life of Thomas JefferSON,” 65.

  WHEN DUSK COMES I am an indebted to Fraser D. Neiman of Monticello, who generously checked my observation that the cemetery remained in sunlight longer than Shadwell, the Rivanna, Monticello itself, Mulberry Row, and the main gardens and orchards.

  Fraser and his team ran a solar radiation simulation in a geographical information system (ArcGIS), using a digital elevation model of Monticello Mountain and the surrounding topography, including Montalto. The simulation took into account the effects of topography. The simulation estimated the amount of solar radiation that hit the ground surface between the hours of seven and eight p.m. on July 6, 1826. The result showed that the ground surface at the cemetery remains in direct sunlight after the ground surfaces around the mansion and around the houses on Mulberry Row have passed into shadow. The northwestern slope of the mountain is the only portion of Jefferson’s five thousand acres that remain in light after the cemetery itself passes into shaDOW.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

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