Exposure
“It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.” With those words published in the September 1, 1802, issue of the Richmond Recorder, James Callender opened the door to Sally Hemings’s world at Monticello, or at least the world as he chose to portray it.20 It had been almost thirteen years since she and her brother had returned to Monticello. James was tragically gone. The first anniversary of his death loomed, and this now twenty-nine-year-old mother of two faced a crisis that her sixteen-year-old self could never have imagined when she came back to America with Jefferson. She had no doubt expected a private life. This was exposure in the most public and hostile way. The cruelty Callender directed toward her continued over the course of several months.
Callender’s informers were Jefferson’s neighbors in Charlottesville and people in Richmond, and one gets a sense from what he got right and what he got wrong how familiar his informants were with life at Monticello. In his original piece he spoke of Hemings’s and Jefferson’s “son” “Tom,” who was “ten or twelve years of age.” He also said that Hemings had gone “to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters.” In his column of September 15, he mentioned that she had five children.21 His next piece revealed that a man in Richmond had “bet him a suit of clothes or any sum of money” that the story was true, but pointed out that Callender had made an error in his first story: Hemings had not gone to Paris with Jefferson but traveled later.22 Of course, that man clearly was not talking off the top of his head, for that was a specific detail about a long-ago event that no one could have guessed. The next column purported to correct information about Tom’s age. “He is not big enough at least our correspondent thinks so, to have been in existence fifteen or sixteen years ago. Our information goes to twelve or thirteen years (emphasis in original).”23
Sally Hemings did not have five children in 1802. She had, however, given birth five times, but three of her children had died. The people talking to Callender may have been close enough to know when she got pregnant—there would have been reason to gossip about that—but were not closely following her children’s lives after that time.24 The mountain was full of fair-skinned enslaved children of all ages, some of them Hemingses who probably resembled one another. Who from the outside could, or would want to, be keeping track of who belonged to whom?
One strongly suspects that Callender’s informants actually told him that Hemings had lost children, and he simply felt that saying Jefferson had five children with an enslaved woman sounded better than just two, for that clearly established the relationship as long-standing. What seemed to bother him, and later commentators who joined in, was the apparent stability of the relationship, which suggested that Hemings was something like a wife to Jefferson. That, they believed, was an insult to white women, for this was, in modern terminology, a zero-sum game. If he chose to live with a particular African American woman, that inevitably meant he rejected all white women. Awful as he was, Callender was no fool. Telling his readers, in the midst of articles meant to be jeering and hostile, that Hemings had once had five children, but that only two survived, might actually have triggered some empathy with her. Nearly all of his readers would have known someone who lost a child, or lost one themselves, in a world where diseases carried away the offspring of all classes and races. Only the lowest of the low could have failed to sympathize with a mother who had endured such losses.
As his biographer Michael Durey pointed out, Callender had a particular penchant for exaggeration, a not unhelpful trait for a polemicist. At one point he said that Hemings had up to thirty “gallants of all colors.”25 Five or six would not have been enough; she had to have thirty of them in all colors. He dubbed Hemings and Jefferson’s purported eldest son “President Tom” and made him an important part of his series—President Tom who bore “a striking, though sable” resemblance to Jefferson, President Tom who was “putting on airs.” It was the perfect way to ridicule Jefferson, a child with his same name, a sable Tom Jr. who strutted about full of himself—showing the clear dangers of racial intermixture. That’s what happens when you mix the races, he was saying, you get these ridiculous creatures who do not know their place. Not one of the other supposedly five living children was ever mentioned. Neither four-and-a-half-year-old Beverley nor the infant Harriet could have served Callender’s needs so well.
Callender’s discussion of President Tom indicates that his multiple informants were, in a somewhat confused way, trying to fix Hemings’s first child’s age and, thus the beginning of her relationship with Jefferson, by reference to her trip to France. They were simply going on when they remembered Hemings’s first child was born—when the gossip started—sometimes mixing up when she went to France with when she returned. That is the reason for Callender’s language in his “correction” of himself, saying that Tom was not “big enough to have been in existence “fifteen or sixteen years ago.” Using fifteen or sixteen years as a marker for this child’s “existence” would have taken things back to around 1787, when Hemings had gone to France. Of course, she did not have a baby when she went there. She had her baby when she returned. Had that child lived, he or she would indeed have been twelve years old.
Hemings could have expected the usual run of gossip about her and Jefferson. As the mistress of the plantation owner, she would have had all eyes fixed on her—the eyes of the enslaved, as well as any others who knew of her circumstance. She could not have expected to have her name in the newspaper with a virulent Scotsman branding her a “slut as common as the pavement,” suggesting that she lived in the pigsty at Monticello.26 His hatred for her was unreasoning and unbounded. Why? And why had Jefferson brought this man into her life, anyway?
The basic outline of Jefferson’s history with Callender is straightforward and familiar. He noticed Callender’s undeniable talent for polemics during the mid-1790s and thought the ardent Republican might be useful in his struggles with the Federalists. Callender had shown that he was willing to go to almost any length to hurt those with whom he disagreed—a trait that should have given Jefferson pause about getting involved with him. Unfortunately, it did not. The 1790s for Jefferson was life during wartime. The Federalists had to be stopped no matter what. To all appearances, Callender was a comrade, and Jefferson optimistically (naïvely) thought their shared political beliefs a sound basis for a connection in times of war. Callender would only go after those whom he was supposed to go after—the much hated Federalists. Although Jefferson later played down the closeness of their connection, his early financial support of Callender, and encouraging words and gestures, put him into the position of being something of a mentor to him.27 Being mentor to James Callender, however, was like walking a cobra on a leash. Jefferson never had any reasonable prospect of knowing when Callender might turn on him.
By the end of the 1790s, Callender’s sharp pen and criticism of the Adams administration got him sent to jail in Richmond under the power of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Jefferson resolved to pardon everyone convicted under the law when he became president. Callender had served his term before Jefferson took office and had to pay a $200 fine. Jefferson ordered the federal marshal David Meade Randolph, brother-in-law to Thomas Mann Randolph, to give Callender back his money. Randolph hesitated, infuriating Callender, who perversely saw Jefferson as responsible for Randolph’s behavior. He grew angry when Jefferson failed to answer one of his letters and demanded a patronage job—postmaster of Richmond. Even as he seethed about the perceived ingratitude of Jefferson and the Republicans—he really had suffered for doing their bidding in the climate of the Alien and Sedition Acts—he decided to give himself insurance. After his release from jail, he went to Charlottesville to find out if the hints in the newspapers about Jefferson and an enslaved woman were true. He also made inquiries in Richmond.28
When Jefferson learned of Callender’s rising a
nger, he thought additional money might mollify him. It did not. He wanted to be postmaster of Richmond, the only thing that could repay him for the time he had spent in jail for having roasted the Republicans’ enemies in the pages of the Richmond Examiner and his other publications. Callender went to Washington and met with James Madison, but the meeting satisfied no one. When told of this, Jefferson sent his secretary Meriwether Lewis, of later Lewis and Clark fame, with an additional fifty dollars to give to Callender, along with a promise to help him get reimbursed for the fine he had paid. This inflamed him further, for he now realized that there was no chance that Jefferson would give him a job in his administration.29
Callender’s fine was repaid, but his rage was now out of control. He felt used, and that was not all. James Callender’s hatred of blacks was full-blown and vicious. He was genuinely horrified that the man who had once been his hero and benefactor had an African American mistress and children by her. Jefferson, a traitor to the white race, had been unworthy of his respect from the beginning. In his fury, Callender sought to humiliate Jefferson by making Hemings a special target, when she had not done anything to him at all. As noted earlier, Callender had made part of his career in Richmond excoriating the white men of the town for being involved with black women. He claimed then that he was concerned only about married men who were committing adultery, giving a pass to bachelors. Despite what he said, the passion he repeatedly brought to his denunciations and the things he said about black people in general make plain that it was interracial mixing, not adultery, that really infuriated him.29
Jefferson had been a widower for two decades. It is highly unlikely that he ever frequented Charlottesville taverns and dances with Hemings or took her to the theater, like the men of Richmond whom Callender assailed. Jefferson and Hemings’s world was private. Her life centered on caring for his rooms and his belongings—a space Jefferson guarded closely. Although she may have traveled to Philadelphia, Washington, and Poplar Forest, in all events she was strictly of Jefferson’s domestic world. Not that consistency would have mattered to Callender, but his attack upon Jefferson the bachelor and Hemings the completely private person made no sense, given his earlier posture about attacking only married men who publicly broke their marriage vows.
There is no record of what Jefferson ever said to his white family about Callender’s writings in 1802, and no record of what the Hemingses thought. Just as Jefferson’s white neighbors knew about the exposure of the relationship, members of the enslaved community knew as well. The only question that any of these people could have had at this point was what Jefferson would do next. This crisis had implications for his public and private lives, the former more than the latter. For most people who did not live at or in the environs of Monticello, this was a revelation. For the people who lived there, it was not. By the time of Callender’s exposé, both the Hemings and the Jefferson families, and other relatives close to them, had had at least twelve years to adapt themselves to Sally and Thomas’s lives at Monticello. They did it in the way that all families, at one time or another, are forced to deal with potentially embarrassing situations involving their loved ones; they closed ranks. One of the great strengths (and great weaknesses) of the institution of the family is that family members protect or, depending upon the situation, cover for one another. Members are anxious, sometimes to the detriment of themselves or other individuals in the family, to present a united and, usually, positive front to the outside world.
If one were to drop down into the middle of any seemingly bizarre family situation, one would wonder how these people could possibly live in those circumstances. The people living in it, however, would have had years to fit themselves into whatever strange configuration one found them in. A thousand tradeoffs, exchanges, and accommodations would have been made, completely away from the view of outsiders. The family adjusts and endures. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it had no choice.
Slavery simply provided families in the South with many more ways to be bizarre than in regions where it never took hold or was abandoned early on. Fathers owning sons, brothers giving away brothers as wedding gifts, sisters selling their aunts, husbands having children with their wives and then their wives, enslaved half sisters, enslaved black children and their free little white cousins, living and playing together on the same plantation—things that by every measure violate basic notions of what modern-day people think family is supposed to be about. This was one of the myriad reasons why slavery was a horrific thing. These weird family situations actually violated emerging norms for the family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which is why southern whites of that time worked so assiduously to hide this aspect of southern life.
One of the more difficult things for modern-day observers to accept is that Jefferson’s daughters knew of his relationship with Hemings, in much the same way that their mother was said to have lived with John Wayles and Elizabeth Hemings without knowing they were having multiple children together. The people of their time, however, at least the ones who wrote about it, absolutely assumed that these women knew. In fact, much of the commentary about Jefferson and Hemings dwelled on his daughters’ likely feelings about this over the years. Their contemporaries never entertained the notion that the women of the household did not know what was going on in their own houses. They understood their community and its mores, and knew that such situations were not uncommon. Martha and Maria’s father’s fame and position in society could not protect their family from things that were endemic to the institution of slavery.
Jefferson’s white daughters, like white women all over the South in their time, were expected to adjust to the men in their lives, not the other way around. They loved him dearly, and would not have stopped doing so for any conceivable reason—certainly not for having a mistress. It is hard to see through the heavy prism of the Victorian age that followed Jefferson’s time, but celibacy was not an expectation among the people of the eighteenth century. Martha and Maria could no more force that on their father than they could have made him marry a white woman he did not want to marry, a thing that would have been to their distinct disadvantage anyway. After the deep disappointment in the 1790s, described earlier, when her father-in-law remarried and destroyed her chance of becoming the mistress of Tuckahoe, Martha Randolph had lived a somewhat unsettled existence, moving between Monticello, Eppington, Varina, Belmont, Edgehill, and, finally, back to Monticello.
The Randolph-Harvie marriage was a socially acceptable union that had been, in fact, personally disastrous for Martha and her children, who would have grown up in and inherited the grand house Tuckahoe, had Thomas Mann Randolph not remarried. Maria Eppes, who married in 1797, was in a much more stable situation with her husband and lived about a hundred miles from Monticello. By the time Callender began ranting about Hemings, these women had likely made all the necessary adjustments. Sally Hemings was a woman they knew, their mother’s half sister with whom they had grown up. This was in all ways a family matter, and, as so often happens, they may have resented the intrusion of outsiders more than what was going on in their family. What neither Martha nor Maria had bargained for, however, was that Jefferson’s decision to return to public life would result in making their privately made accommodations about their family life known to the world.
As for the Hemingses, all they could do was watch and wait to see whether this new public phase would compel Jefferson to make a change. Would Hemings and her children remain at Monticello and things continue as they had, would Jefferson simply end their association, or would he send her, Beverley, and Harriet away? Following so closely upon James Hemings’s heartrending death, the family must have felt that a plague had been visited upon them.
27
THE PUBLIC WORLD AND THE PRIVATE DOMAIN
WHEN JEFFERSON WENT to live at the President’s House in 1801, he took no member of the family who had been the most intensely involved with him for the preceding twenty-seven years. Hemingses proba
bly visited him, including Sally, for there was periodic traffic between Jefferson’s two households during his eight years in Washington. At least every six months, David Hern Jr., an enslaved man at Monticello, traveled to the capital and back, carrying letters, plants, new horses for Jefferson, and other items. Even Robert Hemings, who had been with the new president at the start of his national career in Philadelphia in 1776, may have come to see the man with whom he had spent so much time and who was now at the pinnacle of his power. But the closest the family came to having a full-time representative there was Edith (Edy) Hern Fossett, the fifteen-year-old who came to Washington in 1802 to be an apprentice cook to Honore Julien, the man who had taken the job that Jefferson had originally intended for James Hemings. Sometime in the early 1800s, perhaps before she left Monticello, she married Joseph Fossett, the son of Mary Hemings. This Hemings in-law would remain at the President’s House for six years.1
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 69