14. For example, the Royers and their daughter do not figure in either Malone’s or Brodie’s biographies of Jefferson, although both discuss his affair with the duchesse de La Rochefoucauld. Short’s biographer George Green Shackelford, in an otherwise detailed biography does not mention Short and Royer either: Jefferson’s Adoptive Son: The Life of William Short, 1759–1849 (Lexington, Ky., 1993).
15. Yvon Bzardel and Howard C. Rice Jr., "Poor in Love Mr. Short," WMQ, 3d ser., 21 (1964): 516–33.
16. Ibid., 518, 523.
17. Ibid., 520, 519, 523, 523–26, 526–28.
18. Ibid., 531–33.
19. James Maury to TJ, Sept. 17, 1786, Papers, 10:389. Maury notes that his mother "some how or other" had heard that Patsy was "in a Convent, which has made her very uneasy and I am afraid she will not easily forgive you"; TJ to James Maury, Dec. 24, 1786, ibid., 628, asking him to assure his mother that the convent was a "house of education only" and that the nuns did not attempt to influence the girls.
20. Ellen (Eleanora) Randolph Coolidge’s Recollections of Martha Jefferson Randolph, [after 1826], Family Letters Project.
21. See MB, 730 n. 47; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 239; Stanton, Free Some Day, 110.
22. MB, 730 n. 47; Ellen Coolidge, Recollections, Family Letters Project.
23. Daniel Roche, The People of Paris: An Essay in Popular Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, Calif., 1987), 66.
24. Ibid.
25. Archibald Bolling Shepperson, John Paradise and Lucy Ludwell of London and Williamsburg (Richmond, Va., 1942), 202–5; Herbert E. Sloan, Principle and Interest: Thomas Jefferson and the Problem of Debt (New York, 1995), 41–42. See Lucy Ludwell Paradise to TJ, Aug. 2, 1788, Papers, 13:457, calling Jefferson "My dear Protector" and, Aug. 17, 1788, ibid., 522, "What happiness should I enjoy, could I see Mr. Paradise as thoughtful, regular, Active and Industrious as you are"; Lucy Ludwell Paradise to TJ, Aug. 21, 1788, ibid., 533–34.
26. See above, chap. 2.
27. TJ to John Jay, Nov. 19, 1788, Papers, 14:215–16.
28. MB, 279, entries for April 6, 16; 734, entry for May 25. It is very likely that he bought other items of clothing for her that were included in his occasional listings of his payments for clothes "for servants." See, e.g., 694, entry for Feb. 21, 1788; 729, entry for April 23, 1789.
29. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 239; O. J. Wister and Agnes Irwin, eds., Worthy Women of Our First Century (Philadelphia, 1877), 20.
30. Stanton, Free Some Day, 110.
31. Wister and Irwin, Worthy Women, 20
32. Mary Jefferson Eppes to TJ, Feb. 2, 1801, Papers, 32:537; TJ to Mary Jefferson Eppes, Feb. 15, 1801, ibid., 593.
33. MB, 734. See also n. 57.
34. Clifford D. Panton Jr., George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, Violin Virtuoso and Composer of Color in Late 18th Century Europe (Lewiston, N.Y., 2005), 5, 17.
35. See Londa Schiebinger, "Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science," Eighteenth-Century Studies 23 (Summer 1990): 387–405. Schiebinger notes that as scientific "‘evidence’ mounted that women and blacks lacked native intelligence, proponents of equality collected examples of learned European women and learned Africans" (p. 399). These exceptional people had to meet standards set by people who were their opposites. "Of course, European males generally set the standards of scholarly excellence. Learned women or blacks had to excel in those arts and sciences recognized by the white male academy—fields such as classical music, astronomy, Latin or mathematics" (p. 400).
36. "Bridgetower, George (August Polgreen)," Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, rev. ed. (1992). See also Panton, Bridgetower.
37. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 245; Stanton, Free Some Day, 101.
38. TJ to Nathanial Burwell, March 14, 1818, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1903), 15:165–67, quoted in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 447.
13: "During That Time"
1. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 246. See also below, chap. 20.
2. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, Dec. 23, 1790, Papers, 18:350.
3. TJ to Francis C. Gray, March 4, 1815, LOC, 36173; TJ, Notes, in Writings (New York, 1984), 267.
4. TJ to James Madison, May 25, 1788, Papers, 8:202.
5. Elizabeth Fox Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York, 1984).
6. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 246; Burstein, Inner Jefferson, 144–49; Republic of Letters, 1:7, quoting Jefferson.
7. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 573; TJ to Isaac MacPherson, Aug. 13, 1813, in TJ, Writings (New York, 1984), 1286. This contains TJ’s very famous statement against patents on ideas.
8. Malone, Jefferson, 2:17.
9. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 254; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 567–68. Among other comments, Henry Randall remembered TJ’s grandson saying that SH was "decidedly good looking."
10. There is no official record of when SH died, but her son Madison gave his mother’s year of death as 1835, linking it to the time before he left Virginia. It is possible that the sixty-eight-year-old Hemings misspoke or that the newspaper that carried his story made a mistake in recording what Hemings said about the date. In his memoir of his trip through the United States, Count Francesco Arese, a visiting European who spent time in Charlottesville in 1837, claimed to have seen her and referred to her as "very pretty…although she was no longer young." She would have been in her sixties. Apparently SH, or at least the story of "his pretty Negress," as she was described in the book’s index subheading under "Jefferson, Thomas," surely one of the more arresting index entries for him in any historical work, had become an important enough part of the town’s history to be talked about to visitors as if she were a natural wonder. Count Francesco Arese, A Trip to the Prairies and in the Interior of North America [1837–1838], Travel Notes, trans. Andrew Evans (New York, 1834), 29, 214.
11. Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 54.
12. TJ, Notes on the State of Virginia, 267.
13. Ibid., 269; William Peden, "A Bookseller Invades Monticello," WMQ, 3d ser., 6 (1949): 633.
14. Papers, 9:295; MB, 554 n. 60. David Humphreys had gone back to America in 1786, and Charles Williamos had died in 1785.
15. MB, 635 n. 6; 689, Jan. 1788 notation for "Trumbull’s servants"; 741, entry for Aug. 31.
16. Yvon Bizardel and Howard C. Rice Jr., "Poor in Love Mr. Short," WMQ, 3d ser., 21 (1963): 523, 527–28.
17. Ibid., 519.
18. TJ to John Trumbull, June 1, 1789, Papers, 15:164.
19. TJ to William Short, March 29, Papers, 11:253; Bizardel and Rice, "Poor in Love Mr. Short," 523. Although the older man told his young friend to follow his "inclinations" about the time he spent in the countryside, TJ’s tone suggested resignation rather than active support of Short’s preferences. Their mutual friend the aristocratic Madame de Tessé was aware of Short’s situation, but "grande dame that she was, politely refrained from mentioning a girl in her bantering allusions" in her letters to Jefferson about Short’s spending so much time there instead of being in Paris. She teased TJ by saying that Short much preferred Saint-Germain to the city. TJ and Madame de Tessé were very close, and what could not be said in letters was very likely commented upon during his many visits to her home.
20. See, e.g., TJ to Maria Cosway, Jan. 9, 1789, Papers, 16:144–46. He notes that he had not heard from her for a while, but this could be because he had not written to her. He blamed illnesses in his family for failing to communicate for over two months. That was certainly true, but he had written to other people—to Madison and John Adams multiple times. He wrote to Angelica Church as much as he wrote to Cosway during that period—exactly once. TJ’s tone is always gallant and flirtatious, but their correspondence at this point, from his side, does not sound like one deeply in love with another. See MB, 680 n.
3, suggesting that Cosway’s second stay in France during TJ’s residence there did not amount to a real renewal of their affair.
21. For a discussion of historians’ use of Maria Cosway as antidote to SH, see Gordon-Reed TJ and SH, 184–90. For the best treatment of the subject, see also R. R. Burg, "The Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Their Historians," Phylon 27 (1986): 128–38. I did not find this article until I began research for this book and, unfortunately, did not know to discuss it in my first book about the scholarly treatment of SH and TJ. Burg’s dead-on and scathing analysis of the way TJ biographers viewed and wrote stories about Jefferson and the various women in his life (Betsy Walker, Maria Cosway, and Sally Hemings) is essential reading for anyone interested in the way racial attitudes, conscious or unconscious, often affect the writing of American history.
22. TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788, Papers, 12:152.
23. TJ to Dugald Stewart, June 21, 1789, Papers, 15:204.
24. TJ to Elizabeth Eppes, July 28, 1786, Papers, 11:634; TJ to Maria Jefferson, April, 11, 1790, ibid., 16:331.
25. Rhys Isaac, "Monticello Stories," in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1999), 120.
26. TJ to Maria Cosway, April 24, 1788, Papers, 13:103; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 230–31. See also Isaac, "Monticello Stories," 122; E. M. Halliday, Understanding Thomas Jefferson (New York, 2001), 100–104.
27. Kaminski, ed., Jefferson in Love, 23.
28. Martha Jefferson to Eliza House Trist, [after Aug. 14, 1785], Papers, 8:437
29. Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York, 2004), 290–95.
30. Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1997).
31. Peter Bargaglio, "An Outrage upon Nature: Incest and Law in the Nineteenth Century South," in In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900 (New York, 1991).
32. TJ, Notes, in Writings, 238.
14: Sarah Hemings: The Fatherless Girl in a Patriarchal Society
1. Jefferson Family Bible, LVa.
2. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York, 1996). See also Peter Kolchin, "Reevaluating the Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective," Journal of American History 70 (Dec. 1983): 579–601, tracing the evolution of attitudes about the nature of life in antebellum slave communities.
3. Lucia Stanton, Slavery at Monticello (Charlottesville, 1996), 16. "Between 1784–1794 [TJ] disposed of 161 people by sale or by gift." Lucia Stanton, "‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1999), 148, 162. The post-Revolutionary/early Republic periods, in which the Hemingses lived at Monticello, witnessed the transformation of the southern slave society. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 264–65, describing the "massive exodus" of the slave population from the upper South as the interstate slave trade transferred thousands of slaves to the lower South, separating and traumatizing thousands of enslaved individuals and families; Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York, 2005), 41, noting, "The domestic slave trade was also a part of a larger economic transformation commonly referred to as the market revolution taking place in America in the first half of the nineteenth-century." See, generally, Farm Book for listing of slaves.
4. Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 568.
5. Fawn Brodie, "Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren: A Study in Historical Silences," American Heritage 27 (Oct. 1976): 23–33, 94–99.
6. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), 540–48; Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 251–52.
7. Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791 (New York 1927), 265–66, entry for May 24, 1790; Jack Shepherd, Cannibals of the Heart: A Personal Biography of Louisa Catherine and John Quincy Adams (New York, 1980), 113–15; The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard) (New York, 1906), 6.
8. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre, 75; Paul C. Nagel, The Lees of Virginia (New York, 2006).
9. Henry Lee to Richard T. Brown, Paris, Aug. 24, 1833, unpublished letter at Stratford Hall, Home of Robert E. Lee. Interestingly enough, the bulk of Lee’s letter is spent retelling the Walker story. Not surprisingly, it is clear that TJ’s attempted seduction of the married Betsy Walker, a white woman, was for Lee a greater offense than having children with an enslaved African American woman. The scandal engulfed Lee personally and professionally, for he and his wife’s sister had not only engaged in adultery but also broken the laws against affinity-based incest. After being denied a government appointment because of his affair, in the same letter in which he sought to explain what had happened between him and his sister-in-law, Henry bitterly compared himself with TJ. Why was it, he asked incredulously, that "the well known example of Mr. Jefferson, the sage, the patriot, the light of philosophy, the friend of freedom, the apostle of liberty, the redeemer of the Republick," should not have been enough to erase him from the hearts, minds, and esteem of the public? "Around the shady sides of Monticello," he raged, "his [TJ’s] offspring wander with skins as tawny as their soil & eyes bright with hereditary lust." Not only was the Sage of Monticello bad, Henry posited; his children were bad, too.
10. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre, 75.
11. MB, 729, 734.
12. Jefferson’s acquisitive nature is well known. Susan Stein has cataloged the astounding array of possessions he accumulated while in France. See The World of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello (New York, 1993).
13. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, 2000), 149–51.
14. Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 177–83; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 570. Isaac Jefferson’s anecdote about Cary gives an insight into TJ’s personality and tendency to want to maintain peace at all cost. The idea of a houseguest stalking into a kitchen to see what is on the menu and then if they "didn’t have what he wanted—obliged [everyone else] to wait dinner till it was cooked" and beating a young slave boy who transgressed in some fashion, or other slaves who displeased him, rather than taking the matter up with TJ, astounded Isaac Jefferson, as was made clear by his statement that "Col. Cary made freer at Monticello than he did at home." Tolerating Cary’s sociopathic behavior seems more than mere hospitality on TJ’s part. In fact, it was almost a perversion of the notion of hospitality, since the term implies at least a degree of mutual respect between the guest and the host. Throughout the ages, bullies have known what they are doing (and whom they safely can do it to), and one wonders what Cary actually thought of TJ after he allowed him to carry on in this fashion in his home before all the members of his household.
15. Memoirs of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 4, Special Collections, ViU; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 155.
16. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. William J. Connell (Boston, 2005), 91.
17. TJ to Anne Cary, Thomas Jefferson, and Ellen Wayles Randolph, Mar. 2, 1802, in Writings, 1102.
18. Lucia Stanton, "‘A Well-Ordered Household’: Domestic Servants in Jefferson’s White House," White House History, no. 17 (2006): 5–6.
19. Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph to TJ, Jan. 31, 1801, Papers, 32:528.
20. See Stanton, Free Some Day, 122, quoting Ellen Coolidge on Jefferson’s idea of his relationship with Burwell Colbert.
15: The Teenagers and the Woman
1. Jefferson Family Bible Record, LVa.
2. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 534–35.
3. TJ to James Madison, May 7, 1784, Papers, 6:267; Republ
ic of Letters, 1:228–29, 242, 264; Irving Brant, James Madison, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, 1941–61), 2:283; Gordon-Reed, TJ and SH, 115; The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, 17 vols. (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962–91), 6:182 n. 28.
4. TJ to James Madison, Feb. 20, 1784, Papers, 6:546.
5. TJ to Madison, April 22, 1783, Papers, 6:262, expressing his desire that Floyd and Madison get together and saying that he "often made it the subject of conversation, more exhortation, with her [Floyd] and was able to convince myself that she possessed every sentiment in your favor which you could wish. But of this no more without your leave." Julian Boyd notes, p. 262 n.1, that this paragraph "was entirely written in cipher" and had to be decoded by the editors.
6. Brant, James Madison, 2:283–87; James Madison to TJ, Aug. 31, 1783, Papers, 6:335. A passage in the letter that had referred to Floyd was "heavily scored out by Madison" at a later point. Boyd, Papers, 6:335 n. 1. TJ was sympathetic about his friend’s "misadventure which has happened from whatever cause it may have happened" and assured him that "the world still presents the same and many other resources of happiness, and you possess many within yourself." He then counseled, "Firmness of mind and unintermitting occupations will not long leave you in pain."
7. Jean Edward Smith, John Marshall: Definer of a Nation (New York, 1996), 73, 85–86; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 534–35.
8. Kierner, Scandal at Bizarre, 29; Edith Tunis Sale, Manors of Virginia in Colonial Times (Philadelphia, 1909), 122; Jefferson Randolph Anderson, "Tuckahoe and the Tuckahoe Randolphs," Register of the Kentucky State Historical Society 35 (1937): 29–59.
9. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, 1999).
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Page 89