The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  Jefferson became involved with Scottish-born James Thomson Callender, a newspaperman who attacked George Washington, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton with reckless accusations. Jefferson praised one of his effusions: “Such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect. They inform the thinking part of the nation,” he told Callender. The journalist was a heavy drinker with a paranoid streak that widened appreciably when he was jailed under the Sedition Act, the law that made it a crime to criticize a president. Jefferson, who believed the law was unconstitutional, gave Callender money and sympathy. When Jefferson became president in 1800, he pardoned the journalist.

  Only minimally grateful, Callender demanded that he be appointed postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, as a reward for his services to the Republican cause. When President Jefferson balked, Callender retaliated with a series of vicious articles in his Richmond newspaper. He revealed that Jefferson had paid him substantial sums to support his slanderous labors and quoted the president’s words of approval. Next, the inflamed scribe accused Jefferson of fathering several children by Sally Hemings, the young mulatto who had escorted Maria Jefferson to Paris. It was “well known” among Jefferson’s neighbors that he had kept Sally “as his concubine” for many years, Callender declared. One of their children was a boy of about twelve named “Tom,” with red hair and a striking resemblance to Jefferson. Supposedly, Tom had been conceived in Paris, when Sally escorted Maria Jefferson across the Atlantic to join her father. Everyone in the vicinity of Monticello knew about Sally. So did James Madison, when he urged Americans to vote for Jefferson because of his “virtue.”3

  Federalist editors leaped on the Sally story and gleefully reprinted it in their newspapers throughout the nation. As the Federalists saw it, they were retaliating against the Jeffersonian Republican editors who had revived the British slanders about Washington’s supposed sexual sins in the Revolution and exposed Alexander Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds. The Boston Gazette published a song about Sally, supposedly written by the “Sage of Monticello” to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Callender reprinted it in his Virginia paper, making the accusation difficult for Jefferson’s friends and family to ignore:

  Of all the damsels on the green

  On mountain or in valley

  A lass so luscious ne’er was seen

  As Monticellian Sally

  (chorus) Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?

  What wife was half so handy?

  To breed a flock of slaves for stock

  A blackamoor’s the dandy

  When pressed by load of state affairs

  I seek to sport and dally

  The sweetest solace of my cares

  Is in the lap of Sally.4

  Next, Callender revealed that Jefferson’s former friend John Walker, now a fierce Federalist, accused him of trying to seduce his wife, Betsey, thirty years ago. Although Walker had known the story for over a decade, he claimed to be outraged and threatened to challenge Jefferson to a duel. As Walker talked and wrote about it, the story took on even more lurid dimensions. He claimed that Jefferson had pursued Betsey as late as 1779, when he was a married man living in supposed contentment with Martha Wayles. Jefferson’s friend Thomas Paine attempted to defend him against the ten-year extension of the story. “We have heard of a ten year siege of Troy,” Paine wrote. “But who ever heard of a ten year siege to seduce?” Both stories became national sensations.5

  II

  Until this explosion, there was scarcely a mention of Sally Hemings in Jefferson’s letters or the records he kept at Monticello in his Farm Book and Account Book. Sally had begun having children in 1795 and by 1802 had given birth to two girls and a boy. There was no record of a child who would approximate the age of the boy Callender described; he would have been born not long after Jefferson, his daughters, and James and Sally Hemings returned from France. The journalist claimed that Sally had as many as thirty other lovers beside President Jefferson. She was “a slut as common as the pavement.”6

  In accordance with their agreement, Jefferson had freed Sally’s older brother, James Hemings, after he had trained his younger brother, Peter, to become Monticello’s cook. It took James four years to complete this task. One reason may have been James’s fondness for alcohol, a habit he apparently acquired in Paris. James used the money Jefferson paid him during these years to return to France. But he found revolutionary Paris a strange and unsettling place, and soon sailed back to America. He paid a visit to Monticello and was cordially welcomed by Jefferson. James talked grandly of perhaps going to Spain to find work there. Jefferson noted in a letter that he seemed to have gotten control of his drinking, a hopeful sign.

  Alas, it was only a temporary reform. In the fall of 1801, penniless and depressed by his addiction to alcohol, James Hemings committed suicide in Philadelphia. Jefferson was deeply distressed by this tragic news. James had been one of his most capable and devoted servants for many years. He had served as his coachman and butler before becoming a chef. When Jefferson became president, he had offered James the post of chef at the executive mansion in Washington, D.C. But Hemings, perhaps reluctant to resume the master–servant relationship, had turned him down.

  By this time it had become clear that Jefferson considered all the children born to Betty Hemings and John Wayles entitled to various degrees of freedom. They were permitted to travel around Virginia, to marry men and women of their choice, and to make arrangements with employers as far away as Richmond. They kept all the money they made. Jefferson apparently believed they were ultimately entitled to complete freedom, as third-generation mulattoes. Also important was their blood relationship to Martha Wayles; he continued to express her special concern for them by this privileged treatment.

  In 1794, Jefferson freed Robert Hemings, James’s older brother, who had been trained as a barber. Robert had married an enslaved woman in Fredericksburg. He persuaded her master to pay Jefferson to free Robert, who in turn promised to repay him and purchase his wife’s freedom. Jefferson was not pleased by Robert’s abrupt demand for freedom, which left him without a barber. But he gave Robert his certificate of manumission. The couple lived in Richmond for the rest of their lives.

  In April 1792, Jefferson had given Sally’s older sister, Mary, a form of freedom. She had been hired as a servant by Colonel Thomas Bell, a Charlottesville storekeeper. They apparently became lovers and soon had two children. Mary had previously had children by an unnamed father at Monticello. Jefferson kept these children under his control but agreed to sell Mary and her Bell children to the colonel. Thereafter they lived as man and wife, and no one in Charlottesville said a censorious word. That is not entirely surprising. Like her sisters and brothers, Mary’s skin was probably white. When Bell died in 1800, he freed Mary and their children and made them his beneficiaries.7

  III

  President Jefferson was staggered by James Callender’s assaults on his personal character. Friends such as James Madison came to his defense with scathing denials and denunciations of Callender. Madison dismissed the story as “incredible.” But Jefferson made no attempt to answer the charges publicly. Only in private letters to close friends and political allies, he admitted he had, while single, “offered love to a handsome lady.” This was the only charge that was true, he insisted, implicitly denying Callender’s story about Sally Hemings. Eventually he negotiated a private admission of guilt with John Walker that avoided further altercation and a duel.8

  A troubled Jefferson asked Martha and Maria to join him in the executive mansion in Washington. Opinions vary in respect to his motives. Friends thought he was trying to protect them from the ugly gossip swirling through Virginia in the wake of Callender’s assault. His political foes sneered that he was trying to portray himself as a man who had retained the devotion of his two daughters and was therefore innocent of Callender’s charges.

  Martha and Maria left their husbands and children in Virginia and joined the president in response to his summon
s. For six weeks, they participated in a stream of formal dinners with congressmen and senators. Jefferson insisted on paying all their expenses, including new dresses and bonnets for Maria. One Federalist guest reported that the two daughters appeared to be “well-accomplished young women…very delicate and tolerably handsome.” Martha enjoyed the experience, but Maria found it tiresome to make conversation with so many strangers. She was even more troubled by how much their visit had cost Jefferson. She wrote him a touching note after she returned home, hinting rather strongly that she wished he had a wife: “How much do I think of you at the hours which we have been accustomed to be with you alone and how much pain it gives me to think of the…solitary manner in which you sleep upstairs. Adieu much beloved of fathers…You are the first and dearest to my heart.”9

  IV

  Callender’s assault came as President Jefferson was undergoing terrific political stress as president. He had taken office hoping to reverse a decade of hostility between America and France. But his vision of the French as America’s natural allies vanished in a cascade of reports and rumors that France’s new leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, planned to send an army to New Orleans to create a rival nation in the Louisiana Territory, a vast swath of the continent between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. France had given it to Spain in 1763 to compensate for Spanish losses in the Seven Years’ War with Britain, but Napoleon had pressured Spain into secretly ceding it back to France. Another French army invaded St. Dominique (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), determined to regain control of this wealthy sugar island from rebellious slaves who had seized it with the encouragement of the Federalists.

  In collusion with the French, the Spanish closed the port of New Orleans, cutting off the western states’ export trade. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, called for war, and numerous Jefferson supporters in the West joined the cry. Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris as a special envoy to try to resolve the crisis. The president discovered, to his and everyone else’s amazement, that Napoleon was prepared to sell New Orleans and the entire territory of Louisiana to the United States. The French army in St. Dominique had been decimated by yellow fever and other diseases, and Bonaparte had decided to cut his losses and abandon his scheme to revive the French empire in America. Although there was nothing in the Constitution that permitted the acquisition of more territory, Jefferson accepted the offer, doubling the size of the United States.10

  The purchase of the Louisiana Territory made Jefferson immensely popular—and defused the Federalists’ attacks on his personal life. He was reelected in 1804, winning four out of every five votes. The Federalist party was reduced to a hapless minority. Callender, the one man in the nation who might have continued to attack Jefferson about “dusky Sally,” conveniently drowned in the James River in three feet of water, a few months after he had been beaten over the head by the federal district attorney for Virginia.11 But no one seemed to notice or care. Jefferson’s fame soared to unparalleled heights. His followers compared him to George Washington and found him superior because he had acquired “an empire for liberty” without firing a shot or losing a single soldier—and without raising taxes.12

  V

  In the midst of this improbable ascension from the depths of disgrace to the heights of fame, Jefferson’s personal life received a devastating blow. His beloved younger daughter, Maria, had enjoyed a happy marriage with her cousin, Jack Eppes. He adored her with a fervor that more than matched her father’s devotion to Martha Wayles. Jack won election to Congress, where he supported his father-in-law with wit and eloquence. Jefferson liked him so much that he invited him to live at the “palace,” as the presidential residence was often called in its early years.

  Unfortunately, Maria had inherited not only her mother’s beauty and temperament but also her fragile physique. Her first baby, a daughter, was born prematurely and lived less than a month. Maria spent the next two years suffering from a variety of illnesses, including a breast infection and excruciating back pains thst reduced her to invalidism. Her next baby, a boy whom she named Francis after her father-in-law, survived but was a frail child, subject to alarming convulsions that made the family fear he was an epileptic.

  Pregnant again, Maria gave birth to a girl on February 15, 1804. Before the birth she described herself as “depressed and low in spirits.” Afterward she was so ill that she was unable to nurse the child. She again developed a breast abscess and suffered from constant nausea, which made it almost impossible for her to digest food. Her anguished father, hearing these reports, rushed from Washington the moment that Congress adjourned. In a letter he sent by express, Jefferson urged Jack Eppes to take Maria to Monticello. Jefferson had convinced himself that the house would work some kind of magic on her—a sign of how distracted he was. The equally distraught Eppes ordered his slaves to make a litter and carry Maria to the top of the mountain.

  In a hasty letter to James Madison, Jefferson reported that Maria was going to recover, thanks to being “favorably affected by my being with her.” Alas, Maria’s will to live dwindled away, in a heartbreaking imitation of her mother’s decline. On April 13, 1804, his sixty-first birthday, Jefferson reported to James Madison that Maria “rather weakens.” She continued to have a “small and constant” fever and found it impossible to keep any food in her stomach. On April 17, 1804, Jefferson wrote in his account book: “This morning between 8 and 9 o’clock my dear daughter Maria Eppes died.”13

  Jefferson was almost as prostrated as he had been after Martha’s death. It took him two months to express his feelings to anyone, and then it was a cry of almost unbearable anguish: “Others may lose of their abundance but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life,” he told John Page. Jefferson was referring to Martha Jefferson Randolph. It was difficult for anyone who did not know him intimately to grasp the centrality of his family to Jefferson’s vision of happiness.14

  VI

  Another woman who had once been close to Jefferson heard about Maria’s death and wrote him a letter. It took Abigail Adams almost a month to overcome the bitterness her soured friendship with the president had left in her heart. She began by telling him that if he were “no other than the private inhabitant of Monticello,” she would have written to him immediately. Only when “the powerful feelings of my heart burst through” her restraint did she feel compelled to shed “tears of sorrow…over your beloved and deserving daughter.” She realized, thinking of her son Charles, that they had the loss of a beloved child in common. She knew the pain a parent feels when chords of affection are “snapped asunder.” She had “tasted the bitter cup” and she could only hope Jefferson would learn to accept it as a decree of “over-ruling providence.”

  Deeply moved, Jefferson sent the letter to Maria’s husband, Jack Eppes, who pronounced it “the generous effusions of an excellent heart.” His son-in-law advised Jefferson to answer it expressing only “the sentiments of your heart.” He urged him to avoid any mention of ex-president John Adams. Unfortunately, Jefferson replied to Abigail before he received this good advice. He began by declaring he would never forget her kindness to Maria in London. He added that her letter gave him a chance to express his regret for the “circumstances” that seemed to have “draw(n) a line of separation between us.”

  At first Abigail responded with assurances that she felt the same way. Encouraged, Jefferson proceeded to get into how John Adams had been “personally unkind” by appointing a raft of Federalist judges on his last night as president. Portia rushed to defend her dearest friend and soon she was condemning Jefferson for hiring “the wretch,” James Thomson Callender, to defame John with “the basest libel, the lowest and vilest slander which malice could invent.” When Jefferson tried to put his connection to Callender in a better light, Abigail exploded: “The serpent you cherished and warmed [has] bit the hand that cherished him and gave you sufficient specimens of his talents,
his gratitude, his justice and his truth.”

  A discouraged Jefferson, after more futile letters, finally replied, “Perhaps I trespassed too far on your attention.” Abigail, probably feeling renewed sympathy for his loss of Maria, told him that in a tribute to their lost friendship, “I would forgive, as I hope to be forgiven.” She wished him success in administering the government “with a just and impartial hand.” Abigail waited weeks to tell John Adams about this correspondence. After reading the letters, he wisely chose to say nothing about them.15

  VII

  Fortunately for Jefferson’s peace of mind, Martha Jefferson Randolph was a remarkably healthy young woman. She gave birth to twelve children in the course of her marriage, and eleven lived to maturity. But Martha’s—and Jefferson’s—confidence in a happy private life slowly eroded as Thomas Mann Randolph revealed an emotional instability that ran like a dark thread through his family’s history. He suffered from crushing depressions, and he slowly acquired a grievance against his wife. Martha had persuaded him to buy the Edgehill plantation, only four miles from Monticello. Whenever Jefferson returned to his hilltop mansion, Martha joined him with her children, leaving Randolph little choice but to follow them.

  More and more, Randolph felt he was in competition with the great Thomas Jefferson for his wife’s affections, and was an inevitable loser. At one point he wrote Jefferson a bitter letter, saying he felt like “the proverbial silly bird” who could not “feel at ease among swans.” He accused Martha of looking down on him and undervaluing his talents. At another point, he made plans to sell Edgehill and move to Mississippi to raise cotton, as many other Virginians were doing. His constantly growing family meant he was slipping into debt. The soil in Virginia was depleted and the market for its crops was depressed because of the abundant harvests from new farms in Kentucky, Tennessee, and other western states. With Martha’s help, a distraught Jefferson talked him out of this reach for independence.16