The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  XIV

  Six months after Jefferson’s death, an auction took place at Monticello. It was advertised in the Charlottesville Central Gazette as the sale of “the whole of the residue of the personal estate of Thomas Jefferson, dec, consisting of 130 VALUABLE NEGROES, stock, crop &C Household and Kitchen furniture.” The slaves, claimed the ad, were the “most valuable for their number ever offered at one time in the state of Virginia.” There were also “valuable historical and portrait paintings” including a bust of Jefferson, and the polygraph, the copying instrument he used when he wrote letters, plus “various other articles curious and useful to men of business and private families.”31

  Martha Jefferson was not present at this ordeal. She had fled to Boston with her two youngest children to live with Ellen Randolph Coolidge. For five days, her unmarried children and the executor of the estate, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, watched as the mansion was virtually stripped bare of furnishings. Even more painful was the sale of the slaves. Many members of the Hemings extended family—sons and daughters and grandchildren of Elizabeth Hemings by fathers other than John Wayles—were sold to strangers. Years later, Thomas Jefferson Randolph remembered his anguish. “I had known all of them from childhood and had strong attachments to many,” he said. “I was powerless to relieve them.”32 Fifty-three-year-old Sally Hemings was not among the sold. Martha Jefferson later freed her, using a device known as giving a slave his or her “time.” Technically she remained a slave and was not required to leave the state like other freed slaves. She moved to Charlottesville, where she lived with her sons, Madison and Eston, until her death in 1835.

  The sale did not come close to paying Thomas Jefferson’s debts. Nor did the sale of the mansion itself, a few years later, for a pathetic $7,000. But Thomas Jefferson Randolph grimly vowed that he would repay his grandfather’s debts “to the last copper” if it took the rest of his life. The effort required another twenty years of backbreaking toil on the plantation he had inherited from his bankrupt father, Edgehill, and the sacrifice of all comforts and luxuries. The big, burly grandson made this personal sacrifice to redeem the good name of the grandfather he loved.

  Martha Jefferson Randolph returned from Massachusetts and did everything in her power to assist her son. At one point, she and her unmarried daughters helped him copy and edit the first collection of Jefferson’s writings. They launched a school for young women that flourished for many years. Martha permitted friends to persuade the legislatures of South Carolina and Louisiana to send her gifts of $10,000, which she passed on to her son. In 1836 Martha died suddenly, apparently of a stroke, at the age of sixty-four. She was buried in Monticello’s graveyard beside the father she had never ceased to love.33

  IF JEFFERSON IS WRONG, IS AMERICA WRONG?

  On November 1, 1998, the British science magazine Nature announced the imminent publication of an article titled “JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE’S LAST CHILD.” The text stated that tests conducted by pathologist Dr. Eugene M. Foster revealed that the DNA of a descendant of Sally Hemings’s youngest child, Eston Hemings, matched the DNA of a descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s uncle, Field Jefferson. “The simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings,” Dr. Foster wrote, “are that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson…”1

  A media explosion tore across America and the entire world. In an article in the Washington Post, David Murray, head of the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, D.C., counted 295 editorial and news citations, 8 pieces in newsweeklies, and 31 broadcast transcripts. National Public Radio announced, “The proof is finally in…DNA testing has ended [the] debate.” The Des Moines Register proclaimed Jefferson was an “adulterer on Mount Rushmore.” The New York Times quoted a Jefferson scholar who said, “If people had accepted this story, he never would have become an American icon…The personification of America can’t live 38 years with a black woman.”2

  II

  Behind this uproar lay 250 years of debating Thomas Jefferson’s reputation. His fame had continued to expand in the decades before the Civil War, but his public image became more complicated as Americans began to argue about slavery. Both the enemies and the defenders of the “peculiar institution” found support in his life. His writings were full of denunciations of slavery. But he also revealed grave doubts about African-Americans’ intellectual abilities and was a strong advocate of states’ rights in the ongoing argument about the power of the federal government. Jefferson feared a bloody race war if slavery were abolished instantly, as growing numbers of its northern critics, soon called abolitionists, demanded. In 1820, he lamented that southerners had “the wolf by the ears” and could not let him go. He saw in the growing disagreement “the [death] knell of the union.”3

  Some abolitionists revived James Thomson Callender’s 1802 accusation about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. They saw it as proof of the moral degeneracy of slavery. “The best blood of Virginia flows in the veins of slaves, even the blood of Jefferson,” they declared. Soon a story was circulating in anti-slavery circles that one of Sally Hemings’s daughters had been sold in a New Orleans slave market for $1,000. According to Dr. Levi Gaylord of Sodus, New York, it was “attested to by a southern gentleman” who had witnessed the ghastly event. Next a novel, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, written by a fugitive slave and first published in France, created another sensation. The book opened with a slave auction in which Sally Hemings and two of her daughters were sold to the highest bidders.4

  Visiting British writers such as Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope eagerly participated in the uproar. They told their readers about “hospitable orgies” at Monticello and claimed that Jefferson was the father of “unnumbered generations of slaves.” They portrayed him sitting at his dinner table, waited on by a half dozen of his own black children. The British used these supposed facts to ridicule the idea that all men were created equal. Jefferson’s sins became a weapon to blunt America’s worldwide appeal as a universal democracy.5

  III

  In 1861, the Civil War erupted, killing 620,000 young Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s reputation collapsed. He became linked in many northern minds with “The Slave Power” that they blamed for bringing this catastrophe upon the nation. In the South he was equally execrated because he was considered responsible for the antislavery crusade that had led to the region’s defeat and desolation. For a while, it looked as if he were destined to be a dismissed and derided founding father.

  Jefferson’s fame was reborn in 1871 with the popularity of a book by his great-granddaughter, Sarah Nicholas Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph’s introduction declared the seemingly modest purpose of the book: “I do not…write of Jefferson either as of the great man or as of the statesman. My object is only to give a faithful picture of him as he was in private life—to show that he was, as I have been taught to think of him by those who knew and loved him best, a beautiful domestic character.”

  The book barely mentioned politics. That contentious world was viewed, if at all, as an intrusion on the family’s happiness. Randolph’s goal was to give readers an appreciation of “the warmth of his [Jefferson’s] affections, the elevation of his character, and the scrupulous fidelity with which he discharged the duties of every relation in his life.” No public man’s character “had been more foully assailed than Jefferson’s,” she continued. “And none so fully exposed to the public gaze, nor more fully vindicated.”6

  The Domestic Life was warmly reviewed in newspapers and magazines in the North and South. The Nation, a magazine hitherto given to damning Jefferson, praised it extravagantly. One of his iciest New England critics admitted that the man Randolph portrayed with so many convincing quotations from his letters was “entirely amiable and charming” and deserved to be “more mildly judged” than he had been in recent years.7

  In 1874, James Parton’s Life of Thomas Jefferson did even more to revive Jefferson’s reputation. Part
on insisted that the essence of Jefferson’s character was love: “In every other quality and grace of human nature he has often been equaled, sometimes been excelled, but where has there ever been a lover so tender, so warm, so constant, as he? Love was his life…. He knew no satisfying joy, at any period of his life, except through his affections.”

  Parton also projected an image of Jefferson as a hero of American culture. At thirty-two he could “calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet and play a violin.” Totally carried away, Parton declared: “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If Jefferson was right, America is right.” The biographer convinced himself—and hundreds of thousands of readers—that Thomas Jefferson and America were virtually one indissoluble entity.8

  IV

  In 1873, The Pike County Republican published a story about Thomas Jefferson that struck a very different note. The editor of this small Ohio newspaper was fifty-three-year-old Samuel F. Wetmore, an abolitionist who had been born in Ohio and had worked on several newspapers in the Midwest before launching the Republican in 1868. His friend and future son-in-law, Wells S. Jones, a Union brigadier general in the Civil War, owned 1,700 acres in Pike County and had announced his intention to make this slice of southern Ohio a Republican bastion. That proved to be a difficult task. Jones lost a run for the state senate in 1867, largely because he proposed giving African-Americans the right to vote in Ohio. The defeat led him to persuade—and probably finance—Wetmore to start the Pike County Republican. Helpful patronage came from Washington, D.C., where Republicans were in power under President UIysses S. Grant. They made Wetmore the postmaster in Waverly as well as a U.S. marshal.

  By 1873, Wetmore was a worried man. The Republican Party was in trouble, both in Ohio and in the nation. President Grant had won the war as a consummate general, but he left a lot to be desired as a political leader. Washington, D.C., swirled with rumors of scandals in his administration. Worse, Grant had signed into law a bill raising the pay of the members of Congress and the Supreme Court. Angry Democrats and not a few worried Republicans denounced the “salary grab” as little more than theft. The Democrats of Ohio were especially vociferous.

  This was the atmosphere in which Samuel F. Wetmore announced a series of articles about the ex-slaves who were now living in Pike County. He called the series “Life Among the Lowly.” For readers in 1873, the title had an instant familiarity. The phrase was the subtitle of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wetmore’s great-grandmother had been a Stowe. He was also friendly with the family of Dr. Levi Gaylord, the man who had first published the fictitious story about a daughter of Thomas Jefferson being sold in New Orleans.9

  Wetmore’s choice to launch the “Lowly” series was Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son. The newsman began by admitting that his subject had not experienced many of the physical cruelties of slavery. But “we must say the system was cruel at best. To keep such a man in the condition of a slave, however well treated in other respects, was a sin of very deep dye…If he had been educated and given a chance in the world he would have shone out as a star of very great magnitude. But he was kept under, by his own father, an ex-president of the United States, and a man who penned the immortal declaration of independence which fully acknowledges the rights and equality of the human race!”

  Wetmore described Madison as five feet ten inches tall, “sparely made, with sandy complexion and a mild grey eye.” These details “accord[ed] very nearly with the description given of Thomas Jefferson, except that he was six feet one and a half inch in height.” Thereafter, the story was told in Madison’s words, ghostwritten by Wetmore. The heart of the brief narrative was his description of Sally Hemings’s experience in Paris as nine-year-old Maria Jefferson’s companion and nurse:

  Their stay (my mother’s and Maria’s) was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time. She gave birth to four others and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself) and Eston—three sons and one daughter. We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born…

  Madison went on to tell how he was “named…by the wife of James Madison, who was afterward President of the United States. Mrs. Madison happened to be at Monticello at the time of my birth, and begged the privilege of naming me, promising my mother a fine present for the honor. She consented and Mrs. Madison dubbed me by the name I now acknowledge, but like many promises of white folks to the slaves she never gave my mother anything.”

  Madison said he learned about Jefferson’s great fame only after he died. “About his own home he was the quietest of men. He was hardly ever known to get angry.” He was “uniformly kind to all about him.” But he “was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us [slave] children. We were the only children of his by a slave woman.” Toward his white grandchildren, however, he was “very affectionate.”10

  Madison’s story was brought to the attention of James Parton, who was publishing installments of his forthcoming biography of Jefferson in the Atlantic Monthly. In July 1873, Parton discussed the story of “Dusky Sally” and stated politely that Madison Hemings was “misinformed.” His real father was a “near relation” of Mr. Jefferson, “who need not be named.” Parton had been told by Henry S. Randall, author of a biography of Jefferson published in 1858, that the father of Sally’s children was Peter Carr, the son of Dabney Carr, Jefferson’s brother-in-law. Peter and his younger brother Samuel had been raised at Monticello. Randall’s source was Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson.11

  John A. Jones, the editor of Pike County’s Democratic newspaper, The Waverly Watchman, also dismissed Madison Hemings’s story, with a minimum of politeness: “Hemings, or rather Wetmore, gives a very truthful account of the public and private life of the Jefferson family; but this no doubt, was condensed from one of the numerous lives of Jefferson which can be found in any well regulated family library…There are at least fifty Negroes in this county who lay claim to illustrious parentage…They are not to be blamed for making these assertions. It sounds much better for the mother to tell her offspring that ‘master’ is their father…”12

  V

  Eight months later, Wetmore published another installment of his “Life Among the Lowly” series—an interview with Israel Jefferson, also an ex-slave from Monticello. By this time, the political sky was darkening for the Republicans. In September, the American economy had collapsed and the Panic of 1873 had plunged the nation into a severe depression. Ohio voters elected William “Foghorn” Allen as governor, the first Democrat in twenty years, and gave the party a majority in the state legislature. Not a single Republican was elected from Pike County. Wetmore’s newspaper crusade was a dismal failure.

  Israel told Wetmore that after Jefferson’s death, he was sold to a neighbor. Later he married a free mulatto woman who inspired him to purchase his freedom from his new master, to be paid over several years. In this process Israel had to take a last name, and chose Jefferson because “it would give me more dignity to be called after so eminent a man.”

  Israel recalled how he participated in the “exciting events attending the preparations of Mr. Jefferson and other members of his family on their removal to Washing
ton DC” in 1800, when he was elected president. Four years later, Israel started working as a waiter at Jefferson’s table and claimed that thereafter “the private life of Mr. Jefferson was very familiar to me.” For fourteen years, he had “made the fire in his bedroom and his private chamber, cleaned his office, dusted his books, run…errands and attended him at home.” He often escorted important visitors into Jefferson’s chamber. Israel said that “Sally Hemmings” (Wetmore’s spelling) was “employed as [Jefferson’s] chamber maid.” He [Jefferson] was “on the most intimate terms with her…. in fact, she was his concubine.” Based on his “intimacy with both parties,” Israel confirmed that Madison Hemmings [sic] was “the natural son of Mr. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and that his brothers Beverly, Eston and sister Harriet are of the same parentage.”13

  VI

  Sometime in 1874, Thomas Jefferson Randolph received in the mail a copy of Israel Jefferson’s recollections in the Pike County Republican. The founder’s grandson was still living on his farm, Edgehill, four miles from Monticello. Randolph wrote a six-page letter responding to Israel’s claims. According to Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, a record, Randolph noted acerbically, “in Mr. J’s handwriting,” Israel was born on December 28, 1800. Mr. Jefferson left for Washington on December 1, 1800. Israel was describing as his earliest recollection something that happened twenty-eight days before he was born.

  As for Israel becoming a waiter at Jefferson’s table in 1804 (when he was four years old), Randolph acidly reported that from 1801 to 1809 Israel and his entire family were on the list of slaves leased to a Mr. Craven, who had a farm some distance from Monticello. Again he was quoting from the Farm Book, “in Mr. J’s writing.” A record of February 10, 1810, places Israel among Jefferson’s farm workers, not at the Monticello house. When he went to work in the house (at an unspecified future date) he labored as a “scullion” in the kitchen. It was unlikely that he would know anything about the private life of Mr. Jefferson. “Israel was never employed in any post of trust or confidence about the house at Monticello.”