Oral history is collected by trained interviewers and is an important part of today’s historical profession. But it has recognized limitations. The human memory is a very unreliable recording instrument. Oral tradition has far more serious limitations. Its unreliability is inevitable as it travels down the generations. It remains a valuable part of historical memory. But in a court of law it would be banned as hearsay evidence. That makes it hard, if not impossible, to see what role oral tradition can play in proving Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.
Recently, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, one of the nation’s leading African-American historians, published an article in which he described his family’s oral tradition that they were the descendants of former slave Jane Gates and her owner, Samuel Brady. Professor Gates set out to “prove or disprove” the story. He found white descendants of Samuel Brady who gave him blood samples for DNA testing. He compared the DNA results with DNA-tested blood from his black relatives—and was amazed to discover “the tests established without a doubt that Brady was not the father of Jane Gates’ children.” One of his relatives dismissed his findings. “I’ve been a Brady eighty-nine years and I’m still a Brady,” she told him.28 Though Mr. Gates does not do so, his relative could cite Dr. Kidd’s motto, “the father is always unknown,” and argue that an interloper in the family line has disrupted the descent of Samuel Brady’s DNA. The story testifies to the unreliability of both oral tradition and DNA evidence.
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In 2008, two biostatisticians, William Blackwelder and David Douglas, found grievous fault with archaeologist Fraser Neiman’s statistical study that declared Jefferson’s guilt a 99-percent certainty. Neiman used a sampling method called Monte Carlo, which is often used by businessmen to evaluate investments. Another version is used by insurance companies. But experts warn that Monte Carlo has serious flaws. People put too high a probability on outcomes produced by the method. A whole industry called AIE, Applied Information Economics, has been developed to train Monte Carlo practitioners to develop more realistic probabilities.
Blackwelder and Douglas published their critique on a website to invite further discussion. The man who asked them to undertake this task is Steven T. Corneliussen, a science writer who works with physicists in Virginia. Blackwelder is a biostatistical consultant at the National Institutes of Health; Douglas is a physicist and senior scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News. Statistics and probability theory and computer simulations are Douglas’s specialty. All three men were troubled by what they saw as a serious misuse of science in Neiman’s study.
Blackwelder condemned Neiman’s conclusion, that “doubt about Jefferson’s paternity can no longer be reasonably sustained.” The veteran biostatistician called this “a gross misinterpretation” of the study. Douglas’s criticism was equally harsh. He found that Neiman miscounted the probable conception “windows” for Sally Heming’s pregnancies. (The term refers to the interval between the end of a menstrual cycle and the start of another one during which a woman may be fertile.) In four of her six pregnancies, Sally could have conceived while Jefferson was absent from Monticello. Douglas even found a distinct possibility that Jefferson was absent from Monticello at the time of Eston Hemings’s conception—the only child to which DNA has linked a Jefferson. With Blackwelder’s full agreement, Douglas concluded the probability of Jefferson’s presence at all six conceptions was less than 50 percent. Douglas also faulted Neiman’s unscientific presentation, which omitted crucial details that would enable other statisticians to replicate the study.29
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These surges of uncertainty have led to increasing doubts about the reliability of Samuel F. Wetmore’s ghosted narrative of Madison Hemings’s life in the Pike County Republican. It seems only fair to apply the same standard of proof to Wetmore’s journalism that Jefferson paternity advocates have applied to the testimony of Thomas Jefferson Randolph and others who have denied Jefferson’s fatherhood. They claim these people’s affection and loyalty to Thomas Jefferson prompted them to lie about his relationship with Sally Hemings.
What was Wetmore’s motivation in claiming Jefferson’s paternity? The answer: hatred and contempt for Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Party. Viewed in this light, the Wetmore-Hemings story begins to look more and more like a recycling of James Thomson Callender’s vindictive 1802 assault, with Wetmore in control.
Recent research has added strength to this suspicion. In his opening sentences, Wetmore claims that Madison Hemings was five feet ten and one half inches tall, giving him a strong resemblance to Jefferson. In the Virginia census of 1833, Madison was measured as five feet seven.30 Why did Madison Hemings tolerate this distortion? It seems likely that Wetmore had convinced him it was important to “improve” his story in various ways to make it more appealing to readers. If Hemings were willing to agree to let Wetmore misstate his size, would he not be equally ready to say that his mother had only one lover, Thomas Jefferson? This would correct the cruel accusation that James Thomson Callender had flung at Sally: she was “a slut as common as the pavement.” It would make an innocent Sally another victim of Thomas Jefferson, the uncaring slave owner.
Madison Hemings was the only one of Sally Hemings’s children who never passed for white. In census after census, he was listed as a Negro. That makes a reader dubious about his “sandy complexion,” which supposedly added to his resemblance to Jefferson. Madison’s brother Beverly and sister Harriet left Monticello with Jefferson’s permission in the early 1820s and vanished into the white world. His brother Eston moved from Ohio to Wisconsin and passed there. The nasty remark Wetmore has Madison make about “white persons” for Dolley Madison’s failure to give his mother a gift after his birth suggests he had few if any warm feelings for whites, and especially for Thomas Jefferson, the man who had enslaved him. These feelings were probably exacerbated by Madison’s experience in Pike County, Ohio. The largely Democratic citizens of Waverly, the county seat, refused to permit blacks to live within the town limits.
Wetmore’s presence as the narrator is visible in other ways. At one point, Hemings tells how familiar he was with Martha Jefferson Randolph’s children. He claims they taught him to read—and he reels off the names of the eleven who lived to adulthood: Ann, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, Mary, James, Benjamin Franklin, Lewis Madison, Septemia, and George Wythe. Madison had not seen any of these people for forty-seven years. This is surely Wetmore the ghostwriter at work, with The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson or some other biography of Jefferson on the desk beside his manuscript.
In the same category is Madison’s astonishing knowledge of Jefferson’s early life. “Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was educated at William and Mary College, which had its seat at Williamsburg. He afterwards studied law with Geo. Wythe and practiced law at the bar of the general courts of the Colony. He was afterwards elected a member of the provincial legislature from Albemarle county.” Jefferson was sixty-two years old when Madison was born. This passage is almost certainly Samuel F. Wetmore copying word for word from a popular biography.
Equally dubious is Hemings’s claim that he never knew how famous Jefferson was until after his death. Even granting that Jefferson left the presidency when Madison was a toddler, wouldn’t the teenage Hemings notice and wonder why hundreds of visitors came to Monticello each year to pay homage to Jefferson’s fame? Again, this is Wetmore the ghostwriter at work. He is trying to make readers sorry for Hemings, whose famous “father” paid so little attention to him. Once more we see that contempt for an unfeeling Thomas Jefferson is the desired outcome of Madison’s story.
Another dubious statement is Hemings’s claim that Jefferson was extraordinarily healthy: “Till within three weeks of his death he was hale and hearty and at the age of 82 years walked erect and with a stately tread. I am now 68, and I well remember that he was a much smarter man, physically, at that age than I am.” When
Jefferson was sixty-eight, Madison was six years old. That puts this recollection in the same class as Israel Jefferson’s story about waiting on Jefferson’s table at the age of four. Throughout his later life, Jefferson suffered from crippling attacks of rheumatism, which he frequently mentioned in his letters. In 1794, 1797, 1802, 1806, 1811, 1813, and 1819 agonizing pain in his back, hips, and thighs often kept him from walking.31
Several historians have pointed out with not a little sarcasm that records make it clear Dolley Madison was not at Sally Hemings’s bedside when Madison was born, as Wetmore-Hemings claim in their narrative. Madison was born on January 19, 1805. On this date Dolley was in Washington, D.C., with her husband, James Madison, Jefferson’s secretary of state. Paternity proponents have come up with a theoretical answer—Dolley made a documented visit to Monticello in the fall, and that was when she promised Sally a gift if she named the child after her husband. Underlying the entire story is the assumption that the deeply religious Dolley and her husband were aware of—and approved of—Jefferson’s relationship with Sally. There is not a shred of proof for this assertion. The only documented evidence is a James Madison statement we have already seen: he said Callender’s accusation was “incredible.”32
Further doubts about the reliability of Madison Hemings’s narrative arise when we discover how many details can be traced to Callender’s original account, published three years before Madison was born. Madison traced his mother’s birth back to Elizabeth Hemings’s relationship with John Wayles. Callender misspelled the name as “Wales” and so did Wetmore-Hemings. Wayles is called a “Welchman”, in both accounts, when his background was English. These errors are of no great import, but they tell us who was in control of the story. Clearly, it was not Madison Hemings; it was Wetmore writing with copies of Callender’s articles or quotations from them on his desk. This is another reason to suspect that Madison’s story is Callender with the window dressing of a first-person narrative.
Newspaper ethics in the nineteenth century did not put a high value on accuracy. “Faking” a story (embellishing it or inventing it wholesale) was accepted journalistic practice. Indifference to facts was virtually universal, as the example of the newspaper reporting on George Washington’s supposed father-son relationship to Thomas Posey make dolorously clear. When we consider Israel Jefferson’s story and its veritable tissue of lies (documented by Thomas Jefferson Randolph), the evidence strongly suggests Samuel F. Wetmore was a practitioner of the shoddy art of faking the truth.33
Two years after he wrote the Madison Hemings article, Wetmore was fired as postmaster of Waverly for stealing $155 from his accounts. He resigned as editor of the Pike County Republican and vanished from the local scene. This was not the first time Wetmore revealed a dishonest streak. In 1871, a man sued him for failing to repay a debt of $362—about $5,000 in today’s money. Toward the end of the Civil War, on March 31, 1865, when Wetmore was forty-four, he joined the army and received a $100 signing bonus, then complained of “rheumatism” and was mustered out thirty-nine days later. He never repaid the balance he owed on his $150 clothing allowance or his $100 munitions allowance. A few months before Wetmore disappeared, he was sued in the Waverly court on behalf of an infant, Adaline Rose. Unfortunately, the archival records of this lawsuit have been lost. But it has some of the earmarks of a paternity suit. Could the man who wrote Madison’s Hemings’s story be guilty of the same indiscretion for which he pilloried Thomas Jefferson? Such ironies are not uncommon in history.34
Wetmore’s brother Josiah took over the newspaper and issued a statement that betrayed not a little agitation. At one point, he claimed Samuel was “severely ill.” At another point he admitted that Samuel had “given rise to scandal, by withdrawing without consultation.” The new editor added that Samuel had sent a message “from a distant city, hinting at a continued journey,” which suggested “a prolonged absence.” So great was the turmoil inside the Wetmore family, no one seemed to notice how incongruous it was to claim someone was severely ill and then report he had left his wife and three children to flee to a distant city.
Samuel Wetmore’s absence turned out to be permanent. No one in Waverly ever heard from him again. Although the Pike County Republican frantically eulogized him as “a man who never used tobacco or any other narcotic in any form,” it seems likely that an erratic character had come to a bad end.35
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The difference between the short, tan-skinned Madison and his tall younger brother, Eston, who had reddish hair and a striking resemblance to the Jeffersons, suggests that the two men had different fathers. That casts further doubt on the Wetmore-Hemings assertion that Sally Hemings never had sexual relations with anyone except Jefferson. Further fueling this doubt are the recollections of a French visitor, Comte de Volney, who spent three weeks at Monticello in 1796. He was amazed by the atmosphere of sexual freedom. “Women and girls…do not have any censure of manners,” he wrote in his journal, “living freely with the white workmen of the country or hired Europeans, Germans, Irishmen and others…” Another French visitor made similar observations around the same time.36
The most important person in Sally Hemings’s life almost certainly was her mother, Elizabeth Hemings. She had six children by John Wayles and eight more by other fathers, some white, some black, after she came to Monticello. This makes it seem likely—or at least plausible—that Sally, too, had several lovers. The relaxed sexual atmosphere at Monticello also reduces the significance of various slave children, from Callender’s “Master Tom” (Woodson) to Eston Hemings, resembling Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation made this one of the chief points in their 2000 conviction of Jefferson—now withdrawn. If Peter Carr fathered some of Sally’s early children, they might well resemble Jefferson. He or his brother Samuel might also have fathered children by other Hemings women. As we shall soon see, there is another Jefferson relative who also might have enjoyed Monticello’s relaxed sexual mores.37
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Dr. Walllenborn had a point when he called for a reexamination of the role of Peter Carr in Sally’s life. The two men who named him as Sally’s lover, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and overseer Edmund Bacon, admittedly had motives to shade or deny the truth. But they did not testify at the same time or in the same place. On the contrary, their accounts are separated by many years and several hundred miles. Randolph spoke at his Edgehill farm, virtually in the shadow of Monticello, in the mid-1850s; Bacon talked in Kentucky after the Civil War had begun. There is no evidence that either was aware of what the other man had said. This lends a modicum of credibility to their words.
One historian has proposed a scenario that would explain why Sally might have told her son Madison that Jefferson was his father. Peter Carr married a Baltimore heiress in 1797, after Sally had conceived but not yet given birth to her second child. If Sally were his mistress, the situation may have been charged with explosive jealousy. Bitterness and anger may have led her to turn to other lovers and toward the end of her life to say Thomas Jefferson was their father, as an act of revenge against Peter Carr. This scenario makes Sally a woman with a broken heart—a victim not only of the monstrous injustices of the slave system but the duplicity of a faithless lover.
Peter Carr’s heart, too, may have been damaged. Thomas Jefferson had regarded him as the son he never had and expended a great deal of time and money to educate him, hoping he would become a national leader. But his political career faltered and expired early, and he bumbled through the rest of his life like a man in a daze. Thomas Jefferson Randolph reported hearing Carr express his shame over his affair with Sally and the embarrassment it had caused Jefferson. This underscores the possibility that he felt lifelong regret.38
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In recent years there has been a growing inclination among historians to take Randolph Jefferson seriously as a potential lover of Sally Hemings. He lived twenty miles from Monticello and often visited his famous brother. Randolph was twelve years younger than
Thomas Jefferson, and this rather large age gap meant there was not much intimacy between them. But they remained friendly, and Jefferson was always ready to help his brother out of financial and personal difficulties. Randolph inherited 2,200 acres of prime farmland on the south side of the James River and enough slaves to make a comfortable living. But he was a poor businessman, often in debt.
Isaac Jefferson, a Monticello ex-slave interviewed in 1843, described Randolph as “a mighty simple man [who] used to come out among the black people and play the fiddle and dance half the night.” Monticello’s slaves called him “Uncle Randolph”—a glimpse of how friendly and down-to-earth they found him. Randolph seems to have been such a frequent visitor to Monticello that his appearance there was no cause for special comment. In a letter to her father, Martha Jefferson Randolph remarked on “Uncle Randolph” being “in the house” and giving a “dram” to a sick slave, which made him feel better. It is unlikely that each of his visits was noted in any formal way. This subtracts not a little from the claim by the Jefferson Foundation Research Committee that Randolph could be dismissed as a paternity candidate because there is no “documented” evidence of his being at Monticello when Sally Hemings conceived.
Randolph was too fond of drams for his own good. At one point, Thomas Jefferson urgently advised him to get his drinking under control. It is not hard to envision Randolph—and Sally—participating in the late-night revels Comte de Volney described. When Eston Hemings was born, Randolph was fifty-one years old and had been a widower for a decade. A letter from Thomas Jefferson has survived, inviting Randolph to Monticello during the “window” of time when Sally conceived Eston.
The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers Page 41