The final word came from Gordon Wood, generally regarded as the leading historian of the revolutionary era, who was asked to review the published collection of essays that came out of the Charlottesville conference. Wood argued that the core of the Jefferson problem was not his inevitable flaws but our unrealistic expectations. “We Americans make a great mistake in idolizing… and making symbols of authentic figures,” Wood warned, “who cannot and should not be ripped out of their time and place.” No real-life historical figure could ever prove a satisfactory hero because his human weaknesses would always undercut his saintly status. “By turning Jefferson into the kind of transcendent moral hero that no authentic historically situated human being could ever be,” Wood wrote, “we leave ourselves demoralized by the time-bound weaknesses of this eighteenth-century slaveholder.”20
It seemed to me that Wood’s point was true enough; in fact, just the kind of sober assessment of the Jefferson problem one wanted to hear amid all the shrill pronouncements. But it also seemed abundantly clear that it would make absolutely no practical difference. Yes, perhaps we all would be better served if Americans were allowed to select their heroes (and villains) only from fictional characters, who would therefore never disappoint us. But we won’t and can’t. We would be even better served if we discarded our need for heroes altogether. But no people in recorded history have ever been able to do that, and there was no reason to believe that modern Americans would prove an exception. Moreover, the scholarly instinct to establish a secure checkpoint between the past and the present in order to prevent the flow of traffic back and forth, while it had the advantage of deterring those ideologically motivated raiding parties that wanted to go back to capture heroes and villains to suit their own political agenda, also had the disadvantage of making history an irrelevant, cloistered, indeed dead place, populated only by historians.
The Jefferson genie had long since escaped from the historical bottle anyway. There was no putting him back. Evidence of Jefferson’s natural tendency to surge out of the past and into the present kept popping up in the press even as the 250th anniversary celebrations died down. The New York Times reported a special mock-trial session organized by the New York City Bar Association, presided over by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, designed to try Jefferson on three charges: that he subverted the independence of the federal judiciary, that he lived in the lavish manner of Louis XIV (the Monticello exhibit), and that he frequently violated the Bill of Rights. Though the prosecution possessed a hefty load of evidence for conviction, Jefferson was found not guilty on all charges; the lawyers for both sides toasted his name.21
Meanwhile, down in northern Virginia the Washington Post reported a new development in the escalating protest against the plan to locate a new Walt Disney theme park in the historic region around several Civil War battlegrounds. A wealthy Iranian real estate owner named Bahman Batmaughelidj had gone over to the opposition. Called Batman in the press, he turned out to be the same Iranian philanthropist I had met that night in Worcester. He had learned that the Walt Disney Corporation was the producer and main distributor of the Merchant and Ivory film Jefferson in Paris, which endorsed the story of Jefferson’s sexual liaison with Sally Hemings. He had now decided to throw his considerable weight against the Disney theme park scheme because of Disney’s complicity in the reinvigoration of the Sally scandal. “Americans don’t realize,” Batmaughelidj warned, “how profoundly Jefferson and his ideas live on in the hopes and dreams of people in other countries. This movie will undercut all that. People all around the world will view it as the defining truth about Jefferson. And of course it is a lie.”22
RESURGENCE, 1998
WELL, THE DEFINING TRUTH about the Sally Hemings story was that the available evidence on each side of the controversy was sufficient to sustain the debate but insufficient to resolve it one way or the other. Anyone who claimed to have a clear answer to this most titillating question about the historical Jefferson was engaging in massive self-deception or outright lying. On two occasions I had made presentations before the staff and tour guides at Monticello in which I suggested that we exhume Jefferson’s remains in order to obtain genetic material that would permit DNA comparisons with the Hemings descendants. That, so it seemed to me, was the only way the mystery could be solved. The folks at Monticello listened attentively, concurred with my assessment of the situation, but shook their heads in horror at the ghoulish thought of desecrating the Jefferson grave. Besides, several argued, there probably wasn’t enough physical evidence remaining to obtain the DNA material required for a reliable scientific study anyway.
Unbeknownst to me, modern science was racing to the rescue with a new technique that permitted DNA comparisons without obtaining genetic material from Jefferson himself. Because the Y chromosome is passed intact on the male side of the family, and because more sophisticated laboratory methods for identifying the genetic markers on specific Y chromosomes were now scientifically feasible, one did not have to dig Jefferson up. A research team headed by Dr. Eugene Foster, a retired pathologist at the University of Virginia, obtained blood samples containing Jefferson’s Y chromosome from a living descendant and from several descendants in the Hemings line. The results, published in the prestigious scientific magazine Nature and released to the press on Halloween Day, 1998, showed a match between Jefferson and Eston Hemings, Sally’s last child. The chances of such a match occurring randomly were less than one in a thousand. This constituted conclusive evidence that Jefferson fathered at least one of Sally’s children and, in conjunction with the preexistent circumstantial evidence, made it highly probable that a long-term sexual relationship existed between them. If the Tom and Sally story was the longest-running soap opera in American history, it had at last reached its final episode.23
The scholarly response to this revelation is virtually certain to extend and deepen the critical consensus that Peter Onuf had summarized five years earlier. We already knew that Jefferson was an inherently elusive character who lived the central contradiction in American history, which is to say that he crafted the most inspiring egalitarian promise in modern history while living his entire life among two hundred slaves. Now we also know that he fathered several children by one of those slaves while claiming to regard racial amalgamation as a horrific prospect and a central reason why slavery itself could not be easily ended. Prior to the DNA evidence, one might have reasonably concluded that Jefferson was living a paradox. Now it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was living a lie.
All the major newspapers, magazines and television networks covered the story as a front-page item; a revitalized version of the culture wars broke out in the op-ed pages. Because I had coauthored the essay that accompanied the DNA study in Nature, and was also on record as opposing the ongoing impeachment hearings on President Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, William Safire of The New York Times accused me of timing the release of the study to undermine the case against Clinton, presumably by demonstrating that illicit liaisons with younger women had a distinguished presidential pedigree. Several black scholars and journalists used the occasion to ask why so many white historians, including yours truly, had failed to get this right and had paid insufficient attention to the oral tradition within the Hemings family, which had always regarded the existence of a sexual relationship between Tom and Sally as a self-evident truth. The clear implication was that racism was at work, along with the collateral urge to protect Jefferson from complicity in the secret sexual history between blacks and whites in the American South.24
At the level of popular opinion, however, neither the scholarly critique of Jefferson’s exalted status nor the journalistic craving to make him a double-edged weapon in the culture wars seemed to make much difference at all. Rather like a stock market that had already anticipated a stirring piece of fresh financial information, mainstream Americans took the news in stride, which only confirmed my impression that the Fawn Brodie version of the Sally and Tom story had long si
nce triumphed in the marketplace of public opinion. Tourists at the Jefferson Memorial and at Monticello, when asked to offer their reaction to the recent revelations, expressed casual indifference, claiming to have known it all along. (In retrospect, it would seem that the only folks who had resisted the truth were the white descendants in the Jefferson family and the majority of professional historians.) A positive spin on the story could also be detected in the calls pouring into the talk shows. Jefferson was now more resolutely human than ever before, the American Everyman for our more permissive era, the word made flesh who dwelt amongst us. In yet another stunning metamorphosis, his most unattractive feature—his deep convictions that blacks were inherently inferior and could never live alongside whites in peace and harmony—was now subject to reconsideration. No matter what Jefferson had publicly said or written, he had lived a biracial private life. In that sense he was our long-lost multicultural hero.
Such interpretive excesses only reinforced my realization that Jefferson was the most potent and promiscuous icon in American history. More than any other figure in the American pantheon, he embodied our will to believe. No matter what we learn about the historical Jefferson, that real man who walked the earth between 1743 and 1826, the mythological Jefferson will survive and flourish. The Jefferson Memorial is enduringly situated on the Tidal Basin, the mansion at Monticello is impeccably restored, the face on Mount Rushmore is forever. It is safe to get to know him as he really was.
The Jefferson who emerges in the pages that follow is a flawed creature, a man who combined massive learning with extraordinary naiveté, piercing insights into others with daunting powers of self-deception, utter devotion to great principles with a highly indulged presumption that his own conduct was not answerable to them. While offering an early version of this warts-and-all portrait before an audience in Richmond, an elderly woman rose to scold me for my irreverence. “My good man,” she complained, “you are a mere pigeon on the great statue of Thomas Jefferson.” All I can say in my defense is that the subject of the chapters that follow, while great, is not a statue.
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PHILADELPHIA: 1775–76
It is easier to reach a confident opinion about the sort of man he was in 1776 than to do so for 1793 or 1800.
—DUMAS MALONE (1948)
IT WAS A PROVINCIAL version of the grand entrance. On June 20, 1775, Thomas Jefferson arrived in Philadelphia in an ornate carriage, called a phaeton, along with four horses and three slaves. The roughly three-hundred-mile trip from Williamsburg had taken him ten days, in part because the roads were poor and poorly marked—twice he had been forced to hire guides to recover the route—and in part because he had dawdled in Fredricksburg and Annapolis to purchase extra equipment for his entourage. As the newest and youngest member of Virginia’s delegation to the Continental Congress, he obviously intended to uphold the stylish standard of the Virginia gentry, which the Philadelphia newspapers had recently described, with a mixture of admiration and apprehension, as those “haughty sultans of the South… .”1
So he had outfitted Jesse, Jupiter and Richard, his black servants, in formal attire befitting the regalia of a proper Virginia gentleman, to include a postilion’s whip for Jesse, who rode the lead horse in the team. Richard sat inside the phaeton with his master; Jupiter, who had been Jefferson’s personal servant and companion ever since student days at the College of William and Mary, trailed behind with the two extra horses. (Jupiter, as it turned out, was to accompany Jefferson throughout most of the early ride into history; he died in 1800 just before Jefferson ascended to the presidency, after drinking a medicinal potion prepared by the “witch doctor” within the slave quarters at Monticello.) No contemporary record survives of the impression this elegant entourage made upon the more austere Quaker residents of Philadelphia, but the jarring juxtapositions that lie at the center of Jefferson’s character and career had already begun to reveal themselves. The man who, precisely a year later, was to draft the most famous and eloquent statement of human rights in American—and perhaps world—history entered national affairs as a conspicuously aristocratic slaveowner.2
So much that we know about young Jefferson derives from later recollections, when memories were clouded by the golden haze surrounding the mythology of the Declaration of Independence and remembered anecdotes were realigned to fit various personal and political agenda. Moreover, there is the nearly insurmountable difficulty posed by what Jefferson specialists have come to call the problem of the Shadwell fire, which destroyed most of Jefferson’s personal papers in 1770, making the recovery of his formative years an exercise in inspired guesswork. Given the paucity of early evidence and the veritable flood of material that begins to flow after 1776, the temptation to read the young revolutionary through the elder statesman is nearly irresistible and, in some ways, unavoidable.
Take, for example, the matter of young Jefferson’s physical appearance. What did the thirty-two-year-old delegate from Virginia look like? All agree that he was tall, six feet two inches, perhaps a quarter inch taller. After that, however, the picture begins to blur. Edmund Bacon, Jefferson’s overseer at Monticello during the presidential years and then into his retirement, recalled that “his skin was very clear and pure—just like he was in principle.” But most other reports, and most of the later portraits, describe him as red-faced and heavily freckled, with a complexion that was either scorched or radiant, depending on the viewer’s predilections. The only contemporary picture of young Jefferson, a pen-and-ink drawing done by Pierre du Simitière in 1776, shows a somewhat padded face with a vacant stare. And there are reasons to doubt the drawing is really Jefferson at all. But most descriptions of the older Jefferson emphasize his “scranny” or thin face. Bacon said he “had no surplus flesh”—and bright, luminous eyes. The color of his eyes is also controversial. Virtually all the later reports indicate they were clear blue; the earlier descriptions, and most of the portraits, have them hazel or green. Perhaps they changed color in different light.3
One of his ex-slaves, Isaac, emphasized his erect posture. “Mr. Jefferson was a tall, straight-bodied man as ever you see,” he recalled. “Nary a man in this town walked so straight.” Bacon agreed that Jefferson was “straight as a gun barrell.” But others, mostly enemies, described him as loosely jointed and seemingly collapsible, all wrists, elbows and ankles. The discrepancy might have been a function of different postures. On his feet he was square-shouldered and formal. He bowed to everyone he met and tended to stand with his arms folded across his chest, defining his own private space and warding off intruders. When seated, however, he seemed to melt into the upholstery with a kind of contorted grace, one hip high, the other low, shoulders slouched and uneven, his torso folded in several places, part jackknife and part accordion.
His two most distinctive characteristics were his hair and his incessant singing. Disagreements about the color of his hair, unlike disagreements about his eyes, seem susceptible to reconciliation. It was reddish blond or sandy red. Those few commentators who described it as gray came from a later period, when aging had reduced the reddish hues but made no inroads into his naturally full and thick complement, which was seldom dressed and even less frequently powdered or wigged. He tended to tie it behind his neck much as he sat, loosely and with an air of disheveled informality.
He sang whenever he was walking or riding, sometimes when he was reading. His former slave Isaac reported that one could “hardly see him anywhar outdoors, but that he was a-singin’.” Bacon confirmed that “when he was not talking he was nearly always humming some tune, or singing in a low voice to himself.” Apparently this constant singing was a long-standing habit. So, if we are prepared to take a few leaps of faith, we can plausibly envision him riding into Philadelphia in 1775 in his phaeton, with his horses and his slaves, a tall and slim young Virginian, with reddish blond hair and a self-consciously diffident air, lounging nonchalantly in his seat, singing to himself.4
YOUNG JEFFERSON
Little is known of her (the problem of the Shadwell fire again), except that as a Randolph she was descended from one of the most prominent families in Virginia. There is reason to believe that Jefferson’s relationship with his mother was strained, especially after his father’s death, when, as the eldest son, he did everything he could to remove himself from her supervision. But all inspired speculation on this point is really pure guesswork; no explicit evidence exists. After boarding with the local schoolmaster to learn his Latin and Greek, he went off to the College of William and Mary in 1760. There he gained a reputation among his classmates as an obsessive student, sometimes spending fifteen hours with his books, three hours practicing his violin and the remaining six hours eating and sleeping. He was an extremely serious young man.5
After graduating in 1762, he brought his highly disciplined regime to the study of the law in Williamsburg under the tutelage of George Wythe (pronounced with). Then, after a long, five-year apprenticeship, he began to practice on his own, mostly representing small-scale planters from the western counties in cases involving land claims and titles. Although he broke no legal ground and handled no landmark cases, he gained a reputation in the Williamsburg court as an extremely well-prepared barrister, an indifferent speaker before the bench but a formidable legal scholar.6
Joseph J. Ellis Page 4