In the November 5, 1998, issue of Nature, the results of a DNA comparison between Jefferson’s Y chromosome and the Y chromosome of several Hemings descendants demonstrated a match between Jefferson and Eston Hemings. Comparisons between the Y chromosome from the Carr line yielded negative results, as did comparisons between Jefferson and the first of Sally’s children, Thomas Woodson. In effect, the interpretation offered by the white Jefferson descendants was discredited; the interpretation offered by the Hemings descendants was partially supported.
But the Eston match is the crucial new evidence and really all that matters, since it is virtually impossible to believe that a sixty-four-year-old Jefferson fathered a child by Sally Hemings six years after the Callender accusations surfaced in a Monticello version of the one-night stand. Sally gave birth to seven children between 1790 and 1808. Whether Jefferson fathered all of them will probably never be known. But the match with Eston shifts the burden of proof toward the presumption that Jefferson was the father of each. The likelihood of a long-standing sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings can never be proven absolutely, but it is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
AHR American Historical Review
Boyd Julian P. Boyd et al., eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 25 vols. to date (Princeton, 1950– )
Cappon Lester G. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 1959)
Domestic Life Sarah N. Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 1978). Originally published 1871
Family Letters Edwin Morris Betts and James A. Bear, eds., The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson (Columbia, 1966)
Farm Book Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, with Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings (Princeton, 1953)
Ford Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 10 vols. (New York, 1892–99)
History Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, 2 vols. (New York, 1986). Library of America edition. Originally published 1889–91
JAH Journal of American History
JER Journal of the Early Republic
JSH Journal of Southern History
L&B Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1905)
LC Library of Congress
Malone Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 vols. (Boston, 1948–81)
Randall Henry S. Randall, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, 3 vols. (New York, 1958)
Smith James Morton Smith, ed., The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison 1776–1826, 3 vols. (New York, 1995)
VMHB Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
WMQ William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. Ser.
The notes that follow represent my attempt to adopt a commonsensical approach to the customary rules of scholarly citation. Jefferson presents a daunting challenge in this regard, in part because he himself left such a massive trail of literary evidence, in part because he subsequently attracted so many biographers and historians that the secondary literature on his life is truly imposing, and in part because his life crossed over virtually all the major political, social, cultural and intellectual developments of revolutionary America, each of which has generated substantial scholarly literatures in its own right. A full accounting of all the sources consulted, in short, would require another book as long as this one. This strikes me as silly, as well as a course vulnerable to the charge of conspicuous erudition. I have tried to cite all the primary sources from which I quote in the text. I have also tried to cite those secondary works and those titles that had a decided impact on my thinking. When it comes to Jefferson, the unspoken truth is that no mere mortal can read everything, and no sane reader would want an exhaustive account of all that has been consulted. In partial compensation for my sins of omission, I have littered the notes below with interpretive assessments of the sources cited, thereby giving the endnotes the occasional flavor of a bibliographic essay.
PROLOGUE. JEFFERSONIAN SURGE: AMERICA, 1992–93
1. Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1960), 395–420.
2. Ibid., 375–76.
3. Ibid., 377–78.
4. Information on the number of visitors to the Jefferson Memorial was provided by the National Park Service.
5. Jim Strupp, ed., Revolution Song: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy (Summit, N.J., 1992).
6. Mary Jo Salter to Joseph Ellis, February 5, 1993, author’s personal correspondence.
7. Mary Jo Salter to Joseph Ellis, May 5, May 10, May 12, 1993.
8. Mary Jo Salter, Sunday Skaters (New York, 1994), 79–93.
9. Merrill Peterson, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York, 1970), viii.
10. Susan R. Stein, The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1993).
11. See the review of the exhibit by Garry Wills, “The Aesthete,” New York Review of Books (August 12, 1993), 6–10.
12. Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue,” Atlantic Monthly, CCLXX (November 1992), 62–64.
13. Frank Shuffleton, Thomas Jefferson: A Comprehensive Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, 1826–1980 (New York, 1983) and, by the same author, Thomas Jefferson, 1981–1990: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1990).
14. Leonard Levy, Jefferson and Civil Liberties: The Darker Side (Cambridge, 1963); Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968).
15. Eric McKitrick, “The View from Jefferson’s Camp,” New York Review of Books (December 17, 1970), 35–38.
16. Paul Finkelman, “Jefferson and Slavery: ‘Treason Against the Hopes of the World,’ ” in Peter S. Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville, 1993), 181–221.
17. Scot A. French and Edward L. Ayers, “The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson,” in Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 449–50; Washington Post, October 17, 1992, D-1, D-4.
18. Peter S. Onuf, “The Scholars’ Jefferson,” WMQ, L (October 1993), 673–75.
19. Ibid., 671–99.
20. Gordon Wood, “Jefferson at Home,” New York Review of Books (May 13, 1993), 6–9.
21. New York Times, June 24, 1994, B-1, 3.
22. Washington Post, April 13, 1994, E-1.
23. E. A. Foster et al., “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” Nature, November 5, 1998, 27–28; see also Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “DNA Analysis: Founding Father,” ibid., 13.
24. U. S. News and World Report, November 9, 1998, 58–69, which contains the fullest account of the DNA story as well as the popular response to it. My summary of the popular reaction is also based on the interviews that a group of my students at Mount Holyoke conducted with tourists at the Jefferson Memorial and Monticello as well as a reasonably thorough survey of the television talk shows the week following the Nature story.
1. PHILADELPHIA: 1775–76
1. Boyd, I, 169; Randall, I, 112; Malone, I, 202–03. The quotation about “haughty sultans” is from Rivington’s Gazette, February 9, 1775.
2. On Jupiter, see Farm Book, 17; Garden Book, 269; Family Letters, 182–83.
3. For recollections of Jefferson’s general appearance, see the comments by Isaac and Bacon in James A. Bear, ed., Jefferson at Monticello (Charlottesville, 1967), 4, 11, 83. The pen-and-ink drawing by du Simitière is reproduced as the frontpiece in Silvio A. Bedini, Declaration of Independence Desk: Relic of Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1981). Most leading authorities question the authenticity of this drawing, believing it to be of someone else.
4. Bear, ed., Jefferson at Monticello, 13, 18, 72–73, for the erect posture and “incessant singing.” Other vivid firsthand descriptions are available in Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty
Years of Washington Society, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York, 1906), 69; Richard Beale Davis, ed., Jeffersonian America (San Marino, 1954), 10–12; E. S. Maclay, ed., Journal of William Maclay, 1789–91 (New York, 1891), 113. The different portraits are gathered in Fiske Kimball, The Life Portraits of Jefferson and Their Replicas (Philadelphia, 1944) and Alfred L. Bush, The Life Portraits of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, 1987). The best secondary accounts of Jefferson’s physical appearance are Malone, I, 48, and Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 1978), 14–15. See also the files on “Jefferson’s Physical Appearance” in the Research Department, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Monticello. A nice summary of the contested character of Jefferson’s appearance is in Peterson, Jefferson Image, 244–45.
5. This concise synthesis of the early years is drawn from the standard biographies. The best ones for this period are Marie Kimball, Jefferson: The Road to Glory, 1743–1776 (New York, 1943); Malone, I, 3–112; Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life (New York, 1993), 1–31, which engages in intriguing speculation about Jefferson’s attitude toward his mother, all of it highly conjectural. The quotation about being carried by a slave to Tuckahoe is in Randall, I, 11. The matter of the Shadwell fire is nicely summed up in John Dos Passos, The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (Garden City, 1954), 159.
6. Frank L. Dewey, Thomas Jefferson, Lawyer (Charlottesville, 1986).
7. On the decision to build Monticello and the earliest efforts at construction, see Jack McLaughlin, Jefferson and Monticello: Biography of a Builder (New York, 1988), 146–76; see also Malone, I, 143–52. For the political decision to enter the House of Burgesses, see Malone, I, 128–42. A concise summary of the political context in the Virginia House of Burgesses is in Jack P. Greene, “Foundations of Power in the Virginia House of Burgesses, 1720–1776,” WMQ, X (1959), 485–506. Efforts to explain the reasons why the wealthy planters of Virginia were nearly unanimous in opposing British authority from 1765 to 1776 have moved past crudely economic explanations (i.e., indebtedness to English creditors). The most sophisticated overview of the political psychology within the Tidewater elite is T. H. Breen, Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of the Revolution (Princeton, 1985). The best review of the issues is Herbert Sloan and Peter Onuf, “Politics, Culture and the Revolution in Virginia: A Review of Recent Work,” VMHB, XCI (1983), 258–84.
8. Malone, I, 153–65; Boyd, I, 86–88. Douglas L. Wilson, “Thomas Jefferson’s Early Notebooks,” WMQ, XLII (1985), 433–52.
9. Ford, I, 6, for Jefferson’s recollection of listening to Henry in his autobiography.
10. Jefferson to Thomas Adams, June 1, 1771, Boyd, I, 71–72, for the piano quotation; Jefferson to Archibald Cary and Benjamin Harrison, December 9, 1774, ibid., I, 154–56, for the sashed windows.
11. This summary follows the general interpretive line of Malone, I, 182–96.
12. The quotations by Ward and Adams are most conveniently available in Boyd, I, 675–76, which is part of Boyd’s note on Summary View.
13. For the best analysis of Summary View, see H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1965), 158–64. The most recent appraisal, with an exhaustive account of the secondary literature, is Stephen A. Conrad, “Putting Rights Talk in Its Place: The Summary View Revisited,” Onuf, ed., Jeffersonian Legacies, 254–80. The original draft of Summary View is in Boyd, I, 121–34.
14. Boyd, I, 125, for the quotations.
15. For the constitutional context of Jefferson’s argument about parliamentary power, see Anthony Lewis, “Jefferson’s Summary View as a Chart of Political Union,” WMQ, V (1948), 34–51.
16. Boyd, I, 129–31.
17. Ibid., I, 121–23.
18. On the “expatriation” theme, see Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, 158–64; there is also an excellent discussion in Wills, Inventing, 84–89. Jefferson’s draft of the document designed to “prove” the purity of the original migration is in Boyd, I, 277–85.
19. Ford, I, 10, for Jefferson’s autobiographical recollection.
20. The authoritative account of the episode is by Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York, 1964); for a hilarious juxtaposition of Jefferson’s version in Summary View with the real story, see Wills, Inventing, 27–28.
21. The quotation is from Jefferson to John Randolph, August 25, 1775, Boyd, I, 241; for Jefferson’s childlike demeanor in building Monticello, see McLaughlin, Monticello, 373–74.
22. Jefferson to John Page, December 25, 1762, then again on January 20, 1763, Boyd, I, 3–8, for the anticipation of Rebecca’s interest; then Jefferson to John Page, October 7, 1763, ibid., I, 11–12, for the disillusionment with his rejection. On the stilted and adolescent prose style, see ibid., I, 80–81. The best appraisal of Jefferson’s sentimentalism is the excellent new book by Andrew Burstein, The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (Charlottesville, 1995).
23. One catches a provocative glimmering of these tendencies in Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence, 1984).
24. Lyman Butterfield, ed., The Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (4 vols., Cambridge, 1961), II, 121, 173, 182. My version of the Adams temperament is more fully available in Joseph Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York, 1993).
25. On Pendleton, see David John Mays, Edmund Pendleton, 1721–1803 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1952).
26. The best descriptions of Lee are in Edmund Randolph, History of Virginia, ed. Arthur Shaffer (Charlottesville, 1970). See also Wills, Inventing, 3–4.
27. William Henry Wirt, Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence and Speeches (3 vols., New York, 1891) is the fullest account of Henry’s life and career. The best recent study is Richard R. Beeman, Patrick Henry: A Biography (New York, 1974). The quotations from Randolph and Jefferson are reproduced in Beeman, Patrick Henry, 192, 133.
28. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography, III, 335.
29. Douglas L. Wilson, ed., Jefferson’s Commonplace Book (Princeton, 1989), for specific entries and explicit examples of Jefferson’s note-taking habits.
30. The cost accounting of the war is in Boyd, I, 182–84; the prediction of a short war is in Jefferson to John Randolph, November 29, 1775, ibid., I, 269.
31. There is an excellent discussion of the awkward disjunction in the Continental Congress by the summer of 1775 in Wills, Inventing, 48. The quotations are from Jefferson to Francis Eppes, June 26, 1775, and Jefferson to John Randolph, August 25, 1775, Boyd, I, 174–75, 242. The authoritative modern study of the Continental Congress is Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York, 1979).
32. Boyd, I, 199–92. The quotations are taken from Jefferson’s draft rather than from the copy adopted by the Congress.
33. The full draft is in ibid., I, 199–204. The earliest account of Jefferson’s strong proclivity towards dichotomies is in Jordan, White over Black, 476–77.
34. Livingston’s remarks are reproduced in Boyd, I, 189.
35. See the long note, containing all the quoted material, in ibid., I, 187–92.
36. The final version of Causes and Necessities is in ibid., I, 213–19.
37. Ibid., I, 225–30, 276–77. The Adams quotation is from John Adams to Timothy Pickering, April 11, 1822, Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States (10 vols., 1850–56), II, 513.
38. On Jefferson’s activities at Monticello, see Malone, I, 215–16. On the situation in Virginia, see Thad W. Tate, “The Coming of the Revolution in Virginia: Britain’s Challenge to Virginia’s Ruling Class, 1763–1776,” WMQ, XIX (1962), 323–43.
39. The remark on his mother is from Jefferson to William Randolph, May–June, 1776, Boyd, I, 409.
40. Jefferson to Thomas Nelson, May 16, 1776, ib
id., I, 292.
41. Jefferson, I, 216–17; Bedini, Declaration of Independence Desk, 4–5. Jefferson eventually gave the desk to his granddaughter Ellen Randolph Colledge as a wedding present in 1825, predicting that “its imaginary value will increase with the years… , as the relics of the Saints are in those of the Church.”
42. John Adams to Abigail Adams, March 17, 1776, Lyman Butterfield, ed., Adams Family Correspondence (3 vols., Cambridge, 1963), I, 410; John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 2, 1776, ibid., II, 3.
43. Jefferson’s three drafts of the Virginia constitution are reproduced in Boyd, I, 329–65.
44. Ibid., I, 362–63, for the most progressive features in Jefferson’s third and final draft.
45. Ibid., I, 357.
46. Ibid., I, 312–14, provides Jefferson’s notes on the debate in the Continental Congress. The story told here has several contested features, the chief one being the reasons for selecting Jefferson over Lee. The fullest discussion of the controversy is in Randall, I, 145–62. Dumas Malone’s synthesis in Malone, I, 217–19, is a model of fairness. Lee’s resolution of June 7 is reproduced in Boyd, I, 298–99.
47. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography, III, 335–37, offers the classic Adams account, which mixes the truth with his own personal need to show posterity that he, not Jefferson, was in charge. For a discussion of Adams’s persistent claim that the Declaration was no more than an elegant ornament to the crucial business in the Continental Congress, see Ellis, Passionate Sage, 64–65, 99–100.
48. The two authoritative studies of the chronology and different drafts of the Declaration are: Julian Boyd, The Declaration of Independence: The Evolution of the Text (Princeton, 1945) and John H. Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence (New York, 1906). Pauline Maier’s forthcoming book, Sacred Scriptures: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), which she graciously allowed me to read in draft form and which helped me in the final stages of my own revisions, will unquestioningly become the new standard work. The Adams recollection is from Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography, III, 336. Boyd attempts to hold open the possibility that the signing occurred on July 4, as Jefferson claimed, but the scholarly consensus is that Jefferson’s memory was wrong. See Papers, I, 306–07. For a convenient summary of the many myths about the signing ceremony, see Charles Warren, “Fourth of July Myths,” WMQ, II (1945), 242–48.
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