Back in the 1980s, I had a GF named Louise Montgomery. She was working on a doctorate in journalism at the University of Texas. Louise swooned for Thomas Jefferson, calling him brilliant, a man of protean intellect and vision. She was not alone, of course. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, third American president (1801−1809) and founder of the University of Virginia, has many admirers. I think he was pretty great, too, but not perfect.
You probably know where I am heading with this—Jefferson’s liaison of nearly four decades with Sarah “Sally” Hemings, one of the hundred or so slaves on his plantation known as Monticello. Hemings, it must be noted, was a mulatto, as was her mother Betty. They and other female relatives either married white men, or were white men’s common-law wives or concubines. The extent to which these women (and many thousands of others) voluntarily entered into sexual relationships with white men will never be known. But what is certain is that they had little power; coercion during the slavery days—1619−1865—took place on many levels.
Betty’s owner copulated with her and produced a half-dozen mixed-race children. Who was he? John Wayles, an attorney, slave trader, business agent and planter. His daughter Martha married Jefferson in 1772. This means Hemings and his wife were half-sisters!
In 1785, Jefferson, recently widowed, was named Minister to France. Joining him in Paris were his daughter Patsy and two servants, one of whom was Hemings’ brother James. Two years later, his other daughter, Polly, followed. She was accompanied by 14-year-old Sally Hemings. It was during this two-year span—1787 to 1789, when Jefferson returned to the USA to serve as Secretary of State—that his sexual relationship with Hemings began. The first of their six children, Harriet (1), was born in 1795, followed by Beverly (1798), Thenia (1799), Harriet (2) (1801), Madison (1805) and Eston (1808). Jefferson was careful about noting the fathers of slave children in his Farm Book, but rather curiously did not do so for these six. Although they were seven-eighths white, he regarded them as slaves under the principle of partus sequitur ventrum. Three of these very light-skinned people later chose to “pass”—that is, to identify as being of European descent.
In the Southern states during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was not at all uncommon for male slaveholders to bring comely young women to their beds. There was little social opprobrium against it as long as the men were discreet. (This is, of course, seeing the situation just from the position of the politically and economically dominant whites. Anger often boiled in the slave quarters about it.) So what Jefferson did with Hemings was by no means unique.
As one of the Founding Fathers, he could hardly have been more prominent. Acutely aware of how history would view him, he went to great lengths to cover his tracks about the Hemings story. He might have succeeded, if not for a few things that were out of his control. One is that the Hemings family’s oral tradition, very important in African culture, identified Jefferson as the father of both Harriets, Beverly, Thenia, Madison and Eston.
We should posthumously thank a man named James T. Callender. Portrayed as a liar, drunkard and scandal-monger by Jefferson’s defenders, he published pamphlets stating that the great man of Monticello had been consorting with a slave-girl. Jefferson did his best to play it cool, and he was aided by biographers who were not about to touch these sordid allegations. As for the paternity of Sally Hemings’ kids, in the mid-19th century the Jefferson family began fingering Peter Carr (Jefferson’s nephew) as the culprit. That was convenient since he had died in 1822 and was not around to refute the charges. Patsy and Sally had almost the same lifespans—1772 to 1836 and 1773 to 1835, respectively—and it strains credulity that Patsy did not know of this relationship. She and many others helped keep a lid on the truth.
More than a century passed, and historians such as Henry Randall, James Parton, Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson were content to ignore the Jefferson−Hemings story or treat it as an unsubstantiated rumor. After all, Jefferson had written and spoken contemptuously about miscegenation. To him, children born of interracial couplings were nothing but “spurious issue.” In my view, Randall, Parton, Malone and Peterson are guilty of poor historiography. Malone, who spent decades on a magisterial six-volume biography, insisted that such a “vulgar liaison” was “virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards.”
In the 1950s, a new generation of historians began to look closer at the matter. The Hemings descendants had never stopped claiming that they were in fact part of the extended Jefferson family. Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) showed that he had been present at Monticello when each of Hemings’ six children was conceived. For poor Peter Carr, exculpation came late. Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) offered more powerful evidence—some would say proof—that Jefferson was guilty as charged. The next year, Eugene Foster conducted a study of the DNA of Hemings’ great-great-grandson. The result? A match with the Y-chromosome of the Jefferson male line. That, combined with the circumstantial evidence, left little room for doubt.
Thomas Jefferson wrote stirringly about liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness. His words ring somewhat hollow now that we (almost certainly) know that he fathered six children with Sally Hemings. It seems clear that Jefferson, an elusive character, was duplicitous and had feet of clay.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello, issued a report in 2000 accepting Jefferson’s paternity. Since then, there have been several intense and emotional scenes between the two branches of Jefferson’s family at Monticello and at nearby UVA—a healing, as it were. Now, well into the 21st century, we can finally stand back and look at sobering issues like slavery and sexual intimidation with a clear eye. I can only suppose that Louise—my old-time used-to-be—would concur.
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