American Sphinx (37 page)

The Federalist barrage started right away, though the earliest shots tended to be aimed to wound rather than kill, poking fun at such targets as the distinctive Jeffersonian literary style, with its fondness for exalted phrasings and frequent alliterations. “Man is, by nature, a mighty megalonyx,” wrote one Federalist in mock imitation of the Declaration of Independence, “produced purposely, in a philosophical view, to prowl, pillage, propagate, and putrify.” The publication of five new editions of
Notes on Virginia
in 1801, presumably an effort by publishers to cash in on Jefferson’s new visibility as president, offered Federalist editors a broad range of easy targets. For some reason they tended to fasten upon Jefferson’s claim that huge, hairy prehistoric beasts called mammoths still lived on in the unexplored American West, one of those pre-Darwinian ideas Jefferson found attractive because it supported his anti-Buffon contention that the American environment produced large animals. Federalist wits ridiculed his “mammoth theory” over and over again, and the motif became a centerpiece of opposition sarcasm toward Jefferson’s pretensions as a scientist. In the same quasi-playful mode, Jefferson’s defenders countered the mammoth onslaught by presenting him with a “mammoth cheese” weighing 1,235 pounds, reputedly from the milk of nine hundred cows, “not one of them a federalist.”
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The truly serious assaults on his character first came on the religious front. In his
Notes on Virginia
Jefferson had presented an argument for religious freedom that concluded with a clever comment on his own open-mindedness: “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” The Federalist clergy of New England seized on this remark as conclusive evidence that Jefferson was some combination of pagan, infidel, atheist and heretic. Editorials throughout New England played on the theme that the most Christian country in the world was now headed by a man who denied the central tenets of Christianity. While Jefferson does not appear to have been personally hurt by the charge, he recognized the political damage it was doing to his party; so he composed a brief essay on the merits of Jesus as a role model, which was actually based on a similar essay by Joseph Priestley, the English deist, that compared Jesus and Socrates as splendid embodiments of humanistic values. Jefferson saw to it that his essay was leaked to Republican friends in order to counter what he called “the anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions.” Yes, he explained to Benjamin Rush, he did reject “the corruptions of Christianity,” but not “the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”
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Such distinctions were wasted of course on his Federalist critics, who were looking for ammunition rather than truth. Jefferson provided them with more than they could have hoped for when, only two weeks after his inauguration, he offered passage on a government ship to Tom Paine, who was attempting to return to America from France after barely escaping the guillotine. Jefferson’s letter to Paine was picked up by the American press from the Paris papers, where Paine himself had probably planted it to publicize the honor of Jefferson’s testimonial. “I am in hopes,” Jefferson wrote to Paine, “you will find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it will be your glory to have steadily laboured and with as much effect as any man living. That you may long live to continue your useful labours and reap reward in the thankfulness of nations is my sincere prayer. Accept assurance of my high esteem and effectionate attachment.”
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From Jefferson’s perspective Tom Paine was an authentic American hero, a charter member of “the band of brothers” that had made the American Revolution happen and had then carried “the spirit of ’76” to France, where it had produced more collateral damage than either man had anticipated, true enough, but where the future would surely recover the original ethos. Unfortunately for Jefferson, Paine’s reputation in America had not aged well. When he landed in Baltimore, the local newspaper caught the mood by observing sarcastically that “our pious President thought it expedient to dispatch a frigate for the accommodation of this loathsome reptile.” Paine’s chief offense was not that he was a practicing alcoholic with the social graces of a derelict, though that was true, but rather that he had written
The Age of Reason,
which was as full-throated an attack on Christianity as
Common Sense
had been on monarchy. By publicly associating with Paine, Jefferson exposed himself to the full-broadside blasts of the Federalist press as an “arch infidel,” “a defiler of Christian virtue” and “a companion of the most vile, corrupt, obnoxious sinner of the century.” All Americans who took Christianity seriously now had to make a choice, said one editor, between “renouncing their savior, or their president. . . .” The attacks were relentless and unequaled in the early history of the young nation for their polemical intensity. As Henry Adams put it, if Jefferson had decided to congratulate Napoleon for his despotic seizure of power in France, “he could not have excited in the minds of the New England Calvinists so deep a sense of disgust by seeming to identify himself with Paine.” It was, in a real sense, one of Jefferson’s finer moments, since he was fully aware of Paine’s notoriety but stuck by him to the end, even inviting him to live and dine at the presidential mansion for several weeks. Federalist editors had a field day describing “the two Toms” walking arm in arm, allegedly comparing notes on the ideal way to promote atheism or their past successes in despoiling Christian virgins.
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“The
circle
of our President’s
felicities
is greatly enlarged,” observed the editor of the Federalist
Port Folio,
“by the indulgence of Sally the sable, and the auspicious arrival of Tom Paine the pious.” The reference to “Sally the sable” was a casual insertion of the most sensational accusation made against Jefferson, a charge of sexual (and in its own day racial) impropriety. Virtually every Federalist newspaper in the country picked up the story, which first appeared in the
Richmond Recorder
in September 1802. “It is well known,” the story began, “that the man,
whom it delighteth the people to honor,
keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. . . . The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking, although sable resemblance to those of the President himself.” For several months the Federalist press printed editorials disclaiming knowledge as to whether the allegations were true, but then proceeding to provide readers with colorful variations on the provocative gossip, some even set to verse:

Of all the damsels on the green

On mountain or in valley

A lass so luscious ne’er was seen

As Monticellan Sally.

Editorials referred to “Dusky Sally,” “Black Sal,” the “African Venus” and the “mahogoney colored charmer.” The Boston press was especially interested in how the fifty-nine-year-old president managed to make love with a much younger (Sally was thirty-one or thirty-two) woman. The answer was her African features:

Thick pouting lips! how sweet their grace!

When passion fires to kiss them!

Wide spreading over half the face,

Impossible to miss them.

And so on.
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It was a publicist’s dream at the time because it gave the Federalists, who were growing more desperate with each Republican victory in the ongoing state elections, the kind of small but sharp-edged piece of scandal that cut across all party or policy disagreements and straight into the core question of Jefferson’s character. It has been a publicist’s dream ever since, because the charges could not until recently be conclusively proved or disproved and because advocates on each side of the debate possessed just enough evidence at their disposal to block a comfortable verdict for the opposition. (See “A Note on the Sally Hemings Scandal” at the end, for a concise summary of the evidence.) John Adams had one of the shrewdest reactions to the charges when they first surfaced. Adams was still in his anti-Jefferson phase, so his response was not conditioned by their former friendship. As a victim of similarly venomous vendettas Adams claimed to empathize with Jefferson. On the other hand, the allegations were “a natural and almost inevitable consequence of a foul contagion in the human character, Negro Slavery.” Jefferson was not only contaminated by that contagion, but also not above suspicion because “there was not a planter in Virginia,” Adams observed, “who could not reckon among his slaves a number of his children.” The charge of sexual impropriety therefore placed “a blot on his Character” that was not completely implausible. It possessed a certain moral truth because it raised to relief the inherently immoral condition in which all slaveowners, Jefferson included, lived their lives.
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What Adams did not say for the record, but almost surely thought, was that there was an analogous sense of poetic justice about the allegations, because they originated with a former Republican scandalmonger named James Callender, whose previous career had been spent vilifying Jefferson’s opponents, Adams among them, in much the same truth-be-damned fashion and with Jefferson’s support and approval. Callender had been the reporter to break the story of Hamilton’s shady escapades in 1797 and the following year had slandered Adams as “the corrupt and despotic monarch of Braintree” in a pamphlet entitled
The Prospect Before Us.
Jefferson had endorsed and helped pay for
Prospect,
but Callender, whose only consistency was a perverse flair for treachery, turned against him when Jefferson refused to reward his labors with the postmaster’s job in Richmond. According to one Federalist account, probably apocryphal, Callender lingered outside the presidential mansion for several days hoping for a personal interview. When he spotted Jefferson at an upstairs window, he shouted out his threat: “Sir, you know that by lying I made you President, and I’ll be d———d if I do not unmake you by telling the truth.” Jefferson denounced Callender as “a lying renegade from Republicanism,” then had Monroe, still governor of Virginia at the time, release statements denying that Jefferson had ever befriended or salaried Callender or had anything to do with his earlier diatribes against Adams. But Callender had saved his copies of Jefferson’s incriminating letters and immediately distributed them to the Federalist press. “I thank you for the proof-sheets you enclosed me,” Jefferson had written to Callender in reference to
Prospect;
“such papers cannot fail to produce the best effect.”
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The duplicity that was exposed in his dealings with Callender was wholly in character for Jefferson. It was the Freneau deception and the Mazzei mischief all over again, with Jefferson denying to himself and then to the world his complicity in behind-the-scenes political skullduggery, then being genuinely surprised when the truth came out. Now, with the publication of his ill-considered correspondence with Callender, he was caught in a lie, which was bad enough, but the lie also enhanced the credibility of Callender’s other charges about more titillating behind-the-scenes escapades with Sally Hemings.

There was one additional reason that Callender’s charges disturbed Jefferson’s quite remarkable powers of deception and denial. Namely, they were essentially true. While we cannot know with any degree of certainty what the emotional character of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings may have been, we can be reasonably sure that it was long-standing, most probably dating from his last two years in Paris. It was also most probably consensual, at least to the extent that any inherently unequal relationship between master and slave can permit mutual consent. It clearly satisfied basic biological needs that Jefferson was unable or unwilling to deny himself, since the liaison continued for several years after the Callender exposé.

Mostly, however, it was covert, secret in several senses of the term. Not a trace of evidence about the relationship ever found its way into Jefferson’s vast personal correspondence. (So adept at covering his tracks was Jefferson that it required nearly two centuries and the most advanced genetic detective work of modern science to establish the case for his paternity of Sally’s children.) Moreover, within the interior world of Monticello, which Jefferson always described in his most heartfelt fashion as an idyllic haven of domestic serenity, there must have been a veritable labyrinth of sealed-off physical and psychological spaces.

Martha Jefferson Randolph, his eldest daughter, lived with her growing brood of children at Monticello throughout the duration of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. How she could have avoided knowing the truth strains even our most sophisticated understanding of the human capacity for denial. But Martha went to her grave insisting the Callender accusations were untrue, defending her father’s reputation, somehow convincing herself in the process of persuading others. And then there was Jefferson himself, dutifully recording the names of Sally’s children in his
Farm Book
as slaves, treating them as such while they grew up, as if there were no connection between them and him, indeed as if the man who fathered them and the man who owned them were different people.

At the public level the consequences of the Callender accusations did not linger so poignantly, while the scar on Jefferson’s reputation never went away, and the New England Federalists did their best to keep the accusations alive in the public press, even going so far as to put the matter of Jefferson’s character on the official agenda of the Massachusetts legislature, the political damage to his presidency proved less serious than the lingering stigma that attached itself to his image with posterity. The damage control teams in the Republican press helped the cause, Jefferson’s posture of total silence on the matter prevented any prolonged debate from feeding on itself and, most significant, the steady string of Republican successes—the debt was being retired, taxes were being eliminated, the economy was humming along nicely, half a continent was peacefully acquired—simply crowded out the bad news. At the height of the Sally stories, John Quincy Adams suggested that the Federalists were forced to resort to such scandalmongering because their political program had been “completely and irrevocably, abandoned and rejected by the popular voice.” Whatever alarm Jefferson’s supporters felt, he observed, would prove short-lived. “What they take for breakers,” Adams noted, “are mere clouds of unsubstantiated vapour.”
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This became Jefferson’s public position as well. The frantic behavior of the Federalist press was symptomatic of its utter desperation, he insisted, as its cause slid beneath the surface of American politics forever. The Federalists were simply clutching at dirt as they went under.