American Sphinx (5 page)

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

W
ELL, 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 since 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.

1

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)

I
T 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.
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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

T
HE ELEMENTAL
facts of his earlier life, at least the most basic pieces of biographical information, are less fuzzy than a picture of his physical appearance. Jefferson was born in Shadwell, in Albemarle County, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1743. Family legend has it that his earliest memory, when he was only about three years old, “was of being carried on a pillow by a mounted slave on the journey from Shadwell to Tuckahoe,” perhaps a kind of early premonition of his Philadelphia entry. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a moderately successful planter with a local reputation for physical strength and a flair for adventure as an explorer and surveyor of western lands. When he died in 1757, he left behind two hundred hogs, seventy head of cattle, twenty-five horses, sixty slaves, six daughters, two sons and his widow, Jane Randolph 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

In 1768 he made two important decisions: first, to build his own home atop an 867-foot-high mountain on land that he had inherited from his father; second, to offer himself as a candidate for the House of Burgesses. The first decision reflected what was to become his lifelong urge to withdraw into his own very private world. The name he first picked for his prospective home was The Hermitage, a retreat that soon became Monticello, his mansion on a mountain and lifetime architectural project. The second decision reflected his political ambition and growing reputation within the transmontane region of the Old Dominion, as well as his emerging stature within the planter elite of the Tidewater. He took his seat in the House of Burgesses in May 1769, then quickly became a protégé of two established Tidewater grandees: Peyton Randolph, an uncle on his mother’s side as well as the most powerful figure in the legislature, and Edmund Pendleton, the shrewd and famously agile apologist for the planter aristocracy.
⁷

On New Year’s Day of 1772 he completed his self-image as an aspiring “paterfamilias” by marrying Martha Wales Skelton, an attractive and delicate young widow whose dowry more than doubled his holdings in land and slaves. Marriage seemed to steady him. Up until the early 1770s the various account and commonplace books that he kept for recording his dealings and readings seemed to have been written by a series of different people. The handwriting varies wildly with wholly different slants, penmanship styles and spacing. Around the time of his marriage this unconscious experimentation stopped; his writing settled into the clear, unpretentious form that it retained until old age and that is now enshrined in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence.
⁸

His political identity, on the other hand, remained shadowy and marginal. The first vivid image of Jefferson in the House of Burgesses proved emblematic. As a young law student in Williamsburg he stood in the hallway of the House, listening to Patrick Henry toss off his extempore oratorical thunderbolts against the Stamp Act in 1765. Jefferson was a listener and observer, distinctly uncomfortable in the spotlight, shy and nervous in a distracted manner that was sometimes mistaken for arrogance.
⁹

From his earliest days in the House he opposed all forms of parliamentary taxation and supported nonimportation resolutions against British trade regulations. But so did most other members of the House, along with the entire Tidewater leadership. (In 1771 his political radicalism collided with his domestic agenda when he ordered an expensive piano from London, “of fine mahogany, solid, not veneered,” in anticipation of his marriage to Martha. Even though this violated the nonimportation resolution, he ordered it sent anyway, saying he would store it until the embargo was lifted. The same thing happened three years later on an order of “sashed windows” for Monticello.) He seemed to most of his political contemporaries a hovering and ever-silent presence, like one of those foreigners at a dinner party who nod politely as they move from group to group but never reveal whether or not they can speak the language. He had a deep-seated aversion to the inherent contentions and routinized hurly-burly of a political career and was forever telling his friends that life on the public stage was not for him. Just as his political career was getting started, he seemed poised for retirement.
¹⁰

Given his subsequent role in the Continental Congress and then in shaping the course of the American Revolution, his selection to serve on the Virginia delegation in Philadelphia was a fortunate accident. Jefferson was not elected to the original delegation in 1774; he was not considered a sufficiently prominent figure to be included with the likes of George Washington, Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton and Peyton Randolph. In 1775, however, he was chosen as a potential substitute for Randolph—Jefferson was regarded as Randolph’s political godson—in anticipation of Randolph’s decision to abandon his post at Philadelphia in order to assume leadership of what was regarded as the more important business back in Virginia. It would be fair to say that Jefferson made the list of acknowledged political leaders in the Old Dominion, but just barely, and largely because of his ties by blood and patronage with the Randolph circle. If his arrival in Philadelphia in June 1775 marked his entry into national affairs, he entered by the side door.
¹¹

WHIG PRINCIPLES

T
HERE WAS ONE
significant exception to this dominant pattern of reticence and marginality, but it happened to be the one item that delegates from the other colonies knew about the young Jefferson. “I have not been in Company with him yet,” reported Samuel Ward the day after Jefferson arrived, but “he looks like a very sensible spirited, fine Fellow and by the Pamphlet which he wrote last Summer he certainly is one.” Likewise John Adams recalled that Jefferson entered the Continental Congress carrying “the reputation of a masterly pen . . . , in consequence of a very handsome public paper which he had written for the House of Burgesses, which had given him the character of a fine writer.”
¹²

The reference was to a pamphlet that Jefferson had somewhat inadvertently published the previous year. In July 1774 he had taken it upon himself to draft a set of instructions for the first Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress. In a typical act of avoidance he had come up sick for the debate in the Virginia Convention, but friends had arranged for the publication of his draft by a press in Williamsburg. From there printers and newspaper editors throughout the colonies had picked up the pamphlet under the title of
A Summary View of the Rights of British America.
The audience at whom Jefferson had actually aimed his instructions, the Virginia legislators, chose not to follow them, preferring to recommend that its delegates adopt a moderate posture toward Great Britain. What Jefferson had recommended, and what became the basis of his political reputation outside Virginia, was decidedly more radical. Indeed, if the arguments of
Summary View
were to be believed, they put him in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in America.
¹³