Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (26 page)

While William Clark lived long and was influential in Indian affairs, Lewis suffered from melancholy and committed suicide. Although some historians later claimed Lewis was murdered, there is scant evidence to support that notion. Suffering from what was then described as “hypochondria,” which is how later Lincoln described his own depression, the modern term would more likely have been manic depression, or bipolar syndrome. There is also some suggestion that Lewis suffered from the effects of syphilis. Contrary to common myth that she survived to her nineties, Sacagawea actually died in her twenty-eighth year. Her son, born on the trip and nicknamed Pomp, was later raised by Clark and traveled in Europe before returning to America, where he became a trapper and guide.

Must Read:
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
by Stephen Ambrose.

Why did Aaron Burr shoot Alexander Hamilton?

Thomas Jefferson did not sit around idly while waiting for his two adventurers to return. The deal with France was the centerpiece of Jefferson’s first administration, and while the few remaining Federalists in Congress tried to undermine it on constitutional grounds, the acquisition and the president were so popular that resistance was futile.

Jefferson had earlier made the historically popular move of cutting taxes, including repeal of the Whiskey Tax that Washington had led an army to enforce. He won more admirers when he balked at the widely accepted practice of paying tribute to pirates based in North Africa—the “Barbary pirates.” A brief naval war followed, which did not end the tribute payments, but did give America some new naval heroes (Stephen Decatur chief among them), inspired the line in “The Marines’ Hymn” about “the shores of Tripoli,” and earned America a new measure of international respect. (It also provided members of the Marine Corps with their distinctive nickname. To ward off sword blows, the marines wore a protective piece of leather around their necks—hence “leathernecks.”)

By election time in 1804, Jefferson’s popularity was so great that the opposition Federalist Party was all but dead.

But a group of Federalists known as the Essex Junto did attempt a bizarre break from the Union. Their conspiracy would have been historically laughable had it not ended in tragedy. Part of their plan was to support Aaron Burr for governor of New York. No friend of Jefferson’s, Burr had been frozen out of power in the Jefferson administration, and then unceremoniously dumped by his party as candidate for vice president (and replaced by George Clinton, the aging governor of New York). The long-standing hatred between Burr and Alexander Hamilton resurfaced as Hamilton used all his influence to defeat Burr in the governor’s race. To Hamilton, Burr was a “dangerous man, and one who ought not to be trusted with the reins of government.” That was the polite attack; others were aimed at Burr’s notorious sexual exploits. An admitted adulterer, Hamilton was no paragon of marital fidelity, either, and Burr pulled no punches in his counterassaults.

Hamilton’s political destruction of Burr was successful, but with awful results. A few months after the election, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel, and they met on the morning of Wednesday, July 11, 1804, on the cliffs above the Hudson in Weehawken, New Jersey. Hamilton’s son had died in a duel, and he opposed the idea of dueling, but personal honor and that of the fading Federalist Party forced his hand. The widely accepted version of events is that Hamilton fired his pistol but deliberately missed, an intention he had supposedly stated before the duel. Others dispute that, and say Hamilton just missed. Burr did not. (As Gore Vidal’s fictional Aaron Burr put it in the novel
Burr
, “at the crucial moment his hand shook and mine never does.”) Hamilton was mortally wounded, and suffered for an excruciating thirty hours before dying. Aaron Burr, who had nearly been president a few years before, was now a fugitive.

But Burr was hardly finished as a factor in American politics, or as a thorn in Thomas Jefferson’s side. Perhaps inspired by Napoleon, an ambitious colonel who had become an emperor, Burr envisioned securing a western empire he intended to rule. With James Wilkinson, one of Washington’s wartime generals who was appointed by Jefferson to govern Louisiana, but who was secretly on the Spanish payroll, Burr organized a small force in 1806 to invade Mexico and create a new nation in the West. For some reason, Wilkinson betrayed Burr, and the conspiracy was foiled. Burr was captured and placed on trial for treason, with Chief Justice John Marshall presiding. Jefferson’s hatred for Burr was unleashed as he did everything in his power to convict his former vice president. But the crafty old Federalist Marshall saw the trial as another way to undermine Jefferson, and his charge to the jury all but acquitted Burr. Following a second treason charge, Burr jumped bail and fled to Europe, where he remained for five years, attempting to persuade Napoleon to organize an Anglo-French invasion of America. He did return to New York in 1812, where he continued a colorful and lusty life until his death in 1836.

Must Read:
Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America
by Thomas Fleming.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

From the
Richmond Recorder
, published by James Thomson Callender (1802):

A Song Supposed to have been written by the SAGE OF MONTICELLO

When pressed by loads of state affairs

I seek to sport and dally

The sweetest solace of my cares

Is in the lap of Sally,

She’s black you tell me—grant she be—

Must colour always tally?

Black is love’s proper hue for me

And white’s the hue for Sally

Callender, the muckraking journalist who had revealed Hamilton’s affair a few years earlier, was disappointed when he failed to get a patronage job from Jefferson in 1800. He turned the tables and began to attack Thomas Jefferson with the charges that Jefferson kept a slave as his lover.

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: Did he or didn’t he?

The DNA evidence is in. Or is it?

While Jefferson won the election of 1804 in a landslide, the campaign was notable for the one juicy bit of mudslinging gossip it had produced. A popular Federalist claim of the day was that Jefferson had carried on an affair with a young slave named Sally Hemings while he was envoy in Paris, and that she had given birth to Jefferson’s illegitimate children. What makes the Hemings story all the more remarkable is that fact that “dusky Sally,” as the newspaper called her, was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson. Sally’s mother had become the mistress of Martha Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, after the death of Martha’s mother, and as a result Sally was Martha’s slave half-sister. Martha Jefferson died in 1782, when Sally was nine, and Jefferson, then thirty-nine years old, was grief-stricken, apparently to the point of suicide. But while Jefferson was in Paris, in 1787, his daughter Maria was brought to France during an epidemic in Virginia. She was accompanied by Sally, now almost sixteen. Some believe that at this time, Sally Hemings became Thomas Jefferson’s mistress and eventually bore him children during a thirty-eight-year relationship. (This relationship is also lovingly but fictionally depicted in the Merchant-Ivory film
Jefferson in Paris
.)

Jefferson remained silent on Callender’s charges, and while the public was certainly aware of them, they had little impact on the election in 1804. What the incident shows is that there is nothing new about “negative campaigns” and mudslinging during presidential races.

The controversy was mostly forgotten over the years, as Jefferson was lionized for his role in the founding of the country, placed on Mt. Rushmore, and celebrated in a Broadway musical called
1776
. But the story gained new life with the publication of two books,
Jefferson: An Intimate History
(1974), Fawn Brodie’s “psychobiography,” and Barbara Chase Riboud’s novel
Sally Hemings
(1979), both of which became best-sellers by claiming the relationship was real. Defenders of Jefferson countered that while Jefferson certainly had a love affair while in Paris, it was with Maria Cosway, the wife of an English painter, and whether it was consummated is a matter of conjecture. Others, including Virginius Dabney, author of
The Jefferson Scandals
(1981), a refutation of the Sally Hemings rumor, point to two of Jefferson’s nephews as Sally’s lovers and the possible fathers of her children.

Then came another book, a scholarly work called
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
,
by Annette Gordon-Reed, followed by DNA tests on descendants of Jefferson and Hemings in 1998. The national news media widely reported that these tests confirmed the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, and that Eston Hemings, who was freed in Jefferson’s will, was Jefferson’s son. In fact, they do not do so conclusively. Out of seven tests, the DNA match found one match identical to twenty-five Jefferson males then living in Virginia. Six of these Jefferson males were between fourteen and twenty-seven and could have been responsible for impregnating Sally Hemings. The controversy spilled into very public view when the descendants of Hemings sought to be admitted into the Monticello Association, an organization of descendants of Jefferson, which would entitle them to be buried in the Jefferson cemetery. The Jefferson group declined to accept the Hemings group because the scientific evidence was deemed inconclusive, but they did offer a separate burial area for descendants of Jefferson’s slaves.

In 2008, Gordon-Reed published a new book,
The Hemingses of Monticello
, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, in which she essentially concluded that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Sally’s children, an opinion that has become more widely accepted. At Jefferson’s home, Monticello, this long-rumored relationship is now acknowledged.

Does it matter whether it was really Jefferson, or one of his younger relatives? What is the real historical import of the question? What takes this story out of the context of a
People
magazine article or a daytime television talk show? Ultimately, the story of Jefferson and his slaves is about the great American contradiction, particularly as it is embodied by Jefferson—the contradiction between “all men are created equal” and the “peculiar institution” on which Jefferson’s life and fortune were built. It is that great contradiction that led Samuel Johnson to rise in Parliament during the Revolution and ask, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”

Harvard professor Orlando Patterson, who has written several histories of slavery, once attempted to resolve this contradiction when he wrote in the
New York Times
, “Jefferson was no saint, but his reflections on African-Americans must be understood in the context of his times and his relationship with an African-American woman. Nearly all Caucasians of his day, including most abolitionists, simply assumed that African-Americans were racially inferior. Jefferson was unusual in the degree to which he agonized over the subject. He was overtly inclined to what we would consider today to be racist views, but he also held out the possibility that he might be wrong. In this regard, he was ahead of his times.”

What was impressment?

Following Washington’s example, Jefferson declined an opportunity to run again. (There was no constitutional limitation on the number of presidential terms of office a single individual might serve until after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unique election to a fourth term in 1944. The Twenty-second Amendment, ratified in 1947, limits a president to two terms or to a single elected term for a president who has served more than two years of his predecessor’s term. When Ronald Reagan left office in 1989, he stated his opposition to this limitation on principle, expressing the belief that the people should be entitled to vote for the candidate of their choice. For more on this amendment, see Appendix 1.) Although Jefferson had been reelected at the peak of his popularity, he left under less happy circumstances, primarily because of his unpopular Embargo Act.

Passed in 1807, the act was the result of America’s international weakness at a time when Napoleon had turned the world into a battleground with England and its allies. Jefferson wanted to keep America—a weak, third-rate nation with no real army and a skeleton navy—neutral in the wars that had left Napoleon in control of Europe and had made the British masters of the seas. America had actually flourished economically during the fighting, as the warring nations eagerly bought American goods and ships. But American neutrality did not protect her merchant ships from being stopped by British vessels, which could take any British subject off the ship and “impress” him into Royal Navy service. On board the ships, legal distinctions such as “naturalized citizenship” were meaningless, and Americans were being seized along with British subjects.

The Embargo Act, which prohibited all exports into America as economic retaliation for the British impressment policy and as a means to keep America out of war, was one of the most unpopular and unsuccessful acts in American history. In his last week in office, Jefferson had it abolished, replaced by the Nonintercourse Act, which prohibited trade only with England and which provoked only more impressment attacks.