Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (25 page)

The accompanying historical analysis by Eric S. Lander and Joseph Ellis ran under the subheading “DNA analysis confirms that Jefferson was indeed the father of at least one of Hemings' children.”
³⁸

Before long a backlash began to take shape. Several weeks later
Nature
published letters complaining that “the authors did not consider all the data at hand in interpreting their results. No mention was made of Thomas Jefferson's brother Randolph (1757–1815), or of his five sons,” and that “any male ancestor in Thomas Jefferson's line, white or black, could have fathered Eston Hemings.” Responding to the criticism, the authors allowed, “The title assigned to our study was misleading in that it represented only the simplest explanation of our molecular findings.”
³⁹

By a bizarre historical coincidence, the Hemings DNA findings emerged at the precise moment when another American president, William Jefferson Clinton, was under fire in a scandal involving the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. In his analytical article in
Nature
, Ellis drew a straight line between the two scandals:

Proposing a moral equivalence between Thomas Jefferson and Bill Clinton enraged conservatives, who began suggesting that the timing of the DNA announcement had been manipulated to help Clinton.
⁴⁰
At the very least, as William Safire charged in an essay titled “Sallygate,” the DNA announcement had handed the Clinton White House a powerful talking point: “That's the White House party line: everybody did it. If Jefferson impregnated a young slave and refused to comment on Callender's story, what's the big deal about Clinton dallying with young women and lying under oath about it? The historian's spin: We are all Federalists; we are all sinners; so forget this impeachment stuff.”
⁴¹
An NBC correspondent commented: “The White House must be smiling. After all, if Bill Clinton's favorite President could end up on Mount Rushmore and the $2 dollar bill despite being sexually active with a subordinate, it might put Mr. Clinton's conduct with a certain intern in a different light.”
⁴²

Soon after the DNA announcement, Monticello's president, Daniel P. Jordan, appointed a staff research committee “to gather and assess critically all relevant evidence about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.” In January 2000 the committee issued its report, which Jordan summarized at a press conference: “Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.”
⁴³

This announcement truly changed the Jeffersonian landscape. Both Daniel Jordan and Monticello's chief historian, Lucia Stanton, had previously gone on record expressing strong doubt that Jefferson had fathered Hemings's children; Jordan had called it “a moral impossibility.”
⁴⁴
But the DNA findings had compelled them to take a fresh look at the historical material and caused them to reverse their position. By and large, the academic community concurred. For example, the eminent historian of slavery Philip Morgan wrote, “In an earlier work, I accepted too readily the conventional wisdom that one of the Carr nephews fathered Sally's children…. The weight of evidence now tilts heavily in [Jefferson's] direction and the burden of proof has dramatically shifted.”
⁴⁵

Herbert Barger, who had assisted in gathering the DNA samples for the tests, indefatigably fired off lengthy, impassioned letters of protest whenever a newspaper or magazine referred to the Hemings-Jefferson link as a fact. He succeeded in persuading
The Washington Post
to admit that its reporting on the story required a clarification. The newspaper's ombudsman wrote: “The Post often has failed to make clear what is fact (DNA testing shows that a Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings but not which Jefferson), what is speculation and what is convenient.”
⁴⁶

Barger's seemingly lonely effort was just the beginning of a counter-surge. A group of Jefferson's admirers established the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society in 2000 to defend the Founder. They formed up under the flag, reflecting the liberal-conservative split in opinion over the interpretation of the DNA, perhaps caused but certainly widened by Joseph Ellis's comparison of Jefferson to Clinton. In the foreword to a book of essays titled
The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty
, the society's president referred to it as “a group of concerned businessmen, historians, genealogists, scientists, and patriots.”
⁴⁷
David N. Mayer, professor of law and history at Capital University and author of a book about Jefferson's constitutional thought, characterized the Monticello report as “a politically correct history. It reaches the conclusion that a lot of people would like it to reach.”
⁴⁸

The campaign against Monticello's conclusion centered on the core point that a number of Jeffersons could have been the father of Eston Hemings. “There were at least seven close relatives who could have been the father, the most likely being Thomas Jefferson's younger brother, Randolph,” wrote Reed Irvine. Even Ann Coulter, not known as a historian, had that exculpatory fact at her fingertips: “There were 25 Jefferson males with the same DNA alive when Hemings conceived her last son. Seven of them were at Monticello during the relevant time period.”
⁴⁹
The Jefferson biographer Alf Mapp Jr. was willing to go even further in exonerating Jefferson: “As of this date [2008], though another member of the Jefferson family may have fathered children by Sally Hemings, there is no available evidence that Thomas Jefferson did.”
⁵⁰

Professors Mapp and Mayer became two of the thirteen academics who formed the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter in 2000 “to reexamine the issue carefully and issue a public report.” This group included well-known historians and political scientists such as Lance Banning, Harvey C. Mansfield, Forrest McDonald, and Jean Yarbrough. Three Ivy League colleges were represented along with the University of North Carolina, Stanford, Bowdoin, and other top-tier universities. The commission was led by Robert F. Turner, associate director at the Center for National Security Law, University of Virginia School of Law.
⁵¹
They came to a conclusion quite different from that of the Monticello committee. As Turner described it: “The scholars' conclusions ranged from ‘strong skepticism' about the allegation to a conviction that the charge was ‘almost certainly false.'” One member, Forrest McDonald, Distinguished University Research Professor at the University of Alabama, said, “I have studied the subject as thoroughly as I could…. Thomas Jefferson was simply not guilty of the charge.”
⁵²

In a July 4, 2001, opinion piece in
The Wall Street Journal
, Turner lamented the free fall in Jefferson's standing in a Gallup opinion poll, a decline he blamed on the Hemings affair and on “a cultural struggle taking place in contemporary academia.”
⁵³
He quoted Ellis's oft-repeated observations that, among academics, Jefferson is “the dead-white-male who matters most” and the “most valued trophy in the cultural wars.” He insisted that Jefferson was “probably getting a bum rap” and pointed the finger at Jefferson's “less cerebral” brother Randolph, who “would seem to be a far more likely candidate for Eston's paternity than the aging president…. Randolph is documented by a 19th-century slave account to have spent his evenings at Monticello playing his fiddle among the slaves and ‘dancing half the night.'”

Turner also cited “the eyewitness testimony of Jefferson's highly respected overseer, Edmund Bacon,” which he said “may be the single most important piece of evidence in the case.” In Bacon's account, “[Jefferson] freed one girl [Harriet] some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter; she was——'s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother's room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early.”
⁵⁴
That ellipsis—“she was——'s daughter”—has tantalized and taunted generations of Jefferson scholars. Because the original notes from Bacon's interview have never come to light, no one knows whom Bacon was talking about.

But it is easy to show that Bacon's account is false: it is contradicted by the calendar. Harriet Hemings was born in 1801 at Monticello, but Bacon did not begin work at Monticello until September 1806, so he could not have witnessed Harriet's father, whoever he was, leaving Sally Hemings's room. (Bacon stated that he began to live at Monticello in December 1800, but Jefferson kept careful records of hirings and payments to employees and contractors, and there is no mention of Bacon until 1806; it is almost inconceivable that Bacon was present before then unless he did nothing, drew no pay, and for five and a half years kept such a low profile that he entirely eluded Jefferson's notice.) Throughout his memoir Bacon exaggerated his closeness to Jefferson, and I can only conclude that the loyal overseer was willing to fabricate a phantom lover in order to protect the reputation of his old boss.
^*

Turner also focused on one more piece of evidence that hadn't been adequately explained. The Monticello blacksmith Isaac Granger had remarked in his memoir that “Old Master's brother, Mass Randall, was a mighty simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night; hadn't much more sense than Isaac.”
⁵⁵
Randolph Jefferson lived on a plantation in Buckingham County, some twenty miles from Monticello, but Isaac's remark implies that Randolph was a frequent visitor to Monticello's slave quarter. This intriguing piece of evidence—supporting the core of the defenders' arguments—could not be easily brushed off. Nothing in the Monticello records suggests Randolph's frequent presence on the mountain, but Isaac Granger was there, an eyewitness. And “used to come” implies something that happened frequently or habitually. It holds open the door for Randolph being the father of Sally Hemings's children.

One advantage of living in Charlottesville is that the town is awash in Jeffersonian items, such as the slender brown volume I happened to spot in the window of an antiquarian bookstore. It was the rare, 1951 edition of Isaac Granger's
Memoirs of a Monticello Slave
. In 1967, Monticello's director, James Bear, published a scholarly version of Granger's memoir with footnotes and an index under the title
Jefferson at Monticello
; everyone naturally uses this modern edition. I had noticed that Granger's text contained many confusing leaps of subject matter, non sequiturs that could not be easily explained. But when I looked at the 1951 edition, many of the non sequiturs suddenly made sense: they came at chapter breaks in the original manuscript that Bear ignored when having the text retypeset for his edition, in which chapters dealing with different subjects were run together without any page or line breaks in a continuous text.
⁵⁶

A vitally important piece of information had been obscured by the architecture of this book. When I looked at the paragraph describing Randolph's visits to a slave quarter in the 1951 edition, I could clearly see that it was in a section where Granger describes family activities and events that took place
away from Monticello
. The blacksmith was talking about Randolph's frolics not along Monticello's Mulberry Row but in the slave quarter at Randolph's
own
plantation in the next county. He knew about Randolph's activities because Monticello slaves, including members of Granger's own family, often visited his plantation. Everyone relies on the newer edition with all its useful scholarly apparatus, but when I examined the original book, the strongest evidence for “Uncle Randolph's” paternity vanished.
⁵⁷

Sally Hemings retains her hold on the American imagination not just as an irritant to Jefferson's admirers but as a profoundly subversive figure. Like an American Cassandra, cursed never to be believed, she has kept alive the fear that there may be parts of our past we do not know, or do not want to know, but that never go away—a whole secret history. Her story suggests the unsettling, painful truth that the gulf between masters and slaves was an illusion, that it had been fabricated, then laboriously sustained even as the idea of race became blurred, obsolete, and then unsustainable, as it did at Monticello, that in slavery time the country developed a system to generate power and wealth that was not just oppressive but insane.

“I am of a mixed breed…[a] Mongrel,” said an illustrious American in a speech in 1881. It was not Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington but Samuel Clemens who made that claim. He was addressing the annual banquet of the Pilgrim Society, an organization founded on principles of genealogical purity and dedicated to preserving the idea that America was a white man's nation. Invited to address their gathering, Clemens skewered them, their forebears, and their triumphalism: “Those Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else's ancestors.”

Gathering into one lineage all the outcasts of American history, Clemens stood before the Pilgrim sons presenting himself as the archetype of the true American, an amalgam of the wretched genealogical refuse of Indians, Quakers, witches, and Africans: “The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel…. [M]y complexion is the patient art of eight generations.”
¹
Clemens spoke figuratively—he was not literally the descendant of Quakers, witches, and slaves—but his metaphorical language was all the more powerful: he was speaking a truth about the country, an old truth long suppressed by a founding myth that had “abolished everybody else's ancestors.” But the abolition was incomplete, there were survivors, and they carried their parallel genealogies.

Clemens offered not a soothing dream of multiculturalism but a vision of violent genealogical conquest by which all identities but Anglo-Saxon had been eradicated. He was speaking not just about race but about power, and power's yearning to cleanse itself. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is violating all His laws.”
²

Jefferson constantly moved the boundaries on his moral map to make the horrific tolerable to him. In the deleted passages of the Declaration of Independence, he vehemently denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce” in which “men are bought and sold.” But not long after, finding it financially expedient, he sold slaves repeatedly, on a large scale. The execrable commerce somehow became less execrable. In the 1760s, Jefferson had argued a court case declaring it “wicked” that a white man be held in servitude just because deep in his lineage he had some black blood. The very idea of a white man held in bondage just like a black man struck him as a horrible, nightmarish entrapment, a foul species of evil. But by the 1790s, exactly that was going on at Monticello. Jefferson and his family could not conceive of themselves doing anything that was evil. So they redefined evil. A few favorite black people would be exceptionally well treated; a very few, those with kinship ties, would be smuggled out one way or another. But in the meantime the family on the summit was haunted by the sight of white relatives in slavery to them.

In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas Jefferson. We know this not from what Jefferson's detractors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman as well “had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.” Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr. Jefferson's blood was Jeff's blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to these people of a parallel world.

Jeff said the resemblance of one Hemings to Thomas Jefferson was “so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” This is so specific, so vivid—“at some distance or in the dusk”—that Jeff had to be relating a likeness he had seen many times and could not shake the memory of.

We can imagine one of these encounters, a scene at twilight with Jeff, age eighteen, walking out onto the terrace after dinner. The view to the west is glorious as the sun falls below the Blue Ridge Mountains, sixty miles in the hazy distance. Muffled sounds of conversation and music emanate from the house and mingle with the rising night sounds of the forest. The small town of Charlottesville lies in darkness in the valley below. From the terrace—the ambiguous boundary line between the Jefferson world above and the slave world below—Jeff gazes down onto a path and sees the tall figure of his grandfather striding purposefully, head and shoulders erect, the famous profile clearly distinguishable even in the fading light. There's something odd about the clothes, but no matter. We then hear a sound from behind Jeff, and he turns, startled, to see Mr. Jefferson approaching him from the house. Jeff looks down to see his grandfather still on the path, receding into the distance. He turns and the real grandfather is on the terrace with him. Mr. Jefferson claps his hand on Jeff's shoulder and comments on the soft beauty of a Virginia night in early spring. Jeff peers into the darkness, and the man below has vanished.

We can see Jefferson's double appearing at the periphery of a family event, standing at a respectful distance; or suddenly striding into view, not quite in focus; or seen from the terrace playing the fiddle with his head thrown back, just like Mr. Jefferson. We can see the Randolphs seeing the double, and we observe that they make no comment, appear to take no notice, unless perhaps a Randolph is alone and can give a long curious look without being noticed. This double was someone they could not avoid seeing but were not supposed to notice. In fact, Jeff Randolph saw the double many times. He haunted Monticello.

Jeff described an incident of the two realms colliding. The moment of collision would make a powerful little film because the camera is adept at capturing suspense and astonishment. The incident occurred at dinner in the elegant dining room. Jefferson was there, along with Jeff Randolph and his mother, Martha Randolph, and her other children, and a guest. We see and hear the people at the table as Mr. Jefferson discourses brilliantly. The camera rises slightly, and we see, moving silently behind the diners, the double, bearing a fresh platter of food and heading for Mr. Jefferson. We see the double's face and that of the honored guest as he listens intently to Mr. Jefferson's remarks. An inner voice tells the guest,
Don't look, don't raise your eyes, you do not want to know
. But of course he looks up, and our hearts freeze. The camera focuses on Jeff for the reaction shot, since he in fact wrote about this very moment: “in one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.”

The guest must have been a Northerner or a foreigner. Local friends, drilled in the social protocol of the “peculiar institution,” noticed the slaves who resembled Mr. Jefferson but never breached protocol by mentioning them. A University of Virginia professor who often visited Monticello with a colleague said that they “saw what others saw” but never heard the topic discussed. “An awe and veneration was felt for Mr. Jefferson among his neighbors which…rendered it shameful to even talk about his name in such a connexion.” Still, what the professor saw vexed him, and he pondered the connection “in his own secret mind,” the locked and silent chamber.
³

In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph took the biographer Henry Randall around Monticello, filling the writer's astonished ear with stories of the parallel family who lived on the mountain. Jeff said that his grandfather made no attempt to conceal the resemblance between himself and his slaves. He told Randall that Sally Hemings “was a house servant and her children were brought up house servants—so that the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who visited this political Mecca.”

The biographer was amazed at these revelations. Not being a Southerner, he was unaccustomed to the notion of slaves resembling the master's family. He could not comprehend that Jefferson tolerated this daily display of miscegenation. “Why on earth,” he asked, didn't Jefferson “put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight”? Jeff replied that his grandfather “never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance.” He went on to say that he had no doubt that his mother “would have been very glad to have them removed” but that everyone so “venerated” Jefferson that none dared to “broach such a topic to him.” Jefferson's power was such that he imposed his own reality on this little familial empire. “What suited him, satisfied [us],” Randolph said.
⁴

Jefferson exerted an extraordinary level of psychological control over his family to keep his version of reality in place and the parallel realm unexamined. His great-granddaughter Sarah Randolph said that Jefferson never talked about anything he didn't want to talk about. An unsympathetic acquaintance wrote not of reticence or taciturnity but of “that frigid indifference which forms the pride of his character.”
⁵
Frigid indifference forms a useful shield for a public character against his political enemies, but Jefferson deployed it against his own daughter Martha, who was deeply upset by the sexual allegations against her father and wanted a straight answer—
Yes or no?
—an answer he would not deign to give.

Sharper than a serpent's tooth is a thankless father's indifference, but Jefferson knew he could expect his daughter's devotion and felt no need to make explanations. As a grown woman, Martha remained the daughter, and she never became a confidante, even when scandal engulfed the family. She unburdened herself to her children. “My mother, as she has often told me, was very indignant, even exasperated,” the granddaughter Ellen wrote. One day Martha and Jefferson's private secretary confronted Jefferson with a widely published, highly insulting poem about him and Hemings. In silence, Jefferson “smiled at their annoyance.”
⁶

Jefferson could smile, but his daughter could not. She “took the Dusky Sally stories much to heart,” Jeff Randolph said. Jefferson's silence about his mixed-race children split them off from reality. Though it was a species of schizophrenia to which Southern families had become accustomed, denial yielded not comfort but only anxiety, and from anxiety there erupted rage at the “yellow children,” who were blamed for it all.

Another moment arrived when the parallel world broke through the barrier. In 1822, Jefferson freed Sally Hemings's two oldest children, Beverly and Harriet, then aged twenty-four and twenty-one. He did this furtively, through an intermediary (the ever-loyal Edmund Bacon), and without the required legal authorization, which would have attracted attention; but even so, he could not escape notice and suspicion. Bacon recalled the departure of Harriet: “He freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it…. by Mr. Jefferson's direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia, and gave her fifty dollars.”
⁷
Harriet's brother Beverly left the same year. Even though “there was a great deal of talk about it” in Charlottesville, at Monticello all was silence, or evasion. In the Farm Book, Jefferson wrote the words “run away [18]22” and “run. 22” next to their names.
⁸
The $50, plus stage fare, that he gave Bacon for Harriet was a large sum, yet Jefferson made no note of it in his accounts.

The family detected Jefferson's hidden hand at work, and they also knew that his entries about Harriet and Beverly in the Farm Book were just a cover story. Ellen said that it was her grandfather's decision to allow the two Hemingses “to withdraw quietly from the plantation” and that “it was called running away.” Jefferson freed them because they were “sufficiently white to pass for white.”
^*
It was his “principle” to do this, she said. The alternative—to acknowledge that these people were her grandfather's children—was unthinkable: “The thing will not bear telling. There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.”

Jefferson went to his grave without giving his family any denial of the Hemings charges, so they had no weapon to fire and no shield for defense when stories about his mixed-race offspring continued to circulate, stories that always tormented his daughter Martha. On her deathbed in 1836, Martha called her sons Jeff and George Wythe Randolph to her side. She enjoined them “always to defend the character of their grandfather.” She told Jeff to look in the Farm Book, where the birth dates of the slaves were kept, and directed him to find the birth of the slave “who most resembled Mr. Jefferson.” Jeff found the entry—and maddeningly for history did not disclose the identity of this man. Martha asserted that Hemings and Jefferson had been apart from each other for fifteen months before the birth of that child, and “she bade her sons remember this fact.”
⁹

Martha had found comfort in fraud, because the Farm Book and other records show that Jefferson was present at Monticello every time Sally Hemings conceived, and there is no indication that Hemings was ever away from Monticello at those times. Challenging the Jeffersonian paternity of just one Hemings child in any case would not get her father off the hook, but apparently Martha's intent was to give her children
some
deniability.
¹⁰

In the 1960s a University of Virginia scholar scrutinized the entries in the Farm Book, counting to nine on his fingers as he tried and failed to duplicate Martha's result. He wrote to another specialist, offering advice on how to draft a delicate footnote conceding as obliquely and obscurely as possible that Jefferson's daughter had not told the truth to her sons: “The only embarrassing thing to phrase will be a footnote pointing out that Martha was wrong in saying that Jefferson was not at Monticello 9 months before the birth of each of Sally's children. Perhaps you could say it this way: ‘In attempting to refute a libel, Martha made a misstatement.'”
¹¹