The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (107 page)

12.
TJ,
Notes on the State of Virginia
, 267.

13.
Ibid., 269; William Peden, "A Bookseller Invades Monticello,"
WMQ
, 3d ser., 6 (1949): 633.

14.
Papers
, 9:295;
MB
, 554 n. 60. David Humphreys had gone back to America in 1786, and Charles Williamos had died in 1785.

15.
MB
, 635 n. 6; 689, Jan. 1788 notation for "Trumbull’s servants"; 741, entry for Aug. 31.

16.
Yvon Bizardel and Howard C. Rice Jr., "Poor in Love Mr. Short,"
WMQ
, 3d ser., 21 (1963): 523, 527–28.

17.
Ibid., 519.

18.
TJ to John Trumbull, June 1, 1789,
Papers
, 15:164.

19.
TJ to William Short, March 29,
Papers
, 11:253; Bizardel and Rice, "Poor in Love Mr. Short," 523. Although the older man told his young friend to follow his "inclinations" about the time he spent in the countryside, TJ’s tone suggested resignation rather than active support of Short’s preferences. Their mutual friend the aristocratic Madame de Tessé was aware of Short’s situation, but "
grande dame
that she was, politely refrained from mentioning a girl in her bantering allusions" in her letters to Jefferson about Short’s spending so much time there instead of being in Paris. She teased TJ by saying that Short much preferred Saint-Germain to the city. TJ and Madame de Tessé were very close, and what could not be said in letters was very likely commented upon during his many visits to her home.

20.
See, e.g., TJ to Maria Cosway, Jan. 9, 1789,
Papers
, 16:144–46. He notes that he had not heard from her for a while, but this could be because he had not written to her. He blamed illnesses in his family for failing to communicate for over two months. That was certainly true, but he had written to other people—to Madison and John Adams multiple times. He wrote to Angelica Church as much as he wrote to Cosway during that period—exactly once. TJ’s tone is always gallant and flirtatious, but their correspondence at this point, from his side, does not sound like one deeply in love with another. See
MB
, 680 n. 3, suggesting that Cosway’s second stay in France during TJ’s residence there did not amount to a real renewal of their affair.

21.
For a discussion of historians’ use of Maria Cosway as antidote to SH, see Gordon-Reed
TJ and SH
, 184–90. For the best treatment of the subject, see also R. R. Burg, "The Rhetoric of Miscegenation: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Their Historians,"
Phylon
27 (1986): 128–38. I did not find this article until I began research for this book and, unfortunately, did not know to discuss it in my first book about the scholarly treatment of SH and TJ. Burg’s dead-on and scathing analysis of the way TJ biographers viewed and wrote stories about Jefferson and the various women in his life (Betsy Walker, Maria Cosway, and Sally Hemings) is essential reading for anyone interested in the way racial attitudes, conscious or unconscious, often affect the writing of American history.

22.
TJ to Anne Willing Bingham, May 11, 1788,
Papers
, 12:152.

23.
TJ to Dugald Stewart, June 21, 1789,
Papers
, 15:204.

24.
TJ to Elizabeth Eppes, July 28, 1786,
Papers
, 11:634; TJ to Maria Jefferson, April, 11, 1790, ibid., 16:331.

25.
Rhys Isaac, "Monticello Stories," in
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History Memory, and Civic Culture
, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, 1999), 120.

26.
TJ to Maria Cosway, April 24, 1788,
Papers
, 13:103; Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson
, 230–31. See also Isaac, "Monticello Stories," 122; E. M. Halliday,
Understanding Thomas Jefferson
(New York, 2001), 100–104.

27.
Kaminski, ed.,
Jefferson in Love
, 23.

28.
Martha Jefferson to Eliza House Trist, [after Aug. 14, 1785],
Papers
, 8:437

29.
Melvin Patrick Ely,
Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War
(New York, 2004), 290–95.

30.
Nell Painter,
Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
(New York, 1997).

31.
Peter Bargaglio, "An Outrage upon Nature: Incest and Law in the Nineteenth Century South," in
In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900
(New York, 1991).

32.
TJ,
Notes
, in
Writings
, 238.

1.
Jefferson Family Bible, LVa.

2.
Brenda E. Stevenson,
Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South
(New York, 1996). See also Peter Kolchin, "Reevaluating the Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective,"
Journal of American History
70 (Dec. 1983): 579–601, tracing the evolution of attitudes about the nature of life in antebellum slave communities.

3.
Lucia Stanton,
Slavery at Monticello
(Charlottesville, 1996), 16. "Between 1784–1794 [TJ] disposed of 161 people by sale or by gift." Lucia Stanton, "‘Those Who Labor for My Happiness’: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves," in
Jeffersonian Legacies
, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1999), 148, 162. The post-Revolutionary/early Republic periods, in which the Hemingses lived at Monticello, witnessed the transformation of the southern slave society. Ira Berlin,
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 264–65, describing the "massive exodus" of the slave population from the upper South as the interstate slave trade transferred thousands of slaves to the lower South, separating and traumatizing thousands of enslaved individuals and families; Steven Deyle,
Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life
(New York, 2005), 41, noting, "The domestic slave trade was also a part of a larger economic transformation commonly referred to as the market revolution taking place in America in the first half of the nineteenth-century." See, generally,
Farm Book
for listing of slaves.

4.
Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 568.

5.
Fawn Brodie, "Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren: A Study in Historical Silences,"
American Heritage
27 (Oct. 1976): 23–33, 94–99.

6.
Philip D. Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry
(Chapel Hill, 1998), 540–48; Stevenson,
Life in Black and White
, 251–52.

7.
Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791
(New York 1927), 265–66, entry for May 24, 1790; Jack Shepherd,
Cannibals of the Heart: A Personal Biography of Louisa Catherine and John Quincy Adams
(New York, 1980), 113–15;
The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (Margaret Bayard)
(New York, 1906), 6.

8.
Kierner,
Scandal at Bizarre
, 75; Paul C. Nagel,
The Lees of Virginia
(New York, 2006).

9.
Henry Lee to Richard T. Brown, Paris, Aug. 24, 1833, unpublished letter at Stratford Hall, Home of Robert E. Lee. Interestingly enough, the bulk of Lee’s letter is spent retelling the Walker story. Not surprisingly, it is clear that TJ’s attempted seduction of the married Betsy Walker, a white woman, was for Lee a greater offense than having children with an enslaved African American woman. The scandal engulfed Lee personally and professionally, for he and his wife’s sister had not only engaged in adultery but also broken the laws against affinity-based incest. After being denied a government appointment because of his affair, in the same letter in which he sought to explain what had happened between him and his sister-in-law, Henry bitterly compared himself with TJ. Why was it, he asked incredulously, that "the well known example of Mr. Jefferson, the sage, the patriot, the light of philosophy, the friend of freedom, the apostle of liberty, the redeemer of the Republick," should not have been enough to erase him from the hearts, minds, and esteem of the public? "Around the shady sides of Monticello," he raged, "his [TJ’s] offspring wander with skins as tawny as their soil & eyes bright with hereditary lust." Not only was the Sage of Monticello bad, Henry posited; his children were bad, too.

10.
Kierner,
Scandal at Bizarre
, 75.

11.
MB
, 729, 734.

12.
Jefferson’s acquisitive nature is well known. Susan Stein has cataloged the astounding array of possessions he accumulated while in France. See
The World of Thomas Jefferson at Monticello
(New York, 1993).

13.
Peter S. Onuf,
Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
(Charlottesville, 2000), 149–51.

14.
Dubois,
A Colony of Citizens
, 177–83; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 570. Isaac Jefferson’s anecdote about Cary gives an insight into TJ’s personality and tendency to want to maintain peace at all cost. The idea of a houseguest stalking into a kitchen to see what is on the menu and then if they "didn’t have what he wanted—obliged [everyone else] to wait dinner till it was cooked" and beating a young slave boy who transgressed in some fashion, or other slaves who displeased him, rather than taking the matter up with TJ, astounded Isaac Jefferson, as was made clear by his statement that "Col. Cary made freer at Monticello than he did at home." Tolerating Cary’s sociopathic behavior seems more than mere hospitality on TJ’s part. In fact, it was almost a perversion of the notion of hospitality, since the term implies at least a degree of mutual respect between the guest and the host. Throughout the ages, bullies have known what they are doing (and whom they safely can do it to), and one wonders what Cary actually thought of TJ after he allowed him to carry on in this fashion in his home before all the members of his household.

15.
Memoirs of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 4, Special Collections, ViU; Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 155.

16.
Niccolò Machiavelli,
The Prince
, trans. and ed. William J. Connell (Boston, 2005), 91.

17.
TJ to Anne Cary, Thomas Jefferson, and Ellen Wayles Randolph, Mar. 2, 1802, in
Writings
, 1102.

18.
Lucia Stanton, "‘A Well-Ordered Household’: Domestic Servants in Jefferson’s White House,"
White House History
, no. 17 (2006): 5–6.

19.
Martha Jefferson Randolph and Thomas Mann Randolph to TJ, Jan. 31, 1801,
Papers
, 32:528.

20.
See Stanton,
Free Some Day
, 122, quoting Ellen Coolidge on Jefferson’s idea of his relationship with Burwell Colbert.

1.
Jefferson Family Bible Record, LVa.

2.
Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 534–35.

3.
TJ to James Madison, May 7, 1784,
Papers
, 6:267;
Republic of Letters
, 1:228–29, 242, 264; Irving Brant,
James Madison
, 6 vols. (Indianapolis, 1941–61), 2:283; Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 115;
The Papers of James Madison
, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E. Rachal, 17 vols. (Chicago and Charlottesville, 1962–91), 6:182 n. 28.