Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (55 page)

THE
STRANGER
ASSU
MED
“
A
FREE
AND
EASY
”
Ibid., 6–7.

SHE
DID
NOT
KNOW
Ibid., 7.

A
T
THIS
POINT
THE
DOOR
TO
THE
PARL
OR
OPENED
Ibid.

“A
ND
IS
TH
IS
THE
VIOLENT
DEMOC
RAT
”
Ibid., 5–6.

T
AKING
HIS
LEAV
E
Ibid., 8.

A
GRIEF
THAT
LED
HIM
TO
THOUGHTS
OF
S
UICIDE
Randall,
Jefferson,
I, 382. See also Parton,
Life,
265–66, and
JHT,
I, 396–97.

PROMIS
ED
HIS
DYING
WIFE
Parton,
Life,
265.

A
DECADES
-
LONG
LIAISON
WITH
S
ALLY
H
EMING
S
Annette Gordon-Reed has done by far the finest work on this subject; my debt to her is incalculable. See
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
(Charlottesville, Va., 1997) and the monumental work
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
(New York, 2008). See also the findings in the
Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,
TJF, January 2000, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings (accessed 2012); Lewis and Onuf,
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson
; and Catherine Kerrison, “Sally Hemings,” in Cogliano, ed.,
A Companion to Thomas Jefferson,
284–300. For a contrary view, see William G. Hyland, Jr.,
In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal
(New York, 2009), and Daniel Barton,
The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson
(Nashville, Tenn., 2012), 1–30.

The 1998 DNA finding that a male in the Jefferson line had fathered at least one of Sally Hemings's children led to a scholarly reevaluation of the entire question of the Jefferson-Hemings connection. The then-president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Daniel P. Jordan, charged a committee with the task of examining the issue. “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,” Jordan wrote when the committee's report was published in 2000. “We recognize that honorable people can disagree on this subject, as indeed they have for over two hundred years. Further, we know that the historical record has gaps that perhaps can never be filled and mysteries that can never by fully resolved.”

I agree with Jordan and with the committee. (One member dissented and wrote a minority report, which is available at TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings.) In my view, there is convincing biographical evidence that Jefferson was a man of appetite who appreciated order, and that the ability to carry on a long-term liaison with his late wife's enslaved half sister under circumstances he could largely control would have suited him.

Dissenters have pointed to Jefferson's younger brother Randolph Jefferson as a candidate for paternity, a possibility that would fit with the DNA finding. Isaac Jefferson, the Monticello slave who left his recollections, reported that Randolph Jefferson “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” As the committee pointed out, however, Isaac Jefferson left Monticello in 1797, which means “his reference probably predates that year, and most likely refers to the 1780s, the period that is the subject of the majority of his recollections.”

To those who continue to argue that there was no relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, I am taking the liberty of quoting at length the “Assessment of Possible Paternity of Other Jeffersons” from the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:

One reaction to the DNA study of Jefferson and Hemings descendants has been the accurate observation that the test results only prove that
a
Jefferson fathered the last of Sally Hemings's children—not that Thomas Jefferson himself was the father. In order to investigate this possibility, Monticello researchers reviewed Thomas Jefferson's papers as well as Jefferson family genealogies to determine the identities and whereabouts of other male members of his family.

Sally Hemings's confirmed times of conception extend from early December of 1794 through mid-September of 1807. During these eighteen years at least twenty-five adult male descendants of Jefferson's grandfather Thomas Jefferson (1677–1731) lived in Virginia: his younger brother Randolph and five of his sons, as well as one son and eighteen grandsons of his uncle Field Jefferson. Of this total, most were living in the Southside region—over a hundred miles from Monticello—and do not figure in Jefferson's correspondence or his memoranda.

There remained eight out of the twenty-five for whom age and proximity warranted further documentary investigation. These include Randolph Jefferson and his five sons (Isham, Thomas, Jr., Field, Robert, and Lilburne) as well as two grandsons of Field Jefferson (George and John Garland Jefferson). While each of these individuals had some interaction with Thomas Jefferson and spent some time at or in the vicinity of Monticello, most had no documented presence at Monticello during the times when Sally Hemings conceived her children. Several of them were at Monticello when Thomas Jefferson was absent (Sally Hemings is not known to have conceived in his absences). Randolph Jefferson's sons Thomas, in 1800, and Robert Lewis, in 1807, may well have been at Monticello during the conception periods of Harriet and Eston Hemings. Randolph Jefferson was invited to Monticello during the period of Eston Hemings's conception, but it is not known that he actually made the visit.

The committee concludes that convincing evidence does not exist for the hypothesis that another male Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children. In almost two hundred years since the issue first became public, no other Jefferson has ever been referred to as the father; denials of Thomas Jefferson's paternity named the Carr nephews. Furthermore, evidence of the sort of sustained presence necessary to have resulted in the creation of a family of six children is entirely lacking, and even those who denied a relationship never suggested Sally Hemings's children had more than one father. Finally, the historical evidence for Thomas Jefferson's paternity of Eston Hemings and his known siblings overwhelmingly outweighs that for any other Jefferson.

Readers who do wish to examine the issue in detail will find TJF, http://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings (accessed 2011–12) to be invaluable.

ONE
THAT
OPENED
IN
1764
PTJRS,
IV, 599. Jefferson believed March 1764 marked the “dawn of the revolution.”

LIVED
AND
GOVERNED
I
N
A
F
IFTY
Y
EARS
' W
AR
To Jefferson, the conflict ran from 1764 (ibid.) to the end of the War of 1812 in 1815. Louise Burnham Dunbar,
A Study of ‘Monarchical' Tendencies in the United States from 1776 to 1801
(New York, 1970), details American attitudes toward monarchy and the handful of attempts that were made to move the young nation in the direction of hereditary or lifetime power. George C. Herring,
From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776
(New York, 2008), 11–133, covers America's relations with the world generally, but the story of U.S.-British tensions is at center stage. Also illuminating are Robert Middlekauff,
The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763–1789
(New York, 2005); Alan Taylor,
The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies
(New York, 2010); and Edmund S. Morgan,
The Birth of the Republic,
1763–89
(Chicago, 1977). Bernard Bailyn,
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), is a landmark work on the role of deeply held notions of liberty and of the pervasiveness of conspiracy.

Several related issues must be explored in order to describe and assess the idea of a Fifty Years' War. One question is the pervasive paranoia at the time, something that has been the subject of scholarly debate since Bernard Bailyn did his study of pamphlets in the revolutionary era and Richard Hofstadter laid out his vision of “the paranoid style.” (Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
[Cambridge, Mass., 1996].) A seminal paper is John R. Howe, Jr., “Republican Thought and Political Violence of the 1790s”
American Quarterly
19 no. 2 (Summer, 1967): 147–65. Howe contends that the political climate in the 1790s was so emotional and overheated that “stereotypes stood in the place of reality.” (Ibid., 150.) He attributes this climate to the intensity of the Founders' awareness of the fragility of republicanism and the failure of previous experiments, an awareness of the immensity of their historical moment followed by a profound anxiety about the decline of virtue, which was, of course, to be the glue of their free society. Under pressure, Howe argues, the Americans of the time could become deranged.

Gordon S. Wood, for one, disagrees. He has written that the paranoia and conspiracy theories were actually the rational thoughts of rational men, really reflected by the dominant currents of the era. Men of the Enlightenment assumed that history was a course of events in which men could cause effects—that they were agents in control of their fates. This meant that when something happened, someone was behind it. Wood gives Jefferson more credit than many scholars for his fears of a monarchical plot. In her 1922 study, Louise Burnham Dunbar held that there were indeed monarchical plots seriously considered, but that the American people by and large were antimonarchical.

A second key question is how one defines monarchism and republicanism. What the Federalists wanted was what John Adams described a little too openly as a “monarchical republic” (
EOL,
82)—modeled on England's system but without the “corruption,” that is, the blurring of branches, which occurred because crown ministers were members of Parliament. (Wood,
The Idea of America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States
[New York: 2011], 182.) They wanted a strong federal government where citizens owe fealty to the nation over the states, with a strong centralized economy and a powerful army that could challenge the European monarchies on their level. Certainly from the start George Washington and John Adams drew on the iconography of a monarchy, and the Federalists who defended the Constitution did so because of their disillusionment with the idea of a confederacy and fears of the excesses of democracy. They had a sense of themselves as working within an English tradition, hence Jefferson's Anglophobia. Wood points out that, being from the West Indies, Hamilton did not have loyalty to a state. (
EOL,
90.) Hamilton very consciously modeled the financial system on that of Britain. The monarchy debate also plays into Jefferson's role in the battles over the judiciary, since that was the branch most easily seen as a fortress against democracy and the source of permanent establishment.

“
PLANTING
A
NEW
WORLD
”
TJ to John Page, March 18, 1803, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

“I
T
WAS
INCUM
BENT
”
Ibid.

“T
HE
CIRCUMSTAN
CES
OF
OUR
COUNTRY
”
Margaret Bayard Smith,
First Forty Years,
81.

IT
WAS
A
“
BOLD
AND
DOUBTFUL
ELECTION
”
TJ to Roger C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, LOC. Extract published at Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Digital Archive, www.monticello.org/familyletters (accessed 2011). This was very nearly the last letter of his life, a message sent to the Washington organizers of celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. Jefferson, in fact, wrote two additional letters after this one, both about business matters, including arranging for the payment of duties on a shipment of wine. See J. Jefferson Looney, “Thomas Jefferson's Last Letter,”
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
112, no. 2 (2004): 178–84.

ONE
·
A FORTUNATE SON