Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  When Brodie’s book appeared, Coolidge granted Malone permission to publish Ellen’s entire letter in The New York Times.32 Rising up as a voice from the grave, it instantly became the central text for those who believed that Jefferson was not the father. Malone himself later hedged, saying in 1984 that he refused to believe Jefferson and Hemings had a long-term affair but that “it might have happened once or twice.”33

  Then came Barbara Chase-Riboud’s book Sally Hemings: A Novel (1979), portraying the Jefferson-Hemings relationship as “an extraordinary and fascinating love story,” in the author’s words.34 Though Brodie’s biography and Chase-Riboud’s novel swayed millions of minds, the academy, especially the corps of Jefferson specialists, budged hardly at all. It seemed that the Hemings-Jefferson mystery was ultimately insoluble and would forever remain mired in scholarly dispute. But science caught up with history.

  The fabled lost tsarina of Russia and a filmmaker both had hidden hands in the dramatic DNA revelation that one of Sally Hemings’s children had a blood tie to Jefferson’s family. In 1995 the director James Ivory released a film titled Jefferson in Paris, dramatizing a passionate affair between the mature Jefferson and the adolescent Hemings. Around the time of the film’s release, the topic of DNA testing was a hot one in Jefferson’s hometown of Charlottesville because a DNA test had recently cracked the world-famous case of a local woman named Anna Anderson Manahan. For decades Manahan had claimed to be Anastasia, daughter of the tsar murdered by the Bolsheviks, Nicholas II. The tsar’s surviving relatives, including members of the British royal family, gave blood samples to be compared with tissue taken from Manahan before her death. When the results showed she did not have the royal DNA, a great story was ruined by science, and Manahan was posthumously ushered into the pantheon of fakers.

  A number of people suggested, half-jokingly, that it might be time to “dig up Jefferson,” extract some cells from whatever was left of him, and settle the Hemings business once and for all. During a dinner-party conversation in Charlottesville in 1996 at the home of Dr. Eugene Foster, a retired pathologist, a guest named Winifred Bennett floated the idea that DNA testing might resolve the Hemings controversy.

  Intrigued by his dinner guest’s suggestion, Dr. Foster took the DNA idea to officials at Monticello, who put him in touch with Herbert Barger, a passionate genealogist married to a collateral descendant of Jefferson’s, “a first cousin, six generations removed,” as Barger described her.35 Barger took up the case eagerly, as he felt confident that DNA would exonerate the Founder. Conducting a proper DNA analysis required locating a sufficient number of Hemings and Jefferson descendants for a valid sampling. Blood samples had to come from direct descendants along an unbroken male line. Sally Hemings’s youngest son, Eston, had one male descendant who consented to be tested.36

  Thomas Jefferson had no legitimate son who survived to adulthood, but with Barger’s help Dr. Foster was able to obtain blood samples from male descendants of Jefferson’s uncle Field Jefferson. Descendants of the paternal grandfather of Peter and Samuel Carr—the nephews whom the Jefferson family blamed for the Hemings “yellow children”—also consented to be tested.

  The results, announced in the November 5, 1998, issue of Nature under the headline “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” stunned historians and the public: Eston Hemings had been fathered by a Jefferson. For historians, the DNA revelation was the equivalent of discovering a lost continent. Madison Hemings, once ridiculed as an abolitionist tool, had apparently been vindicated, as had Fawn Brodie. DNA also suggested that the solemn statement by Jefferson’s grandchildren that one of the Carr brothers had fathered Hemings’s children was untrue; the Carrs could not have fathered Eston.37

  Dr. Foster and his coauthors were careful not to overstate their findings. They wrote, “The simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings are that Thomas Jefferson, rather than one of the Carr brothers, was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson.” But they also conceded:

  We cannot completely rule out other explanations of our findings based on illegitimacy in various lines of descent. For example, a male-line descendant of Field Jefferson could possibly have illegitimately fathered an ancestor of the presumed male-line descendant of Eston. But in the absence of historical evidence to support such possibilities, we consider them to be unlikely.

  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:

  Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton’s sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role. The parallels are hardly perfect, but some are striking…. Our heroes—and especially Presidents—are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all of the frailties and imperfections that this entails.

  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” pa
ternity 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.

  14

  The Man in the Iron Mask

  “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.