Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

by Henry Wiencek

  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 e
xasperated,” 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

  When Jeff Randolph took Henry Randall around Monticello in the 1850s and told him that two Hemings women had children who resembled Jefferson, he also said that he knew the identities of the real fathers of the mixed-race Hemings children. Randall wrote down what Jeff told him:

  Mr. Jefferson had two nephews, Peter Carr and Samuel Carr whom he brought up in his house. They were the sons of Mr. Jefferson’s sister and her husband Dabney Carr…. Sally Henings was the mistress of Peter, and her sister Betsey* the mistress of Samuel—and from these connections sprang the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. Both the Henings girls were light colored and decidedly goodlooking…. their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised by the latter—never disavowed by them. Samuel’s proceedings were particularly open.12

  Samuel Carr was a convenient scapegoat because, in fact, he did have a black family. He fathered several children with a free woman of color, Judath Barnett, and this black family lived in a settlement of free blacks north of Charlottesville that came to be known as Free State. Its very existence was a rebuke and a repudiation of Thomas Jefferson’s insistence that free blacks could not live side by side with whites. By the time Jeff pinned the blame for the Hemings children on his Carr cousin, Samuel was in his grave, and his mixed-race family had decamped for more secure freedom in Ohio.

  Possibly, Jeff Randolph knew the truth about his grandfather’s “proceedings” and kept it hidden from the women in the family. Jeff told his sister Ellen that Samuel and Peter Carr had admitted their guilt to him in a tearful confession sometime in the second decade of the nineteenth century. But if that were so, why didn’t Jeff tell his mother on her deathbed and relieve her torment?

  Before we pass judgment on Jeff Randolph, there are additional factors to consider. Like his father, Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph, Jeff was forced into the role of buffer and middleman, handling the dirty business. Like his father, he was caught between Jefferson and the women in the family, who were blind in their devotion to Jefferson. He always had to consider the feelings of his mother and sisters while bowing to his grandfather, and simultaneously he had to make everything run.

  Jeff’s account hints at a sympathy for his enslaved relatives—a dangerous sentiment for a slave master—and hints also at a divide in the family. His sister Ellen called these people—unquestionably her own blood kin—the “yellow children” and spoke of them with disdain as “a race of half-breeds…. The thing will not bear telling.”13 We sense feelings of astonishing intensity and relentlessness. At Monticello the “yellow children” lived in the glare of those hostile feelings every day. No act of loyalty or devotion could mitigate those feelings, because for Ellen the mere existence of these children defiled the reputation of her grandfather. This is strikingly different from Jeff, who spoke of the Hemingses neutrally, even sympathetically.

  Jeff had connections to the African-American community his sister might not have known about, and at almost the same time he was making his revelations to the biographer about the mixed-race children of Monticello, he offered crucial help to a Charlottesville “black” family trying to cross the legal line into whiteness. Around 1835 a free mulatto woman named Ann Foster, a property owner who lived near the University of Virginia, gave birth to a son she named Clayton Randolph Foster. Her bestowing the name Randolph proves nothing by itself, but an obscure court record from the 1850s is intriguing: “Upon evidence of Thomas J. Randolph…Susan Catharine Foster and Clayton Randolph Foster, children of Ann Foster, are [declared by the court to be] not negroes in the meaning of the act of assembly.”14

  To give such evidence, Jeff had to prove to the court’s satisfaction that he had authoritative knowledge of sufficient white blood in the Foster lineage to have them declared “not negroes.” At the very least, Jeff knew this mixed-race family very well. He was less inclined than his sister to revile such people as “a race of half-breeds,” knowing as he did the peculiar geography of the parallel world
that Jefferson’s ideology compelled them to deny.

  Jeff offered the same help to the grandchildren of Mary Hemings Bell, doing what he could to rescue a few people from the system. These rescues present themselves as psychological mini-dramas, with hints of secret blood ties, hidden identities, and a redemptive climax; they suggest hidden grief endured by the masters, consciences we cannot perceive until we learn to read the secret signs.

  The insanity of this world is apparent in the story of the Fosters, who walked into the Albemarle County courthouse as black people and left as whites, their true genealogy abolished. And the brutality of this world is apparent in the nature of the evidence Jefferson’s partisans offered for his innocence of the charges James Callender had made against him. One of Jefferson’s supporters blithely admitted that rape was common at Monticello: “In gentlemen’s houses everywhere, we know that the virtue of unfortunate slaves is assailed with impunity…. Is it strange, therefore, that a servant of Mr. Jefferson’s, at a home where so many strangers resort…should have a mulatto child? Certainly not.”15

  Ellen Randolph made a similar admission. She wrote that young white men in the vicinity of Monticello regarded the slave quarter as their bordello: “There were dissipated young men in the neighborhood who sought the society of the mulatresses and they…were not anxious to establish any claim of paternity in the results of such associations.” Ellen may have been referring to her brother Jeff’s school friends, who were “intimate with the Negro women,” according to Edmund Bacon.16 The silent implication was that the black women were immoral, but Jeff Randolph defended the character of slaves: “There was as much decency of deportment and as few illegitimates [among the slaves] as among the laboring whites elsewhere; as many lived in wedlock from youth to age without reproach.”17