4. Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 160.
5. Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood, p. 30; Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, p. 30.
6. Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, pp. 12–13.
7. Setlock, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings”; Arthur E. Sutherland, book review of A Brief Narrative of the Case and Trial of John Peter Zenger by James Alexander and Stanley Nider Katz, Harvard Law Review 77, no. 4 (Feb. 1964), pp. 789–90; historictrials.freeservers.com/Crosswell/wasp.htm.
8. Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, pp. 55, 124.
9. Transcription from Monticello website. Callender adopted a high moral tone in his assault on TJ for sexual misconduct, but he was no friend of African-Americans. The same issue of the Recorder carried an advertisement on the front page offering a $10 reward for a runaway slave named Fanny, and another ad offered for sale “A light, active negro boy.” Potential buyers were advised to “enquire of the Printers.”
10. Richmond Examiner, Sept. 25, 1802, in McMurry and McMurry, Jefferson, Callender, and the Sally Story, p. 53; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood, p. 35.
11. Richmond Examiner, Sept. 25, 1802, in McMurry and McMurry, Jefferson, Callender, and the Sally Story, pp. 53–54; Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 161.
12. Ellis, American Sphinx (1996 ed.), “Appendix: Note on the Sally Hemings Scandal.” Ellis revised the appendix for subsequent editions. The 1996 version is on the Monticello website: www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1996sphinx.html.
13. Jon Kukla examines this subject in depth and reproduces several original documents. Kukla, Mr. Jefferson’s Women, pp. 189–98.
14. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 350.
15. Ibid., p. 360.
16. Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, pp. 160, 168, 170.
17. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 374; Richmond Examiner, July 20 and 27, 1803; McMurry and McMurry, Jefferson, Callender, and the Sally Story, p. 100.
18. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 356, 374.
19. Richmond Examiner, July 20, 1803; Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 370; Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, pp. 131, 166–71, 176.
20. Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, p. F5; Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, pp. 133–34.
21. I am grateful to Jon Kukla for providing his transcriptions of the Cocke Diary, from the Cocke Papers, box 188, MSS no. 640. TJ’s defenders question Cocke’s truthfulness, claiming that he nursed a grudge against TJ for a variety of reasons, one being that his roof leaked because he had followed a Jeffersonian design: “He was probably jealous and resentful.” Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, pp. 94–96.
22. Lanier and Feldman, Jefferson’s Children, p. 19. A TJ defender has alleged that the exclamation is a later interpolation by an unknown person, but the handwriting is identical to that on the rest of the page.
23. In his 1874 biography James Parton briefly brought up the Hemings story in order to dismiss it. Parton, Life of Thomas Jefferson, p. 569.
24. Hemings, “Life Among the Lowly”; Israel Jefferson, “Reminiscences of Israel Jefferson,” in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 481. Israel Jefferson’s original last name is now known to have been Gillette; he adopted the Jefferson surname at the urging of the Albemarle County clerk. Jeff Randolph’s unsent letter: Justus, Down from the Mountain, pp. 148–52. McMurry and McMurry, Anatomy of a Scandal, p. xxxi.
25. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 476; Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, p. 176; “Extract from a letter Fiske Kimball to Gibboney,” Oct. 28, 1938, Genealogical data pertaining to the Hemings family of Monticello, MSS 6636 6636-a 6636-b 6636-c, Special Collections, University of Virginia. Quite possibly, Kimball made his remark not out of any prejudice of his own but from an awareness of the prejudice of his recipient.
26. Dos Passos was then writing The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson. Malone and Hochman, “Note on Evidence,” p. 523. McMurry and McMurry, Anatomy of a Scandal, p. xxxi.
27. They wrote, “Our concern here…is with the circumstances of its appearance rather than its contents.” Malone and Hochman, “Note on Evidence,” pp. 524, 526.
28. Peterson, Jefferson Image in the American Mind, pp. 186–87. In addition to the Madison Hemings memoir, Peterson was discounting kinship claims by the Fossett family that had appeared in Ebony magazine.
29. Brodie also gave tentative credence to James Callender’s allegation that TJ had been the father of “President Tom,” supposedly the firstborn child of Sally Hemings, even though Madison Hemings made no mention of a brother named Tom in his memoir, listing his siblings as Beverly, Harriet, and Eston. He said his mother became pregnant in France by TJ and that the infant died at Monticello shortly after its birth. Brodie explained the contradiction by speculating that Tom had left Monticello before Madison’s birth and that Sally wished to keep Tom’s existence a secret even from his siblings to protect Tom’s new identity. But Brodie rejected claims by Joseph Fossett’s descendants that he was TJ’s son. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 292, 558n45.
30. Ibid., pp. 229–30.
31. Ibid., pp. 292, 439, 536n21; Harold Coolidge to Brodie, Dec. 14, 1970, in Bringhurst, “Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson,” p. 441.
32. Ellen (Eleanora) Wayles Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, Monticello.org, Family Letters Digital Archive, http://familyletters.dataformat.com/default.aspx. Ellen’s letter was published in Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 84, pt 1 (April 1974), pp. 65–72, and in New York Times, May 18, 1974.
33. New York Times, July 4, 1984, p. C9.
34. Dabney and Kukla, “Monticello Scandals,” p. 61.
35. Herbert Barger website: http://jeffersondnastudy.com/ (accessed Dec. 7, 2011).
36. No descendants of Beverly Hemings could be found—he had disappeared into the white world—and Madison had no living direct male descendants.
37. The DNA findings brought not just revelation but destruction. Fawn Brodie’s “vindication” had been partial and very ambiguous. Though she thought there had been a “President Tom” Woodson born of Hemings and TJ in 1790, the DNA evidence proving that the Woodsons had no blood tie to the Jeffersons suggested to some that “President Tom” might never have existed, that James Callender had lied or been misled by his sources, and that Brodie had chased a phantom. In any case, Brodie, who died long before the DNA tests, had not been entirely convinced that the Woodson family was descended from President Tom: “The tie relating Thomas Woodson to Jefferson and Sally Hemings is not yet binding, but further research may uncover the essential links. The tenacious Woodson family oral history cannot be discounted just because all the links have not yet appeared.” Brodie, “Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren.” The strength of the Woodson family’s oral history suggests that they have some connection to the Monticello community.
38. Lander and Ellis, “Founding Father.”
39. Nature, Jan. 7, 1999, p. 32.
40. As one of Jefferson’s defenders wrote: “The new ‘evidence’ was rushed to press in the middle of the congressional impeachment inquiry of Bill Clinton. Prof. Ellis actively opposed the impeachment effort, and he repeatedly used his new position to draw parallels in defense of Mr. Clinton.” Turner, “Truth About Jefferson.”
41. Safire, “Sallygate.”
42. Media Research Center, CyberAlert, Nov. 3, 1998, www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/1998/cyb19981103.asp#2.
43. Daniel P. Jordan, statement on the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Jan. 26, 2000; “Jefferson Likely Dad of Slave Child,” Associated Press, Jan. 26, 2000.
44. Daniel Jordan quote: www.pbs.org/jefferson/archives/interviews/jordan.htm.
45. Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, p. 78. One member of Monticello’s staff committee, White M
cKenzie Wallenborn, M.D., dissented from the majority view. He contended in his minority report that TJ had denied the Hemings allegations, and he concluded, “The historical evidence is not substantial enough to confirm nor for that matter to refute his paternity.” In a later statement he wrote that the Monticello committee’s conclusion had opened the door to “the campaign by leading universities (including Thomas Jefferson’s own University of Virginia), magazines, university publications, national commercial and public TV networks, and newspapers to denigrate and destroy the legacy of one of the greatest of our founding fathers and one of the greatest of all of our citizens.” In Dr. Wallenborn’s view a more accurate conclusion would have been that “it is still impossible to prove with absolute certainty whether Thomas Jefferson did or did not father any of Sally Hemings’s five children.” Thomas Jefferson Foundation DNA Study Committee Minority Report, April 12, 1999; Reply to Thomas Jefferson Foundation Response to the Minority Report to the DNA Study Committee, 2nd revision, June 29, 2000; both at Monticello.org.
46. Shipp, “Reporting on Jefferson,” p. B06.
47. Coates, Jefferson-Hemings Myth, p. 9.
48. Thomas, “Report That Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Children Disputed.”
49. The Irvine and Coulter articles, and many others, are archived at http://jeffersondnastudy.com/.
50. Mapp wrote, “If Alive, He Still Would Be Ahead of Our Time.”
51. For nearly a decade the Final Report of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter, April 12, 2001 was available only online, and many of its files became unreadable. Robert Turner’s 2011 print edition includes all the original scholarly views plus a lengthy analysis by Turner. Although the group boasted a professor of biochemistry and biophysics, its glaring weakness was the absence of any specialist on Southern history, plantation history, or African-American history.
52. Individual Views of Prof. Forrest McDonald, in Turner, Jefferson-Hemings Controversy, p. 311.
53. Turner, “Truth About Jefferson.”
54. Turner, Jefferson-Hemings Controversy, p. 14; Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 102.
55. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 22.
56. Isaac Jefferson, Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, p. 35. The original, handwritten setting copy of the manuscript, dating to the 1870s, is online: www2.lib.virginia.edu/small/collections/tj/memoirs.html.
57. When TJ’s daughter and grandchildren were searching for any scrap of evidence that might exonerate TJ on the Hemings charge, they never mentioned Randolph as a possible father. The grandchildren placed the blame on their cousins the Carr brothers. Although some twenty-five male Jeffersons resided in Virginia in the years when Sally Hemings was having children, nearly all of them lived at great distances from Monticello, and no credible evidence suggests that any of them were on the mountain at the right time to be the father of a Hemings. If Randolph did father the Hemings children, he did so without leaving any evidence of his visits to the mountain. Even TJ’s staunch defender Cynthia H. Burton conceded this point in her book, Jefferson Vindicated: “Not enough is known to definitely place Randolph at Monticello when all the Hemings children were conceived” (p. 60). At the time Eston Hemings was conceived, TJ had invited his brother Randolph to visit. Born on May 21, 1808, Eston was conceived between August 15 and September 12, 1807, according to Burton’s calculations (ibid., table preceding p. 38, p. 58). TJ arrived at Monticello from Washington on August 4. Four days later he was handed a letter from Randolph, who asked him for money to pay for some seed Randolph was buying for Monticello. On August 12, TJ sent him the money with a note saying that their sister was at Monticello “and we shall be happy to see you also” (Mayo, Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother, pp. 20–21). The letter from Randolph had been hand delivered to Monticello by Randolph’s son Lewis in July, but in his August 12 reply TJ made no mention of Lewis’s presence at Monticello, which he certainly would have done to keep Randolph apprised of his son’s movements, a customary feature of the era’s correspondence. (Another factor argues against Lewis: he was about fifteen years younger than Sally Hemings.) Lewis must have left Monticello before TJ arrived on August 4—so Lewis could not have been the father of Eston. Did Randolph act on the invitation to visit? In his letter TJ enclosed the $20 cash payment Randolph had asked for, indicating that TJ did not expect to see his brother at Monticello anytime soon. Visits very often leave some kind of trace—a note in the accounts for a sum of money paid, received, or lent; a follow-up “thank you for coming” letter; or a mention in a letter to someone else that “Uncle Randolph has been here.” But no record refers to Randolph actually visiting Monticello in August or September 1807.
14. The Man in the Iron Mask
1. http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/pilgrims1.html.
2. Quoted in Niebuhr, Irony of American History, p. 21.
3. Henry Randall to James Parton, June 1, 1868, transcribed in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 497.
4. Ibid., pp. 494–96.
5. This was the notorious James Callender. Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 159.
6. Quoted in Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, p. 80.
7. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 102. I have omitted a portion of Bacon’s remarks, which I will take up later.
8. Farm Book, plate 130.
9. Henry Randall to James Parton, transcribed in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 495–96.
10. Ibid. Cynthia Burton suggests that Hemings might have been away from Monticello at a Carr farm, but her evidence is not compelling. Years later Jeff Randolph related what his mother had said to Randall, who passed Martha’s refutation along to another biographer, James Parton. Randall claimed to Parton that he had independently verified Martha’s research: “It so happened when I was afterwards examining an old account book of the Jeffersons I came pop on the original entry of this slaves birth: and I was then able from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation…” Here, at that spot in Randall’s sentence, generations of scholars have held their breath, tantalized. Randall continued: “but those circumstances have faded from my memory. I have no doubt I could recover them however did Mr. Jefferson’s vindication in the least depend upon them.” The minutest inquiries into plantation records and calendars have failed to turn up the “well known circumstances.”
11. John Cook Wyllie to James A. Bear Jr., May 6, 1966, “Genealogy of Betty Hemmings Compiled by John Cook Wyllie, Genealogical Data Pertaining to Hemings,” Wyllie Papers.
12. There is confusion over which Carr brother was supposedly the lover of Sally Hemings. In this passage, Randall says that Jeff Randolph identified Peter Carr as Hemings’s lover; in Ellen Coolidge’s 1858 letter to her husband she identifies Samuel Carr. It is more likely that Samuel was the one they both had in mind. Ellen wrote her letter immediately after her conversation with Jeff when her memory of the details would have been fresh. Randall wrote his letter twelve years after his conversation with Jeff Randolph, so it is likely Randall got the Carr brothers mixed up. But to further complicate the issue, in an 1873 letter Jeff wrote, “The paternity of these persons was admitted by two others,” meaning both of the Carr brothers.
13. Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, Family Letters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., http://retirementseries.dataformat.com. The transcription in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, pp. 258–60, is erroneous and misleading.
14. Towler, “Albemarle County Court Orders,” Albemarle County Minute Book, 1856–59, Oct. 6, 1857, p. 190. This record is among the fascinating discoveries made by Sam Towler in the Albemarle County courthouse.
15. Richmond Examiner, Sept. 25, 1802, in McMurry and McMurry, Jefferson, Callender, and the Sally Story, pp. 53–54; Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, p. 161.
16. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 88. Jeff Randolph disputed Bacon’s story.
17. Thomas Jefferson Randolph Memoirs, version 2, no. 1397.
1. Hemings, “Life Among the Lowly.” The Brodie transcription, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 471–76, is the most reliable in print, with only minor, inconsequential errors.
2. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 32.
3. Ibid., p. 228.
4. Ibid., p. 32.
5. Ibid., p. 30.
6. Trescott, “Hemings Affair,” pp. B1, B6.
7. Dabney and Kukla, “Monticello Scandals,” p. 61.
8. Robert Towne dramatized and updated this brand of mastery in the film Chinatown, when an aged tycoon, Noah Cross, in one coup seizes control of both the water supply and the young granddaughter he has incestuously fathered. When the detective Jake Gittes asks the magnate, who already has more wealth than he can possibly use, what more he could possibly desire, Cross replies, “The future, Mr. Gittes. The future.” At the moment when, in a horrifying spasm of violence, Cross wins everything he covets, he symbolically wraps his hand around the eyes of his daughter-granddaughter to shut out the knowledge of how she came to be and how she came into his possession; she must be made blind.
9. One scholar expressed doubt there was a “treaty” at all: Philip D. Morgan, “Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, p. 84n45. Jon Kukla raises the possibility that the affair began not in France but at Monticello in 1793 or 1794: Mr. Jefferson’s Women, pp. 125–33.
10. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, June 8, 1797, in Papers, vol. 29.
11. Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, p. 174.
12. Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, pp. 123–24. I am grateful to David Kalergis for his observation that Madison may have learned the word from Tristram Shandy.
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves Page 34
