The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers

by Thomas Fleming

  The novel was the target of negative remarks from several historians. Chase-Riboud fired back in an interview in the New York Times: “These men have an overwhelming investment in Thomas Jefferson, they’ve spent their whole lives writing about this man. I have a similar emotional investment in Sally Hemings…I find it extraordinary that certified historians are rebutting a novel.”

  Some of these scholars were soon doing much more than rebutting her book. When they learned that CBS-TV and later NBC-TV were considering a miniseries based on the novel, they launched a letter-writing campaign to persuade the network to abandon the project. Both networks dropped the idea. These Jefferson defenders did not seem to realize that they were perilously close to violating the First Amendment. Barbara Chase-Riboud, out several hundred thousand dollars and understandably vexed, deplored some people’s “presumed rights to interpret American history.”

  The 1990s began with a proclamation by the columnist George Will that suggested there was no need to worry about Sally Hemings or Thomas Jefferson’s problems with slavery. Mr. Will named Jefferson the “man of the millennium.” The Sage of Monticello summed up “the American idea” in his character—confident, serene, tolerant, curious—the epitome of a free man. His whole life, as a politician and statesman, a scientist, educator, and architect, bore witness to his extraordinary and unique greatness. With the collapse of communism and America’s emergence as the world’s only superpower, was James Parton’s Jefferson going global?

  In the scholarly community, very different thoughts were germinating. In 1993, the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, historians under the leadership of Peter S. Onuf, who had succeeded Merrill Peterson as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, convened a six-day Jeffersonian Legacies Conference. Mr. Onuf marshaled a wide range of scholars for the task of understanding “not only Jefferson in his own world” but also “his influence in shaping ours.” The tone of the meeting was, in the words of one participant, “unreverential.” Few speakers tried to defend Jefferson. Instead, his role in the history of race and slavery was frequently attacked.

  Rhys Isaac of La Trobe University in Australia castigated the conclave for being too kind to Jefferson, who in his view had left America a legacy of inequality for blacks, women, and native Americans. Paul Finkelman, a visiting professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, acidly noted Jefferson’s anguish when the Missouri Compromise crisis of 1820 raised the specter of civil war and disunion. Jefferson called it “an act of…treason against the hopes of the world.” Finkelman said treason had indeed been committed in the land of the free—by Thomas Jefferson. The speaker who got the most press attention was Robert Cooley, a descendant of Sally Hemings. He told the scholars that they should take the Hemings oral tradition seriously. The lack of documentary evidence was hardly surprising, he said; Jefferson’s white children made sure any incriminating records were destroyed after his death. No one challenged Mr. Cooley’s assertions.9

  Interest in Sally Hemings remained intense in many quarters of the cultural world. In 1995, Disney/Touchstone released a motion picture, Jefferson in Paris, starring Nick Nolte as Jefferson. The producers were Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, a team famed for historical dramas. The film accepted the Madison Hemings story of Sally becoming Jefferson’s concubine in Paris.

  Many scholars were beginning to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly relentless media determination to assume the Jefferson and Sally story was true. Andrew Burstein, professor of history at the University of Tulsa, exclaimed, “I’m becoming an endangered species, a Jeffersonian scholar that accepts the traditional notion that maybe a large number of Virginia slave owners did go to bed with their slaves but maybe Thomas Jefferson was not one of them.”10

  Another holdout was Joseph Ellis. His 1997 book American Sphinx, The Character of Thomas Jefferson ranged over Jefferson’s long life, studying him at various periods. Ellis’s approach reflected the new, unreverential attitude of the scholarly community. He cast an often jaundiced eye on the evolution of Jefferson as a national icon. Ellis debunked Jefferson’s supposed originality, pointing out how often he borrowed resounding phrases and lofty ideas from other people. In his political career he was often guilty of duplicity, especially in his statements about his relationship with James Thomson Callender. But Ellis drew the line when it came to Sally Hemings. “The accusations of sexual promiscuity defy most of the established patterns of Jefferson’s emotional life,” he wrote.11

  Even more unreverential was another book published in 1997, American Scripture, Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier, professor of history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Maier undertook to prove Jefferson was far from the sole author of the Declaration. Other members of the five-man committee, such as Benjamin Franklin, made important contributions, and the Continental Congress as a whole spent hours adding and subtracting clauses. Moreover, Maier uncovered in her research dozens of similar declarations issued by towns and state legislatures during the period when, in John Adams’s words, the sentiment for independence became a “torrent” sweeping the reluctant Congress into the decision to break with the mother country. The Declaration, in short, was “the work not of one man but of many.”

  Maier found additional evidence to support her conclusion that the later worship of Jefferson and the Declaration, above all Abraham Lincoln’s reverential tribute to it in the Gettysburg Address, was the product of similar mass emotions. Like the fervor of 1776, they were generated by political turmoil that “prepared” American hearts to receive the document as gospel truth. In Maier’s view, Jefferson becomes a sort of unconscious plagiarist by taking credit for the Declaration. Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s other personal flaws go unmentioned in this demolition.12

  That same year (1997), Annette Gordon-Reed, an African-American lawyer on the faculty of New York Law School, published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, An American Controversy. Gordon-Reed had grown up in a Texas town where views on blacks and slavery had not changed very much since the Civil War. She had gotten interested in Jefferson when she read Winthrop Jordan’s White Over Black. The movie Jefferson in Paris had focused her attention on Jefferson and Sally Hemings. She brought to her subject a sharp intelligence and a readiness to take on Jefferson’s defenders, no matter how weighty their academic prestige.

  Going Fawn Brodie one better, Gordon-Reed called Samuel Wetmore’s ghostwritten version of Madison Hemings’s life “the Rosetta Stone” of the puzzle and argued that white scholars were much too quick to dismiss black testimony. Essentially she maintained that what was at issue was not absolute proof, which can probably never be achieved, but of “controlling public impressions of the amounts and nature of the evidence.”

  Douglas Adair as well as subsequent biographers of Jefferson have argued that overseer Edmund Bacon was an objective eyewitness, with no ax to grind.13 Gordon-Reed dug out the 1862 volume in which Bacon’s recollections were first published. The last chapter had been omitted in a version published in the next century. In this missing chapter, Gordon-Reed found strong statements condemning the South for the Civil War and argued that the book was trying to reclaim Jefferson as an icon of a reunited America. She noted that Bacon proudly recalled a friend saying the overseer would “go into the fire if Thomas Jefferson asked him to.” In short, he, too, was motivated to “shade the truth” about Sally Hemings.14

  Many historians were impressed by Gordon-Reed’s book. Charles B. Dew of Williams College called it “the definitive work on the Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings issue.” In the media and in the historical community, there was a growing sense that it would not take much more evidence to convince a great many people that Jefferson and Sally had a relationship. In Charlottesville, Virginia, Dr. Eugene Foster was hard at work taking blood samples for his study of Jefferson-Hemings DNA.

  Notes

  BOOK ONE: George Washington

  THE AGONIES OF HONOR


  1. The New York Herald, March 30, 1877, p. 2, col. 5.

  2. The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series (hereafter PGWCL), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1983–6:12, source note. The biographer who discovered the original letter was Bernard Knollenberg, George Washington, The Virginia Period, 1732–1775 (Durham, NC, 1964).

  3. Peter R. Henriques, Realistic Visionary, A Portrait of George Washington (Charlottesville, VA, 2006), 68. In his biography of Washington, Fitzpatrick wrote that claiming it was a love letter to Sally “requires an imagination unresponsive to the niceties of honor and good breeding.” John C. Fitzpatrick, George Washington Himself, A Common Sense Biography (Indianapolis, 1934), 110.

  4. Wilson Miles Cary, Sally Cary, A Long Hidden Romance of Washington’s Life (New York, 1916) (privately printed), 13–18.

  5. Ibid., 20 (note).

  6. Ibid., 50. Sally Fairfax writes of the family’s “impression that my husband’s mother was a black woman.” Also see James Thomas Flexner, George Washington, vol. 1, The Forge of Experience (Boston, 1965), 27.

  7. Cary, Sally Cary, 23–24.

  8. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington, vol. 1 (New York, 1948), 33, 43, 71, 73.

  9. Ibid., 103.

  10. Flexner, Washington, vol. 1, 19–20.

  11. Ibid., 21.

  12. Freeman, Washington, vol. 1, 193–94 ff.

  13. Ibid., 264–66.

  14. Ibid., 261.

  15. Flexner, Washington, vol. 1, 242.

  16. Freeman, Washington, vol. 2, 87.

  17. Rupert Hughes, George Washington, The Human Being and the Hero, vol. 1 (New York, 1926), 203, 226–27. Also see Flexner, Washington, vol. 1, 162. Washington’s letter implies “he was staying away from Belvoir, that his feelings were hurt.”

  18. GW to Sally Fairfax, November 15, 1757, PGWCL, vol. 5, 36.

  19. GW to Sarah Fairfax, February 13, 1758, PGWCL, vol. 5, 93.

  20. Flexner, Washington, vol. 1, 184–85.

  21. Henriques, Realistic Visionary, 74.

  22. GW to Col. Stanwix, March 4, 1758, PGWCL, vol. 5, 102.

  23. Peter R. Henriques, “Major Lawrence Washington Versus the Reverend Charles Green: A Case Study of the Squire and the Parson,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 100 (1992), 233–64.

  24. Flexner, Washington, vol. 1, 193.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Washington to Martha D. Custis, July 20, 1758, PGWCL, vol. 5, 301.

  27. Freeman, Washington, vol. 2, Appendix II, 404–6.

  28. Washington to Sally Fairfax, September 25, 1758, PGWCL, vol. 6, 41–43.

  29. Knollenberg, George Washington, 167, note 21.

  30. John C. Fitzpatrick, Writings of George Washington (hereafter WGW), vol. 2, 170–71. Washington asked that the suit be shipped “as soon as possible.” Also see Patricia Brady, Martha Washington, An American Life (New York, 2005), 63.

  PARTNER IN LOVE AND LIFE

  1. For relative money values, see Economic History Services, http://www.eh.net/hmit. For the lawsuit, see Freeman, Washington, vol. 3, 225, 282.

  2. Henriques, Visionary Realist, 88–89.

  3. Brady, Martha Washington, 31.

  4. George Washington Parke Custis, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington (Philadelphia, 1861), 20.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Brady, Martha Washington, 55.

  7. GW to John Alton, April 5, 1759, PGWCL, vol. 6, 200.

  8. GW to Robert Cary & Co, May 1, 1759, PGWCL, vol. 7, 315–18.

  9. GW to Richard Washington, September 20, 1759, PGWCL, vol. 6, 359.

  10. Joseph E. Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” The Papers of Martha Washington, with an introduction by Ellen McCallister Clark (Westport, CT, 1994), 149.

  11. Rev. Jonathan Boucher to GW, August 7, 1768, PGWCL, vol. 8, 122–25.

  12. Ibid.

  13. GW to Benedict Calvert, April 4, 1773, PGWCL, vol. 9, 209.

  14. B. Calvert to GW, April 18, 1773, PGWCL, vol. 9, 215.

  15. GW to Burwell Bassett, August 28, 1762, PGWCL, vol. 7, 147.

  16. John Parke Custis to Washington, July 5, 1773, PGWCL, vol. 9, 264.

  17. Washington to Myles Cooper, December 15, 1773, PGCWL, vol. 9, 406–7.

  18. Rupert Hughes, George Washington, The Rebel and the Patriot, 1762–1777 (New York, 1927), 164. Freeman, Washington, vol. 3, 306–7.

  19. Some historians cite a letter supposedly written by Pendleton, in which he wrote that Martha talked to them “like a Spartan to her son going to battle,” urging them to “stand firm” against the British. This letter has never been found. It appeared for the first time in a nineteenth-century biography. She may have had such sentiments. Certainly her husband had them and probably discussed them with her.

  20. GW to MW, June 18, 1775, Papers of George Washington, Revolutionary Series (hereafter PGWRV), vol. 1, 3.

  21. GW to MW, June 23, 1775, PGWRV, vol. 1, 27.

  FROM GREAT SOMEBODY TO LADY WASHINGTON

  1. Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” from MW to Elizabeth Ramsay, December 30, 1775, 164.

  2. Mercy Otis Warren to Abigail Adams, April 17, 1776, PGWRV 3, 75n.

  3. Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 204.

  4. John Parke Custis to GW, June 10, 1776, PGWRV 2: 484–86.

  5. Flexner, vol. 2, George Washington and The American Revolution, 359.

  6. Elswyth Thane, Mount Vernon Family (New York, 1968), 48–58.

  7. Freeman, Washington, vol. 5, 281–82.

  8. Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” John Parke Custis to MW, October 12, 1781, 187–88n.

  9. GW to Lafayette, November 15, 1781, “I arrived…to see poor Mr. Custis breathe his last.” Fitzpatrick, ed., WGW, vol. 23, 340.

  10. GW to JAW, January 16, 1783, Fitzpatrick, ed., WGW, vol. 26, 41–45.

  11. Miram Anne Bourne, First Family: George Washington and his Intimate Relations (New York, 1982), 101–2.

  12. Freeman, Washington, vol. 6, 211. One senator, previously hostile to GW, wrote: “It was a great dinner, and the best of the kind I ever was at.”

  13. Abigail Adams to Mary Cranch, July 12, 1789. Stewart Mitchell, ed., New Letters of Abigail Adams (Boston, 1947), 15.

  14. Stephen Decatur Jr., Private Affairs of Washington From the Records and Accounts of Tobias Lear, Esq., His Secretary (Boston, MA, 1933), 62. Also see Bourne, First Family, 130.

  15. Brady, Martha Washington, 181.

  16. “Worthy Partner,” MW to Fanny Bassett Washington, October 23, 1789, 219. MW to Mercy Otis Warren, December 26, 1789, 223–24.

  17. Freeman, Washington, vol. 7, 231.

  18. David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York, 1974), 319–20.

  19. Thomas Fleming, ed., Affectionately Yours, George Washington, A Self Portrait in Letters of Friendship (New York, 1967), 243–44.

  20. Patricia Brady, ed., George Washington’s Beautiful Nelly (Columbia, SC, 1991). Introduction, 7. Also see Unger, Unexpected George Washington, (Hoboken, NJ, 2006) 256–57.

  21. MW to Lucy Knox, undated, 1797, Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” 304–5.

  22. Elizabeth Willing Powel to GW, March 11, 1797, Dorothy Towhig, ed., Papers of GW Retirement Series (hereafter PGWRet), vol. 1, 28–30.

  23. GW to Elizabeth Willing Powell, PGWRet, vol. 1, 51–53.

  24. GW to Sarah Fairfax, May 16, 1798, Fitzpatrick, WGW, 36, 262–66.

  25. MW to SF, May 17, 1798, Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” 314–15.

  26. Ibid., Introduction, xxv, 1797 letter to Tobias Lear.

  27. EWP to MW, January 7, 1798, Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” 311–12.

  28. Freeman, Washington, vol. 7, 620–25. Also see Henriques, Realistic Visionary, 187–204. Many people, including this writer, consider the latter the best account of Washington’s death.

  29. Fields, ed., “Worthy Partner,” xxxi.

  30. Ibid., xxvii.

  THE OTHER GEORGE WASHINGTON SCANDALS


  1. Nigel Cawthorne, The Sex Lives of the Presidents (New York, 1998).

  2. Allen French, “The First George Washington Scandal,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, Vol. 65 (1935), 460–74, citing Public Record Office, AD1: 485–689.

  3. Worthington Chauncey Ford, The Spurious Letters Attributed to Washington (Brooklyn, NY, 1889), Introduction, 1–13. The letters are reprinted in full in this book.

  4. Ford, Spurious Letters, 69–76.

  5. Troy O. Bickham, “Sympathizing with Sedition? George Washington, the British Press and British Attitudes during the American War of Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, January 2002, Third Series, vol. 59, no. 1, 101–122.

  6. Ford, Spurious Letters, 26–29.

  7. John Thornton Posey, General Thomas Posey, Son of the American Revolution (East Lansing, MI, 1992), 14.

  8. Ibid., 14–18.

  9. John C. Fitzpatrick, “The George Washington Scandals,” Bulletin No. 1 of the Washington Society of Alexandria, 1929, 4–5. This is the Scribner’s article “with some additions.”

  10. Posey, General Thomas Posey, 272–75.

  11. Linda Allen Bryant, I Cannot Tell a Lie (Lincoln, NE), 2004, xii.

  12. Ibid., 15.

  13. Ibid., 20.

  14. Ibid., 41–42.

  15. Mount Vernon Fact Sheet on West Ford, 2000, 1–2. Mary Thompson, the research historian at Mount Vernon, has done a very thorough study of Washington’s travel data for 1784–1785. It confirms that Washington never visited Bushfield between 1783 and his brother’s death in 1787.

  16. Joel Williamson, New People, Miscegnation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1980), 49ff. Peter Henriques has kindly given me a copy of a speech he gave in 2005 about West Ford and his relationship to John Augustine Washington’s family. He shows convincingly that the probable father was William Augustine Washington, John’s third son. William and Venus were about the same age. William died tragically at age seventeen when a gun held by a friend accidentally discharged. West Ford later named his son William.