Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (23 page)

Martin, James, and Robert did not marry at Monticello. It may be a coincidence, but it is likely that they knew that having a spouse owned by Jefferson might have permanently chained them to Monticello. At least it would have vastly complicated any attempt to leave.
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When Robert married, he did not ask Jefferson to purchase his family and bring them to Monticello; he wanted to get away.

Jefferson's requests indicate that he wanted Martin around, but the last time the servant is mentioned in Jefferson's household financial accounts is in 1783, which suggests that Jefferson had less trust in him or that Martin was losing interest in household management.
⁵⁰
In the summer of 1792, after some twenty years on and off as Jefferson's butler, Martin's “sullen and fierce” nature grew restive, and he did something very, very few slaves would have dared: he argued with his owner and insisted on being sold. In the fall Jefferson wrote again to Hylton about Hemings in a much sharper tone than in the earlier, breezy, “where is Martin?” note:

Jefferson's remark suggests a power struggle between two strong-minded men. For a master to admit having a disagreement with a slave is extraordinary, disagreement being tantamount to mutiny. The last time Martin Hemings appears in Jefferson's Farm Book is in the roster of Monticello slaves taken in November 1794. In January 1795, Jefferson wrote to his daughter about two items to “be disposed of”—a carriage and Martin. The devoted servant, the savior of Monticello, has become another piece of surplus equipment, and he disappears.
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There was something very disturbing to the Jefferson family about this final transaction. When Jefferson's grandchildren told their stories about Martin, they said that their scant personal memories of him were from their earliest childhood and most of what they knew had come from Jefferson and their mother, Martha. Randall wrote, “The stern Martin died so early that nothing of him but infantile recollections of his gloomy, forbidding deportment, is preserved by any of the living generation.” Died? The letter from Jefferson to his daughter Martha, mother of Randall's informants, shows quite clearly that Martin had not died but been “disposed of,” that is, put up for sale; the family must have disliked admitting what Jefferson had done. Jefferson himself made no note anywhere of his manservant's ultimate fate. In his records and perhaps in his conscience Jefferson resolved the problem of sullen Martin Hemings off the books.
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James, Robert, and Martin all enjoyed an unusual measure of independence and freedom of movement, and yet there was a stark difference among them. The first two managed to negotiate their way to freedom; Jefferson resisted and complained but granted it. That path was never open to Martin, and he knew it. He did not have the blood tie to Jefferson's wife, and he looked different from his half brothers. Isaac the blacksmith said in his memoir: “Jim and Bob bright mulattoes, Martin, darker.”
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One task Jefferson assigned John Hemmings was to make the beautiful wooden railings along Monticello's terraces. They feature a delicate interplay of diagonals and rectangles—a casual display of geometry that Jefferson always loved—in a style known as Chinese Chippendale. The original fences deteriorated and were torn down, but they have been reproduced from Jefferson's drawings, and you can see them today. One of the best viewpoints, oddly enough, is from Mulberry Row. From that point the magnificent architectural features of the mansion seem to peek out from over the railing, offering an odd-angled, understated view of the house's greatness. This is the view the slaves had of the house from their quarter. That lovely railing, Hemmings's handiwork, is a kind of demarcation line between the worlds of the slave and the free.

On the terrace, all is beautiful, ethereal, with that majestic dome gleaming in the sun. Down below is the workaday architecture of the kitchen wing—drab in comparison, extremely plain. There is hardly any distance between these two realms. Even today one can feel the psychological state this architecture induces when seen from below—a sense of the tantalizing proximity of untouchable beauty. That railing is the emblem of an odd borderland: down here stood people who were related by blood to those up there, yet they were slaves. There is the tunnel, the dark opening on the right, where they entered the upper realm to serve the others. If you stood here two hundred years ago, you instinctively knew your place in the chain of being. Builders were acutely sensitive to how their creations would be viewed. Did Jefferson plan this contrast, as he planned everything else so meticulously? Or is it an accident of architecture and topography? Every morning he appeared behind that railing, surveying his domain. Down below, in that drab kitchen block, was the room where Sally Hemings lived.

From Sophocles to William Faulkner, the family has been the microcosm that reveals the society. When a plague ravages the realm of Oedipus, an oracle tells him there are murderers in his city, but the king's investigation into affairs of state soon transforms into a search through his own family history, driven by the haunting question
Who was my father?

The search for the father in the Sally Hemings story is similarly an affair of state. For two centuries some white Americans have viewed her as a threat not just to Jefferson's reputation but to the country. Jefferson's chief scholarly defender, Professor Robert F. Turner of the University of Virginia School of Law, puts it in stark terms. Referring to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he writes:

The discovery in 1998 that DNA samples proved a link between the bloodlines of the Hemings and Jefferson families did not convince everyone that Thomas Jefferson had been the father of Sally Hemings's children. Jefferson's defenders raise the possibility that another Jefferson family member had been the father and point to Thomas's younger brother, Randolph. Given that the historical evidence is very confusing even for specialists, the defenders have been able to persuade a growing number of people that the case against Thomas Jefferson has not been proved. Several books, including one by the widely respected historian Thomas Fleming, have systematically argued Jefferson's innocence.
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The body of evidence in the Hemings case consists of a vexing accumulation of eyewitness and earwitness testimonies;
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recollections that are biased or partially mistaken; an African-American's memoir that contradicts the Jefferson family's assertions; accounts by African-American families that contradict each other;
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newspaper articles written in a poisonous political atmosphere; a variety of reliable, unreliable, incomplete, or partially erased documents; and many missing documents whose contents can only be surmised.

When Jefferson left for France in 1784, he took along his daughter Martha and later wrote to his sister-in-law Elizabeth Wayles Eppes requesting that she send eight-year-old Maria to France with a servant to care for her. Eppes chose fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings for the journey.

In Paris, Sally was reunited with her older brother James, whom Jefferson had with him in France to train as a chef. Almost exactly the same age as little Martha, Sally may have resided in Jefferson's house or in the convent where his daughters were being schooled. Jefferson gave her small payments from time to time and bought her clothes appropriate for a servant who went out on social occasions with her young mistress. French law did not allow slavery, so Sally and her brother could have left Jefferson's employ and lived as free people if they hired a lawyer to instigate the required legal proceeding.

Sally's son Madison later said that she became pregnant by Jefferson in Paris, did not want to return to Virginia, where she would be “re-enslaved,” but made a “treaty” with Jefferson: she would return to Virginia and become his “concubine” (Madison's word) if he would agree to free their future children when they turned twenty-one. According to Madison, Jefferson consented to the treaty, and after their return to Monticello Sally gave birth to a child who died. Aside from Madison's statement, there is no record of the childbirth. Hemings's first recorded childbirth, noted in Jefferson's Farm Book, took place in 1795, when she had a girl named Harriet, who died as a toddler. Hemings had four children who we know survived to adulthood. Her recorded childbirths are:

 

Harriet 1795, died 1797

Beverly 1798

unnamed daughter 1799, died 1800

Harriet 1801

Madison 1805

Eston 1808

 

Rumors of Jefferson having a mistress at Monticello began to float through political circles.
⁴
In 1800, William Rind of
The Virginia Federalist
claimed to possess “damning proofs” of an unspecified “depravity” of Jefferson's. The rumors took a bit more shape in 1801 when Rind's
Washington Federalist
, referring obliquely to a “Mr. J.,” reported that a well-known figure had “a number of yellow children and that he is addicted to golden affections.”
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These charges may not have come from thin air. William Rind and his brother had been the wards of Jefferson's cousin Edmund Randolph; they had spent time around Monticello and might have heard stories of mixed-race children on the mountain.
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In August 1802 a Hudson, New York, journalist, Harry Croswell, wrote in
The Wasp
that President Jefferson had a “wooly headed concubine.” Croswell hated Jefferson, having been convicted of libel for stating that Jefferson had secretly paid a journalist to attack George Washington and John Adams in print. (The charge was true, but he lost on the prevailing legal ground that truth was no defense against libel.) One of Croswell's lawyers was none other than Alexander Hamilton, who may have been the source for the tidbit about Jefferson's “concubine.”
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The Sally Hemings scandal erupted on a huge scale a month later, when on September 1 the Richmond
Recorder
, another Federalist paper hostile to the president, printed a claim that Jefferson had an African-American mistress and children by her. The author of the article was James Thomson Callender, a Scottish émigré who had established himself as a political journalist in Philadelphia several years earlier. It was Callender who had taken payments from Jefferson to fund attacks on Federalists. Croswell ended up in court for publishing the truth about the payments; Callender ended up in jail, under the Sedition Act, for writing the articles. Once an ardent supporter of Jefferson's, Callender turned against him when the president refused to grant him a patronage job in Richmond.

Callender deployed a distinctive vocabulary and style: “hard-hitting, sarcastic, heavily satirical,” and, on occasion, “deliberately scurrilous,” according to his biographer, Michael Durey. He had the habit of taking “the most extreme position on an issue” and had a mastery of English prose “from which he extracted new forms of invective.” According to Durey, Callender possessed a “misanthropy…so thoroughgoing as to be egalitarian. Neither wealth, nor learning, nor family background could create an elite superior to the mass of mankind. His was the egalitarianism of a common depravity, premised on the belief that no social group had the moral requirements to exercise authority.” He had a “constant preoccupation with the ubiquity of corruption in American political life.”
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One might expect that a newspaper story that looms so large over American history appeared on the front page under a banner headline, but it was tucked into the middle of page 2, under the innocuous-appearing words:

Jefferson did not respond. He had earlier said that by the time he responded to one charge, twenty more would be printed, so the effort was useless. But two weeks after Callender's first article appeared, Jefferson's supporter Meriwether Jones fired back in the Richmond
Examiner
. Jones played down the Hemings allegation, insisting it was all just partisan politics as usual and asserting that the president's Federalist enemy Chief Justice John Marshall stood “
behind
the curtain,” while Alexander Hamilton lurked in the distance. A week later Jones offered a more spirited defense of Jefferson, claiming that “not a spot [has] tarnished his widowed character”
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and asserting that any number of white men could have fathered the Hemings children: “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.”
¹¹

In
American Sphinx
(1996), Joseph Ellis characterized the widowed Jefferson as an asexual man who directed his passions into architecture rather than women. Though Ellis later changed his thinking about the Hemings allegation, his assessment that Jefferson's “most sensual statements were aimed at beautiful buildings rather than beautiful women” still resonates because it fits so well with the received image of Jefferson as a cerebral, detached gentleman.
¹²
But there are well-documented episodes of Jefferson's sexual aggressiveness toward a neighbor's wife. In 1768 an old friend of Jefferson's, John Walker, asked him to look after his young wife, Betsy, and their infant daughter while Walker took off on a long frontier expedition to negotiate an Indian treaty. Walker had no idea he had invited a viper into his home. Jefferson repeatedly pressed his attentions upon Betsy, who just as repeatedly rebuffed him. With rather astonishing directness, he continued to show his ardor for Mrs. Walker after her husband's return, indeed while John was just several rooms away.

When the failed encroachments later became public, Walker wrote out a statement of what had happened, with many details as related by his wife. During a visit the Walkers made to the home of a mutual friend, the ladies retired to bed, leaving the gentlemen to talk, but Jefferson, then a bachelor, “pretended to be sick, complained of a headache & left the gentlemen among whom I was. Instead of going to bed…he stole into my room where my wife was undressing or in bed. He was repulsed with indignation & menaces of alarm & ran off.” Later, after he was married, Jefferson

When all of this got into the newspapers, Jefferson was compelled to admit the truth of the accusations. To deny them would impugn the honor of a white married woman and force a duel with John Walker. The president made his confession in a private letter to Walker, a copy of which he was forced to send to a member of his cabinet, who served as a silent witness of the confession. Jefferson never breathed a word of this admission to his family. When they asked him why they never visited their old friends the Walkers any longer, Jefferson lied, telling them that he and Walker had argued about money.

Callender printed his exposés with exquisite timing: midterm elections loomed just weeks away in October. He proclaimed that Jefferson had become the Jonah of the Republican Party, and if it did not toss him over the side, the party would be “gone forever.”
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Jefferson had a hard journey from Monticello back to Washington in October, suffering “excessive soreness all over and a deafness and ringing in the head.”
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He attributed his ailments to bad weather on the road, but the incessant ringing in his head may have been the words
Sally…Callender…Sally…Callender…Sally…

Scandal sells. In the fall of 1802, with Callender at the peak of his journalistic form, skillfully piling invective on Jefferson, Federalist newspapers around the country avidly reprinted his attacks, subscriptions to
The Recorder
soared to a thousand, then to fifteen hundred, and Callender boasted that circulation “has extended from Maine to Georgia, to the remotest corners of the state of New York, to Vincennes, and to Kentucky.” So many ads poured into the office that the weekly
Recorder
began to publish twice a week.
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But Callender's fervent wish that the Republicans would toss Jefferson overboard did not see fulfillment. The electorate was not impressed by his allegations, and Republican candidates won handily in the midterm voting.

Then, within a few months, Callender's life unraveled. He was savagely beaten, in a cowardly fashion, by James Monroe's son-in-law George Hay, who came up behind him with a cudgel and struck him half a dozen blows to the head. Hay had his own quarrels with Callender, but the “Dusky Sally” campaign probably accounted for at least one or two of the blows. In the court proceeding that followed, Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr pledged bond for Hay. A small group of drunken law students invaded the office of
The Recorder
and threatened to burn it. Fearing assassination, Callender began keeping a gun, drank more heavily than ever, and talked of suicide. One Sunday morning he was seen staggering around Richmond, apparently drunk. Later that day, July 17, 1803, he was found dead in the shallows of the James River, in a spot where the water was only three feet deep. He was forty-five years old and left four sons who had recently journeyed from Philadelphia to Richmond to live with him. Within hours a coroner's jury convened, examined the body, and pronounced the journalist's death an accidental drowning, with intoxication the proximate cause.