Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (24 page)

Such swift adjudication by the local coroner was not unusual for the time, but the burial showed haste: before the sun set that day, Callender was laid in a grave.
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To add mystery, some months earlier Meriwether Jones had made a strange, obliquely predictive remark: “Oh! could a dose of the James River, like Lethe, have blessed you with forgetfulness.”
¹⁸
Either Jones could not resist a nasty parting shot at his fallen enemy, or he tried to forestall an investigation into Callender's mysterious demise. Callender was barely in his grave when Jones wrote in
The Examiner
that the death had been not an accident but a suicide, “putting a miserable end to a miserable life.”
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19

The extreme notoriety of the Hemings affair generated an enormous amount of publicity, gossip, and speculation. Much of this has come down to us in various forms to create a constantly buzzing background noise of unverifiable data. In 1811 a Vermont schoolteacher, Elijah P. Fletcher, visited Charlottesville and heard “many anecdotes much to [Jefferson's] disgrace.” One of Jefferson's local detractors had the nerve to bring Fletcher to Monticello, where the ex-president courteously received them. Fletcher came down from the mountain convinced, as he wrote in a letter, that “the story of Black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth,” but Fletcher did not record a single detail of any evidence he may have spotted. Later, an Italian traveler to Charlottesville wrote, “Apropos of negresses, may I be permitted to say that…I was shown a pretty one—although she was no longer young—who had beautified the last days of Jefferson”; but this also is simply local chatter that proves nothing.
²⁰

More compelling are private remarks that were written down by one of Jefferson's good friends, John Hartwell Cocke, a wealthy planter who aided Jefferson in establishing the University of Virginia. Cocke knew Jefferson and his family well and had visited Monticello. In his diary in 1853, Cocke—a highly religious man who despised slavery and its “corruptions”—wrote about two planters who had children with slave women and decided to send the women and children to free states, one to Ohio, the other to a Northern city. He personally knew of a score of such miscegenation cases in Virginia, he continued, and had no doubt that hundreds more could be found in the state: “Nor is it to be wondered at, when Mr. Jefferson's notorious example is considered.”

Cocke made another diary reference to Jefferson several years later: “All Batchelors, or a large majority at least, keep as a substitute for a wife some individual of the[ir] own Slaves. In Virginia this damnable practice prevails as much as any where, and probably more, as Mr. Jefferson's example can be pleaded for its defense.”
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Jefferson's former overseer Edmund Bacon came to his employer's defense when he gave his long interview in 1862 about his life at Monticello. Bacon mentioned that Jefferson had ordered him to give money to a daughter of Sally Hemings's and to put her on the stagecoach to Philadelphia and freedom. Bacon allowed that there was a lot of talk in the neighborhood about this quiet manumission, with people saying the young woman, whom Bacon did not name, was Jefferson's daughter. But Bacon insisted Jefferson was not the father and that he knew this from the evidence of his own eyes: on “many a morning,” he had seen another man, whom he did not name, leaving Hemings's room.

When the U.S. census taker came to the home of Sally Hemings's son Madison in Pike County, Ohio, in 1870, he was stunned to hear Hemings declare his lineage. “This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson!” wrote the census taker on his official return.
²²
Three years later a local newspaper editor, S. F. Wetmore, interviewed Madison, who referred to Thomas Jefferson as “my father” in a first-person account published as “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1” in the
Pike County Republican
on March 13, 1873.
²³
Wetmore subsequently interviewed another former Monticello slave, Israel Gillette Jefferson, who supported Madison Hemings's claim:

Some anonymous troublemaker sent a copy of Israel Jefferson's article to Jeff Randolph, who wrote a lengthy, outraged rebuttal but apparently never sent it to the newspaper; perhaps he had cooled off.
²⁴
The statements of Madison Hemings and Israel Gillette Jefferson saw the light only in an obscure Ohio newspaper and were promptly forgotten; they might as well have been dropped down a hole.

In 1938, Madison Hemings's granddaughter Nellie E. Jones wrote to Monticello saying that she had spectacles, an inkwell, and a silver buckle that had belonged to Thomas Jefferson and then to Sally Hemings. Though the then curator, Fiske Kimball, expressed interest in examining the items, the foundation's president, Stuart Gibboney, did not think the matter worth pursuing. Perhaps in an effort to get Gibboney to pay attention to Mrs. Jones, Kimball pointed out her skill at business correspondence: “This very respectable colored woman writes a letter much more intelligently than many of our own race.” Nonetheless, Gibboney told Jones not to bother sending the artifacts, which were sold to a dealer after Mrs. Jones's death and disappeared.
²⁵

After some seventy-five years in oblivion, the memoir of Madison Hemings surfaced when an Ohio archivist found it in the early 1950s and sent a copy to John Dos Passos, who was then working on a book about Jefferson. Dos Passos circulated it among a small group of Jefferson specialists.
²⁶
Madison Hemings's twenty-two-hundred-word memoir became a central item of evidence in the Hemings affair. In a scholarly article Dumas Malone and Steven H. Hochman conceded that Hemings had spoken sincerely, but they dismissed outright his claim that Jefferson was his father. They described the newspaper editor, Wetmore, as a biased abolitionist, a wily anti-Jeffersonian who had manipulated Hemings—“quite clearly, the story was solicited and published for a propagandist purpose”—but they did not discuss the text in detail.
²⁷
In
The Jefferson Image in the American Mind
(1960), Merrill Peterson disparaged the Hemings memoir as a manifestation of the old “miscegenation legend” engendered by “the hatred of the Federalists” and “the campaign of British critics to lower the prestige of American democracy by toppling its hero from his pedestal.”
²⁸

Madison's memoir found one very influential believer. Fawn Brodie turned the Jeffersonian world on its ear in 1974 with the publication of
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
. The author of three previous biographies, Brodie maintained that Jefferson and Sally Hemings enjoyed an intense, passionate, but necessarily secret love affair for more than thirty years. She took Madison Hemings at his word when he claimed Jefferson was the father of Hemings's children.
²⁹

While Hemings descendants rejoiced at Brodie's biography, many scholars denounced it not only for the author's conclusions but for her method, which rested heavily on psychoanalytic interpretation. Brodie brought smirks to some scholarly faces, for example, when she theorized that Jefferson must have had Hemings on his mind when he toured the fields of France and commented on the “mulatto” color of the soil.
³⁰

To counter the avalanche of negative publicity that engulfed Jefferson after the publication of Brodie's biography, Dumas Malone dramatically released a long-suppressed document that, he said, proved Jefferson's innocence; it was a letter Ellen Randolph Coolidge had written to her husband in 1858 asserting that Jefferson's nephew Samuel Carr had fathered Sally Hemings's children. Ellen did not want her accusation against her cousin to become public. In the portion of her letter she wished her husband to show around, Ellen vaguely laid the blame for Monticello's “yellow children” on the plantation's “Irish workmen” and “dissipated young men in the neighborhood who sought the society of the mulatresses.” And indeed, Ellen's letter had been kept private by her descendants for more than a century, perhaps because of her somewhat slanderous remark that her cousin Sam Carr was a “keeper of a black seraglio.” Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Jefferson's great-great-great-grandson, had allowed Brodie to read the letter but to quote only selected passages, and he resented Brodie's interest in Jefferson's alleged black progeny: “I am distressed that the subject which seems to interest you most relates to the controversial matter of Mr. Jefferson's children and I can assure you categorically that this is not a subject which I wish to have raised by making use of quotations from the letters of Ellen Coolidge.”
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When Brodie's book appeared, Coolidge granted Malone permission to publish Ellen's entire letter in
The New York Times
.
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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.
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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.
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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: