Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (39 page)

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.

15. “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee”

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
.

13.
Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 182n5.

14.
There was a tradition among some African-American families from Charlottesville that Harriet returned there after TJ's death and started a family, but the evidence they offered in the 1940s is extremely garbled and calls for further research. Pearl Graham, Notes on an Interview with Three Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, July 28, 1948, typescript graciously provided by Lucia Stanton. Graham, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” pp. 98–100. Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson
, pp. 554–55n47.

15.
Quotation from
Cleveland American
, reprinted in
Liberator
, Dec. 19, 1845, in Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 165.

16.
Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 164.

17.
“A Sprig of Jefferson Was Eston Hemings,”
Scioto Gazette
, Aug. 1, 1902, quoted in
Frontline
website “Jefferson's Blood,”
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1902sprig.html
, also quoted in Leary, “Sally Hemings's Children,” pp. 172–73. According to this account, which appeared nearly fifty years after Eston's death, “There came from Monticello, Virginia, to Chillicothe, a remarkably fine looking colored man and his family. Eston Hemings was of a light bronze color, a little over six feet tall, well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn.”

18.
Fawn M. Brodie, “Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren,”
Getting Word: The Newsletter
(Winter 2007/2008), p. 2.

19.
“Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp,” Sept. 29, 1917, p. 4; Sept. 30, 1917, p. 3.

20.
Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 169.

21.
Ibid., p. 162.

22.
Ibid., pp. 166–67.

23.
Ibid., p. 171.

16. “The Effect on Them Was Electrical”

1.
Petition of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, quoted in Adam Rothman,
Slave Country
, p. 27.

2.
Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” p. 52; Ress,
Governor Edward Coles
, pp. 11–17.

3.
Ress,
Governor Edward Coles
, p. 34.

4.
Monroe, “Edward Coles, Patrician Emancipator,”
www.lib.niu.edu/2005/iht1210502.html
.