WASHINGTON, EARLY 1802
Lewis long since had perfected his expedition plans, but now that it was a reality countless new issues of supply, manpower, route, information, maps, armament had arisen, all complicated by the dark probability that war with France would knock everything into a cocked hat. Daily he was at his desk in his little canvas-walled chamber, developing contingency plans and laying out new lists. He was thus deeply engrossed when a steward in a white jacket appeared to say that Mr. Smith was at the door.
Puzzled, Lewis followed him to the entrance hall with its marble benches. Samuel Smith, who was roughly Lewis’s age, ran the
National Intelligencer
and was a warm supporter;
indeed, Smith had opened his paper at the express urging of the president. His wife was a pretty woman whom Lewis seemed to remember had had a part in resolving the Burr crisis.
He found the editor obviously agitated. “Ah, Captain Lewis, I must see you in private.” Clutching his case, he looked about guardedly, though Mr. Grumby was outside watching a grocer’s wagon turn into the drive. Lewis led him to the little chamber, where he opened his case and spread a Richmond newspaper across the expedition lists on the desk. “Look,” he said, tapping an article headed THE HERO UNMASKED!!!! It was a broad smear against the president, and Lewis saw it was the work of James Callender, the disheveled Richmond editor who’d been jailed, fined, and cruelly abused under the Alien and Sedition Acts for his partisan Democratic screeds and was demanding the Richmond postmastership in recompense—and in hopes it would make him acceptable to a high-society belle, the very same man whom Lewis himself had ejected bodily from the mansion when last he’d visited. Guilt settled on him in a dark cloud. Had his own temper been the trigger that had fired this bombshell?
The piece was scurrilous and even ridiculous in places, but he saw it possessed an undeniable power. The president of the United States, it shrieked, keeps a black concubine, a helpless slave who must submit on command to his foul advances; in tears she comes to his bed at the crook of his finger to yield herself to his lust. Yet the dexterous author managed to present her also as a sable Venus ruling a black seraglio at Monticello where unspeakable excess was daily fare, where decent men averted their eyes and no editors dared take readers lest sensibilities be shocked beyond recovery.
And who is this African goddess? Black Sally, she’s called, Nigger Sally, one Sally Hemings, who has been forced to occupy the great man’s bed since she was but a child. And on her our president, who poses as a man of such nobility, has gotten a passel of little half-breed children who
frolic through his house like innocent mice, never acknowledged by their natural father.
As Lewis sagged in his chair, stomach churning, he saw the attack was curiously contradictory, filled with hateful contempt for the black wench, but offering alligator tears for the slave child given no choice but to submit to naked lust. Thomas Jefferson poses as a nobleman, the servant of the people, the reluctant owner who opposes slavery—but absent the institution, where would he find his lush bedwarmer? Sally seemed to be both a black Venus yielding her favors and an innocent child condemned to a life of shame by the man of power with his perverted desires and his evil dominance.
And so forth for a few thousand words.
In a frightened-sounding voice, the editor said, “You understand, papers all over the country will take this up. Federalists will gloat and sneer and slather, but so will Democrats. No one will leave it alone. Best friends will snigger behind their hands.”
“Why,” Lewis cried, “people won’t really believe it. The editor is a scoundrel, has no reputation. Have you seen him? Disgusting specimen of humanity.”
“True, but few people will know that. And yes, they will believe. They’ll
want
to believe.”
Of course Lewis knew he was right. And in a moment Smith added uncertainly, “It’s not true, I suppose. I mean—”
Lewis withered him with a glance. “Of course not!” But just the same he remembered Miz Hemings’s beauty and her impact on him. If ever there was a woman to play such a role …
“You’ll have to present it to him, won’t you?”
“I suppose,” Lewis said. His heart sank.
“Remember,” Smith said, “it’ll be in every paper in the country, friendly or unfriendly. Everyone—
everyone
—will know about it.” When he left Lewis folded the paper. It lay on his desk like a bomb. After a while he walked across the lawn to Mr. Madison’s office.
“You showed it to him, Jimmy?” Dolley asked. They were in the drawing room; Jimmy had come home early looking very tired. He had handed her the paper wordlessly, and she had grasped the gist of it in moments. “How did he react?”
“He read it. Then he handed it back. His expression never changed.”
“He must have said something though.”
“He did. He said, ‘My, the depths to which the human soul can sink.’”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Jimmy, he can’t get away with that. He’ll have to speak, deny it, something—”
“I doubt he’ll say a word more. Ever. So I would recommend too.”
Yes, maybe that would be best. “It must have been a tense moment,” she said.
He chuckled sourly. “To say the least. I waited till he handed it back. Utter silence. So I said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. President.’ He didn’t answer and I left, glad to be gone.”
She returned to the article. “Could it be true?” She was thinking of that afternoon when Sally Hemings slid the wineglass under the bottle’s mouth.
“Of course not!” He glared at her, but she thought the whole miserable situation including Tom opening himself to such an attack was what bothered him. As to the charge, Jimmy might be sure it was false, but she certainly wasn’t. “She’s a very pretty woman,” she said tentatively.
“Really, Dolley, that’s quite outrageous! To suggest—”
She shrugged.
“What’s the matter with you? This suspicion—Tom simply wouldn’t use his people that way nor would any decent gentleman. Tom least of all.”
“Many slaveholders do.”
“Well,
we
don’t. No man on Montpelier abuses a woman. My father wouldn’t have permitted it and neither will I.”
“But, Jimmy, if it were true, maybe it wouldn’t be abuse.” She thought again of how confident and at home Sally Hemings
had been that afternoon. This was no cowering slave. This was a woman, her birth and bondage merely an accident. But of course it did go to the core of slavery. A woman of that bearing and aplomb could have her pick in a free society.
That was the point Dolley’s Quaker father had made when he freed their slaves—put them in a free society and they’d do as well as anyone else. Poor Pa—he had folded up and gone to bed till he died when his business failed in Philadelphia and Ma had taken in boarders, but it struck her now that Ma had never said a harsh word about her husband. Not a word. And Dolley realized her mother had simply recognized her father’s quality. Somehow it had taken her ten years to reach that understanding … .
Images of Sally sliding that glass away … If Tom used her, Dolley thought, it was not against her will. Late on a chilly night, the woman drifting into the bedchamber when the house was quiet. Quite plausible. But she saw that she had angered Jimmy. She wondered if she had inadvertently tickled his own suspicions.
“All right, dear,” she said. “I’m not accusing Tom of anything. But you know there’s talk. Sally’s children do bear a resemblance to him—remember that beautiful little boy?—and she keeps right on having them. But that doesn’t prove—”
“Stands against the allegation, actually. The idea that he’s impregnating a slave woman in the very house that his daughters frequent—Lord, you know how he feels about them, sun rises and sets—now that just defies imagination. Or at least,
my
imagination. As to the children—well, it’s a big and tangled family.”
She listened carefully as he laid out some of the interwoven Jeffersonian skeins. Most of it was new to her; Jimmy had been close to the family for years. Tom had married and been deeply in love with Martha Wayles. Her father, John Wayles, was said to have taken one Betty Hemings as concubine after his third wife died. Betty had been the daughter of an English sea captain and a full-blooded African woman, and she’d borne John Wayles six children, so the story went. When he died his estate, including Betty and her children,
went to Martha Wayles Jefferson. Sally and her sister, Betsy, were toddlers then.
Dolley’s mouth fell open. “My goodness,” she said. “Then Sally was Martha Jefferson’s half-sister?”
He nodded. “If the stories hold up. That’s another reason I don’t think Tom would—”
“But that rationale would work in reverse too.” Tom had adored his wife and been devastated when she died. A half sister might have an attraction no slave woman could match. Nearly twenty years had passed since Martha’s death, a long time, which could be all the more reason that he …
Jimmy frowned. “Really, Dolley, this suspicion ill becomes you.” Well, she thought, he’s right. But the resemblance …
She saw an odd look sweep Jimmy’s face. Tom, he said evenly, had a sister who also was named Martha. She had married Dabney Carr. A good fellow, Dabney Carr, before Dolley’s time. Dabney and Martha had had six children before he died when still young. Martha Carr had brought her brood to Monticello, including her sons, Peter and Samuel, who were still there. Tom’s nephew Peter had become his favored protégé.
“The story,” Jimmy said, “like it or not, is that Peter Carr is the father of Sally’s children. And that his brother, Samuel, keeps Sally’s sister, Betsy, as his concubine.”
She stared at her husband. “And Tom condones this?”
Jimmy shrugged.
Oh, Pa, she thought, at this new evidence of the tangled evils of slavery, you were a great and decent man … .
It was an immensely painful time, Madison thought. Over the next two months he noticed every condescending smile, every sneer, every wink and chuckle. In the halls of Congress one day he encountered Burr, and that worthy bowed to him with a look of absolute glee.
“My sympathies, sir,” said the gentleman from New York, with a deep chuckle. “She’s said to be a fine-looking piece; why, I might have trouble resisting her myself!” At which he laughed out loud.
Hurrying on, Madison rounded a corner to find four congressmen shouting with laughter as they topped each other’s ribaldry. They lapsed into embarrassed silence at sight of him. He bowed. “Gentlemen,” he said, putting what he hoped was ironic emphasis on the word; but if they understood his meaning it wasn’t evident. Each bowed, murmuring, “Mr. Secretary.”
Dismayed Democrats from Baltimore to Maine wrote that Federalists were making hay over the spectacle of Sable Sally and the great man. It all went to prove, so Federalists said, that the leader was a licentious devil steeped in sin, a natural follower of the libertine French with their mad revolution. That he would despoil an innocent slave child only demonstrated what the American people could expect as he prepared to spring them into French slavery.
Danny Mobry came for tea, and Madison felt that her big, black coachman looked at him with an open sneer. Dolley said he was imagining things, that in fact Samuel Clark was a good man who was careful not to sneer at anyone. Madison wondered if he were approaching a point where every glance carried a message.
He noted sourly that there was scarcely an editor across the country who resisted the temptation to lapse into doggerel, printing other excesses, then topping it with his own.
Of all the damsels on the green
On mountain or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen
As Monticellian Sally.
Yankee Doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock, of slaves for stock,
A blackamoor’s the dandy.
When pressed by loads of state affairs,
I seek to sport and dally,
The sweetest solace of my cares
Is in the lap of Sally.
That epic ran thirty-two stanzas and it was lack of space rather than of inspiration that ended it.
Letters poured in from loyal Democrats. Take heart. Ignore slings and arrows. No sensible person listens to trashy gossip. Be strong. Hew to the course. Confound the Federalists. Madison took it as sure sign Democrats were worried sick.
All the while the president never said a word.
A report came from Boston. John Adams was saying that while he would not suspect President Jefferson per se, he was only too aware that southern slaveholders used and abused their female slaves as a matter of course, hence all numbered their own children among their slaves.
Someone sent a letter that John Quincy Adams had written for a newspaper to lament the tasteless excesses of press and Federalists. He doubted the president would stoop to the actions charged but used the situation to launch a cogent attack on slavery, urging support for the nascent abolition movement stirring in Boston. The paper said Mr. Adams was a state senator contemplating a run for Congress.