The President's Daughter (74 page)

38. Are you surprised when Harriet's granddaughter, Roxanne, refuses to accept the truth about her real identity, regardless of the evidence? Should Harriet have waited, as her mother said, to tell her granddaughter the truth about her life? Do you think Harriet gets what she deserves? Why or why not?

Harriet (Wayles?) Hemings was born at Monticello, Albemarle County, Virginia, in May of 1801, the fifth child and third daughter of a quadroon slave, Sally Hemings (1773—1836), and the alleged eleventh child of Sally Hemings's master and brother-in-law, Thomas Jefferson. Sally Hemings herself was the daughter of John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, by Elizabeth Hemings, a slave who bore him six children after the death of his second wife, and Elizabeth was the daughter of a whaling captain named Hemings and an African. Of the seven children Sally Hemings bore between 1790 and 1808, Harriet was the only daughter to survive to adulthood and fulfill the promise made to all the Hemings children that they would be allowed to run away at twenty-one.

Harriet Hemings grew up on Thomas Jefferson's plantation as a slave, and between 1821 and 1822, she fled Monticello and went north, according to records, to Philadelphia and passed for white.

In 1802, one year after Harriet Hemings's birth, Jefferson was publicly accused of fathering Sally Hemings's children in a scandal that reached national proportions. Although the original article was written by a former employee and protege, of Jefferson's, a muckraking Federalist journalist named James T. Callender, other Republican newspaper editors, especially in the South, investigated the story, found it to be true and common knowledge in the Richmond-Charlottesville area, and published Calender's allegations,
to which Jefferson never replied. For example, the editor of the Maryland
Frederick-town Herald
wrote:

Other information assures us, that Mr. Jefferson's Sally and their children are real persons, that the woman has a room to herself at Monticello in the character of seamstress to the family, if not as housekeeper; that she is an industrious and orderly creature in her behaviour, but that her intimacy with her master is well known, and that on this account, she is treated by the rest of the house as one much above the level of his other servants. Her son, whom Cal-lender calls president Tom, we are also assured, bears a strong likeness to Mr. Jefferson.

Sally Hemings and her children, however, remained at Monticello (her eldest son, Thomas, disappeared at this time) and Beverly, her second son, born in ‘98, was four years old, and she had two more sons, in 1805 and 1808.

In 1826, Jefferson freed these last two sons, Eston and Madison, in his will along with their uncles John and Robert. These were the only slaves Jefferson ever freed. The other Hemingses descended from his father-in-law went on the block to pay his bankruptcy debts.

In 1836 the Albemarle County census taker listed Sally Hemings, Madison, and Eston as white, presumably to erase any trace of the crime of miscegenation attached to Jefferson's name, a crime which was punishable by fine and imprisonment at the time (in Virginia, until 1967).

In 1873, Madison published his memoirs in the
Pike County Gazette.
In them he revealed the fate of Harriet as he knew it:

Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give but will not for prudential reasons. She raised a family of children, and as far as I know, they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived, or lives. I have not heard from her for ten years, and do not know if she is dead or alive. She thought it in her interests, on leaving Virginia, to assume the role of a
white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such, I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.

Edmund Bacon, the overseer at Monticello in 1822, had this to say:

He freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter; she was ___________‘s daughter. When she was nearly grown, by Mr. Jefferson's direction, I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars. I have never seen her since and don't know what became of her.

Harriet's elder brother Beverly, as far as we know, went west to California and passed for white, while Thomas Hemings changed his name to Woodson and remained, as Madison did, on the black side, from which scores of descendants, with tenecious oral histories, exist.

Thomas Jefferson never officially freed either Sally Hemings or his runaways, who would have been fugitive slaves up until the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation and thus the property of his heirs and subject to arrest or return to their owners or sale.

In 1974, Fawn Brodie, a professor of history at the University of California, included a chapter on the Hemings affair and their family relationships with Thomas Jefferson in her book
Thomas Jefferson, an Intimate Biography.
In 1979, the author of the present work published a novel based on the historical and psychological evidence in this biography, as well as on doctorate dissertations on the Hemings family at the University of Virginia, on the Jefferson papers at the Library of Congress, on previous research done by non-Jeffersonian historians, and on her own independent research in the United States and France.

The descendants of Eston Hemings came forward after the publication of Fawn Brodie's book. They all considered themselves white descendants of Jefferson.

On July 3, 1979, three months after the publication of
Sally Hemings,
the curator of Monticello tore out the staircase in Thomas Jefferson's bedroom mentioned in the novel, which had incited too many questions from tourists.

The staircase has never been restored. The rationale was that although there were “steps” there, the actual staircase was not authentic and to put
any
stairs back would be “misleading to the public.”

In 1981, Virginius Dabney published
The Jefferson Scandals,
a rebuttal in which he attempted to defuse the issue by attacking both the Brodie biography and the Chase-Riboud novel—a strange thing for a historian to attack a novel. Dabney had a hard time even admitting that Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson's half sister-in-law, did not reprint Madison's memoirs, made no attempt to verify by date or location the accusation of the Carr brothers' parentage of the Hemings children.

In February 1993, the research director at Monticello discovered a letter from Thomas Jefferson to his son-in-law Francis Eppes, dated December 7, 1799, announcing that “Maria's maid” (according to the director, a euphemism for Sally Hemings) “produced a daughter about a fortnight ago, and is doing well.” This hitherto unknown child was named Thenia and died at an early age. This is the first and only direct and poignant reference in writing to Sally Hemings by Thomas Jefferson himself, except his entries in his farm book. This extremely interesting letter raises the question of why Jefferson would share such news with his son-in-law if the daughter in question was not his.

Because of the notorious family resemblance of all of Sally Heming's children to Thomas Jefferson (guests were startled at seeing them) the “any old white man” theory of the origins of these children was, even in 1802, impossible and never attempted.

Instead, forty years after Jefferson's death and sixty years after the fact, by uncorroborated hearsay, Jefferson's granddaughter Virginia Randolph accused her by-now-dead grandfather's nephew, Samuel Carr (“a good natured Turk”) of fathering Sally Hemings's children. The only trouble with this theory is that Samuel Carr had just turned nineteen when Sally Hemings's first child was born and this child had been conceived in Paris. Moreover, there is no explanation why Samuel Carr (and in some cases his brother Peter Carr) didn't come forward in 1802, when the scandal broke (and he was twenty-seven years old), to defend his granduncle's reputation. There would have been no social onus attached to such a declaration, even if he were married, except that it is obvious he wouldn't have been believed. If so, certainly Madison or Monroe, who were Jefferson's closest neighbors and his political allies, and who worked desperately to defuse the scandal, would have attempted it. Madison was Peter Carr's mentor. Also inexplicable is that if it was “well known” by the Virginia gentry that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Heming's children, why wouldn't it have been just as “well known”
that Samuel Carr had been the father? Charlottesville was a hamlet “steeped in duelism sic [dueling] gambling, black dances and miscegenation,”
¹
and Richmond a small southern village of some six thousand souls, one-third of them black and only one thousand of them white males over sixteen, where everyone, black and white, knew everything but maintained a wall of silence. It has been historically proven that Thomas Jefferson was present nine to ten months before the birth of all of Sally Hemings's children, including Paris, France, and that she did not conceive when he was not there. Virginia Randolph lied about this (“understandable” according to Virginius Dabney), but her other assertions about Samuel Carr are to be taken as the absolute truth. The Carr brothers never lived at Monticello after 1796, during Hemings's childbearing years. Moreover, it doesn't take a great deal of research to ascertain that not only were neither of the Carr brothers mentioned in 1802, but that Samuel Carr, for example, in order to have fathered Beverly or Thenia Hemings would have had to do so from Maryland and on his honeymoon.

Of course, in 1802 the story was exploited and renewed by Jefferson's political enemies and the abolitionists. On the other hand, despite his horrendous reputation, Callender had never been caught in an outright journalistic lie. There was always a basis of truth even in his most purple-prose accusations. He had spent over a year in the Richmond jail and environs and six months as the house guest of Richmond newspaper editor Meriwether Jones. Second, many of the newspapers that printed the story, especially the southern ones, made independent investigations of their own and pleaded with Jefferson or his representatives for a denial before going to press. Former President Adams, who had been a victim of Calender's excessive writing and the only historical political figure who had actually met Sally Hemings (in London), believed the story was true and said so. Although Callender is usually dismissed with one line as being “a disappointed office seeker, a drunkard, and a liar,” whose declarations were suspect because they came from a “vengeful pen,” Callender's own version, to a dispassionate observer, seems closer to the truth: Jefferson stood by and allowed the Republican press to attack him, Callender wrote, “when with one single word [Jefferson could have] extinguished the volcano of reproach, but with the frigid indifference which forms the pride of his character, the president stood neutral.” When the Republican press attacked Callender through his wife, accusing Callender of infecting her with a sexually transmittable disease and thus killing her,
Callender attacked Jefferson through
his
wife. He later wrote that “If [Jefferson] had not violated the sanctuary of the grave, SALLY and her son TOM, would still perhaps, have slumbered in the tomb of oblivion.”
²

Of all the information published by Callender on the Hemings affair, only a suggestion that Harriet Hemings was a maid in Washington, D.C., has been proved to be incorrect and Callender had warned that this might be so and corrected himself in a later article. Most Jefferson biographers support their assertions about Callender's false statements with a denial of the existence of Thomas Hemings. But as proof, they cite Jefferson's own farm book as a “neutral,” “independent,” and “dependable” record. Against Jefferson's understandable omission, the newspaper war and its investigations of 1802 beyond those of Callender, must be weighed. The silence of Jefferson and his “sons,” Madison and Monroe, the existence of Beverly, Thenia, Harriet, as well as Tom and the positive assertions of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Governeu Morris, and various southern, neutral, contemporary newspaper editors of the times must also be weighed. Added to this is the fact that Jefferson was with Sally Hemings nine months before the births of all her children, including the most recently discovered child, that she never conceived without him, and that there is no contemporary evidence that anyone believed that either Peter or Samuel Carr fathered the Hemings children.

Of the four major accusations thrown at Jefferson by Callender, only the Sally Hemings story is in any doubt. No one at the time, including Jefferson himself, denied the existence of Hemings or her children, nor their shocking resemblance to him noted by numerous visitors to Monticello. Add to this the recent family publications of the Woodsons who claim descendence from this Tom and have a two-hundred-year oral history to back it up, which has been accepted by the Monticello Foundation as correct (although they deny Jefferson's parenthood); the living descendants of Madison and Eston Hemings; Madison Hemings's 1873 memoirs; the stubborn silence of Jefferson as well as the silence of the Carr brothers in 1802 and 1803; the discovery of still another Hemings child, Thenia, who corresponds directly to Jefferson's return from Philadelphia, and it seems that the balance of evidence is against the “defenders” of Jefferson.

In 1799, the birth year of Thenia Hemings, rumor of the liaison was known to the Virginia Federalist editor William Rind, but he failed to publicize it during the 1800 election. The sources of Callender's information were clearly,
and for whatever reason, the Virginia gentry itself, a person or persons living close to Monticello. Envy, political discord, vengeance, moral righteousness must all be considered. Callender himself, a product of a Scottish, Calvinist upbringing, who could be considered a “poor white” converted to slave holding and racism by his residence in Virginia, truly believed that the public had a right to know the character of the candidates running for or holding public office and therefore his prejudice against blacks would have made the Sally Hemings—Thomas Jefferson affair a particular affront. This was particularly apt in Jefferson's case since the President had used similar means to discredit Hamilton. At one point, Meriwether Jones accused John Marshall and Alexander Hamilton of leaking the story and then turned around and accused Supreme Court Justice Marshall of “not being invulnerable to accusations of miscegenation.” My candidate is David Meade Randolph, a relative of Jefferson who hated him and who had been dismissed from his post as a federal marshal and was having difficulty settling his debts. Randolph had been Callender's jailer when he had served a term in the Richmond jail for sedition. Callender stated that he had moved out of Meriwether Jones's house where he had been a house guest for six months when Jones “modified his living arrangements” by moving in his black mistress. In other words, the newspaper war in which the Sally Hemings affair erupted was one of the most vicious, unprincipled, “nothing is sacred” wars in American history, which by far outstripped in scurrility the previous editorial battles of the 1790s. By the time it ended, the dark side of Virginia society had been dragged into prominence; even the most avid consumer of scandal and yellow journalism had been sated.