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The Birth of "Black Sal": An Overview
Listen to "The Source of the Story" (12 minutes):
Our story -- what Joseph Ellis calls "the longest-running miniseries in American history" -- begins on September 1, 1802, when in the Richmond Recorder James Thomson Callender accuses Thomas Jefferson -- who was then mid-way through his first term as third president of the United States -- of a long-standing, child-producing sexual relationship with his slave known as "Black Sal" and "Dusky Sally," whose real name was Sally Hemings.
It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the President himself. ("The President Again")
In a series of malicious attacks characterized by extreme ridicule over most of the next year, Callender and fellow Federalists flailed Jefferson for the most sordid of social sins, miscegenation, with the most sordid of women. The composite Black Sal is a "Wooly-headed concubine" living in a "pig sty," a "slut as common as the pavement" enjoyed by "fifteen, or thirty gallants of all colours," and possessing a "complexion between mahogany and dirty greasy yellow" with a litter of "mahogany coloured propagation" to match. Callender was relentless in his demolition of Jefferson's character (the demolition of Sally's was gratuitous), also accusing him of making improper advances to a friend's wife, Mrs. Walker, when he was a young man and paying off an old debt with depreciated money to a Gabriel Jones.
Why would Callender do such a thing? Why did he embark on such an ardent mission of rhetorical assassination? You might call it justice; you might call it revenge. Callender considered Jefferson a trusted friend, mentor, and father figure who precipitately abandoned him once his political help was no longer needed. Scotsman Callender, who came to America in the mid-1790s as a political refugee after his attacks on the corrupt British government, naturally gravitated first to the Jeffersonian Republican Party in its clashes with the opposing Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. Jefferson ushered Callender into a writing career in support of his political ambitions, aided him financially, and Callender showed his mettle as a political hit-man by taking on George Washington ("If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington"), Adams ("The reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one continued tempest of malignant passions"), and, perhaps most of all, Hamilton, whom he successfully forced to publicly confess to an affair with a married woman as part of a charge that he used public funds for personal use.
All this effective hatchet work got Callender, however, was a $200 fine (a considerable figure then, enough to cause Callender's family extreme financial distress) and nine months in jail under the Adams administration 1798 Sedition Act designed to silence political opponents writing "with intent to defame" the government or the President, to bring them "into contempt or disrepute," or to excite against them "the hatred of the good people of the United States." Therefore, once Jefferson was elected in 1800, Callender expected restitution for his sacrifice as political martyr and reward for his service as political warrior, including the patronage job as postmaster of Richmond. When Jefferson inexplicably went deaf, however, Callender turned parties, turned coat, and turned vicious. His goal was to thwart Jefferson's re-election in 1804.
What success, what impact did Callender's mudslinging have? In the short-term, considerable. At least in terms of political "noise." The "Sally Story" created an immediate stir across the country. Within a week of publication, Federalist promotion of the story forced Republican demurs and defenses and generated a newspaper war of significant proportion. That the Callender-inspired scandal provided perfect fodder for the Federalist attack machine can best be seen by the series of satirical poems that appeared in the Port-Folio, the leading Federalist newspaper of the day. Readers, for instance, were regaled by the voice of the "Great Man" as love poet rhapsodizing over the flat nose, sable skin, kinky hair, and thick lips of his "sooty bride"; as mischievous "Sage of Monticello" parodying both the patriotic Yankee Doodle song and his own Notes on the State of Virginia to celebrate "Monticellian Sally's" perfumed sweat "between a pair of sheets"; as tipsy husband among a party of revelers calling for "whiskey in bumpers" as prelude to a night of carnal ecstasy with his "yellow joy"; and as "demi-god" who wears a "transient veil of soot" to "sneak" into Sally's bed where he "insults the ashes of his wife" by giving "his white girls a yellow brother."
How did Jefferson respond to these vicious personal charges and these pesky attacks on his political career? For all intents and purposes, he ignored them. He did not even say publicly, I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Hemings. Instead, he said nothing specific publicly at all about Callender's allegations. Jefferson's response strategy to the salacious brouhaha going on around him, then, was a studied "no comment" -- a refusal to recognize Callender's charges as worthy of acknowledgment, a refusal to stoop to Callender's level of discourse. In a few private letters, however -- no doubt spinning for posterity as well as local consumption -- Jefferson characterized his past financial relationship with Callender as "mere charity" rather than a political partnership, labeled him a "lying renegado from republicanism," described himself as "mortified" at Callender's "base ingratitude" that presents "human nature in a hideous form," and declared "He knows nothing of me which I am not willing to declare to the world myself." Years later and out of office, Jefferson would say that he hoped that the "tenor" of his fifty years of public life would answer the "federal slanders," for "I should have fancied myself half guilty had I condescended to put pen to paper in refutation of their falsehoods, or drawn to them respect by any notice from myself."
Well, how did Callender's mudslinging campaign end? What effect did all this political commotion have? The surface facts are that Callender dies ignominiously in July 1803, and the chain of events that he set in motion do not achieve their goal since Jefferson is re-elected to a second term as president by a huge margin, winning over 90% of the electoral college vote. Score one for the good guys. Callender was never loved. And the nature of his death seemed almost justified by the quality of his life. Meriwether Jones, his sole eulogist, admittedly no friend, describes it thus: cheated financially, destitute, alienated from political party and personal family, perpetually intoxicated, not eating, "putrid with his own filth," threatening suicide, Callender was found literally dead drunk in less than three feet of water, perhaps "putting an easy end to his life." Tragic, yes, pathetic, yes, but justice was levied on the scandalmonger, the man who done Jefferson wrong. End of story.
But, no. The Jefferson-Hemings controversy should have died with Callender in 1803. Or at least with Jefferson in 1826. But it didn't. It had political legs. It had emotional talons. Above all, it may even have had truth. The surface facts don't tell all. The story lived on in mainstream white public consciousness in the early 19th century where it was eagerly embraced by British traveler-critics intent on exposing the hollow rhetoric of American equality with the help of the callous hypocrisy of the man who invented it. And the story lived on in the subterranean oral tradition of slaves where the fate of the "African Venus" and "sable Helen" of Federalist lore would emerge in the first novel by an African American to eclipse interest in the Great Man himself. In fact, in 1803 and 1826 the Jefferson-Hemings miniseries was just beginning.
