| Episodes |
Thrashing the Hypocrite: An Overview
Listen to "The Monster of Monticello" (8 minutes):
James Thomson Callender, who created the Jefferson-Hemings scandal in 1802 to stanch Jefferson's bid for re-election as president, died -- and died, so some would say, an inglorious death worthy of a consummate liar -- in 1803. Jefferson was re-elected in a landslide in 1804 after successfully stonewalling the charges of sexual impropriety. Jefferson left office in 1808 and stayed out of politics completely through his death in 1826. So why later, in 1843 to take just one example, do we find him accused once more of having "a vast number of children" by his "Quadroon slaves"? Why is it necessary four decades later once more to "drag the crimes of this atrocious wretch before the public"? One would think that the scandal had long lost its political value. But, indeed, the story of the architect of democracy's child-producing relationship with his slave(s) vibrated in the public mind for a good three-quarters of the 19th century. So the question is, why didn't interest in the scandal roused by Callender die with Jefferson? What cultural use did it continue to have? The answer is that, internally, African Americans and abolitionists kept the story alive as part of their attacks against the institution of slavery, and, externally, such as in the instance cited above, British travelers to America latched on to the embarrassing story as part of a campaign to discredit American pretensions to founding a society based on the principle that all men are created equal.
Although America had become a separate country with a proclaimed democratic foundation in 1776, connections between the child and the mother country transcended the Declaration of Independence. Almost two hundred years of bonds are not broken quickly. In the early 19th century, as America struggled to define itself as a unique country and form a national identity, England still had a large influence on Americans as well as a vested interest in asserting its own superiority. In 1824, for instance, Americans bristled at Sydney Smith's insulting, demeaning, and infantilizing rhetorical question: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" Culturally, Americans, although separated, were still heavily tied to and influenced by English ways and sought the approval of their mother country, a fact Ralph Waldo Emerson recognized in his famous 1836 complaint that "we have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe." Politically, as the slave trade ended, first in Britain in 1807, then in America in 1808, the conflict between America and Britain -- which would move again to actual war in 1812 -- grew around this issue of slavery and human rights. Both countries were competing to be thought of and to be the supreme liberators of the world.
Therein lies one reason why the Jefferson-Hemings scandal continued to have legs in the 19th century. Large numbers of British travelers to America meant a proportionately large number of British travel accounts about America, many of which were very critical, comparing America with disdain to their English homeland. It is these travel books, along with the writings of African Americans and abolitionists, that kept the Jefferson and Hemings controversy alive. Many travelers mentioned this scandal as a detail in their negative portrayals of America. Slavery was already a major issue for the British, who were deeply troubled that America continued to enslave blacks. Therefore, being able to say that America's president, who claimed to hate the institution of slavery, and who wrote that "all men are created equal," not only had slaves but had sexual relations and children with one or more of them, as well as leaving them to the auction block on his death, was powerful ammunition for the negative slant of British critics. These travel books created a stir in both America and Britain as both countries argued for the superiority of their respective democratic and aristocratic cultural systems.
There were many British writers who referenced the Jefferson-Hemings allegations in their travel accounts (though Sally remained unnamed), including Edward Abdy, Isaac Candler, Francis Cox, Charles Dickens, Mrs. Felton, Thomas Hamilton, Fredrick Marryat, John Melish, Thomas Moore, Hugo Playfair, Edward Sullivan, Frances Trollope, and Francis Wyse. At the root of their criticism of America was utter disdain for the democratic ideal that "all men are born free and equal." Not only did Jefferson father this "monstrous falsehood," this "false and futile axiom," this piece of "mischievous sophistry," but he fathered "whole gangs of slaves" on his "numerous gang of female slaves," delighting in having them serve at "the hospitable orgies for which his Monticello was so celebrated." This "sublime character," this "atrocious wretch," continually "puling" about liberty and equality yet who "dreamt of freedom in a slave's embrace," symbolically disqualified America from her claims of Land of the Free. There can be no such boasts, sang an anonymous Old World poet, in a country in which "Jefferson's child has been bartered for gold!" "Until the Americans consent entirely to loose the yoke and let the oppressed go free, they should cashier the stars and stripes" and instead adopt "the representation of a man wearing the cap of liberty, and brandishing a slave whip in his right hand, while his left displays the Declaration of Independence; his right foot, at the same time resting on the naked back of a prostrate negro.--With this motto: 'All men are born free and equal.'" Powerful rhetorical indictments, indeed!
Perhaps the most infamous account of this scandal by British travelers was produced by Frances Trollope. In an effort to escape debt in England and intrigued by Frances Wright's mission to enlighten slaves in America, Trollope journeyed to America in 1827, one year after Jefferson passed away. Her hugely successful Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) is known for its gossipy tone and characteristic exaggeration, and in it Jefferson becomes one of Trollope's targets, "elaborating the legend," as Moss and Moss say, "to the point of grotesquerie." At "three score years and ten," the lascivious Jefferson "still taught young females to obey his nod, and so became the father of unnumbered generations of groaning slaves." "If I know any thing of right or wrong," continues this appalled English Lady, "if virtue and vice be indeed something more than words, then was this great American an unprincipled tyrant and most heartless libertine." And "his hot-headed democracy," claims this Old World aristocrat, "would make of mankind an unamalgamated mass of grating atoms, where the darling 'I'm as good as you,' would soon take place of the law and the gospel." Did the "venerable" Jefferson, she concludes devastatingly, "purchase his immortality by a lie?"
African American and abolitionist writers tell a similar story, as we see in the next episode. For instance, the plot trigger in William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), the first novel by an African American, is the sale of Jefferson's (for-all-intents-and-purposes) white daughters at a slave auction. Beset by attacks from all sides on the image and reputation of Jefferson as a "great American," then, as we will see yet further on, Jefferson's family comes to his defense. His great-granddaughter Sarah Randolph, for instance, recognizing that "no man's private character has been more foully assailed than Jefferson's, and none so wantonly exposed to the public gaze," compiles a collection of reminiscences to demonstrate that he was "a beautiful domestic character," implying that, as granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge had said, the base sexual escapades across the color line ascribed to him by the British travelers and others were "moral impossibilities."
The "story-line" of the Jefferson-Hemings miniseries in the 19th century, then, is one of tension between the denigration of Jefferson by British travelers, African Americans, and abolitionists, on the one hand, and the defense of Jefferson by his family, on the other, a tension that is ultimately resolved for a time when the family version is incorporated into what will become the official narrative of events in James Parton's 1874 biography of Jefferson.
