| Episodes |
Tales of Two Families: An Overview
Listen to "Whom Do You Trust?" (13 minutes):
James Thomson Callender's scandalmongering 1802 expose of a miscegenistic relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (whom Jefferson slave Isaac described tantalizingly as "mighty near white" and "very handsome," with "long straight hair down her back") was the story that wouldn't die. As we saw in the previous two episodes of our miniseries, British travelers intent on finding ways to criticize America's declaration of humanitarian ideals as well as African Americans and abolitionists intent on engineering the end of slavery perpetuated the scandal well into the 19th century. Now, however, in this episode the "plot" of this slice of the long history of the scandal is the tension between two competing oral traditions, that of the "white" Jefferson family on one side, anchored by the 1858 letter of Jefferson granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge, and that of the "black" Jefferson family on the other, anchored by the 1873 memoir of Madison Hemings, Sally's next-to-youngest child. Imagine the heads of these traditions in conversation. "There are such things as moral impossibilities," pontificates Coolidge. To which Hemings compellingly replies, Thomas Jefferson is "my father" -- my mother told me so. Would that such a meeting could have happened. It would have been wonderful to see.
Throughout the 19th century Jefferson's immediate family, his associates, and his supporters were vividly aware of, personally affected by, and compelled to neutralize continued damage to Jefferson's image and reputation from Callender's vindictiveness. For instance, Coolidge highlights the "charge" of "yellow children" made against her grandfather, while Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon foregrounds the "great deal of talk" surrounding the freeing of Harriet Hemings. Grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph puzzles over what motivates such calumnies aimed at "Men who lived and died without reproach." And Sarah Randolph mounts a memorial to her great-grandfather's private character, since no man's "has been more foully assailed than Jefferson's." Taken together, these personal-family and working-family members employed such rhetorical moves as the "character defense," the "other man defense," and the "victim syndrome defense" to exorcise their personal demons and to exonerate their beloved Jefferson.
Each of these three rhetorical strategies can be handily seen in Coolidge's letter to her husband. First, we can see what we might call the "character defense" when Coolidge puts it "to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable to his domestic character as Mr. Jefferson, so devoted to his daughters and their children, so fond of their society, so tender, considerate, refined in his intercourse with them, so watchful over them in all respects, would be likely to rear a race of half-breeds under their eyes and carry on his low amours in the circle of his family." Coarsely stated, can such a Father-of-the-Year be at once such a slimy weasel? In Coolidge's memorable phrase, that would be a "moral impossibility."
Her brother Jeff Randolph, he who "slept within sound of [Jefferson's] breathing at night," adds that such co-habitation with Hemings would be physically impossible as well, since Jefferson daughter Martha's "large family occupied the same wing of the building: the private access to their apartments ever contiguous." To Randolph, then, the Jefferson accused for half a century of enjoying a long-lasting and satisfying liaison with "dusky Sally" was "chaste and pure" in character, and, in a phrase as memorable as his sister's, as "immaculate a man as God ever created."
Great-granddaughter Sarah Randolph's book is the character defense writ large. "I do not in this volume write of Jefferson either as of the great man or as of the statesman," she coos, "My object is only to give a faithful picture of him as he was in private life -- to show that he was, as I have been taught to think of him by those who knew and loved him best, a beautiful domestic character." Jefferson the beautiful domestic character of family memory routs Jefferson the pig-sty frequenter of Callender creation. Here is Jefferson the dutiful child overflowing with "filial devotion"; the dutiful husband who tended his dying wife for weeks before her death and grieved inconsolably for weeks after; the dutiful father of three whose "watchful care and tender love, supplied the place of the mother they had lost"; the dutiful student devoting "nearly three-fourths of his time to his books"; the "great lover of nature" daily riding horses till the day of his death; the graceful man whose house was a testament to the fine arts; the philosopher whose mind contemplated the universe. Here is Jefferson in the family circle it would be a moral impossibility to imagine him blaspheming with low amours. "I shall be more than rewarded for my labors," says Randolph the domestic hagiographer, "should I succeed in imparting to my readers a tithe of that esteem and veneration which I have been taught to feel for him by the person [Thomas Jefferson Randolph] with whom he was most intimate during life."
The second mode of deflecting scandal from Jefferson employed by his "white" family and associates is what we might call the "other man defense." Coolidge, on the basis of a conversation with her brother, delivers a knock-out punch to the Jefferson detractors, accusing the Carr brothers, Samuel and Peter Carr, Jefferson's nephews, of sexual indiscretions, and specifically naming Samuel Carr as Sally's likely partner in the low amours:
Now I will tell you in confidence what [Thomas] Jefferson [Randolph] told me under the like condition. Mr. Southall and himself young men together, heard Mr. Peter Carr say, with a laugh, that "the old gentlemen had to bear the blame of his and Sam's (Col. Carr) misdeeds." There is a general impression that the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of Col. Carr, the most notorious good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio kept at other men's expense. His deeds are as well known as his name.
Ten years later biographer Henry Randall would report that he received basically the same story about the Carrs -- though in this version Peter is Sally's lover -- from Randolph himself. This news is stunning! Now Jefferson defenders have an option, other names to utilize, and one, Samuel, that of a known rogue not likely to receive a character defense. Bacon or his editor, on the other hand, withholds the identity of his "other man," but he is sure of one nonetheless. His response to the gossip about Harriet Hemings is to say "People said [Jefferson] freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter; she was ......'s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother's room many a morning, when I went up to Monticello very early." So Ellen Coolidge, Jeff Randolph, Edmund Bacon, and even Sarah Randolph, who speaks of Jefferson's "beautiful domestic character," are witnesses for the defense.
With the newspaper publication of his memoir in 1873 and corroboration by former Jefferson slave Israel Jefferson shortly thereafter, Madison Hemings becomes the key witness for the prosecution of the paternity case against Jefferson and calls forth the third defense, what we might call the "victim syndrome," present in Coolidge's letter but articulated with most clarity and conviction by John A. Jones. There is no doubt, says Coolidge, citing a "notorious villain . . . black as a crow" who falsely proclaimed himself Jefferson's son, that slaves -- dehumanized victims of an unjust social system -- will adopt a master's name for badly needed personal stature. The Madison Hemings memoir, however -- though much ignored or discounted over the years before becoming the foundation for major books in the controversy by Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon Reed -- raises the ante considerably. Brodie calls it "the most important single document" in the controversy. The memoir provides first-person evidence from Sally Hemings herself not only about the relationship with Jefferson but about the "extraordinary privileges" he promised her in Paris. Hemings reveals his mother's Paris pregnancy, details her bargain to return to America with Jefferson in exchange for freedom for her children, names Jefferson as his father, describes Jefferson's relationship with his slave children, portrays the lives of his siblings, and adds much more in a personal way about Jefferson's black family. In short, Hemings is a formidable opponent.
One of the ways that Jones, editor of a rival newspaper, discredits Hemings's story is to assert that slaves taking their master's names are common -- "there are at least fifty negroes in this county who lay claim to illustrious parentage" -- and if all of the rumors of a liaison between master and slave were given attention, "the 'master' would have to bear the odium of all the licentious practices that are developed on the plantation." It's natural, claims Jones, for those victimized by slavery to seek a sense of pride by taking the identity of the master. Jones does not discredit Madison for what he believes to be misinformation, for he, after all, is just reporting what his mother told him, but, rather, he blames Sally for taking Jefferson's name rather than acknowledging "that some field hand, without a name, had raised her to the dignity of a mother."
So, like Frost's two roads diverging in a wood, two oral traditions, each with a different "husband" for Sally, diverge in our miniseries. Which version would become the official narrative of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship? That would be the job of Henry Randall and James Parton, Jefferson's two major 19th century biographers, to decide.
