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Making It Official: An Overview
Listen to "The Official Remembrancers Speak" (7 minutes):
Those of us who know our Jefferson as the sober, solemn, sanctified Jefferson of Ken Burns' 1997 video documentary would be surprised at the number of articles criticizing Jefferson's "character" in the early and middle 19th century, with his "infidel" views on religion causing the most rhetorical heat. Beginning around 1880 and then bursting "in remarkable efflorescence at the turn of the century," however, Merrill Peterson finds that "the recognition of [Jefferson's] 'beautiful domestic character' helped to dispel the legends of the man of bronze and the political monster." The main dispellers were the filio-pietistic Sarah Randolph (1871), as we have seen in the previous episode in our miniseries, and Jefferson biographers Henry S. Randall (1858) and James Parton (1874), as we will see here. Previous biographies focused on Jefferson's public affairs, but Randall was "the first historian to add sweet and mellow [personal] touches to the Jefferson image" -- so much so that he was criticized for making Jefferson "ridiculous by overpraise." And Parton's legend-making included such episodes as that of the romantic but fictional Thomas and Martha cozily sharing a luckily discovered bottle of wine after a treacherous wedding journey in a fierce snow storm to the horribly dreary little cottage then atop barren Monticello -- a cute story that even shows up in Burns. "Nothing written before" Parton's history, Peterson concludes, "so clearly foreshadowed the emergence of Jefferson as a hero of American culture."
How does the Jefferson-Hemings scandal play in this nearly century-long debate over Jefferson's character? Consonant with the gradual shift of attention from Jefferson's public to his private life, the early histories and biographies do not mention the scandal at all. For instance, B. L. Rayner's biography (1832), published just six years after Jefferson's death, deals only with such political aspects of Jefferson's engagement with slavery as his bill for liberation as a freshman Virginia representative and a later bill to curb the sale of slaves. And George Tucker's biography five years after Rayner contains a section on Jefferson's opinions on slavery and a discussion of arguments for and against emancipation -- and that's all. So it is only in the histories of Randall and Parton that the tension between the "white" oral tradition and the "black" oral tradition outlined in the previous episode is resolved. Let there be no more suspense. Unsurprisingly, the "white" tradition wins. Interestingly, Randall was personally tapped in to the Jefferson family story emanating from Ellen Randolph Coolidge and Thomas Jefferson Randolph that we looked at in the previous episode, and, though he didn't explicitly use it, he passed it along to Parton who did. Thus, James Parton's Life of Thomas Jefferson (1874) for all intents and purposes killed and embalmed the story that would never die, producing the Jefferson family version of events as the official narrative of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship that would hold for the next seventy-five years.
For Randall in his Life of Thomas Jefferson (1858), the Callender story is "pseudo 'history'," of which the accusation of Jefferson "converting his house into an African brothel" is only one of several false charges and whose only elaboration is briefly in a footnote. The real history is Jefferson's own account of his relation with Callender as one of "charity" in the letters to James Monroe of July 15 and July 17, 1802 -- letters with which Randall opens, gives in full, and gives without much adieu. Therefore, Jefferson's self-defense greets the reader and literally dominates Randall's account. Callender, on the other hand, is subjected to Randall's ruthless character assassination. Callender, a "common blackguard," a drunk, a "pertinacious mendicant," was sunk in brutality, was sinking into a "further deep" of infamy, was sinking further into madness. Callender's writings -- not even worth reading over again while writing his book, Randall says -- "commenced a foul outpouring of personal calumnies" from others that swelled into a "putrid stream" of "monstrous fabrications," the financial success of which for him did not stem his plunge "deeper in debauchery." "Bloated and noisome, [Callender] reeled from one den of infamy to another," eventually drowning in the James River, where "he had gone to bathe in a state of intoxication."
In addition to 1) putting, in effect, Jefferson on the stand in his own defense and 2) trashing Callender's character, Randall had a third attack strategy that, however, he was sworn not to use. In a letter about the "Dusky Sally Story" to fellow biographer Parton ten years later (1868), Randall revealed that he had "inside" information from Jefferson grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph that Sally "Henings" was the mistress of Peter Carr -- not the Samuel Carr identified by his sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge, as we saw in the previous episode, but close enough. In addition to Randolph's affirmations of the purity of Jefferson's character that we heard in Coolidge's letter as well, Randall added two other important aspects to the story. First, he recounted that Randolph confronted the Carr brothers, Jefferson's nephews, over the injustice of the blame Jefferson was taking for the mulatto children, and the teary brothers admitted their shame for bringing this "disgrace on our poor old uncle who has always fed us!" Secondly, Randall recounted that Jefferson's daughter Martha only spoke to her sons one time about the scandal and used Jefferson's Farm Book to prove by matching conception and birth dates that Jefferson could not have fathered one of Sally's sons -- a fact that Randall was able to confirm himself from the Farm Book. Ironically, Randolph prohibited Randall from printing this damning implication of Peter Carr that would clear his grandfather, which it seems was the goal of all Jefferson's kin. Why Randolph's fear of haunting by the shade of Carr should outweigh haunting by the shade of Jefferson is not clear.
Parton discusses the scandal in the context of campaign lies, a phenomenon of American elections originating, he says, circa 1800. The "Dusky Sally" story -- that "Monticello swarmed with yellow Jeffersons," that Jefferson had a "Congo Harem" -- was one of several such campaign lies aimed at Jefferson. Significantly, Parton is aware of the recent claim of Jefferson's paternity in Madison Hemings's 1873 memoir, calling him the "respectable Madison Henings [sic], now living in Ohio," and he meets the claim head-on, using Randall's testimony about the correlation of dates in the Farm Book to declare that "Mr. Henings has been misinformed," saying also that "the father of those children was a near relation of the Jeffersons, who need not be named." "In view of recent [Hemings's memoir, I suppose] and threatened [an interesting word choice -- we wonder to what he refers] publications," however, Parton, as further evidence, goes on to quote a goodly portion of Randall's letter, still without mentioning Peter Carr by name.
So, by the time we get to Parton in 1874, the case for Jefferson's defense has four virtually first-person components: Ellen Coolidge's testimony about Samuel Carr, Thomas Jefferson Randolph's testimony about Peter Carr, Martha Jefferson Randolph's analysis of the Farm Book data, and Henry Randall's corroborating analysis of that data. Official narrative complete. Case closed. Thus, two decades later the magisterial historian Henry Adams makes no big deal about the sexual charge in regard to a man whom, in any event, he considers as having a "feminine" nature. Callender is a notorious slanderer, Adams says, shrugging off the "Black Sally" story as resting "on a confusion of persons which could not be cleared up." And four decades later, John T. Morse, editor of the popular American Statesman series, would describe how bucket upon bucket of "gossip about Jefferson's graceless debaucheries were sent into every household in the United States" from Callender's "foul reservoir."
The identification of America with Jefferson and his elevation to political sainthood that we are so familiar with today seems to have begun with Parton. "If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong," Parton famously wrote, and "If America is right, Jefferson was right." The Callender episode and the Sally Hemings scandal basically disappear from view after Parton's whitewash courtesy of the Jefferson family via Henry Randall, and Jefferson's reputation evolves gloriously into the 20th century. Jefferson appears on both the nickel and the first-class mail stamp in 1938. In the 1930s and 1940s no whisper of Black Sally in the Black Hills or on the blue Potomac taints his glorification on Mt. Rushmore and in the Jefferson Memorial. On the day of the dedication in 1943, Dumas Malone said the Memorial "signifies in a tangible way [Jefferson's] recognition as a member of our Trinity of immortals, with Washington and Lincoln." But, little remarked, a panel at the Memorial shuns even the reality of Jefferson as a slave owner or a slave-worrier much less as slave lover, distortingly shaving "nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government" from the end of the following optimistic quote about emancipation:
God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.
It is not until racial unrest in the 1950s Civil Rights era that the issue of Jefferson's intimate relations with Sally is revived and gains visibility and political viability -- and credence -- once more.
