| Episodes |
The Myth of Miscegenation: An Overview
Listen to "African American Rumblings" (14 minutes):
Listen to "Squelching the Counter-Narrative" (12 minutes):
On "Black Monday," May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional. And immediately opponents chanted such threats as "Integration the Point of No Return," "Social contact means Miscegenation," and "Americans will be a Mongrel Race." A short time later, no doubt not coincidentally, Ebony, the country's largest mass-circulation African American magazine ("the Negro analogue of Life magazine" according to Merrill Peterson), published an illustrated article profiling several of "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren" -- the fruits of liaisons not only with the "celebrated Black Sal," that "stunningly attractive slave girl with long pretty hair and milk-white skin," but possibly with several other "comely slave concubines" as well. Ebony readers were greeted by a smiling, very negro-looking Dora Wilburn, living alone "in a one-room apartment in a shabby building on Chicago's South Side" but proudly embracing a portrait of Jefferson and, waxing nostalgic, remembering that "My grandmother, rocking in her favorite chair, used to tell me about him all the time . . . She called him 'Grandpa'."
Such white guardians of the official narrative forged by James Parton three-quarters of a century before as Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, Douglass Adair, and, to a much lesser extent, Winthrop Jordan took this story (and similar ones) of the sexually prolific Grandpa Jefferson as a shot across the bow. Sure, signs that the imposing majestic gaze from Mt. Rushmore and the serene sacerdotal figure in the temple-like Jefferson Memorial did not stamp the Sally story out of the African American consciousness were previously evident. For example, in 1935 all-purpose civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois reminded the text book writers that history becomes propaganda when such facts as Jefferson's mulatto children are forgotten, and in 1952 novelist Ralph Ellison almost casually, as if everyone would recognize the allusion, referred to a black character in his classic Invisible Man as Jefferson's grandson -- "from the identical mold. . . . spit upon the earth, fully clothed." But Ebony was the popular press, 500,000 strong. All of a sudden the Jefferson-Hemings scandal was news again. And Jefferson scholar/loyalists felt compelled to respond, to defend, to mitigate the "damage" done to Jefferson's reputation, labeling the Jefferson-Hemings relationship a "tall tale," a "myth," a "legend," "a charge . . . dragged after Jefferson like a dead cat." A new episode in the Jefferson-Hemings miniseries was born.
It looked very much like blacks were ganging up on Jefferson. Lerone Bennett's "human interest" Ebony piece -- which Adair assailed derogatively as a "battle cry" and a "recruiting slogan for militant political action" -- portrayed "proud Negro descendants of America's third president [who] have made the long and improbable journey from the white marbled splendor of Monticello to the 'Negro ghetto' in the democracy their forebear helped to found." Pearl Graham, whose historical researches about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship Jordan tagged "pseudo-scholarly," skewered Jefferson as, "in theory," a man "not so far from Hitler, with his concept of a Master Race," a man who today, among other heinous beliefs, "would sanction South African apartheid." Malcolm X roused his rapt auditors to believe that the "magic words" of the Declaration of Independence so cherished by his civil rights movement counterpart Martin Luther King were written by a man who thought of you as "a sack of potatoes" and "a barrel of molasses," a man who wasn't "talking about us."
White sympathizers, segregationists, and a plain old racially disinterested scholar also added their weight to the revival of the Jefferson-Hemings controversy. For instance, in his best selling Book-of-the-Month-Club selection channeled into hundreds of thousands of American homes, J. C. Furnas hoped to "finally and comprehensively demolish" the "myths pertaining to the American Negro." A reviewer said that Furnas has "taken up mighty arms on behalf of the Negro, democracy, and common sense. . . . [and] leads us to hope that some day we may be able to dismiss unreasonable prejudice which expresses itself in race repression." Goals praiseworthy, indeed. But along the way Furnas notes that "Jefferson was only one of many eminent and sometimes aristocratic slave-owners who left mulatto offspring for their admirers to deny or ignore," and doesn't the Time reviewer compound the intensity of this unfavorable public disclosure by quoting the 1806 Tom Moore poem about Jefferson "dream[ing] of freedom in his slave's embrace."
Segregationists -- such as the Southern Democrats known as the "Dixiecrats" -- drew on Jefferson's racial views in the Notes on the State of Virginia, his life-long slave ownership, and his weak legislative record regarding emancipation to resist integration. Ironically, then, in a pamphlet distributed by the thousands, "Neverist" W. E. Debnam also uses Jefferson's own liaison with a black as evidence of the "shameful situation" miscegenation-wise we are already in, adding the lesson that "just because we've gotten our feet wet in a racial mud-puddle is no reason why the White Race and the negro should jump into the Integration river and drown themselves." And as part of his "image" of America, Frenchman R. L. Bruckberger, another prominent visiting foreigner like the early 19th century British travelers, unexpectedly resurrects, in another Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, the spectre of two Jefferson daughters sold for "unmentionable purposes" at auction in New Orleans, one later committing "suicide by drowning herself to escape the horrors of her position" -- an anecdote seemingly copied directly from Alexander Milton Ross's Memoirs of a Reformer, 1832-1892. One wonders what trail led foreigner Bruckberger to abolitionist Ross, but he too, gratuitously, added to the promiscuous mob piling on Jefferson with what Jordan described as a tale "even less excusable" than Graham's.
The four guardians of the official narrative mentioned above each thoroughly reported on and, we might say, thoroughly investigated the evidence for a Jefferson-Hemings relationship, especially Douglass Adair, whose very rhetorical strategy is to assume a Sherlock Holmes persona objectively following and questioning the evidence step-by-step till innocence and guilt are conferred. The bottom line for all, however, is affirmation of Jefferson's innocence mainly on the persistent basis of the three defenses we have seen before -- the character defense, the other man defense, and the victim syndrome defense -- although Winthrop Jordan adds a fourth. Also, Jordan is less partisan than the other three. He, for instance, acknowledges but denies the persistently powerful character defense:
If we turn to Jefferson's character we are confronted by evidence which for many people today (and then) furnished an immediate and satisfactory refutation. Yet the assumption that this high-minded man could not have carried on such an affair is at variance with what is known today concerning the relationship between human personality and behavior.
Jordan also explores two ways Jefferson, given his expressed views about African American inferiority, might respond to a relationship with Hemings -- one with a "towering sense of guilt" at having given in to his "libidinous desires," the other with a release of tension after a "happy resolution of his inner conflict." However, the other three -- Adair, Dumas Malone, and Merrill Peterson -- are staunch defenders of Jefferson and will come to be known as leading members of the "Jefferson Establishment." As Peterson bluntly says, "The legend [that Jefferson had a relationship with Hemings] survives, although no serious student of Jefferson has ever declared his belief in it."
Dumas Malone -- winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his multi-volume biography of Jefferson, recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Thomas Jefferson Professor at Thomas Jefferson's university -- was the premier Jefferson scholar of his day and the Dean of the so-called Jefferson Establishment. Malone was an ardent defender of Jefferson in this controversy, and so powerful was he that labeling the controversy "The Miscegenation Legend," as he did, and shunting discussion of it to an appendix had almost legislative force on scholarly opinion. Later (episode 8) we will see that he would use his political and prestige power to block a proposed television miniseries on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. Malone assassinates Callender's character, ironically, by calling him "one of the most notorious scandalmongers and character assassins in American history," but such ad hominem attacks on Callender were not unique. What freshens the "character defense" repertoire is Malone's striking representation of Jefferson as "a victim of the slave system he abhorred." If the tradition that Betty Hemings was the concubine of John Wayles is fact, then the noble Jefferson "shouldered and bore quietly for half a century a grievous burden of responsibility for the illegitimate half brothers and sisters of his own adored wife." One imagines a broad-shouldered, tight-lipped, deeply dutiful, long loving, and long-suffering Jefferson taking his lumps for doing the right thing. Truly, as Malone says, "there is material here for the tragedian."
Douglass Adair -- long-time editor of the William and Mary Quarterly, the premier scholarly journal in early American history -- gives us a good example of the revived and enhanced "other man defense." The climax of Adair's carefully plotted analysis is the identification of Peter Carr as Sally's lover, who, as we have seen, was so identified by Thomas Jefferson Randolph via Henry Randall and is the shadow man in James Parton's official narrative. Adair, however, goes far beyond his sources when he poses the question "why did [Sally] mislead her children and conceal their true father's name from them?" Adair's answer is that the Carr-Hemings relationship was a "genuine love match," that Sally had "strong instincts to continence" and "accepted middle-class standards of monogamy," that she was faithful to Peter but he was not to her; so that when he married yet continued his affection, his sexual desire, his deep emotional involvement, and his procreation with Sally, she felt betrayed and jealous. In fact, she must have hated Peter's wife and sometimes him too, taking revenge -- rather than in the more obvious ways of denying him sex or taking other lovers -- by denying to her children, "who were the continuing mark of their mutual affection," the name of their father. This far-fetched climax to an essay that had all the signs of a model investigative exercise may be a sign of Adair's desperation to defend his hero. One is almost tempted to say that, truly, there is material here for the comedian as well as the tragedian.
Merrill Peterson, who was also the Thomas Jefferson Professor at Thomas Jefferson's own university, memorably capsules the "victim syndrome defense" when he includes among the factors responsible for "the miscegenation legend" the "Negroes' pathetic wish for a little pride." The smoking gun in the case of Jefferson v. Hemings, of course, is the memoir of Madison Hemings, which Peterson treats kindly, calling it "more credible" than other accounts: "The recollection checks remarkably well with the data accumulated by scholars on Jefferson's domestic life and the Monticello slaves." But those peripheral facts do not prove paternity, and Peterson dilutes Hemings's credibility by the simple but effective stratagem of juxtaposing it with another slave memoir. "Numerous Negroes" in Jefferson's vicinity "were named after Jefferson," says Peterson, and one Robert Jefferson claimed he "was the son of Jefferson and a house-slave belonging to a Mr. Christian of Charlestown, Virginia," saw Jefferson many times, was often told by his mother and his master that Jefferson was his father, and was named so by his master for that reason. "The story is utterly incredible," concludes Peterson without elaboration, effectively exemplifying in his mind "the flimsy basis of oral tradition" in making judgments in this case. One wonders why it never occurred to Peterson that Jefferson could be the father of both Madison and Robert.
Lastly, Winthrop Jordan, whose White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 is a seminal work in African American studies, adds a new defense to our list, what we might call the "deflection defense." Jordan, the least partisan of the major scholars dealing with the controversy during this period, actually seems agnostic in regard to a definitive answer to the controversy's sexually titillating core question: "In short, Jefferson's paternity can be neither refuted nor proved from the known circumstances or from the extant testimony of his overseer, his white descendants, or the descendants of Sally, each of them having fallible memories and personal interests at stake." Instead, he would turn our attention elsewhere, to the "larger significance" of the controversy, which is "not in Jefferson's conduct but in the charges themselves." Why would "a white man's sleeping with a negro woman" be "a weapon at all"? Why was "the charge of bastardy . . . virtually lost in the clamor about miscegenation"? These for Jordan are the "significant facts" to ponder. More important than who-did-what-to-whom is to realize that Callender "was playing upon very real sensitivities."
For the Jefferson defenders, naturally and perennially, the Sally story is all about Jefferson. Their concern was "the abuse of his [Jefferson's] moral reputation" (Malone) caused by both blacks and whites using the juicy story "as a weapon in current politics to embitter the battle over Negro rights" (Adair). Note: the abuse of his moral reputation. But this slice of the controversy's long history quietly hints that a new dynamic is brewing. What about Sally? Who's concerned about Sally's reputation? Callender, remember, trashed her as a "wooly-headed concubine" and as a "slut common as the pavement." And, noting the simultaneous presence in France of the mature, well-bred English artist Maria Cosway (of whom we will hear more in episode 11) and the 14-year-old slave Sally as romantic options in Jefferson's life, Adair similarly trashes Sally when he questions whether Jefferson "would turn his back on the delectable Cosway . . . to seduce a markedly immature, semi-educated, teen-age virgin, who stood in peculiarly dependent person relation to him." For Adair, that's a no-brainer. But for Pearl Graham, "Any woman who, willing or unwilling, held the close interest of Thomas Jefferson for at least 10 years, and probably well more than twice that time, was no casual light o' love." "Sally was 53 years old when Jefferson died," notes Graham in 1961, and "From this moment, she disappears from history." Not so, not so, as our lengthy miniseries attests. Fawn Brodie (1974), Barbara Chase-Riboud (1979), Annette Gordon-Reed (1997), and Tina Andrews (2000) -- note well: all women, both black and white -- will soon collaborate to move Sally to the center of the Sally story.
