| Episodes |
1) With the publication in 1974 of Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a further question has been imposed upon his biographer: did Jefferson, in defiance of his professed principles and precepts, make the mulatto slave girl Sally Hemings, his paramour, and did she conceive by him children who were reared at Monticello as slaves under the promise that they would be freed when they reached adulthood? Jefferson himself denied this sensational allegation, and the "Sally Hemings story" had, in fact, long been dismissed as a mere political canard until it was revived, refurbished, and given the gloss of verisimilitude by Ms. Brodie.
John Chester Miller xi
2) [Jefferson] insisted that its [slavery's] abolition was "the great object of desire" in the American colonies--this almost a year before the first abolition society was organized in America. Still, when it came to his own private action there was a kind of seesawing, obvious uncertainty, and also evidence of great ambivalence in Jefferson about black people.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 91
3) One sees Jefferson's real ambivalence toward the blacks not so much in his musings about the native endowment, which were complicated by his primitive genetics, but more in what was essentially a gut feeling about the separation of the races. Jefferson wrote with grace and eloquence in favor of emancipation, and introduced and urged legislation which furthered it.
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 57
4) At the very time when we are preparing to exalt those who brought the United States of America into being, and pay tribute to their virtues and their accomplishments, Burr by Gore Vidal and Thomas Jefferson by Fawn Brodie have been published. These best-selling volumes, purporting to be based on sound scholarship, tend strongly to degrade some of the very men whom we, in the Bicentennial, are seeking to honor.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 170
5) To label as dirty graffiti my detailed examination of Thomas Jefferson's 38-year liaison with Sally Hemings, quadroon slave and half sister to his dead wife, as was done by Virginius Dabney, quoting Dumas Malone in TIME [Feb. 17], is a slap at all black people. The Jefferson establishment refuses to look at the material as well as the psychological evidence and persists in denying this most remarkable of our founding fathers a capacity for love. One wonders why. For TIME to describe my Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History as "unflattering" suggests too that the writer of this article never read the book.
Fawn Brodie, "Letter"
6) Gesturing with his big hands, Dr. Malone said that what struck him as most speculative and unhistorical in the Brodie version as not that Jefferson might have slept with Hemings but rather that he carried on the affair with her in Paris and later as president for years on end. A sexual encounter, on the other hand, could be neither proved nor disproved, he conceded, adding, "It might have happened once or twice."
Dumas Malone, qtd. in Campbell
7) Where a biographer spends virtually a whole lifetime with a historical figure, as Dumas Malone has with Thomas Jefferson, and as Arthur Link promises to do with Woodrow Wilson, the involvement is total, and one may look for identification of major proportions. The biographer, inhibited about describing himself, seeks out someone who in some subtle fashion reminds him of himself, or who shares the same conflicts, or who is very like someone who has been of great consequence in his emotional life.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 155-56
8) The stories of what happened to Jefferson's slave children and their descendants, long shrouded in mystery, are now emerging as a flood of information is being released by these long-silent heirs.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren"
9) Still, if it is true that Sally's seven children were also his children, this already illuminates the length and steadiness of their affection for each other and suggests that there may have been much suffering because it could not publicly be honored. A careful marshaling of the facts surely helps to throw light on Jefferson's life and character, and discovering a liaison does not degrade him or her. It may help explain some mysteries, such as why he never married again, and why he lapsed in his later years into ever-increasing apathy toward emancipation of slaves. For it may well be that this special involvement peculiarly incapacitated him for action in helping to change the national pattern of white over black. In any case, the facts may serve to illuminate his general ambivalence--his mixture of love and hate--concerning race.
Fawn M. Brodie, "The Great Jefferson Taboo" 50
10) But two books have appeared recently, both choices of the Book-of-the-Month Club, that are in a quite different category. At the very time when we are preparing to exalt those who brought the United States of America into being, and to pay tribute to their virtues and their accomplishments, Burr by Gore Vidal and Thomas Jefferson by Fawn Brodie have been published. These best-selling volumes, purporting to be based on sound scholarship, tend strongly to degrade some of the very men whom we, in the Bicentennial, are seeking to honor.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers" 170
11) Even if Sally Hemings did, in fact, relate the story printed in the Pike County Republican to her son, the possibility remains that her purpose was to raise him in his own sadly battered esteem and to conceal her own dereliction in having children out of wedlock by one of the Carr brothers. The offense of going "outside her race" (legally, of course, she was both a "black" and a slave) might be mitigated by the exalted station occupied by her paramour. Her story conveys the clear impression that she submitted, not altogether willingly and not without exacting conditions, to the then United States minister to France and later president of the United States, not to just an ordinary white man. On the other hand, as the mistress of Samuel Carr and the mother of his children, she lost the stature bestowed upon her by James Callender. Manifestly, if she is acknowledged to have been the concubine of a president of United States, she acquires an éclat denied every other slave woman in American history.
John Chester Miller 175
12) The story that the third President of the United States had a brood of children by one of his own slaves was first publicized in 1802. The distinction of having given it to the world belongs to an embittered journalist, James Thomson Callender, whose title as the most notorious and most unscrupulous scandalmonger of his generation, or indeed of any American generation, would be difficult to contest.
Dumas Malone, "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life" 65
13) We rode through a meadow filled with kilns. Slaves were everywhere, hard at work. I was surprised to see how "bright" they were. I do not know if that word is still in use at the south, but in those days a slave with a large degree of white blood was known as "bright." It made me most uneasy to see so many men and women whose skins were a good deal fairer than my own belonging to Mr. Jefferson. A number were remarkably handsome, particularly those belonging to the Hemings family whose most illustrious member was Jefferson's concubine Sally, by whom he had at least five children. Recently I learned that Sally is living with one of her sons in Maryland. Apparently the son is now considered white, obliging his mother to keep her identity a secret from their neighbours in Aberdeen. "I inherited the bright slaves from my father-in-law John Wayles," Jefferson sighed. "It is no secret--there are no secrets in Virginia--that many of them are his children." Sally Hemings was a daughter of Wayles which made her the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife. Certainly the girl bore a remarkable resemblance to Martha Wayles, if the portrait in the dining-room at Monticello was to be trusted. Amusing to contemplate that in bedding his fine-looking slave, Jefferson was also sleeping with his sister-in-law! One would have enjoyed hearing him moralize on that subject. Sally greeted us at the door. She was a good-looking fair-complected girl. In her role as unobtrusive housekeeper she was exactly what Jefferson wanted a wife to be---submissive, shy, and rather stupid.
Gore Vidal 196
14) Jefferson's passion for Sally Hemings is attributed by his most recent biographer, Fawn Brodie, to his "normal need for sexual fulfillment, coupled with the attraction of the forbidden." But the truth is, Jefferson was not an ordinary man and there is nothing in his career, other than his putative passion for Sally Hemings, to indicate that the forbidden had an unholy attraction for him.
John Chester Miller 193
15) At some time during the summer, when Cosway decided absolutely against a return to Paris, she [Maria Cosway] found the courage to come by herself. There was surely a letter to Jefferson telling him of this decision, but if so he destroyed it. In fact, in none of the letters Jefferson wrote to Maria, and in none of those he kept of hers, is there evidence that she came to Paris alone in the second autumn. Thus Jefferson demonstrated that he could be as discreet as Trumbull. But come alone she did, as we learn from other sources, and she stayed over three months.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 215
16) For Jefferson was ambivalent not only about slavery, but also about religion, freedom, and power -- ambivalent even about love, which is hardly surprising since in this area his losses were so shattering.
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 59
17) Why did Thomas Jefferson never deny publicly that he fathered these children? The most plausible explanation is that his father-in-law, John Wayles, had undoubtedly sired Sally Hemings, Jefferson's supposed paramour, and five additional children by Betty Hemings. In other words, this group of six illegitimates at Monticello were Jefferson's wife's half-sisters and brothers. With his father-in-law producing one group of mulattoes and his nephews producing two similar broods, it is easy to see why Jefferson was unwilling to enter into public controversy concerning this matter.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 174
18) A careful reading of Jefferson biographies, including the two recent volumes, reveals, however, the curious phenomenon that despite their declared bewilderment over the mysteries of the inner man, Jefferson biographers have been extremely protective of this inner life, or rather of his intimate life, which is not quite the same thing. There is important material in the documents which the biographers belittle; there is controversial material which they flatly disregard as libelous, though it cries out for careful analysis. And there is what one may call psychological evidence which they often ignore or simply do not see.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 161
19) This kind of canonization dominated nineteenth-century biography, and even today the Jefferson scholars wary of the impulse to sanctity are nevertheless often its victim; they glorify and protect by nuance, by omission, by subtle repudiation, without being in the least aware of the strength of their internal commitment to canonization. This we see particularly in their treatment of the story of Sally Hemings. This liaison, above all others in Jefferson's life, is unutterably taboo. Merrill Peterson repudiated the story in both of his volumes on Jefferson, and Dumas Malone devoted a five-page appendix in his Jefferson the President to a detailed denial, which would be more convincing had he not almost totally ignored the most important single document, the reminiscences of Sally Hemings' son Madison. Black historians, however, have long accepted the story as accurate and it is one of the most ironic aspects of the Jefferson image today that the blacks who repudiate him as a hero, because of his ambivalence over slavery, nevertheless believe the historical Jefferson to have been a man of great sexual vitality.
Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 30-31
20) Julian P. Boyd, editor of the massive collection of Jefferson's papers, whose colossal scholarship is universally recognized, terms "the principal defect of Brodie's work the manipulation of evidence, the failure to give due weight to the overwhelming considerations of fact and plausibility which conflict with her preconceptions."
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers"172
21) If the answer to these questions is that Jefferson was simply trying to cover up his illicit relations with Sally Hemings--not to mention the "Congo Harem" he allegedly maintained at Monticello--he deserves to be regarded as one of the most profligate liars and consummate hypocrites ever to occupy the presidency.
John Chester Miller 176
22) According to the episode reported of his own knowledge by Jefferson's grandson, one of his nephews admitted that he and his brother had embarrassed their uncle by their misdeeds. That is, they had had illicit relations with women of the Hemings family. There may have been some uncertainty as to which of them fathered Sally's children, but Ellen Randolph Coolidge and her brother had no doubt that one of them did. These grandchildren of the hospitable master of Monticello were undisposed to say so publicly, however, knowing full well that he would have been wholly unwilling to absolve himself by blaming one of his sister's sons.
Dumas Malone, "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life" 68
23) In our peregrinations in this and Ross counties, we have been made aware that a respectable portion of the population was made up of colored people, who came mostly from Virginia. In our visits among them we have picked up bits of personal history which we have thought the relation would be entertaining reading. We this week commence a series of articles under the heading of "Life Among the Lowly." The subject is Madison Hemings, who claims to be a son of Thomas Jefferson, and who tells a straightforward story. While he never experienced many of the cruelties of slavery, we must say that the system was cruel, at best. To keep such a man as Madison Hemings, in the condition of a slave, however well treated in other respects, was a sin of very deep dye. He is an intelligent man, and understands himself well. If he had been educated and given a chance in the world he would have shone out as a star of the first magnitude. But he was kept under, by his own father, an ex-President of the United States, and a man who penned the immortal Declaration of Independence which fully acknowledges the rights and equality of the human race! This is but another instance added to millions justifying President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation. It did not come a day too soon. Mr. Hemings is five feet ten inches in height, sparely made, with sandy complexion and mild gray eye. And all this accords very nearly with the description given of Thomas Jefferson, except that he was six feet one and a half inch in height.
John A. Jones, qtd. in Dumas Malone and Steven H. Hochman 526-27
24) I indicated the small boy who was now perilously climbing a tree. "Your grandson is going to hurt himself." Jefferson flushed deeply. "That is a child of the place. A Hemings, I think." Since the child was obviously son or grandson to him, I had seriously blundered and, as in law, ignorance is not a defence. It was a curious sensation to look about Monticello and see everywhere so many replicas of Jefferson and his father-in-law. It was as if we had all of us been transformed into dogs, and a single male dog can re-create in his own image an entire canine community, so Jefferson and his family had grafted their powerful strain upon these slave Africans, and like a king dog (or the Sultan at the Grande Porte) Jefferson could now look about him and see everywhere near-perfect consanguinity.
Gore Vidal 201
25) In her recent biography of Thomas Jefferson, Fawn Brodie maintains that "Yellow Tom" was whisked out of sight by the president as soon as Callender's story appeared in the Richmond Recorder lest irrefutable evidence of his carnal relationship with Sally Hemings should come to light. And so Thomas Jefferson banished his only begotten son who had survived infancy and never saw him again simply in order to conceal the proof of his own guilt and to continue his illicit love affair with Sally Hemings without interruption. Ms. Brodie adduces no evidence for this extraordinary incident; we are back with Callender and his dark surmises. The only real difference between Ms. Brodie and Callender is that she dignifies Jefferson's relations with Sally Hemings as a true love affair, one of the grand passions of the American presidency.
John Chester Miller 156
26) It deserves notice that his phrase "all men are born free," which appeared six years later in his Declaration of Independence, and which has been traced with such zealous scholarship to men of the Enlightenment, first came to his lips publicly in the legal defense of a black man.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 93
27) For 169 years there has been accumulating a body of folklore concerning the major mystery of Jefferson's life. Briefly stated, the question is: Did Jefferson, who all his life indicated that he was in favor of the separation of the races and who wrote specifically against miscegenation, did he after the death of his wife have a family by a slave woman? If so, what does this do to the heroic image?
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 58
28) Even those biographers who are wary of the impulse to sanctify are nevertheless often its victims; they glorify and protect by nuance, by omission, by subtle repudiation, without being in the least aware of the strength of their internal commitment to canonization.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 156
29) The amazing thing about Vidal's Burr and Brodie's Jefferson is that so many supposedly intelligent readers seem to take them seriously. It is understandable that these books have sold well, for almost any reasonably literate work that makes sensational charges against revered figures or downgrades those whom we have been taught to honor, will appeal to the groundlings. It is, however, dismaying that persons of presumed discrimination have accepted the slanders in these volumes.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 179-80
30) Jerry Knudson has attacked my Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History in two ways, first with specific complaints about the nature of some of the evidence, second by saying that while many reviewers accepted the validity of the "Sally Hemings story" professional historians did not.
Fawn M. Brodie, qtd. in Jerry Knudson 59
31) Certain black historians, on the other hand, including Lerone Bennett, believe that the miscegenation was real and that Jefferson's descendants dot the country from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. Any defense of this thesis causes anguish and outrage among Jefferson admirers. Why does this story nevertheless persist? Does it touch some chord in fantasy life? Or do people feel that the scholars protest too much? Jefferson, after all, was a widower at thirty-nine. Defenders of Jefferson assure us again and again that miscegenation was out to character for him. But the first duty of a historian is to ask not "Is it out of character?" but "Is it true?"
Fawn M. Brodie, "The Great Jefferson Taboo" 50
32) If the story of the Sally Hemings liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery with an innocent slave victim, as the Federalists and later the abolitionists insisted, but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years. It also brought suffering, shame, and even political paralysis in regard to Jefferson's agitation for emancipation.
Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 32
33) This determined woman runs far beyond the evidence and carries psychological speculation to the point of absurdity. The resulting mishmash of fact and fiction, surmise and conjecture is not history as I understand the term. . . . Mrs. Brodie is not without insight into Jefferson's personality, and except for her obsession, might have contributed to our understanding of him. But to me the man she describes in her more titillating passages is unrecognizable. She presents virtually no evidence that was not already known to scholars, and wholly disregards testimony which I regard as more reliable. . . . Fawn Brodie and Gore Vidal cannot rob Washington and Jefferson of their laurels, but they can scribble graffiti on their statues. It is unfortunate that dirty words are so hard to erase, and it is shocking that the scribblers should be so richly rewarded.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers" 171
34) As regards Jefferson, on the other hand we knew a great deal about his character, motives, ideals, preoccupations, and attitudes. It is on the basis of this knowledge that the man should --indeed, must--be gauged by successive generations of Americans. Jefferson should be --indeed, he asked to be--judged by the moral standards he preached to his daughters, his grandchildren, and the American people in general and by which he judged others, especially Alexander Hamilton. If, then, he is to be accused of seducing a sixteen-year-old slave and having children by her whom he held as slaves, it is in utter defiance of the testimony he bore over the course of a long lifetime of the primacy of the moral sense and his loathing of racial mixture. How could Jefferson hope to escape the avenging Deity who, he believed, struck down whole nations as well as individuals who closed their ears to the injunctions of the moral sense? How can his frequent assertions that his conscience was clear and that his enemies did him a cruel and wholly unmerited injustice be reconciled with the Jefferson of the Sally Hemings story?--unless, of course, Jefferson is set down as a practitioner of pharisaical holiness who loved to preach to others what he himself did not practice?
John Chester Miller 175-76
35) Family matters he discussed only in the family circle, and it can hardly be regarded as accidental that his entire correspondence with his beloved wife has vanished from view. Presumably he destroyed it so that no prying eyes should see it.
Dumas Malone, "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life" 66
36) When, in 1873, he [Samuel Wetmore] decided to begin a series on old colored residents of the area, his system of interviewing was well established. Before talking with Madison Hemings he could have consulted a life of Jefferson, though he sought to give the opposite impression, and he may probably be assumed to have asked leading questions. His Democratic rival, John A. Jones, editor of the Waverly Watchman, promptly published a reply to the story. The contesting editors spoke for their political constituents as well as for themselves in the two documents that are printed below. Let us say in our own behalf that this note on evidence is intended as neither an attack on the sincerity of Madison Hemings, who appears to have been an estimable character, nor as a rounded critique of his story, which we find unacceptable in important respects for reasons not presented here. We would not exaggerate the significance of the fresh light we have shed on the circumstances of its appearance. But, quite clearly, the story was solicited and published for a propagandist purpose.
Dumas Malone and Steven H. Hochman 526
37) In her book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Fawn Brodie conceded that this was truly "a dangerous decision of the heart." At Monticello, in her script the scene of Jefferson's grand passion, love triumphed over all and the infatuated president found solace from the cares of state in the arms of his slave mistress whom he loved more deeply than reputation, honor, and political power. Still, caution was not wholly thrown to the winds for the president did not at any time take Sally Hemings to Washington to share the presidential mansion with him. It was a small, but vital, concession to public opinion.
John Chester Miller 165
38) Jefferson in letters to his friends disparaged the first edition of the Notes as of little value, and warned them not to allow their copies to fall into the hands of publishers, though he suggested, in a contradictory letter to Madison, that he would like to send a copy to each student at William and Mary College. . . . Jefferson was not only uncertain over the value of what he had written, but also apprehensive about the public reaction to what he had said about religion and slavery.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 152-53
39) As for his future as a hero, I am confident, as with the future of Lincoln--whose genius and compassion also rise above his ambivalences--there is no grave danger. But for the specific nature of his future image--there we may well see continuing controversy, endless searching, disenchantment and re-enchantment, and perhaps even a recapture of his essential masculinity
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 59
40) But the three greatest living authorities on Thomas Jefferson [Dumas Malone, Julian Boyd, Douglass Adair] all agree that Mrs. Brodie's book is based on half-truths, unwarranted assumptions and grievous misinterpretation of the known facts.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 171
41) Biographers frequently select the hero as the object of study because for personal reasons of their own emotional life, they have a special affection for him from the very outset. They then devote themselves to a work of idealization, which strives to enroll the great man among their infantile models, and to relive through him, as it were, their infantile conceptions of the father. For the sake of this wish they wipe out the individual features in his physiognomy, they rub out the traces of his life's struggle with inner and outer resistances, and do not tolerate in him anything savoring of human weakness or imperfection: they then give us a cold, strange, ideal form instead of a man to whom we could feel distantly related. It is to be regretted that they do this, for they thereby sacrifice the truth to an illusion, and for the sake of their infantile phantasies they let slip the opportunity to penetrate into the most attractive secrets of human nature.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 156
42) Mrs. Brodie has her obsessive theory and she sends it tracking through the evidence, like a hound in pursuit of game . . . in the end nothing is cornered and we are as remote from the truth as we began. . . . I see no need to charge off in defense of Jefferson's integrity when we have no solid grounds for doubting it.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers" 172
43) The letter below was written in 1858 by Ellen Randolph Coolidge, granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson, to her husband, Joseph Coolidge, in Boston, while she was visiting her brother in Albemarle County, Va. It is now made public for the first time by courtesy of her great-grandson, Harold Jefferson Coolidge. The letter is of immediate interest because it deals with the Sally Hemings story, which has been recently revived in Fawn M. Brodie's new Jefferson biography, "Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History," and which seems to be regarded in certain quarters as wholly true despite the dearth of evidence.
Dumas Malone, "Jefferson's Private Life" 31
44) Apparently, neither she nor any of the other writers who have cited this document [Madison Hemings's memoir] in recent years inquired into the circumstances of its original publication. Any document must be viewed by the historian in its actual setting of time and place, and there is all the more reason for him to do so if it deals with events that occurred long before it was written. This particular memoir refers to supposed happenings in Paris almost a score of years before the narrator himself was born. Our concern here, however, is with the circumstances of its appearance rather than its contents.
Dumas Malone and Steven H. Hochman 524
45) Many of Jefferson's observations about blacks seem today to be contemptuous and racist. Actually Jefferson was trying to write about Negroes as would a budding scientist, looking at them, he said, "as subjects of natural history." His detachment can be seen as remarkable, provided one refuses to become indignant over obvious errors, which were the errors of the eighteenth century. For a white to concede that blacks were superior to whites in any quality, as did Jefferson, set him apart in his own time in Virginia as either radical or quixotic. For a white to plead for total emancipation in Virginia, as Jefferson did, was an invitation to social ostracism.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 158
46) Fawn Brodie is conspicuously free of the rancor and partisanship that actuated Callender. Her efforts are directed toward "humanizing" the master of Monticello by portraying him as the ardent and devoted lover of an attractive slave woman. To explain the eager popular acceptance of this new perception of Jefferson requires recognition of the fact that in the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam era there exists a strong compulsion to belittle the great men of the past, not excluding the Founding Fathers of the American Republic, to the stature of contemporary politicians. It is somehow consoling to believe that Jefferson had a slave mistress, that he brought up his own children as slaves and succeeded in concealing the fact from the American people by lies, evasions, and subterfuges. Finally, Jefferson's romantic involvement with a "black" slave woman serves dramatically to refute his often-expressed conviction that whites and blacks could not live together in the United States in amity and concord. By virtue of practicing integration at Monticello, regardless of what he preached, Jefferson becomes in Ms. Brodie's book one of the culture-heroes of the present-day integration movement -- and this despite the fact that he raised five of his natural children as slaves.
John Chester Miller 172
47) For it is one of the most ironic aspects of the Jefferson image today that the blacks, who repudiate him as a hero, nevertheless believe that the historical Jefferson was a man of great physical vitality, which naturally includes sexual vitality. They believe his descendants dot the country from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. The whites, on the contrary, in insisting on his sexual purity, turn him into a monastic, ascetic, virtually passionless president.
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 59-60
48) Adair's chapter on Jefferson was written in 1960. His assertion that the four documents referred to "prove" Jefferson's innocence seems a bit strong. It is almost impossible at this late date to prove such a thing beyond the shadow of a doubt. But it is altogether possible to indicate, on the basis of these documents, that the master of Monticello was almost certainly innocent. All probabilities point in that direction.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 173
49) The story still waits definitive treatment. Malone does not reproduce or even bother to summarize the remarkably detailed reminiscences of Madison Hemings. Peterson does summarize them, accepting those details which are born out by Jefferson's own Farm Book, and others, but repudiating Hemings's allegations about paternity. Neither Peterson nor Malone volunteer the information that Peter and Samuel Carr were married and living away from Monticello, with families and slave households of their own, during most of the years of Sally Hemings's childbearing. It cannot be demonstrated by documents that either nephew was in Monticello nine months before the births of each of Sally Hemings' children, as recorded in the Farm Book. There is excellent documentary evidence that Jefferson was on hand.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 169
50) But the way one thinks about Thomas Jefferson is conditioned as much by what others have written about him as by the inner needs of the reader in search of a hero. It makes some difference to the hero-seeker whether, on the one hand, he is convinced by the so-called historical record that Jefferson was indeed a brooding celibate Irish clergyman "holding down the lid in the parish" -- in Carl Becker's words, "a man whose ardors were cool, giving forth light without heat" -- or whether, on the other hand, he considers him a casual debaucher of many slave women, as some blacks today believe. There remains, however, a third alternative: that he was a man richly endowed with warmth and passion but trapped in a society which savagely punished miscegenation, a man, moreover, whose psychic fate it was to fall in love with the forbidden woman. The fault, it can be held, lay not in Jefferson but in the society which condemned him to secrecy.
Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 32
51) Rarely has a president been subjected to such vulgarity and rarely have we had so sensitive a president. Nevertheless, Jefferson, following his consistent policy with respect to personal attacks, made no public response of any sort. Some years after he retired from public life he stated that the only answer he ever wanted to make to the slanders of his enemies was the tenor of his life.
Dumas Malone, "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life" 65-66
52) To give credence to the Sally Hemings story is, in effect, to question the authenticity of Jefferson's faith in freedom, the rights of man, and the innate controlling faculty of reason and the sense of right and wrong. It is to infer that there were no principles to which he was inviolably committed.
John Chester Miller 176
53) The insistence of many of these writers that Jefferson remained continent is a curiosity suggesting that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship. The nuances and overtones in his letters are richly suggestive, and the writers most certain of Jefferson's continuing chastity minimize or ignore the relevant fact that Maria Cosway returned to Paris for a second autumn without her husband and stayed almost four months. Moreover, Jefferson kept copies of his own letters to Maria, and all of Maria Cosway's to him. His failure to destroy them tells us that he knew that his daughters would one day probably read them, if not a larger audience. This was one love affair he was certainly willing to share with history.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 207
54) Most Americans who visit the Jefferson Memorial and see the memorable words engraved there: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free," do not know that this is only half of Jefferson's sentence, and that he went on to conclude, "nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government." Those latter words are enough, of course, to destroy Jefferson's heroic image among black students and even some radical whites.
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 57-58
55) The Brodie work is not objectionable simply because it advances wholly unproved charges against Thomas Jefferson. It is even more objectionable because it seeks to show that the alleged fathering of a brood of mulatto children affected Jefferson's whole life thereafter, giving him a guilt complex.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 170
56) Nothing that has been published so far can be said to establish the case absolutely either for or against Jefferson's paternity. But much of the evidence for it is discounted in advance because it would be "badly out of character" (which is admitted to be impenetrable), and because of a common assumption among whites that slaves were only too eager to establish themselves as children of the master, especially if he were distinguished. Moreover, some extremely subtle evidence in Jefferson's own writings is overlooked altogether.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 170
57) Since the publication of my Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), which published for the first time the abundant material supporting the Jefferson and Sally Hemings relationship, descendants of Madison, Eston, and Thomas have come forward with scrapbooks, family Bibles, private genealogies, and pictures that have been quietly preserved over the generations. Their material is an exciting addition to the Jefferson family literature. None of the present-day heirs in one family knows the descendants in the other two families. The black heirs had chosen to remain silent in the past mostly because they were not believed. The whites, descendants of the children of Eston Hemings who "went Caucasian," retained a tenacious tradition of descent from Jefferson but found the connections obscure.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren"
58) Dr. Boyd points out that "among the whole chorus of adulatory critics of Mrs. Brodie's book, not a single Jefferson scholar is to be found. Mrs. Brodie's Jefferson never existed. . . . He is as fictional as the Jefferson in Vidal's Burr," Boyd says. He repudiates completely Brodie's picture of a "despairing, ambivalent, indecisive, guilt-ridden man." Testimony of two aged blacks, published in the Pike County, Ohio, Republican in 1873, on which Mrs. Brodie relies heavily, was "obviously prompted by someone for some unexplained purpose," says Boyd, "being unquestionably shaped and perhaps even written and embellished by the prompter." Malone terms it "in the tradition of political enmity and abolitionist propaganda."
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers"172
59) If Madison Hemings actually told this story to the editor of the Pike County Republican, doubtless he hoped to achieve instant fame as the unacknowledged natural son of Thomas Jefferson. Madison was now an old man and, like most blacks and mulattoes in nineteenth century America, he probably felt cheated by life. In the community in which he lived, he was classed as "colored" and no doubt was treated as such by his white neighbors--which meant that they had nothing to do with him. But if he could prove that he were a natural son of a president of the United States, his position would change dramatically overnight: he would appear not only as good as a white man but as the white man's superior and, as such, entitled to the respect and consideration that had hitherto been denied him.
John Chester Miller 174
60) What Jefferson wrote in the Notes about "the blot of slavery", the nature of black men and their abuse by white men, has caused more controversy among Jefferson admirers and detractors than anything else he ever wrote. Writers of every political complexion and every attitude on race can find something to quote approvingly or disapprovingly from this volume.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 157
61) It could be that Jefferson's slave family, if the evidence should in the end point to its authenticity, will turn out under scrutiny to represent not a tragic flaw in Jefferson but evidence of psychic health. And the flaw could turn out to be what some of the compassionate abolitionists thought long ago, not a flaw in the hero but in the society.
Fawn Brodie, "Political Hero" 60
62) Julian P. Boyd, editor of the massive collection of Jefferson's papers, whose colossal scholarship is universally recognized, terms "the principal defect of Brodie's work the manipulation of evidence, the failure to give due weight to the overwhelming considerations of fact and plausibility which conflict with her preoccupations."
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 172
63) In recent years, two exceptionally able historians have published volumes about Thomas Jefferson. With Malone it is the fourth in his projected six-volume life, and covers Jefferson's first term as president, 1801-1895. Merrill Peterson, author of the brilliant monograph, The Jeffersonian Image in the American Mind, has now published a thousand-page political biography, Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation. Both biographers teach at the University of Virginia, live virtually in the shadow of Monticello, and walk each day in the beguiling quadrangle Jefferson designed 150 years ago. Jefferson is so much a "presence" in Charlottesville, and so omnipresent a local deity, that one cannot help wondering if this in itself does not exercise a subtle direction upon anyone who chooses to write about him. Certainly Charlottesville is the center of the Jefferson Establishment.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 156-57
64) But the three greatest living authorities on Thomas Jefferson all agree that Mrs. Brodie's book is based on half-truths, unwarranted assumptions and grievous misinterpretation of the known facts. All three of them--Dumas Malone, Julian P. Boyd and Merrill Peterson--have devoted the greater part of their adult years to the study of Jefferson, in contrast to Mrs. Brodie, whose other books have been in entirely unrelated fields.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers" 171
65) At the same moment that he [Jefferson] paid tribute here to the superiority of American marriages, he was betraying more than a passing curiosity in "bad passions" and "substituted pursuits." All around him he saw cheerful giving up to "moments of extasy" outside the conventional marriage pattern.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 197
66) It is dismaying that Mrs. Brodie's confused and confusing book has been so highly praised by some non-Jeffersonian scholars in the universities. Written by a professor of history, it has been lauded by other professors of history. Just what this signifies for the deterioration of standards on the faculties of our seats of learning I leave others to determine.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 175
67) There is no Wilson "Establishment" in Princeton, and no comparable Lincoln Establishment anywhere. Jefferson is unique in having at least five distinguished living scholars who have spent fifteen years or more absorbed in and dominated by the multitudinous details of his rich and varied life.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 157
68) Here at the College of William and Mary, where so many of the foremost men in our early history studied, and in Williamsburg, where the heroic Virginians of the revolutionary era made some of the epochal decisions in our annals, it is peculiarly appropriate that we denounce these untruths and half-truths for what they are. The shades of Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Wythe, Patrick Henry, George Mason, Peyton Randolph, Richard Henry Lee and a host of others who made this nation look down upon us here, as we celebrate Charter Day at this fine old institution of higher learning, and as we move into the Bicentennial. Let us remember their great and gallant services, and let us keep faith with them in gratitude for their lasting contributions to the founding of the Republic.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts and the Founding Fathers"180
69) [Sally] was certainly lonely in Paris, as well as supremely ready for the first great love of her life, and she was living daily in the presence of a man who was by nature tender and gallant with all women. For any slave child at Monticello Jefferson was a kind of deity. Since her own father John Wayles had died in the year of her birth, Jefferson was perhaps as close to being a parental figure as anyone she had ever known.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 228-29
70) Despite Mrs. Brodie's repeated assertions that Jefferson had Sally Hemings for his concubine over a period of many years, she reaches the remarkable conclusion that his "heroic image remains untarnished and his genius undiminished." Yet she asserts that the affair gave him a guilt complex for the rest of his life.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 175
71) Malone, on the other hand, is a scholar's scholar. He has dredged up and sifted through untold layers of Jefferson debris, and insists commendably that his footnotes be visible at the bottom of the page. One may quarrel with an occasional interpretation, or complain that he is too intent on sanctification, but no one, in examining any special aspect of Jefferson's life, can say that Malone has not been there before him and left an easily followed and accurately blazoned trail to the documents.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 158
72) He sometimes encouraged supporters to defend his public conduct, but he guarded his personal privacy with a jealousy bordering on obsession. To him religion was strictly a private matter, and so were family relations of every sort.
Dumas Malone, "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life" 66
73) Sally Hemings' arrival [in Paris] brought, too, a sudden urgency about the fate of his own slaves. Before her coming, save for the presence of her brother James, he had little personal reminder of the festering problem he had left behind.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 219-20
74) Thomas J. Randolph, Jefferson's grandson, told historian Henry S. Randall, that Sally Hemings was the mistress of Peter and her sister Betsey, the mistress of Samuel--and from these relationships sprang the great progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. The Hemings girls' "connection with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised by the latter--never disavowed by them," said Randolph.
Virginius Dabney, "Facts" 174
75) The unanimity with which Jefferson male biographers deny him even one richly intimate love affair after his wife's death suggests that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship, especially since they are so gifted in writing about every other aspect of his life. Whether Freud's theory that biographers sometimes relive through their subjects "their infantile conceptions of the father" begins to be an adequate explanation is a matter of debate. But how better to explain the phenomenon of men who insist that this founding father's life is impenetrable and then resolutely close their eyes tow what they must not see.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 171
76) Taking the material gathered in this study concerning planter men who mixed and applying it to Jefferson's case, it seems unlikely that Jefferson was the father of Sally's children. Up to a point Jefferson fits neatly the pattern of the widower as miscegenator exemplified by his father-in-law. One ought not to be greatly surprised to find that he had a mulatto lover among his slaves, but if he did, it probably was not Sally. If it was, he departed the role in two important respects: he did not avow paternity, explicitly or implicitly, for an array of five children or take a very good care of them or of their mother; and he did not seem to maintain the relationship with the mistress until death did them part. If he was the widower father of these mulattoes, he was unwontedly careless about the children. Two were allowed to run away, disappear, and were left like orphans to find their way in the world. The modest care that he did take of the remainder was no more than would be expected for the nieces and nephews of the dear deceased wife and the children of a slave highly favored by his wife and daughters.
Joel Williamson 45
77) So overwhelming is the evidence that Jefferson's affection for Maria Cosway was not casual at all that one must conclude that the historians and biographers referred to refuse to believe the evidence only because they do not want to. It upsets their conviction that Jefferson was a man whose heart was always rigidly controlled by his head; it destroys their image of the supreme man of reason; and, more important, it shatters the tenacious myth out of childhood that the father loves only the mother, and the corollary sentimental legend that one great passion fills a whole live until death. Jefferson is made out to be something less than a man and Alexander Hamilton's ancient canard that Jefferson was "feminine" is perpetuated even in our own time. The ancient accusation in a Federalist newspaper that he was a man "whose blood was snow-broth" lives on, reemphasized recently by Eric McKitrick's description of Jefferson as having "the brooding mentality of a celibate Irish clergyman holding down the lid in the parish."
Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 29-30
78) Jefferson retired to Monticello in 1794, and in 1795 twenty-two-year-old Sally gave birth to a daughter. Subsequently she gave birth to four more children, the last in 1808. On each occasion Jefferson was home at the proper time to have been the father. The children were all very light. Political opponents of Jefferson in Virginia raised the charge that he had sired Sally's offspring. Whether Jefferson was the father or not is problematical and is still heatedly debated. The evidence for Jeffersonian paternity is purely circumstantial-- being home at the right times and the fact that one of the sons very much resembled the master. The argument seems to rest heavily upon the assumption that libido always wins and that something is wrong if it does not.
Joel Williamson 44
79) One wonders if it ever occurred to him that Patsy upon coming home from school on Sunday would look upon the spectacle of her maid newly dressed in stylish Parisian clothes with absolute incomprehension. Perhaps it didn't happen that way. But there is the coincidence that it was early in April that Jefferson spent almost two hundred francs on "clothes for Sally," and that on April 18 Jefferson was appalled to get a note from Patsy formally requesting his permission to let her become a nun.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 239
80) Jefferson may have favored these children because they were his. It seems much more likely that he favored them because they were Sally's. She was free by reason of having lived in France, where slavery was illegal, and if she were free so too were her children. Moreover, Sally and her siblings were bloodkin to the Jeffersons and deserving of special but not lavish consideration, which was precisely what they got.
Joel Williamson 46
81) There is also what one might call hard evidence as well as psychological evidence that Jefferson in Paris treated Sally Hemings with special consideration. . . . He paid 240 francs to a Dr. Sutton for Sally's smallpox inoculation, a very great sum. Shortly after her arrival a French tutor was hired, whose services lasted at least twenty months. A letter from Monsieur Perrault to Jefferson on January 9, 1789, makes clear that he was tutoring "gimme" (Jimmy), Sally's brother, and one could expect that Sally would likely have been included.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 233
82) Further, if Jefferson and Sally had been lovers, the chances are that she would have had ten children instead of five. Given good health, Sally could have borne children up until about 1817 rather than ending that career in 1808; and Jefferson was obviously still a very vital man through 1817. He had retired to Monticello from the presidency in 1809 at the age of sixty-five when Sally was thirty-six or thirty-seven. If they had been lovers, most likely there would have been a continuing string of children-- or we might have hints as to why not.
Joel Williamson 46
83) Now, living under his roof [in Paris], was a swiftly maturing young woman who represented all that had been alluring and forbidden in the world of his childhood.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 229
84) The fact that he was at home at the proper intervals for the five births comes to mean very little when viewed in light of the fact that Sally had no children after Jefferson retired permanently to his home. Indeed, many planters were steadily at home while maids mothered whole flocks of mulatto children without the planters' being named their fathers.
Joel Williamson 47
85) Sally, though only fourteen was almost as mature in person as Jefferson's fifteen-year-old Patsy; Abigail Adams had mistaken her age as fifteen or sixteen. If she resembled Martha Wayles in any fashion, there is no record of it. But certainly she brought with her to Paris the fresh, untainted aura of Jefferson's past, the whole untrammeled childhood, the memories of quantities of slave children, the easy, apparently relaxed and guiltless miscegenation of his father-in-law, the many-faceted realities of black and white in Virginia.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 219
86) Perhaps the best evidence that Jefferson was not the father of Sally's children comes from her side rather than his. Mulatto women who mixed, like planter men who mixed, conformed to certain patterns. Sally fits the pattern of the mulatto maid who had a number of lovers in sequence, not necessarily carelessly or promiscuously but sometimes in a sequence that was so loose that she herself could not be absolutely certain who was the father of a particular child.
Joel Williamson 47
87) But does a man's sexuality atrophy at thirty-nine, especially if he has already demonstrated that he was capable of very great passion? And if he is by nature or upbringing cold and impotent, is not this significantly reflected in his entire personal and political life? All the clinical evidence of our own time suggests a negative answer to the first question, and an affirmative answer to the second. It is true that Jefferson never married again, and the reasons why have been a subject of careful searching in this book. But this searching has been based on the premise that a man's sexuality remains largely undiminished through the years unless it has been badly warped in childhood. Of such warping there is no evidence in Jefferson's life. There is, on the contrary, overwhelming evidence of his continuing capacity to love, though it was always --save for his first passion at twenty-one--directed toward women who were in some sense forbidden.
Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 28-29
88) If Sally followed the example of her mother, she would have been available to her master, but if her master did not want her, she would have taken such lovers as she chose. The great uncertainty about the Jefferson-Sally union is itself strong evidence against its existence and suggests rather that Sally had a number of lovers. Short-run affairs involving mulatto maids usually did not leave tracks. When long-running liaisons were made, the parties were usually known. Mulatto women with steady white lovers could not hide fact and seemed not much to try, either during or after the event. Sex, even then, usually occurred in the sleeping quarters, and lovers had to enter and leave through doors, or at least windows. People saw and knew and talked, unless the meetings were sporadic, which would not have been likely with the widower Jefferson. Sally's quarters were near the big house, access was visible, and no one ever identified a certain man.
Joel Williamson 47
89) Did [Jefferson] write to [Sally] when he was away? Was there ever even a brief note, wishing her well in her study of French? The one record that might illuminate this, the letter-index volume recording Jefferson's incoming and outgoing letters for this critical year of 1788, had disappeared. It is the only volume missing in the whole forty-three-year epistolary record. Julian Boyd tells us that "entries once existed but cannot now be found." This raises the question whether or not someone at some time went through Jefferson's papers systematically eliminating every possible reference to Sally Hemings. Letters from Jefferson to Sally's brothers, and from her brothers to him, are extant. But no letters or notes exchanged between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson have as yet ever found their way into the public record.
Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson 233-34
90) The chances are that Sally had lovers sporadically and in the same loose sequence as her mother, that her children like those of her mother had more than one father, that Jefferson probably was not one of these, being a widower and hence by inclination and training a one-woman man, and that Sally herself would not have been able to name the father of each child, did not feel especially immoral about her affairs, and did not feel much need to justify her motherhood by reference to a father--any father.
Joel Williamson 47
91) About twenty years ago I promised myself that I would write a big book about Thomas Jefferson someday. I was teaching at the University of Virginia, which he founded, and any time that I wanted to I could look up and see Monticello in the dim distance. In the community they continued to repeat a remark of a discerning Ex-President of the United States who had once lectured there. In that place, said William Howard Taft, they still talked of Mr. Jefferson as though he were in the next room. He was there, unquestionably, whether or not any of us really understood what he was saying; and in my youthful presumptuousness I flattered myself that sometime I would fully comprehend and encompass him. I do not claim that I have done so, and I do not believe that I or any single person ever can. Nobody can live Jefferson's long and eventful life all over again, and nobody in our age is likely to match his universality.
Fawn M. Brodie, "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization" 159
92) Jerry Knudson has attacked my Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History in two ways, first with specific complaints about the nature of some of the evidence, second by saying that while many reviewers accepted the validity of the "Sally Hemings story" professional historians did not.
Fawn Brodie, qtd. in Jerry Knudson 59
