Sally
Seems these last few years we’ve come again to confront racism and slavery—America’s original sin. This, unlike the biblical one, existed at the nation’s founding. Why it still inflames too many hearts and is mourned mostly by the minority that endured it, could be in the genes. Possibly I’d just lost track, and it had never truly left.
When I was a kid, I spent years being lost in the swamp of what had come before in my adopted land, too busy being a kid to recognize it. Among all the war games we played, the Civil War stood out. Too much a part of where I lived, what I was hearing, reading, tying to balance being an outsider in the Old South.
Had my mother returned us to Pennsylvania instead of remaining in South Carolina after our father’s death, how might that have turned out? “Well, it was cheaper,” she’d say, though to this day, I wonder, even as I know growing up in the South is part of who I am, an Irish mutt from Sumter.
The rebels seemed dashing back then, and were the better fighters, so the local myth was told. Besides, I could see the rebel battle flag was more striking than the U.S. flag—l liked the early U.S. flag with thirteen stars in a circle, but patriotism aside, the one we have now isn’t the greatest graphic design. Some things don’t take that much consideration.
WW II was harder to recreate in the back woods. Since my mother, grandmother and dead father had lived through WW II, it wasn’t to be overlooked. We children were told our father had taken a job in the Red Cross because his lungs, ruined in the mine explosion, kept him out of the army. He was a stern man in the photographs—was all I knew.
My buddy, Barry and I had no tanks and bombers, so for recreating WW II we used toy soldiers. I had a plastic tommy gun and no idea how I came by it. Hard to think my gentle mother would buy it—especially not for Christmas. But if we weren’t playing football, it was into the woods for practicing our adventures.
In the 50s, the division of labor between the sexes began at birth. Just as in the Old South, the distinction between Black and White was a salient line not ever to be violated.
Making a pretend musket was easy enough, likewise sidearms and swords. So the Civil War and the American Revolution were our go-to games—even the nuns taught them. Both wars were modeled in the imagination on the swampy land that went on forever—at least a mile—beyond our backyards in Sumter, the town, not the fort.
General Sumter held title, but Francis Marion, the legend know as the Swamp Fox, was way cooler in my playacting days. It wasn’t the allure of an actual swamp, but what a nom de guerre! Tarleton’s dragoons chased him all over our part of South Carolina, but could never catch him. The books I read about the American Revolution didn’t paint Tarleton as much a military genius as a barbarous Brit.
Banastre Tarleton—portrait by Joshua Reynolds
“Rebels been rebels since I don’t know when,” like Don Henley wrote, and in South Carolina both wars were definitely patriotic—no difference. Far as the Old South was concerned, the ‘War of Northern Aggression’ still wasn’t over in my youth. Both innocents, Barry and I played rebels and yanks, with only a vague notion of the 650,000 plus men and boys killed in that obscenity. And nothing about how the slaves faired.
The darkies must have arrived like an immaculate conception. And the plantation owners surely loved their mammies and cotton pickers, looking after ‘em like they children. Catholic school history did teach that slavery was bad, though only in the abstract; they didn’t discuss much of it in detail. The nuns also taught sex was an evil best kept hidden inside marriage.
Both were points laid against one particular founding father—but lord, could he turn a phrase.
Monticello in the 1800s—photo in the University of Virginia Library
Thomas Jefferson
Though leftists are now demanding Jefferson be taken off his pedestal for being a slaveholder. Indeed he was—he’d inherited both land and the people to cultivate it from his father, then more through his wife, Martha’ inheritance.
Purity tests abound today, though the gatekeepers as a collective seem wrothful enough to kick any cat they come on. Everybody is talking in UPPER CASE! Paraphrasing Caitlin Flanagan, writer for the Atlantic magazine, some on the left want us to think in sound bites like six-year-olds again. Not like I’d say being a slaveholder was his most redeeming virtue—even Jefferson knew that about Jefferson.
Jefferson was a literate man of the colonial aristocracy and better educated than most in Virginia, if lacking funds. But dreams, aye, he had dreams. For most of our history, Whites have tended to forgive him some of his foibles, and erase the rest, even after the stories resisted being buried.
Monticello—‘little mountain’ in Italian—still sits overlooking Charlottesville. Jefferson spoke flurant French and studied Palladio—did he know Italian as well? One wonders if Jefferson’s ghost is looking down on the university he helped found. It’s done well in the meantime, so he can take satisfaction in that.
Back when Jefferson was President, a certain pamphleteer, James T. Callender, took him to task, accusing him of fornicating with a slave. Sally was Martha Jefferson’s slave, inherited from Martha’s father, John Wayles, though little else is known about Sally. When Martha’s father died, Sally, her mother and the rest of Wayles’s slaves came to Monticello.
“It is well known that the man, Whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age.”
from James Callender’s newspaper article.
To be clear, there’s no evidence that Sally Hemings ever had a child named Tom, though she did have six all told. The stories of Callender’s political feuds, first with the Federalists then turning on Jefferson, are covered extensively in histories of the era. The journalism of the day was full of half truths, gossip and slander; such was what funded publications long before the New York Post and Access Hollywood.
As slaves, African American women birthed children sired by their White slave masters. Widely known if not acknowledged in polite southern society in that time. Widely enough practiced to show up today in genetic tests. It was pointed to by Abolitionists as an evil product of the ‘peculiar institution,’ (coined by John C. Calhoun himself)
Consider but one point, the word ‘quadroon’ a well enough known phrase to land in the dictionary:
“Quadroon: One who is the offspring of a white person and a mulatto; one who has a quarter of Negro blood. One who is fourth in descent from a Negro, one of the parents in each generation being white. [emphasis added]
“In early Spanish use chiefly applied to the offspring of a white and a mestizo, or half-breed Indian. When it is used to denote one who is fourth in descent from a Negro, the previous stage is called a terceron: see the transl. of Juan and Ulloa's Voyage (1772) I. 30, and cf. quintroon.”
from the Oxford English Dictionary.
Our European ancestors were precise in these measurements, even as their morals weren’t quite as considered. Sally Hemings was a quadroon—sired by John Wayles, her mother’s White owner; Sally’s mother in turn had been sired by her own owner, by the name of Hemings. The same John Wayles was the father of Jefferson’s wife Martha, making her and Sally half-sisters, albeit twenty-five years apart in age. One wonders, had they ever met, would either have recognized a family resemblance?
On the face, in the present day we equate the practice with rape—as it undoubtedly was in many cases. Hard to conceive otherwise. If you could sell a mother’s children away, split wives from their husbands, what’s was to say you couldn’t rape them and still be welcomed by the preacher on Sunday?
Though it seems likely there were exceptions. Could be wistful thinking, but I’d like to include Thomas Jefferson in the latter group.
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
It’s a man’s world, as James Brown sang.
The book title above is by Annette Gordon-Reed. I’d read of the scandal years ago, and finished a book by William Howard Adams, The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson, in which he briefly touches on Sally in Paris, almost begging further exploration.
Our colonial forefathers saw all women as righteously under the rule of men, enshrined in practice and law. Some laggards today still preach it as gospel, and argue in court cases whether rape can be crime inside a marriage—back then it was a husband’s legal prerogative, and more so a slave owner’s.
“In 1997, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, showing in detail how historians had traditionally discounted some of the evidence supporting the allegations of Jefferson's paternity of slave children. In 1998, a DNA analysis confirmed that Eston Hemings Jefferson's descendants were related to the Jefferson male line. Together with the historical evidence, the biographers Joseph Ellis and Andrew Burstein, as well the National Genealogical Society, published their conclusions that Jefferson had a long-term relationship and several children by Sally Hemings. In 2010 Gordon-Reed won a MacArthur Fellowship for ‘dramatically chang[ing] the course of Jeffersonian scholarship.’ “
from Wikipedia article on James Callender.
Jefferson sought to be known as a man of moral character—by his writings and by his life. So his supporters argued he couldn’t possibly had had children with a slave barely out of childhood herself. And his detractors point to it as his hypocrisy. As if a widower still in his prime would never be tempted by a young, reportedly beautiful woman in his own household—who was his beloved wife’s half sister said to resemble her? Or that a young slave girl whose own mother and grandmother had slept with their white masters would see it as beyond the Pale?
Gordon-Reed’s book might have used a better editor. It’s built like a well-argued law brief, though starts out a bad narrative. In the early chapters, I had the impression she was picking around the edges of the subject, determined to bat away previous arguments one by one, as if she was batting tennis balls against a practice wall. She goes after Callender, concluding his practice of yellow journalism didn’t preclude his knowing something, if not getting it right. She picks at generations-later white descendants who claimed with no proof another man surely fathered Sally’s children, and earlier biographers wrestling with the same idea.
I was ready to give up on the book, frustrated until reaching Chapter Four, titled Thomas Jefferson. The book’s central argument focuses on Jefferson, the man as he was known. He called himself a republican as opposed to the monarchist-leaning Federalists as the early parties were forming.
“All men are created equal,” leaves no ambiguity about his sentiments; it excludes no one, qualifies no one. Jefferson gave America a founding creed, just as he gave the world.
He suspected Blacks were less intellectual, yet gave them credit enough to admit their constraints under slavery—and educated his own slaves in the trades that might provide them livelihoods should they be repatriated to Africa. He taught Hemings’s children to play the violin—his own musical skill. As President, he finally succeeded in outlawing the importing of slaves—and when South Carolina declared they would reopen the ‘trade’ he saw that effort crushed.
“In 1807, three weeks before Britain abolished the Atlantic slave trade, President Jefferson signed a law prohibiting ‘the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States.’ " [emphasis added]
from Monticello.org, “This Deplorable Entanglement”
Jefferson did not think it possible the two ‘races’ could peacefully coexist in his own country. He foresaw Black anger and White bitterness were the slaves to remain as free men. Nor did he believe that one people had the right to subjugate another, which John C. Calhoun declared was the Black man’s destiny.
Sally Hemings and her children were given their freedom by the time of his death. He did this in the face of what it meant for his sole surviving legal daughter, Martha, and her own financial security. Jefferson died some $100,000 dollars in debt. By today’s standard, over $2 million, a rather crushing figure. It was Martha, her niece, who released Sally from bondage. And from whom would Martha have learned that?
In her book, Gordon-Reed doesn’t attempt to climb inside Jefferson’s head, though she shows sympathy for his being caught between his conscience, his times, and public image. His own writings and actions lay out one side of the argument, creating his own enigma. She is dubious that a man who accused George III of instigating slavery in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, then worked several times to ban the import of slaves to Virginia—could be so base, so cruel, as to rape his dead wife’s half-sister, as he knew full well she was.
This was not a passing affair but a lifelong relationship for them both. For a person who practiced a high moral code in his public life, risking the collapse of his reputation to take Sally as a lover was not done without a price—one that he faced until his death.
Gordon-Reed’s arguments were prescient—writing her book before the release of the DNA research. Once you place the results from the DNA tests beside her argument, it isn’t difficult to believe Thomas and Sally were early lovers who went on to live something as a couple.
At Monticello, archeologists have found what they believe to be Sally Hemings’s room in the basement of the South Wing—below where Jefferson’s own bedroom and study lie. If true, she had lived in his proximity at least since her arrival in Paris at Jefferson’s residence, Hôtel de Langeac as a fourteen-year-old girl.
No wonder Jefferson saw slavery as “this deplorable entanglement.” It was his own entanglement.
Monticello Affirms Thomas Jefferson Fathered Children with Sally Hemings by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation states it is a settled issue. I don’t know whether Jefferson’s living White descendants still dispute this. But the curators of the house have worked to rectify a hole in the historical record. My last visit to Monticello was in the 80s; it might be time to pay another. Monticello.org on Sally Hemings
“Sarah ‘Sally’ Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was a biracial woman slave who was owned by President Thomas Jefferson. Multiple lines of evidence, including modern DNA analyses, indicate that Hemings and Jefferson had a sexual relationship for years, and historians now broadly agree that he was the father of her six children. Hemings was a half-sister of Jefferson's late wife, Martha Jefferson (née Wayles). Four of Hemings' children survived into adulthood. Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835.
from Wikipedia article, Sally Hemings.
Gordon-Reed got several more shots at the subject, including her 2017 essay, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past for the New York Times, which is a good summary of her evolving opinion since her first book. She’s published a second book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.
Does Sally get a vote—a voice?
With the letters Jefferson wrote, the farm books he kept, the house he’d modeled after an Italian architect of the Renaissance, history swirling around him for all his days founding a new nation, there’s hardly a mention of Sally, the woman who lived beside him and bore his six children. And as Gordon-Reed points out, even during his long absences from Monticello, Sally never took another man—least not one who fathered the children she continued to bear. Her grandson, Thomas Eston, was whose genealogy demonstrates the Y-chromosome connection to Jefferson’s family male-line.
And still hardly a mention of Sally.
Partly, these were times when most women weren’t heard unless they stepped out of their role in the home. More immediately, both needed to keep the relationship hidden. Being cast off would not have served her nor her children any more than it would him. If it threatened his reputation, it threatened her survival. Gordon-Reed thinks there is some evidence suggesting some of Jefferson’s volluminous correspondence was destroyed. Otherwise, he was extremely careful not to make mention of Sally outside of the role she played.
Jefferson may have wanted to free Sally and her surviving children a long time before he died, but it would have required he admitting to a sin few in the country might forgive. In the eyes of many southerners it was a sin worse than slavery.
Sally had lived abroad while still very young; she had witnessed two revolutions before she was sixteen, and seen firsthand the complete person, more than any but Jefferson’s wife, Martha. She’d met John and Abigail Adams when she was but fourteen. She must have met Lafayette when he’d come to confer with Jefferson over strategy, while Louis XVI was losing his head.
Did Sally comfort Jefferson during dark times at Monticello? Did she counsel him? Ever accompany him to the new half-built city named for Washington—did Sally ever meet Washington, the man?
For all Jefferson is in the pantheon—his is the one Washington architectural monument one can enter, read his inscribed words, and search sunsets across the Potomac—somewhere nearby stands Sally’s ghost. Such a history as she had witnessed—had lived—and no one knows today where she is buried.
Ah, but Sally, what a ride!
When Sally’s descendants came to Monticello for a reunion, they were honoring their own, and showing justified pride at being Thomas Jefferson’s offspring. And if these descendants of slaves can accept Jefferson as a founding father, I can go with that.