Don’t Know Cacca About Jefferson

Jefferson Memorial interior—photo by Michael Kranewitter on Wikipedia

The Jefferson’s quotes marking the memorial’s interior sample his thoughts on his new country; they go well beyond the usual memorial pablum.

Ya’ll think you know the story? I seriously doubt it, but I’ll grace your claim if you’ll hear me out.

This didn’t start with Linda Caroll’s post, The Hidden Room Where Thomas Jefferson Kept A Woman, though her story reanimated my interest. So if you ran across my response, forgive if I’m plowing old ground.

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Not long after Jefferson retired to Monticello from eight years as the country’s third president, the public scandal had gone cold. When Jefferson wouldn’t appoint him to a postmaster’s position, James Callender turned on him. Though, that sniveling two-faced guttersnipe got what was coming to him ultimately; mainly he up and died. And the locals in Albemarle  County figured the rumors had to be sufficient admonishment to their famous neighbor on the hill, a man known for keeping secrets.

Yet he wasn’t an outlier in early American life. An interesting side note, Thomas Bell, a close friend in Charlottesville, had ‘leased’ a woman from Jefferson named Mary Hemings—daughter of Elizabeth Hemings and Sally’s oldest sister. At some point Mary asked Jefferson if he’d sell her to Bell—and imagine how that went down. Bell and Hemings had fallen in love, or at least had fallen into bed. Bell didn’t come out and declare it, but the locals knew they were an item, having babies and all, and if he couldn’t marry her legally, he’d ‘own’ her instead. They remained together until Bell died—much like Jefferson and Sally.

“Within the extremely narrow constraints of what life offered her—ownership by Thomas Jefferson or ownership by Thomas Bell—Mary Hemings took an action that had enormous, lasting, and, in the end, quite favorable consequences for her, her two youngest children, and the Hemings family as a whole. She found in Bell a [white] man willing to live openly with her, and to treat her and their children as if they were bound together as a legal family… Over the years she would be able to compare notes on her life with a white man with her youngest sister, [Sally Hemings] whom she honored by giving her own youngest daughter the name Sarah (also called Sally), known by the time of her marriage, in the early 1800s, as Sarah Jefferson Bell.”  

from The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Read with emphasis added.

The rumors of his own out of wedlock behavior had gone quiet once Jefferson retired from the field with the Whigs screaming for his scalp on a platter like John the Baptist—and watching the rise of John C. Calhoun, father of southern race theory preaching shit about races inferior to white. His other problem, his running feud with Hamilton? Aaron Burr had taken care of that problem with his pistol at fifty paces.

Jefferson was already dead and gone as far as the Washington wags were concerned. Though the boy was remembered as having laid out a fabulous table while President, having developed a taste for fine food while living in Paris with his personal chef, James—Sally’s brother.

Upon his retirement, Jefferson could get back to renovating his “Little Mountain” beginning with his dream of recreating Andrea Palladio’s dream of ancient Greek villas perched above good outcroppings—of which there are a few in Greece. Jefferson was not known for his monetary acumen, as any architect worth their keep will appreciate, and he ran up a bill on Monticello.

Villa Capri by Andrea Palladio—photo by Marco Bagarella

Plan and section, Villa Capri, Quattro libri dell'Architettura (1570)—uploaded by Marrabbio2 on it.wikipedia

You might also recognize Palladio in the Jefferson Memorial by the later architect, John Russell Pope, who knew his Renaissance history. Of all the memorials and public buildings in Washington, D.C, this has to be the purest example of Greek Revival—in perfect Greco-symmetry. Not all of Pope’s works are as stirring.

Jefferson Memorial by John Russell Pope—photo by Joe Ravi on Wikipedia

Monticello in 1800—photo in University of Virginia archives

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Though, on stepping away from the klieg lights of those days—when candlepower came still from actual candles—Jefferson was also returning to the woman he had fallen for all those years before in Paris. James Madison had encouraged him to get away after his wife’s death, his bereavement laying such a deep depression on him. He must have heard how much Jefferson liked Paris.

Already two years into serving as an envoy to the French court of Louis XVI, getting word that his infant daughter, Lucy, had died from whooping cough back in the States, Jefferson insisted his second child, Polly, be sent straightaway to join him. Sally was assigned to accompany her—a fourteen-year-old slave girl escorting a nine-year-old.

So much of a life, even famous ones, is happenstance—even if we rational beings refuse to admit it.  

Though there’s nothing like an illicit affair with a beautiful teenager half the boy’s age to stir the blood. And Jefferson, from all accounts, wasn’t inclined to celibacy. Thus, the story began.

They say Sally was beautiful, with long, black hair. Then, as now, beautiful women lived in Paris, but Jefferson wasn’t a man to be drawn to physical beauty alone. The several European women he was attracted to were vivacious and intelligent—one might say liberated. And while he admired the freer spirited women of Europe, the far more traditional role of women in rural Virginia wasn’t any more likely to suit them than him once he returned to Monticello. Sally, however, was his before she was his. And it lay at the heart of the scandal he returned with in 1789.

Yet she’d stayed! The central question: why did she?

Curiously, the French indulged in slavery in their colonies, but legislated that slaves brought home had the right to petition for their freedom. Sally had her chance at freedom in Paris, but she returned with him, her brother James and Jefferson’s two daughters to Monticello—bearing his child.

After eight years as president, in 1809 he was retiring to Monticello to live with Sally for the remainder of his days.

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In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published her opening salvo, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American Controversy. Here was this inquisitive academic attorney writing in meticulous prose—asking ‘did they or didn’t they?’ And it’s slow, careful sledding, because she’s only going after evidence of the truth—which she finds in written correspondence, both in what exists and what curiously does not. Even if she’s another survivor of American slavery, she judiciously avoiding editorializing, even about that horror.

It’s as if she feels no need to go outside what’s known, and as you read the book, the facts begin to speak for themselves. Nor does she pass over acknowledging Jefferson, by his influence on the young nation, was a significant player in this original sin.

Gordon-Reed is far kinder to Jefferson that many present-day contemporaries.

Though, be glad no one chases you down as carefully as Gordon-Reed does Jefferson. Or be very dead; then all you can do is scream invectives at the roof of that box you’re crammed into.

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All I wanted was an explanation. But Jefferson had covered his tracks, even if he had not quashed the salacious rumors. Salacious by whose standards? It seems darkly curious that in those days the mortal sin of slavery could be overlooked in the absurdity of keeping the white ‘race’ pure. And it’s depressing that folks still think in such terms.

Being only so-so at research myself, long after the fact and a writer of minimum means, it felt necessary to run these leads down without begging a pass for the Library of Congress, or driving to Cambridge MA for Jefferson’s letters, having to suck up to Harvard grad students to be let into the archives, and other such falderal.

After the fourth or fifth Google ‘page’ of advertisements and cacca, I was thinking the rightwing crazies had a point about Big Tech’s motives, and I wasn’t getting any closer to answering: did she love him or did he love her? Please answer the question—and, no, I don’t want to know where the closest hotel to Monticello is!

Assume for a moment Jefferson had sex with his daughter’s young maid servant, whom he’d inherited as ‘property’ from his deceased wife’s further deceased father. And Sally had his babies. Enough to make you wish for a better founding father? The very thought was enough for his whiter descendants to cover it up with vigor. Sacré blue! as his buddy Lafayette might have exclaimed upon discovering the story. Or not. The French are known to have more tolerance for these foibles of the soul.

Though there it was, a year after Gordon-Reed’s book came out:

“Researchers examined blood samples collected this year from known descendants of the family of America's third president and from those who trace their ancestry to Hemings. In a paper published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature, they report that DNA comparisons all but conclusively prove that Hemings's youngest son, Eston, was fathered by Jefferson.

“ ‘The question for 200 years has been, Did they or didn't they? said Eric S. Lander, a genetic researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-authored a companion essay to the Nature article.

“ ‘There is such a strong case that Jefferson had a liaison with Hemings,’ Lander said, ‘that the DNA evidence converts that possibility into a near certainty.’ “ 

From the 1998  Washington Post article by Leef Smith

I had gotten that far in the tale back when the story broke. I recall reading the research confirming the genetic markers and thought, “well there you go.” And the ‘say it ain’t so’ protests from a number of other quarters, including Jefferson’s more white descendants, I read those too. The Washington Post give the story a fair hearing.

Though Sally Hemings, the woman in question, remained a cipher. For generations, only her descendants were to honor her name.

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It was in the turmoil following George Floyd’s murder that I recalled Hemings’s story. It seemed, in the larger slurry of the country’s argument, that single story wanted to be better understood. I can’t explain why, exactly, but it felt necessary to write something about her, and it needed to be from her viewpoint. Yet I didn’t know where to begin or to find sufficient sources for historical fiction. So I set about buying a few more books—and got lucky.

“ ‘This story is about family and who we are as Americans,’ said Annette Gordon-Reed, an associate professor at the New York School of Law. Her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American Controversy argued that the oral histories of blacks were being pushed aside to protect Jefferson's reputation.

“ ‘We're not two separate people, blacks and whites,’ she said. ‘We're related by culture and by blood. That reality has been denied.’ “

quoting Annette Gordon-Reed from the Washington Post article by Leef Smith

I’ve said elsewhere Gordon-Reed’s first book about Jefferson and Hemings felt slow starting out, mainly because her neutral, lawyerly tone didn’t shade the story to make readers want to turn the page. If she didn’t style the book in breathless prose, there wasn’t a mote she wouldn’t probe to suss out the truth. If DNA is too suspect a science for doubters, I’d urge them to read her book. It is yeoman’s work in service of history.

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Slavery’s molten sludge blankets early centuries of American history, obscuring any clarity. The same plantation culture that settled half the thirteen colonies, the New York and New England mercantile traders, traders both sides of the Atlantic, British traditions of privilege and simultaneously a stubborn pursuit of freedom from tyranny, Enlightenment philosophy disputing Protestant theology, at the bottom lay the unavoidable sludge, that stuff we still don’t wish to discuss.

Jefferson lived a life of contradictions not too unlike our own: All men are created equal. The phrase has been turned against him by some on the left. And he’s been condemned by his own words, true enough:

"Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state...? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained...(and) the real distinctions which nature has made...will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race."

from Notes on the State Of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson, 1785, first published anonymously in England.

If he was wrong about the outcome, Jefferson was right to heed the danger to the country’s enterprise. As he was writing Notes on the State Of Virginia, Jefferson was still six years from becoming Sally Hemings’s common law husband, a situation which they maintained until his death, forty-five years later.

Did he not learn anything from this passage of decades with a woman so close to him? Even if he could never speak of it in the Virginia of his day, or write it down in a note to be later uncovered, did it not occur to him blacks and whites, even if neither were comfortable with the notion, would become the future of the nation?

What Jefferson ought to have recognized just before him at Monticello, that these enslaved people believed Virginia was their home; returning to Africa, a foreign land, was of no interest. Three generations in, they were already Americans.

A cynic might say the reason we became a country of immigrants was largely a result of the ruling class needing cheap as dirt labor, particularly after slavery was grudgingly given up. Aye, the labor was needed if the continent was going to be settled in any fashion, and the capitalists needed butts in factories. The immigrants themselves came willing enough, yet they suffered and died for a distant hope in the future. As did the African Americans.

All men are created equal—the question remains: does a sufficient majority continue to believe it?

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For her entire life, excepting the two years in Paris, Sally Hemings was by Virginia law a slave subject to the whims of her owner. Though she was not any more Black than I am Welsh (despite the last name). Both Sally’s grandmother and mother were impregnated in turn by white slaveowners. She was a ‘quadroon’, like those ever precise Europeans liked to define their chattel.

My Irish ancestors were surely indentured at various times in the Old Sod, god bless the souls if not their bishops, and desperate enough as immigrants to take work in the coal mines, a distinction of little difference from slavery’s forced labor when it came to dying young. Were the coal operators Christians in fact—like the Virginia plantation owners? Christopher Hitchens would find that an unnecessary question.

Life was brutal, and too quickly over for my own father and his brother, so what kind of affection could I muster for the coal barons of Pennsylvania? For robber barons in general? Billionaires? My great grandmother left County Clare at the same age Sally Hemings sailed to Paris, though my great grandmother, Susan Berry, wasn’t sailing overseas for study abroad. Neither was Sally. Women were expendable like dray horses—one more affectation brought over by our European ancestors.

On one hand, the species has spread too thickly—beyond the planet’s carrying capacity, so the fallout is easy enough to recognize, though it seems we are only moved by suffering when it’s right before us. Then we get busy sorting who’s to survive. Unlike Hitchens believed, we could use the example of a loving god, even when we don’t practice the example.

At some point a few centuries from now, assuming the American experiment survives, our descendants will quite likely view our present muddle and shudder to comprehend how we balanced our perception of moral justice alongside nuclear weapons and drones armed with missiles to bomb semi-desert herders. Or any of the other contradictions we—comfortably or not—accept as part of modern life.

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So much is known about the Civil Rights heroes, Martin Luther King, and a legion of others. We have King’s recent holiday to remind us how much we owe those people for reclaiming a nation’s humanity.

Hemings, by comparison, who was she? There’s not even a verifiable portrait of her, yet she bore Jefferson’s children from too young an age, lived decades in his shadow, and witnessed a fantastic piece of early American history, not to overlook the French Revolution. Both her brothers Robert and James could write, and I suspect she could as well, though there’s no trace of that.

Silent witness to this country at its inception, I admire Ms. Hemings, slim story as hers may be.  And salute the author of her best biography, even as Gordon-Reed has so gracefully written what story there is to tell.

“We're not two separate people, blacks and whites. We're related by culture and by blood.” Annette Gordon-Reed.