Jefferson-Hemings Controversy - Controversy

Controversy

In 1802 the journalist James T. Callender, after being refused an appointment to a Postmaster position by Jefferson and issuing veiled threats of "consequences," reported that Jefferson had fathered several children with his slave concubine named Sally. His family denied the allegation. Others privately or publicly made the claim. Elijah Fletcher, the headmaster of the New Glasgow Academy (Amherst County, Virginia) visited Jefferson in 1811 and wrote in his diary:

"The story of black Sal is no farce — That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth — and the worst of it is he keeps the same children slaves — an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts."

Jefferson made no public comment on the matter, although most historians interpret his cover letter from 1805 to Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith as a denial alluding to a more full reply which has been lost.

The Jefferson-Wayles descendants and most historians denied for nearly 200 years that he was the father of Hemings' children. Disagreements have arisen since the late 20th century over how to interpret historical evidence related to the issue. According to an 1868 letter by Jefferson biographer Henry Randall to the historian James Parton, Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, said that Jefferson's daughter, Martha, stated on her deathbed, that Jefferson had been away from Monticello for 15 months before one of Hemings' children was born, so could not be the father. Randolph also observed:

"she had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.... He said in one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all."

Randolph then told Randall that the late Peter Carr, Jefferson's nephew and a married man at the time, had fathered Hemings' children, as explanation for the 'startling' close resemblance that every visitor to Monticello could see. Gordon-Reed noted that Randolph was violating a strong social taboo against naming a white man as the father of slave children. She suggested he would only have done so for the more compelling reason of protecting his grandfather. Because of the social taboos about this topic, Randolph requested, and Randall agreed, to omit any mention of Hemings in his three-volume Life of Thomas Jefferson (1858). Randall passed on the Randolph oral history to the historian James Parton, while suggesting that he had personally seen records supporting it, but no such record existed. Randall's 1868 letter relating Randolph's family account of Carr paternity was a "pillar" of later historians' assertions that Carr was the father and Jefferson was not.

In 1873, the issue received renewed attention: Madison Hemings was interviewed about his life as a slave at Monticello; his memoir was published in an Ohio newspaper. Then age 68, Hemings, who had been noted by the 1870 government census taker as the son of Thomas Jefferson, claimed Jefferson as his and his siblings' father. He said that, when Jefferson and Sally Hemings were still in Paris, she was pregnant with his child and Jefferson promised to free her children when they came of age. On this condition, she returned to the United States with him from France, where slavery was outlawed. Israel Jefferson, also a former slave of Monticello, confirmed the account of Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children in his own interview published that year by the same newspaper.

In 1874, James Parton published his biography of Jefferson, attributing the content of the memoir to the political motives of a journalist who interviewed him. He and other critics essentially discounted Hemings memoir, while attributing to him a range of negative motives for telling his story. (But, the 20th-century historian Merrill Peterson noted Hemings' details about events early in his life were mostly accurate.) In his work, Parton repeated the family's oral history about a Carr paternity and the assertion that Jefferson was absent during the conception period for one of Hemings' children.

Succeeding 20th-century historians, such as Merrill Peterson and Douglass Adair, relied on Parton's book as it related to the controversy. In turn, Dumas Malone adopted their position. In the 1970s, as part of his six-volume biography of Jefferson, Malone was the first to publish a letter by Ellen Randolph Coolidge, Randolph's sister, who claimed the late Samuel Carr (also a married man), rather than his brother Peter, had fathered Hemings' children.

Briefly, the above 20th-century historians and other major biographers of the late 20th century, such as Joseph Ellis and Andrew Burstein, "defended" Jefferson on the following grounds, based on the Jefferson/Randolph family testimony: he was absent at the conception of one Hemings child, and the family identified Peter or Samuel Carr as father(s) of Hemings' children. In addition, they determined he would not have had such a relationship because of his expressed antipathy to blacks and miscegenation in his writings, combined with his perceived moral character.

But, recent historical research has noted evidence that such arrangements among planters were commonplace, although social convention kept them largely undisclosed. In addition, Sally Hemings was three-quarters white, described as "mostly white" and "decidedly attractive", and was the half sister of Jefferson's beloved wife. Historians discounted accounts from former slaves, including Madison Hemings, without cross-checking the facts to determine whose account was best supported by the evidence. For instance, Madison Hemings' account was supported by the fact that Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings' children, although he was deeply in debt. Hers was the only family whose members were all freed; Sally's daughter Harriet was the only female slave he ever freed.

In her book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Annette Gordon-Reed wrote,

"It is my belief that those who are considered Jefferson scholars have never made a serious and objective attempt to get at the truth of this matter. . . The failure to look more closely into the identities of the parties involved, the too ready acceptance and active promotion of the Carr brothers story, the reliance upon stereotypes in the place of investigation and analysis, all indicate that most Jefferson scholars decided from the outset that this story was not true and that if they had anything to do with it, no one would come to think otherwise. In the most fundamental sense, the enterprise of defense has had little to do with expanding people's knowledge of Thomas Jefferson or the other participants in the story. The goal has been quite the opposite: to restrict knowledge as a way of controlling the allowable discourse on this subject."