Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

An American Controversy

Annette Gordon-Reed

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780813933566
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. The publication of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing.

Friends of Jefferson sought to debunk the Hemings story as early as 1800, and most subsequent historians and biographers followed suit, finding the affair unthinkable based upon their view of Jefferson's life, character, and beliefs. Gordon-Reed responds to these critics by pointing out numerous errors and prejudices in their writings, ranging from inaccurate citations, to impossible time lines, to virtual exclusions of evidence—especially evidence concerning the Hemings family. She demonstrates how these scholars may have been misguided by their own biases and may even have tailored evidence to serve and preserve their opinions of Jefferson. This updated edition of the book also includes an afterword in which the author comments on the DNA study that provided further evidence of a Jefferson and Hemings liaison.

Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Each chapter revolves around a key figure in the Hemings drama, and the resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships—relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy is the definitive look at a centuries-old question that should fascinate general readers and historians alike.

1

Madison Hemings

In any debate between mind and conscience the omission of evidence is unforgivable. This remains partly true when the evidence is not immediately at hand and must be sought, but the sin is compounded after it is found and treated with disdain.

—Arna Bontemps, Great Slave Narratives

Fari quae sentiat, “To speak what he thinks”

—Motto of the Randolph family

IT HAS BECOME a cliché to refer to the “invisibility” of black people in the United States as a way of suggesting that blacks are neither really seen nor heard by their white countrymen. The term, which conveys the sense of powerlessness that many blacks feel, is a useful but not totally accurate metaphor. It would be more correct to say that most white Americans do see and hear blacks but only when and how they want to see and hear them.

The application of this principle can be seen quite clearly in the treatment of the short memoirs of Madison Hemings, who claimed, among other things, to be the son of Thomas Jefferson by his slave Sally Hemings (see Appendix B). Although his statement is the only known recitation of the details of this controversial story by any of the parties involved, it has been either ignored by historians or dismissed out of hand with no attempt to address what Hemings actually said. In addition, he has been attacked through the use of stereotypes about ex-slaves and the circumstances under which they lived that should have been laid to rest long ago. Because it would be impossible to exaggerate the level of hostility that the story of Thomas Jefferson’s alleged slave mistress has engendered over the years, it is not surprising that Hemings’s recollections have not been studied with anything that could be called objectivity. The time for doing that is long overdue. But before beginning an analysis of his statement, it is useful to consider the methods most commonly used to discredit it.

The Attacks

Motive: S. F. Wetmore’s and Madison Hemings’s

There have been two chief means of attacking the statement that Madison Hemings gave to the Pike County (Ohio) Republican in 1873. The first and the most often used method has been to question the motivations of its publisher.¹ The statement is problematic, in this view, because it was taken as part of an effort to create sympathy for the blacks who resided in the area where Madison Hemings lived. Individuals who had been involved in the abolitionist movement shifted their focus after emancipation and embarked upon a campaign to win better treatment for the freedmen. Just as abolitionists reprinted anecdotes about the lives of slaves as a way of showing why slavery had to be ended, these former abolitionists (I suppose in the late twentieth century they would be called liberals) used the same kind of anecdotes to remind whites that blacks had suffered and should be helped or, at least, left in peace.

Stories of the misuse of black women were staples of abolitionist literature, and Hemings’s statement can be seen as part of that genre. It has been suggested that S. F. Wetmore, the editor of the Pike County (Ohio) Republican, was sympathetic to the freedmen and, not coincidentally, was interested in increasing the fortunes of the Republican party in a county that was heavily Democratic.² Historian Julian Boyd surmised that Wetmore “must surely have been a fanatical abolitionist.”³ The great biographer of Jefferson, Dumas Malone, with his assistant and coauthor Stephen A. Hochman, pursued this same theme in “A Note on Evidence” in the Journal of Southern History in 1975. The article was intended to set forth the context in which Madison Hemings’s memoirs appeared, giving some information about S. F. Wetmore and a few details about Madison Hemings himself.

Malone and Hochman stated that in 1870 S. F. Wetmore began to collect a series of short biographies of elderly residents of Pike County, having them tell him their life stories, which he then wrote down in his own words. By 1873 Wetmore had chosen to narrow the focus of his inquiries. During that year, in furtherance of his goal of drawing attention to the plight of the freedman, Wetmore “decided to begin a series on old colored residents of the area” and traveled around the county collecting their reminiscences.⁴

Earlier in the piece Malone and Hochman referred to Wetmore’s connections to and work on behalf of the Republican party. They noted that Wetmore had been “rewarded with federal patronage by the Republican administration” but did not state the nature of the reward.⁵ Amid some controversy the Grant administration had appointed Wetmore postmaster of Pike County in 1873.⁶ Malone and Hochman seem not to have known that S. F. Wetmore had occupied another position before his appointment as postmaster that is of great relevance to the Jefferson-Hemings controversy. In addition to being the editor of the Pike County (Ohio) Republican, Wetmore was also a federal district marshal. In that capacity he had taken the census for Pike County in 1870, which probably explains how he came to be interested in gathering people’s life stories and why he would have been a good choice for the job as postmaster. He had traveled Pike County, and he knew where people lived. As Wetmore went through the area conducting the census in 1870, he was, most likely, killing two birds with one stone.⁷

At that time Madison Hemings was living in Ross County, which borders Pike County. The marshal who took the census in that area was a man named William Weaver. When Weaver recorded the census data relating to Madison Hemings’s household, he wrote in the line next to Hemings’s name, “This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson.”⁸ This notation, in Weaver’s hand, looks to have been made at the same time that he wrote in the census data, in 1870—three years before Madison Hemings’s memoirs appeared in Wetmore’s newspaper.

Because parentage was not a category on the census form, there is no obvious reason why the subject would have been raised. Did Madison Hemings spontaneously start talking about Thomas Jefferson during the course of Weaver’s questioning? Or did Weaver bring Jefferson’s name into the conversation? A possible answer to both questions is that Jefferson may have been on the minds of both of them, for Weaver took Hemings’s census information on July 7, 1870. The census report required a listing of the citizen’s place of birth, and Hemings told Weaver that he had been born in Virginia.⁹ The subject may have come up after Weaver realized that he was talking to a Virginian just three days after a celebration occasioned by the effort of one of the most famous Virginians.

One of the many questions never addressed in the scholarly writing on this matter is just how Madison Hemings and S. F. Wetmore came to know one another. Those who believe that Wetmore made up the story see no element of coincidence to the fact that a man scouring the countryside to find stories told by black people that would reflect badly upon white southerners should have happened upon a black man who said he was the illegitimate and somewhat neglected son of Thomas Jefferson. Of course, if Wetmore invented the story or put someone up to telling it, there would be no element of chance, for Wetmore himself would have decided who was the best candidate to play the role. But if Wetmore had just wanted to find something negative to say about slavery, there would have been a great degree of luck in his happening upon Madison Hemings—and having Hemings volunteer this information—during the course of his survey.

When one considers that S. F. Wetmore was not just an editor of a newspaper but a census taker and that one of his colleagues had spoken to Hemings and made the notation about his parentage, the likely origin of Wetmore’s interest in Hemings becomes clearer. Sometime between 1870 and 1873, William Weaver could have mentioned Madison Hemings and his alleged parentage to Wetmore, his fellow marshal and colleague in census taking. Or, with or without such prompting, Wetmore could have reviewed all the local census reports to locate elderly blacks appropriate for his series. Thus, Weaver’s notation may have led him to Hemings.

After speaking with Madison Hemings, Wetmore interviewed Israel Jefferson, another former slave from Monticello who lived in the area. As likely as not, Hemings directed Wetmore to Jefferson as a corroborating witness. In an interview published nine months after the Hemings piece, Israel Jefferson confirmed, as far as he could, the substance of Madison Hemings’s story. He said that Sally Hemings had been Thomas Jefferson’s “chambermaid” and that from his relationships with both people he knew them to have been on “intimate terms” (see Appendix C). Malone and Hochman, as well as other commentators, saw the motivation of the newspaper’s editor as seriously tainting these statements because they were “solicited and published for a propagandist purpose.”¹⁰

There are at least two problems with focusing on Wetmore’s motivation. First, this mode of attack does not deal with the substance of what Madison Hemings said. Malone and Hochman understood this problem, but others writing about the document have not. Even as one points to a motive for telling a story, those who are genuinely interested in discovering the truth have a responsibility to consider the specifics of what has been said. Unless one assumes, and one could hardly do this with good conscience or good sense, that every story recounted for the purpose of creating sympathy for blacks before or after slavery was a lie, the duty to look seriously at what Madison Hemings said remains. Establishing a motive for the appearance of the story in the Pike County (Ohio) Republican does not destroy the statement’s worth as evidence.

The second critical problem with this mode of attack is the use of a stereotype to cast doubt upon the document’s validity. This is not just a banal moral point that stereotypes are bad. It is a judgment about the effect that the reliance on stereotypes has on the finished product of historians. Stereotypes are a problem for the writing of history because they allow for the use of shortcuts. Whenever shortcuts are taken, essential and important parts of the story can be missed, and historians may end up not considering all possible paths to whatever can be called the truth.

The stereotype employed here is the feebleminded black person as pawn to a white man. Without knowing much about Hemings except that he was a former slave, an assumption is made about his strength of character that does not have to be subjected to any level of proof. Hemings does not stand by himself as a person whose identity has to be known and treated with any degree of care. One of the striking features of the writing about the Jefferson-Hemings controversy is the easy manner with which historians make the black people in the story whatever they want or need them to be, on the basis of no stated evidence. In considering Madison Hemings’s statement, historians seem to be saying, “Oh, everyone knows what former slaves were like, so we do not have to consider this individual man and his capabilities when we make the suggestion that he was a pawn in this game of white people.”

That there were blacks who were weak and who were used by whites is certain. Some of the slave narratives could be cited as evidence of this. Yet assuming that this held true across the board could lead one to miss the value of the information communicated in these documents. We might also question whether Madison Hemings was typical of those slaves who gave narratives. By the time this postslavery interview was conducted, he had been a free man for forty-seven years, his entire adult life. No one can simply assume that he would have allowed himself to be a pawn in Wetmore’s game.

Malone and Hochman made the entirely legitimate point that “any document must be viewed by the historian in its actual setting of time and place.”¹¹ Proceeding from this view, they used the historical context to ferret out Wetmore’s possible motive in producing this document. They pointed to specific things about Wetmore that they believed supported the notion of an ulterior motive on his part. However, Wetmore was but one of the parties involved. Because Malone and Hochman presented their view of the world in which Madison Hemings lived, one would expect that they would have considered how setting, time, and place may have affected Hemings.

Madison Hemings was a skilled carpenter who had moved to Ohio after leaving Charlottesville. As Malone and Hochman pointed out, blacks in that state lived a precarious existence because the white residents of some counties resented blacks’ attempts to settle there. Some towns for a period had barred blacks from living within the city limits.¹² So, from the time he moved to Ohio, Hemings had been a black man with a family to raise in an environment that was hostile to blacks’ very existence. This is the historical context in which he operated, not the world of Republican versus Democrat newspapers, not the world of white northern carpetbaggers and southerners. Malone and Hochman should have asked whether and why Hemings would have been inclined to make up, or participate in fabricating, a story about race mixing that would more likely inflame his neighbors than endear him to them.

If the story of Thomas Jefferson’s alleged relationship with Sally Hemings has generated such heat and anger in modern times, what might the likely reaction have been in 1873? What about Israel Jefferson? He, like Madison Hemings, probably would have been aware that his statement could just as likely provoke anger on the part of some whites as feelings of affection. S. F. Wetmore may have been naive enough to think otherwise, but not Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson.

In the historical context as laid out by Malone and Hochman, telling this story would have been extremely risky, and one cannot assume that the two men would have spoken to a newspaper without due consideration. People sometimes risk suffering in order to tell the truth. Lying is another matter, since it is more often done to avoid pain and suffering or to achieve some fairly certain gain. Because neither Hemings nor Israel Jefferson could have been sure that by telling this story they would realize either of these goals, one cannot so easily assume that they would be willing to risk telling a lie. In addition, if Wetmore had added items in his published version of Hemings’s statement that were mischaracterizations or gross inaccuracies, there would have been ample time (perhaps as much as nine months) for Madison Hemings to have alerted Israel Jefferson as to the nature of Wetmore’s game. Under the circumstances, Israel Jefferson would not have agreed to talk to Wetmore knowing that the editor was prone to writing whatever he wanted, regardless of what Jefferson might actually have said.

If Madison Hemings did lie, what could have been his motivation to do so? Malone and Hochman did not raise this question directly, instead describing Madison Hemings, somewhat condescendingly, as “an estimable character” whose “sincerity” they did not doubt.¹³ However, at the end of the article they reproduced Wetmore’s introduction to the Hemings piece and then gave the editor of the Waverly Watchman, a rival newspaper, the last word on Madison Hemings. The editorial fairly bristles with contempt for Hemings and for black people in general.

The editor of the Waverly Watchman, John A. Jones, said that it was “a well known peculiarity of the colored race” to “lay claim to illustrious parentage.” He went on to say:

It sounds much better for the mother to tell her offspring that “master” is their father than to acknowledge to them that some field hand, without a name, had raised her to the dignity of mother. They [black women] want the world to think that they are particular in their liaisons with the sterner sex, whether the truth will bear them out or not.

A perusal of Hemings’ autobiography reminds us of the pedigree printed on the numerous stud-horse bills that can be seen posted during the Spring season. No matter how scrubby the stock or whether the horse has any known pedigree, the “Horse Owner” furnishes a free and complete pedigree of every celebrated horse in the country. One of these is copied, and the scrawniest “plug” rejoices in a descent that would put Sir Archy to shame. The horse is not expected to know what is claimed for him. But we have often thought if one of them could read and would happen to come across his pedigree tacked conspicuously at a prominent crossroad, he woul...