The Final Fate of Jefferson’s Four-Horned Ram

On 23 Feb 1808, a week after young Alexander Kerr, Jr., died from being gored by a four-horned ram on the grounds of the Presidential mansion, Thomas Jefferson made plans to move that animal to Monticello.

Jefferson wrote to his plantation manager, Edmund Bacon, about his flocks:

I am glad to hear you have lost no lambs. you must attend to the males being cut at a proper season in the spring; and at shearing time remember that the lambs are not to be shorn. I have here 18 ewes and shall have about the same number of lambs from them, by a many horned ram, all of which I shall propose to have driven to Monticello in the summer. this breed being very different from the big-tail we shall have to provide two separate ranges for them.

Jefferson wrote nothing in that letter or others to Bacon about the “many horned ram” attacking people and therefore perhaps needing special attention. The manager and an enslaved wagoner named David Hern came to Washington, D.C., and got Jefferson’s Presidential flock to Monticello.

According to one anti-Federalist newspaper, “a female child of one of the President’s domestics”—i.e., his slaves—had been among the ram’s victims; “her person has become disfigured.” That report may have been exaggerated for political reasons. But Jefferson does appear to have had a blindspot when it came to that killer animal.

The President’s established interest in improving American sheep grew after he instituted an embargo on British and French goods in December 1807. The U.S. of A.’s ability to manufacture its own woolens became even more appealing. He therefore loaned out his rams to other Virginia sheep farmers and promoted the fleece of his own flock.

On 13 October, Jefferson wrote to James Ronaldson, a Philadelphia manufacturer:

I happen by accident to have obtained the Iceland or Shetland race of sheep of many horns. it is from their wool I understand that the famous Shetland stockings are made which I believe sell for a guinea a pair being as soft as fur. as this peculiar wool may possibly be useful for some manufacture here, I send a fleece of it as a sample, by my grandson [Thomas Jefferson Randolph], who is going to Philadelphia, and who will put it into your hands. and I am encouraged to take this liberty by the zeal which your letter manifested for the promotion of manufactures. the request I have to make is that you will be so good as to have ascertained whether there will be any particular utility in raising this kind of wool, & what would be it’s probable price in Philadelphia, if encouraging I can probably extend it’s produce to any requisite degree in my neighborhood.

Within two weeks, that man replied that all the weavers and craftsmen who’d seen the fleece said it was suitable for blankets only. Still, Jefferson remained determined to find value in that many-horned ram.

In October 1809 Jefferson told Sen. John Milledge of Georgia: “I have for you a very fine Iceland ram with 4. horns, who will be sent down the river, as soon as the season restores it’s navigation…” Milledge wrote back, “I thank you for the Ice land ram, the wool from the breed of that animal, will answer for clothing our negroes.”

In 1811 Jefferson promised to send a younger four-horned ram to Milledge, but on 5 June he had to report bad news:

The many-horned ram which I was to have sent to Norfolk for you was killed by his sire. this abominable animal killed moreover two fine Barbary rams for me, & was so dangerous generally that I was obliged to have him destroyed. I found the species very worthless.

Jefferson maintained hopes for that animal even after it had killed a boy and injured one or two others in Washington, but once it started kill other rams in his flock, especially those of his favorite breed, he decided it had to die.

Monticello’s “Most Likely” Boys?

Before temporarily leaving the subject of Edmund Bacon’s comments about life at Monticello and what they say about Sally Hemings’s children, I’ll note how one writer on that topic used the same comments I’ve been analyzing.

After Annette Gordon-Reed’s book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and the chromosome study led by Dr. Eugene Foster, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which runs Monticello, created a committee of its paid staff and volunteers to review the evidence on the Hemings children. In January 2000, that committee released a report which concluded that:

The DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children appearing in Jefferson’s records.

(The six children don’t include a child conceived in France; some sources reported such a child, but there’s no contemporaneous documentation for one.)

One member of the Monticello committee, Dr. White McKenzie (Ken) Wallenborn, dissented and insisted that his “minority report” be appended to the main report. Wallenborn described himself as “Former Clinical Professor, University of Virginia School of Medicine” and “Former Historical Interpreter, Monticello.” (Over the following months there were, in turn, a response to his minority report from historian Lucia Stanton, whom I quoted on Bacon earlier, and his reply to her response. Rather like blog comments.)

Wallenborn made a number of arguments against the the committee members’ conclusion. Among other things, he wrote:

[Edmund Bacon] also commented on William C. Rives, a youngster, who would stay and play at Monticello with the other boys (most likely the Randolphs, Carrs, and Maria’s son, Francis)...Willie would stay with Mr. Bacon rather than at the house (Monticello) because the other boys were too intimate with the negro women to suit him.

I just analyzed the passage containing Rives’s complaint about his schoolmates getting too “intimate” with enslaved women. It offered no names, but I deduced that Thomas Jefferson Randolph had to be involved, and noted that Vaul W. Southall had been another of the gang on earlier visits. On what evidence did Wallenborn write otherwise that the Randolphs, Carrs, and Francis Eppes were “most likely” among the boys Bacon recalled?

In fact, how likely were those other males to be playing with Willie Rives and visiting the women enslaved at the mansion around 1806?

• Peter and Samuel Carr were born in 1770 and 1771, respectively. (Another brother, the younger Dabney Carr, was born in 1773.) By the time Bacon saw Rives visiting Monticello, the Carrs were in their thirties, married, fathers, and running estates of their own. They were no longer “boys.” Bacon’s reminiscences in Jefferson at Monticello name the three Carr brothers only once, saying they often praised a certain traveling Baptist preacher.
• Maria Jefferson Eppes’s son Francis was born in 1801. It’s quite unlikely he was being “intimate with the negro women” in the next few years unless they were his wet-nurses.
• The Randolph boys were the sons of Thomas Jefferson’s other daughter, Martha. Besides Jeff Randolph, there were four—all born between 1808 and 1818. In other words, those four weren’t even alive at the time Bacon indicated.

With the one exception of Jeff Randolph, Wallenborn’s list doesn’t appear to name the “most likely” boys to have visited Monticello’s captive women as Bacon described. In fact, most of them seem to be among the least likely candidates in the extended family. The list appears to be a collection of any and all young males known to have lived at or near Monticello at any time in the early 1800s.

In his next paragraph, Wallenborn wrote:

Mr. Bacon recalled that he went to live with Mr. Jefferson on Dec. 27, 1800 and was with him precisely twenty years but Mr. Jefferson recorded his employment as overseer for sixteen years. Possibly Mr. Bacon had started working as early as age sixteen [which would have been in 1801] but was not hired as overseer until age twenty [which would have been in 1805—but we know from Jefferson’s papers that he gave Bacon that job in September 1806] and if so would have been working at Monticello when Harriet Hemings was conceived and born.

I, too, suspect that Bacon started working for Jefferson in his teens, coming to Monticello in 1802. But even if we accept the earliest suggested date of December 1800, that means Bacon could not have been “working at Monticello when Harriet Hemings was conceived.” Harriet Hemings was born in May 1801, a fact stated in the Monticello report. One doesn’t need a medical degree to count back nine months and identify September 1800 as the conception period for that child.

These passages from the “minority report” seem to use Bacon’s remarks a springboard to point at any other males in the Monticello area as possible sexual partners for Sally Hemings, and to fill in holes or ambiguities in the historical evidence by suggesting any alternative scenarios, including those contradicted by documents and biology. They don’t seem to have arisen from examining all the evidence we have, assessing it by uniform standards, and deciding on the most likely explanation for it.

Later in 2000, Dr. Wallenborn helped to found the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society as a reaction to the Monticello report and to the new scholarly and public consensus it echoed. He is now that society’s president.

Edmund Bacon and the Keys to Monticello

Yesterday I quoted Edmund Bacon, longtime overseer for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello, reporting how young William C. Rives complained about how Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the President’s grandson (shown at right), and other schoolmates often became “intimate with the negro women” during weekend visits to Monticello.

That’s evidence of likely sexual behavior between females held captive at Monticello and one of the President’s direct male descendants—not just his nephews, or “Irish workmen,” or “dissipated young men in the neighborhood,” as Randolph’s younger sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge wrote in 1858. Then again, Rives’s idea of intimacy might have stopped short of sex. But whatever happened during those visits to Monticello, they did not lead to any of Sally Hemings’s pregnancies.

Jefferson at Monticello quotes Bacon as saying:

When he [Jefferson] was coming home from Washington I generally knew it, and got ready for him, and waited at the house to give him the keys.

Those keys show up in other passages of the book as well. They were the tools and symbols of Bacon’s authority, and of Jefferson’s trust in him. But Bacon had them only when the President was away from home.

In discussing Jeff Randolph’s visits to the mansion and garden with his Charlottesville school friends, Bacon was explicit in stating that they occurred “when I gave them the keys to stay up there alone”—i.e., when Thomas Jefferson was not at home. And we know from documentary evidence that Hemings conceived children only when Jefferson was at home.

(Eston Hemings, born 21 May 1808, might have been conceived when Jefferson was not at home, as well as when he was; the President’s visit covers only part of the conception window nine months before that birth. However, by late 1807 Jeff Randolph had gone off to school in Philadelphia, and Willie Rives to Hampden-Sydney. In addition, the Eston Hemings Y chromosome matches the Thomas Jefferson Y chromosome, which should—we really hope—differ from the Y chromosomes of his daughter’s son and that boy’s friends.)

It’s conceivable that Jeff Randolph brought his school chums up to Monticello and became “intimate with the negro women” at times when his grandfather was at home, as well as times when he wasn’t. But Bacon didn’t describe Willie Rives coming out to sleep at his house on those occasions. And it doesn’t take much knowledge of teenagers to think that they might behave differently in a big empty house than in the same house with the President and homeowner in it.

Having even brought up the possibility of a sexual liaison between Willie Rives’s schoolmates and Sally Hemings, I should note that at the time Bacon was describing, Hemings was in her early thirties. She was the mother of two to five children (depending on how one wants to count). She was apparently secure in her position as a household servant; Bacon recalled recalled her in a group he described this way:

These women remained at Monticello while he [Jefferson] was President. I was instructed to take no control of them. They had very little to do.

If Jeff Randolph and other boys in their early teens were seeking sexual partners at Monticello, Hemings seems less likely to be vulnerable to enticement or intimidation than scores of other females enslaved there.

TOMORROW: One writer puts Edmund Bacon’s anecdote to use.

Boys Getting Intimate at Monticello

Last weekend I analyzed an anecdote that Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon told about Thomas Jefferson’s eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson (Jeff) Randolph, and his school friends. I estimate that battle in the garden took place in about 1804. In any event it had to be before mid-1807, when Jeff Randolph went off to a school in Philadelphia at age fifteen.

Bacon told another story about that same set of boys, by my estimate a couple of years after the big fight, when some were coming up to Monticello to do more than “play and eat fruit.” Speaking of his favorite among the gang, the future officeholder William Cabell Rives (shown here, courtesy of Wikipedia), Bacon said:

He [Willie] was at Monticello a great deal. Very often he did not like the doings of the other boys when I gave them the keys to stay up there alone, and he would come down and stay all night at my house. He has stayed there many a night. The other boys were too intimate with the negro women to suit him. He was always a very modest boy. I once heard one of the other boys make a vulgar remark. He said, “Such talk as that ought not to be thought, much less spoken out.”

Bacon didn’t name the “other boys” who were reportedly getting “too intimate with the negro women,” but we can easily identify one who was involved: Jeff Randolph. It was his grandfather’s house, his grandfather’s women. Maybe on the first night his guests’ behavior could have taken him by surprise, but on “many a night”? Jeff Randolph had to have acquiesced with what was going on, and probably participated.

I don’t think we can be sure what was going on, though. Young Willie Rives seems to have been a bit of a prig (“Such talk as that ought not to be thought”), so he might have had a low tolerance for intimacy. Were the schoolboys talking with the enslaved women about their lovers? Trying to see them naked? Making out? Having sex? Any of those behaviors might have made Rives nervous.

Slightly earlier in Jefferson at Monticello, Bacon named another of Jeff Randolph’s school friends: Valentine Wood “Vaul” Southall. There’s no way to know if he figured in these “intimate” visits, too, but he’s come up before on Boston 1775. It was back in Ellen Coolidge’s 1858 letter to her husband, passing on her brother’s statements about the “yellow children” at Monticello. She wrote:

Now I will tell you in confidence what Jefferson [Randolph] told me under the like condition. Mr. Southall and himself young men together, heard Mr. Peter Carr say with a laugh, that “the old gentleman had to bear the blame of his and Sam’s (Col. Carr) misdeeds.”

As I wrote before, Jeff Randolph’s stories about Peter and Samuel Carr were contradictory, contradicted by D.N.A. evidence, and unsupported by statements from anybody else. Randolph’s stories about his cousins seem less reliable for what they say and more reliable as evidence that he wanted to deflect attention away from something embarrassing.

So let’s appreciate the irony here. Jeff Randolph accused the Carrs of fathering all the Hemings children, to his family’s public shame, but as a teenager he himself was often reportedly “intimate” with enslaved women in his grandfather’s house. He implied to his sister that Vaul Southall would be able to corroborate his story about Peter Carr, but Southall is our most likely candidate for being up in the house with Randolph and those women. Might the wildly conflicting emotions that Randolph ascribed to the Carr brothers—tearful regret, laughing bravado—reflect his own private thoughts about looking back on his youth?

And how did Randolph respond to Bacon’s recollection about boys getting “intimate with the negro women” being published? He may not have seen it in Jefferson at Monticello, but James Parton quoted that passage about Willie Rives in The Atlantic Monthly in 1873, along with Bacon’s critical remarks on Randolph’s father. The article, an otherwise complimentary picture of “Thomas Jefferson’s Last Years,” caused Randolph to publish a broadside titled “The Last Days of Jefferson” which called Bacon’s recollections the “fiction of an old man” and argued with many points. I haven’t seen that broadside, so I don’t know if Randolph responded to the specific matter of intimacy at Monticello.

TOMORROW: Why Bacon’s anecdote still doesn’t tell us anything about Sally Hemings’s children.

Edmund Bacon Frees an Enslaved Young Woman

So I promised to explain why the question of when Edmund Bacon came to live at Monticello (shown at right), where he eventually was manager for sixteen years, has a bearing on the—let’s face it—far juicier historical question of whether Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’s children. Jefferson at Monticello, Hamilton W. Pierson’s book based on conversations with Bacon, quotes the former overseer as saying:

He [Jefferson] freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. She was nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful. People said he freed her because she was his own daughter. She was not his daughter; she was . . . . . . ’s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother’s room many a morning, when I went up to Monticello very early.

When she was nearly grown, by Mr. Jefferson’s direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia, and gave her fifty dollars. I have never seen her since, and don’t know what became of her. From the time she was large enough, she always worked in the cotton factory. She never did any hard work.

The passage is also quoted here. Though this passage follows one that mentions Sally Hemings by name, the mother and daughter in the anecdote have no names.

Ellen Randolph Coolidge also described Jefferson, her grandfather, freeing one light-skinned female slave in his life. She wrote in an 1858 letter:

It was his principle (I know that of my own knowledge) to allow such of his slaves as were sufficiently white to pass for white men, to withdraw quietly from the plantation; it was called running away, but they were never reclaimed, I remember four instances of this, three young men and one girl, who walked away and staid away. Their whereabouts was perfectly known but they were left to themselves—for they were white enough to pass for white.

Finally, former Monticello captive Madison Hemings told a newspaper editor in 1873 that Jefferson freed his sister Harriet around age twenty-one:

made a solemn pledge [to Sally Hemings] that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. . . . She gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself), and Eston—three sons and one daughter. We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born. . . .

Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give, but will not, for prudential reasons. She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives. I have not heard from her for ten years, and do not know whether she is dead or alive. She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered. . . .

Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the home plantation.

When historians put all these three accounts together, most agree that they offer three different perspectives on the same incident. According to this consensus, at about the time that Harriet Hemings, born in May 1801, turned twenty-one, Jefferson had his manager Bacon help her to leave Monticello for a city to the north. There her pale skin allowed her to live as a white woman and, though she remained in touch with her family and possibly others at Monticello, she disappeared into white American society. I’ll proceed on the assumption that’s correct, while acknowledging that it might not be.

Until 1997, historians took Bacon’s account as direct, authoritative knowledge of who Harriet Hemings’s father was. Then Annette Gordon-Reed pointed out in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy that Bacon couldn’t have known who was spending the night with Sally Hemings when Harriet was conceived because he hadn’t arrived at Monticello yet. Gordon-Reed was working with the date 1806, the earliest that Bacon’s name appears in the records of the slave-labor plantation. It’s my guess that young Bacon arrived in December 1802. But even if we accept the shaky statement in Jefferson at Monticello, Bacon didn’t come on the scene until late December 1800, three or four months after the conception.

Most researchers now accept that Bacon was stretching general knowledge from having lived at Monticello for many years to cover a specific incident that occurred before he arrived. People disagree on how authoritative and reliable his general knowledge and his statement are. Eventually I’ll get back to Bacon’s remarks above, but next I want to discuss something else he mentioned about Monticello.

TOMORROW: Schoolboys getting “intimate with the negro women,” or Willie C. Rives sleeps alone.

Edmund Bacon’s Twenty Years

In my continuing discussion of Edmund Bacon (1785-1866), long-time manager of Thomas Jefferson’s slave-labor plantation Monticello, I quoted how Hamilton W. Pierson, author of Jefferson at Monticello, understood Bacon said he had started work:

I went to live with him [Jefferson] the 27th of the December before he was inaugurated as President; and if I had remained with him from the 8th of October to the 27th of December, the year that I left him, I should have been with him precisely twenty years.

Monticello records show that Bacon managed the slave-labor plantation until October 1822. Jefferson was inaugurated as President in March of 1801, meaning the previous December was in 1800. That adds up to slightly less than twenty-two years, not slightly less than “precisely twenty.”

How do we account for that discrepancy? Bacon obviously had a lot of pride in having worked for Jefferson for “twenty years.” That figure shows up over and over in Pierson’s book. Yet in the passage above, Bacon was scrupulous about acknowledging that he was short of two full decades.

If Bacon had actually worked for Jefferson for nearly twenty-two years, then he would have had no reason to mention that 8 October–27 December gap. On the other hand, if Bacon had actually come to Monticello in 1806 (the earliest his name appears in its account books) and was exaggerating about having worked there “twenty years,” why did he pull back and say it was actually nineteen years and nine months? As long as he was lying about it, why not claim the whole twenty?

Another possible piece in this puzzle is in the University of Virginia library: Bacon’s memoranda book, which has been dated as “1802-22.” Not having seen that document, I’m not certain it contains notes about Monticello that can be firmly dated to 1802. But if it does, it’s obviously a strong clue about Bacon’s arrival.

I suspect Bacon’s count of the years was exact, but he had a faulty understanding or memory of what was going on when he arrived at Monticello, or didn’t communicate it clearly to Pierson. I would guess that Bacon started work for Jefferson on 27 Dec 1802, when he was seventeen years old. The President was then preparing to return to Washington, D.C., for the new congressional term. Young Bacon might have mistaken that activity for Jefferson’s preparations to be “inaugurated as President,” or Pierson might have gotten that impression from the older Bacon’s remarks. (Jefferson at Monticello never states when Bacon left the site, so Pierson apparently didn’t realize when the twenty years had ended.)

From 1803 to mid-1806, I would guess, Bacon worked as an apprentice of sorts around Monticello, gradually taking on larger responsibilities. According to his recollection of the schoolboys’ brawl in the garden (which I estimate as taking place around 1804, though it could have been later), Bacon was then working at the mill and had custody of the keys to the main house and garden. Within months after he came of age, Bacon was in charge of the whole place.

COMING UP: What all this has to do with Sally Hemings’s children.

Edmund Bacon Takes the Job

I’ve been examining the burning question (really, you wouldn’t believe how much this means to some folks) of when Edmund Bacon (1785-1866) started working for Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. According to documents from that slave-labor plantation, Bacon was definitely its “manager,” or overseer, from September 1806 to October 1822. But Bacon’s recollections, published in Jefferson at Monticello in 1862, say he arrived some years before.

Here’s how Bacon said that happened, from chapter 2 of that book:

I was born March 28, 1785, within two or three miles of Monticello, so that I recollect Mr. Jefferson as far back as I can remember anybody. My father and he were raised together, and went to school together.

My oldest brother, William Bacon, had charge of his estate during the four years he was Minister to France [1784-89]. After he was elected President, he told my father he wanted an overseer, and he wished to employ my brother William again. But he was then quite an old man, and very well off, and did not wish to go.

William Bacon’s name does not appear in Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book or the original document on the list of top “stewards,” managers, and overseers of the Jefferson properties in the 1780s . I wonder if he had some lower job. His little brother Edmund wasn’t even born until 1785, so he might well have misremembered William’s role.

William Bacon was born in 1763. If he worked at Monticello in the mid-1780s, then he would just have reached his majority at age twenty-one when Jefferson went to France. It looks to me like helping to run a big plantation was a way for a young man to earn money to invest in his own farm, and to gain experience managing slaves and crops before doing so.

That expectation would explain why Edmund Bacon recalled his brother as being “quite an old man” when Jefferson was seeking a new overseer in the early 1800s. William Bacon was then only in his late thirties—but he might have felt himself to be too old to go back to working for someone else. By that time, over ten years after he had reportedly worked at Monticello, William Bacon had a wife, a son, and a farm of his own.

So, according to Edmund Bacon’s account, Jefferson went with his second choice:

He then inquired of my father if he could not spare me. He replied that he thought I was too young. I was his youngest son, and not of age yet. Mr. Jefferson requested him to send me to see him about it. . . .

When my father told me Mr. Jefferson wanted to employ me, I was keen to go; and I determined that if he employed me, I would please him, if there was any such thing. When I went to see him, he told me what he wanted me to do, gave me good advice, and said he would try me, and see how I would get along. I went to live with him the 27th of the December before he was inaugurated as President; and if I had remained with him from the 8th of October to the 27th of December, the year that I left him, I should have been with him precisely twenty years.

Jefferson at Monticello therefore dated the start of Bacon’s work to 27 Dec 1800. But it didn’t say that he was hired as a “manager.” He was “employed” as Jefferson thought appropriate for a teenager, “not of age yet.”

As a minor, Bacon couldn’t sign contracts. Any wages he earned legally belonged to his father, and adolescents usually worked only for room, board, and clothing anyway. Those circumstances might explain why Edmund Bacon’s name doesn’t appear in Monticello’s accounts regularly until 1806, the year in which he turned twenty-one.

It seems significant that less than half a year after Edmund Bacon came of age, Jefferson definitely made him manager of all of Monticello—in the middle of his second presidential term, when he knew he himself would be busy in Washington. Jefferson put a lot of faith in young Bacon, faith which might have come from having employed him at lesser responsibilities for a while.

So do I accept the date of 27 Dec 1800 as when Edmund Bacon came to Monticello, not as manager but as a lower-level employee? Nope.

TOMORROW: Did you notice that Bacon’s own dates don’t add up?

(The thumbnail image above is a portrait of Steven Edenbo as a young Thomas Jefferson, painted by Pamela Patrick White. Bigger image here. I saw some notecards and prints of this image on the Boston Common on Saturday, and thought people might like to know where to order their own.)

Battle in the Monticello Garden

Yesterday I described the conflicting signals of when Edmund Bacon began work at Monticello. Late in life, he told author Hamilton Pierson that he’d gone to live at that slave-labor plantation at the end of 1800. Yet a letter from Thomas Jefferson dated Bacon’s tenure as manager from 1806, and Bacon’s name doesn’t appear on the Monticello records before that year.

I suspect Bacon actually was living and working at Monticello before 1806, and my first piece of evidence is this reminiscence from him, printed in Pierson’s book, Jefferson at Monticello:

Almost every Friday evening Jeff. Randolph would bring a lot of his mates [from Oglesby’s school in Charlottesville] to Monticello to play and eat fruit. If they did not come on Friday they were pretty certain to come on Saturday. I gave them the keys of the house and garden, and very often they all stayed there over night.

One Saturday a lot of the schoolboys that were not invited concluded that they would come also, and help themselves to fruit. They went around the back side of the garden, broke off the palings, and got in. They then climbed the trees and broke off a good many limbs, and did a great deal of damage.

The other party attacked them, and they had a tremendous fight. The party that had broken in was much the largest, and they could not drive them off. They threw stones at the old gardener and hurt him very badly. They sent to the mill for me, and when I got there the other party were gone, and some of Jeff.’s party were a good deal hurt. Vaul Southall was very bloody. He had fought like a little tiger.

Wm. C. Rives was one of Jeff.’s party. He was an uncommonly fine boy, and was always the peacemaker among the boys. Whenever they got into a difficulty among themselves, they would all say, “Let Willie Rives settle it.” Both parties were always willing to select him as umpire.

So I said to him, “Willie, why didn’t you settle this matter without all this fighting?”

He was very much excited, as well as all the rest of them. “Why, sir,” said he, “you know that I am a little fellow and couldn’t do much fighting, but I called them all the hard names I could think of, and then I started to turn Rompo loose on them, and they all ran off.” Rompo was a very fierce dog. . . .

To me this anecdote has the ring of truth. It doesn’t flatter Bacon, or Jefferson (whom he obviously idolized), or anyone involved—nor does it show anyone in a terrible light. It doesn’t have an obvious moral instruction, or a neat plot. In sum, there’s no reason for Bacon to have described this incident except that it was a memorable slice of life at Monticello.

A little digging, and I identified the boys Bacon named in that anecdote:

• Thomas Jefferson Randolph (1792-1875), the President’s eldest grandson—shown above, courtesy of Monticello.
  
• William C. Rives (1793-1868), who later studied law with Jefferson shortly after his presidency, and then became a politician and diplomat.
  
• Vaul W. Southall, fully named Valentine Wood Southall (1793-1861), another future attorney.
  

They were all nearly the same age, so it made sense for them to go to school and pal around together.

And when did this event take place? Bacon didn’t give a date, but the schoolboys’ actions (getting into a bloody fight over fruit, but really over who’s in what gang; yelling insults) and Bacon’s diction (“to play,” “little tiger,” “little fellow”) suggest to me that those boys were about twelve years old. Which would mean this incident took place around 1804 or 1805.

Furthermore, we know that Jeff Randolph was sent for more schooling in Philadelphia in 1807 at age fifteen, as arranged by his grandfather. Willie Rives entered Hampden-Sydney College that same year. That means Bacon’s encounters with these schoolboys must have occurred before the middle of that year. Bacon must also have been at Monticello long enough to have come to expect Jeff’s weekend visits with his pals (“Almost every Friday evening”).

It’s possible that this great battle took place sometime between mid-1806, when Bacon is definitely documented as having been at Monticello, and the boys’ departure for college in 1807. Males in the culture didn’t have to be as young as twelve to get into stupid fights; Bacon also recalled several violent incidents involving grown men in the President’s family (his daughters and granddaughters did not all marry happily). But Bacon didn’t say that any of those men had “fought like a little tiger.”

Of course, that’s just my subjective impression. I still have to explain why, if Edmund Bacon was working at Monticello by around 1804 or 1805, his name didn’t appear on the records until 1806.

TOMORROW: The circumstances of Edmund Bacon’s hiring.

When Did Edmund Bacon Start Work at Monticello?

Edmund Bacon (1785-1866) was Thomas Jefferson’s “manager,” or overseer, at Monticello for many years in the early 1800s. (The thumbnail image to the right connects to a photograph of Bacon in old age at the Monticello website.) Exactly how many years Bacon lived on that slave-labor plantation has become an issue in the debate over the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children.

In 1862, the Rev. Dr. Hamilton W. Pierson published a book titled Jefferson at Monticello, based on interviews with Bacon. It quotes him describing his tenure at Monticello this way:

I went to live with him the 27th of December before he was inaugurated as President [i.e., 27 Dec 1800]; and if I had remained with him from the 8th of October to the 27th of December, the year that I left him, I should have been with him precisely twenty years.

However, Pierson also reprinted Jefferson’s letter of recommendation for Bacon, dated 18 Aug 1818. It says:

The bearer, Mr. Edmund Bacon, has lived with me twelve years as manager of my farm at Monticello.

That means that Bacon started the manager job in 1806, and implies that he hadn’t lived at Monticello any longer than that.

Dumas Malone, Jefferson’s major twentieth-century biographer, dated Bacon’s tenure as manager from 29 Sept 1806. Thomas Jefferson’s Garden Book quotes instructions to Bacon dated 21 Apr 1806, and says Bacon started to oversee the newly-built toll mill in August. A Senior Historian at Monticello, Lucia C. Stanton, has concluded:

Jefferson’s records...indicate that Bacon began working at Monticello sometime in 1806, becoming overseer on Sep. 29. Nothing in the records indicates his presence at Monticello before this. Since Bacon’s family lived not far from Monticello, it is certainly possible he was on the mountain on an occasional basis. But...he is not mentioned in the Memorandum Books until Sep. 1806. After this date, he appears in the Memorandum Books with great frequency.

So when did Edmund Bacon start to help manage Monticello—1800 or 1806? The answer bears generally on how accurate Bacon’s statements to Pierson were. It also bears specifically on when Bacon might have been able to see a man other than Thomas Jefferson regularly coming out of the room of the mother of one enslaved young woman, “nearly as white as anybody,” who many people said was Jefferson’s daughter. (I’m going to discuss that statement eventually.)

After looking at the text of Jefferson at Monticello and researching its details, I’ve reached my own conclusion about when Bacon started work at Monticello. My reasoning focuses on one of my little areas of interest, the lives of young people in early America. And my conclusion is that both dates—1800 and 1806—are probably wrong.

TOMORROW: Boys behaving badly.

Assessing T. J. Randolph as a Source

I’ve been quoting and analyzing two statements about Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the relationship between them. Both documents—letters from biographer Henry S. Randall and from Jefferson granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge—relied on oral statements from the President’s oldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (shown at left). How well does that information stand up to scrutiny? Not well. In fact, I don’t think we can avoid the following conclusions.

1. Thomas Jefferson Randolph was not a reliable source on the question of Sally Hemings’s children.

Randolph told Randall and Coolidge several things about why his grandfather couldn’t have been the father of any of the Hemings children, and who secretly was the father of them all. But those statements are contradicted by:

• documentary evidence: Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were not separated for fifteen months before the birth of any child.
• architectural evidence: Monticello had no bedroom close enough for Randolph to hear Jefferson’s breathing at night.
• biological evidence: Patrilineal descendants of the youngest Hemings child, Eston, don’t share the same Y chromosome as patrilineal relatives of the Carr brothers, Peter and Samuel.
• chronological evidence: Randall understood that “At the periods when these Carr [i.e., Hemings] children were born, he, Col. Randolph, had charge of Monticello.” Randolph, born in 1792, was three years old when Hemings had her first immediately documented child, and still only sixteen when she had her last.
  
• each other: Different people recorded hearing Randolph identify two different Carrs as having had a long-term, exclusive sexual relationship with Sally Hemings and fathering all of her children.

It’s possible to come up with explanations for some of those contradictions. For example, Randolph might have consistently named Samuel Carr as the father, but years later Randall wrongly remembered hearing the name of Peter Carr instead. It’s also possible that Randolph gave out some accurate information, but stretched the truth to seem more authoritative or to make his explanations cover a longer time. But those suppositions all come back the point above: we can’t rely on the statements that ultimately come from T. J. Randolph.

Most of those statements’ contradictions were apparent when the Randall and Coolidge letters were first published in full. Nevertheless, until Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, most Jefferson biographers took Randolph’s statements about the Hemings children as the most authoritative on the subject.

2. There’s no reliable evidence pointing to Peter or Samuel Carr as father of Sally Hemings’s children.

Only two people appear to have ever mentioned the Carrs as having any contact with Hemings at all: Henry S. Randall and Ellen Randolph Coolidge. And they got their information from Randolph—contradictory and unreliable information. Knowing that, we must conclude that either Peter or Samuel Carr is no more likely to have fathered the Hemings children than any other white man living within seven miles of Monticello. They just happened to be the householders related to Jefferson who lived closest.

In fact, the Carrs are less likely to have fathered the Hemings children than other candidates because:

• Eugene Foster’s genetic study showed that the Carr Y chromosome doesn’t match the Hemings Y chromosome. (The Jefferson Y chromosome does match.)
• No one in the Hemings family and no one in the vicinity of Monticello except for Randolph told people that either Carr was the father. (Madison Hemings and some neighbors said that Thomas Jefferson was the father; others denied that, but didn’t record alternative names.)

Of course, given the paucity of evidence two hundred years later, and the difficulty of proving any paternity without D.N.A. from parents and child, it’s still possible to imagine ways that one of the Carrs could have had some children with Sally Hemings. For example, she could have had children with multiple men, but so secretly that no one at Monticello remarked on that possibility, and the only genetic test available happens to apply only to a child fathered by a Jefferson instead of a Carr. That’s possible. But it’s a less likely explanation than what’s already on the table: Madison Hemings’s recollection, supported by other statements from the time.

3. We have to ask what Thomas Jefferson Randolph might have been hiding.

Normally historians treat people’s statements and recollections as reflecting how they honestly see their world—unless there’s evidence to the contrary. Then we have to consider whether they were mistaken, or shading the truth, or deliberately lying. For example, Henry S. Randall was probably sincere when he wrote:

It so happened when I was afterwards examining an old account book of the Jeffersons I came pop on the original entry of this slaves birth: and I was then able from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation—but those circumstances have faded from my memory.

Still, Randall was mistaken. Possibly influenced by Randolph’s assurance that there was a fifteen-month gap, he overlooked one of Jefferson’s trips to Monticello nine months before Sally Hemings gave birth.

Similarly, we can consider that Randolph was sincerely mistaken about that same fifteen-month gap. But it’s harder to find a simple explanation of why he thought he could hear his grandfather breathing at night, or why he’d tell Randall about his Carr cousins wailing over what they’d done to his grandfather’s reputation and not tell his sister. And then there’s the fact that he wanted to keep his statements from being subjected to public scrutiny.

So without concluding that Randolph definitely was stretching the truth or lying, we should consider that possibility. What would that imply about the whole situation?

What would have motivated Randolph to lie? He said that shortly before his mother died he’d promised her that he would “defend the character” of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph was clearly trying to shape how Randall and subsequent historians wrote about his grandfather. He offered an explanation of the Hemings children alternative to the one discussed most in the press until then: that they were Jefferson’s children.

Perhaps Randolph believed in that explanation, but thought it needed more evidence behind it and tried to fill in some holes. And perhaps he was trying to conceal facts that he feared would reflect badly on his grandfather, his family, and/or himself. In the latter case, what might he have been trying to hide?

Though Randolph defended his grandfather’s character, he wasn’t so careful about his Carr cousins’ reputations, or the Hemings sisters’. He said that there was a lot of sex between white men (“Irish workmen,” “dissipated young men in the neighborhood”) and black women at Monticello. Randolph said his grandfather “was extremely indulgent” toward some young male relatives, and “the idea of watching them for faults or vices probably never occurred to him.” That’s a long way from the eighteenth-century ideal of a patriarch in control of his household (not that many patriarchs truly were). So if Randolph was trying to deny or conceal something, his statements would be evidence of something even more embarrassing than that.

T. J. Randolph Talks Freely to His Sister

On 24 Oct 1858, Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge (1796-1876, shown courtesy of Monticello) wrote a letter to her husband about Sally Hemings’s children, and other children born at Monticello who clearly had both European and African ancestry. Most of her information came from her older brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Coolidge wrote, “I have been talking freely with my brother Jefferson on the subject of the ‘yellow children’.” She wanted to summarize that conversation so that her husband could pass on most—but not all—of the information to a “Mr. Bulfinch.” This was probably a relative of Coolidge’s Boston-born husband; his mother was a Bulfinch.

Coolidge wrote about various white men having sex with the women her grandfather held captive: “Irish workmen,” “dissipated young men in the neighborhood.” However, she said Sally Hemings had only one sex partner:

One woman known to Mr. J. Q. Adams and others as “dusky Sally” was pretty notoriously the mistress of a married man, a near relation of Mr. Jefferson’s, and there can be small question that her children were his. They were all fair and all set free at my grandfather’s death, or had been suffered to absent themselves permanently before he died. The mother, Sally Hemmings, had accompanied Mr. Jefferson’s younger daughter to Paris and was lady’s maid to both sisters. . . .

I have written thus far thinking you might chuse to communicate my letter to Mr. Bulfinch. Now I will tell you in confidence what Jefferson told me under the like condition. Mr. [Vaul W.] Southall and himself young men together, heard Mr. Peter Carr say with a laugh, that “the old gentleman had to bear the blame of his and Sam’s (Col. Carr) misdeeds.”

There is a general impression that the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of Col. Carr, the most notorious good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio kept at other men’s expense. His deeds are as well known as his name.

This echoes what Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall recalled hearing from T. J. Randolph in the same decade—except the details don’t match.

As Annette Gordon-Reed pointed out, Randall heard Randolph tell a dramatic story of the Carr brothers bursting into tears of remorse when he confronted them about the Hemings rumors. Yet Randolph told his sister that Peter Carr spoke about the topic “with a laugh,” and didn’t mention their cousins showing any regret.

In 1868 Randall came away believing that “Sally Henings was the mistress of Peter,” and that Samuel Carr was “particularly open” about having another woman—Betty Hemings—as his mistress. Ten years earlier, Coolidge understood that “the four children of Sally Hemmings were all the children of” Samuel Carr.

The two stories don’t leave room for thinking that there were overlapping rumors. (In other words, something like: “Did you hear Peter’s going out with Sally?” “No! I heard that last week she went out with Samuel.” “Really? I had no idea.”) Rather, in both cases people believed that Randolph had stated that basically everyone at Monticello knew about those relationships: “their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello”; “a general [i.e., widely shared] impression”; “most notorious good-natured Turk.” Furthermore, everyone was clear that all of Sally Hemings’s children were the product of a long-term relationship with one man.

One thing was consistent both times people recalled Randolph’s information: He asked them to keep quiet about the name of the man having children with Sally Hemings. They could speak in general terms about white men having sex with their grandfather’s captives, even about “a near relation of Mr. Jefferson’s” coupled with Hemings. But they shouldn’t name either Peter or Samuel Carr. Which, of course, meant that the Randolph family’s Carr cousins would have no chance to respond before the generations who had known Thomas Jefferson personally had died out.

TOMORROW: Assessing Thomas Jefferson Randolph as a witness.

T. J. Randolph Keeps a Secret

Henry S. Randall’s 1 June 1868 letter to James Parton makes clear that Thomas Jefferson Randolph really, really wanted the biographer to accept that Peter Carr was the father of all of Sally Hemings’s children, and that his grandfather Thomas Jefferson wasn’t the father of any.

It’s also clear from the letter that Randolph really didn’t want Randall to share any of his statements about Peter Carr with the world. Randall explained the circumstances to Parton, who was also planning to write about Jefferson:

Do you ask why I did not state, or at least hint the above facts in my Life of Jefferson? I wanted to do so, but Colonel Randolph, in this solitary case alone prohibited me from using at my discretion the information he had furnished me with. When I rather pressed him on the point he said, pointing to the family graveyard, “You are not bound to prove a negation. If I should allow you to take Peter Carr’s corpse into Court and plead guilty over it to shelter Mr. Jefferson, I should not dare again to walk by his grave; he would rise and spurn me.”

I am exceedingly glad Col. Randolph did overrule me in this particular. I should have made a shameful mistake. If I had unnecessarily defended him (and it was purely unnecessary to offer any defense) at the expense of a dear nephew—and a nobleman—hating a single folly.

Randolph insisted that he wanted to protect the Carr family reputation. Of course, he was even more eager to protect the Jefferson family reputation; that’s why he told all that stuff to Randall in the first place. How did asking the author to keep it secret serve Randolph’s primary purpose? If a serious biographer had published evidence about Peter Carr fathering the Hemings children, complete with an eyewitness account of a tearful confession, that could have laid the fifty-year-old issue to rest.

Unless, that is, the Carrs were to object with public statements of their own. When Randolph spoke to Randall in the 1850s, there were four Carr men still alive who could have offered their own testimony or evidence about Peter and Samuel Carr’s visits to Monticello and the Hemings sisters—or lack thereof:

• Samuel Carr himself. The former colonel and legislator didn’t die until 1855. Would he have liked knowing that his cousin had told a writer, “Samuel’s proceedings were particularly open”?
• Peter’s son Dabney (1802-1854), who served as customs collector at the port of Baltimore and U.S. minister to Turkey.
• Samuel’s son James Lawrence (1813-1874/5), a lawyer in western Virginia.
• Samuel’s son George Watson (1822-1899), an army colonel.

All these men had enough standing in society to challenge Randolph’s statements—if he’d made them publicly. But he made them only in private conversations with a sympathetic author, and then convinced that author to keep them secret. He thus accomplished what he wanted—to keep the Hemings rumors out of Randall’s book—without risking a bigger blowup.

The recipient of Randall’s 1868 letter, James Parton (shown above, courtesy of the Freedom from Religion Foundation), finished his own book about Jefferson in 1874. At that time Randolph and at least one of the four Carrs listed above was still alive, but a newspaper interview with Madison Hemings had brought the story of his mother back into the public eye. Parton therefore addressed the question. He even acknowledged:

There is even a respectable Madison Henings, now living in Ohio, who supposes that Thomas Jefferson was his father. Mr. Henings has been misinformed.

Because obviously a letter from a sympathetic biographer remembering ten-year-old conversations with a man clearly out to restore his grandfather’s reputation was more reliable than what Hemings had heard from his own mother while growing up at Monticello. Similarly, the way that biographer had spelled Hemings’s last name was obviously more authoritative than how the man spelled it himself.

In his book Parton quoted the parts of Randall’s letter about a fifteen-month separation and Randolph sleeping within earshot of his grandfather’s bedroom. He left out the passages that named Peter Carr and instead wrote: “The father of those children was a near relation of the Jeffersons, who need not be named.” (It’s interesting that Parton mentioned the Carrs’ father Dabney several times, and quoted a couple of letters Jefferson had sent to Peter Carr, including one that advised: “Question with boldness even the existence of a God.” Which takes us back to Freedom from Religion, I suppose.)

As a historical source, there are only two troubling details about Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s statement that Sally Hemings was Peter Carr’s mistress:

• In 1858 Randolph told his sister a different story.
• We now know that neither story was accurate.

COMING UP: What Jeff told Ellen.

T. J. Randolph Throws the Carrs Under a Bus

I’ve been quoting from the 1868 letter in which Thomas Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall recalled his conversations with the President’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph about the family’s captive maid Sally Hemings. Those conversations probably started in the early 1850s and had to have finished before 1858, when Randall published his book.

The biggest part of the letter involved Randolph pointing to a first cousin, once removed, as the father of Hemings’s children. Writing in 1868, Randall recalled the statements this way:

Mr. Jefferson had two nephews, Peter Carr [1770-1815] and Samuel Carr [1771-1855] whom he brought up in his house. There were the sons of Mr. Jefferson’s sister [Martha] and her husband Dabney Carr that young and brilliant orator, described by [William] Wirt, who shone so conspicuously in the dawn of the Revolution, but died in 17[73]. Pete was peculiarly gifted and amiable. Of Samuel I know less. But he became a man of repute and sat in the State Senate of Virginia.

Col. [Thomas Jefferson] Randolph informed me that Sally Henings was the mistress of Peter, and her sister Betsey the mistress of Samuel—and from these connections sprang the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. Both the Henings girls were light colored and decidedly goodlooking. The Colonel said their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised by the latter—never disavowed by them. Samuel’s proceedings were particularly open. . . .

Colonel Randolph said that a visitor at Monticello dropped a newspaper from his pocket or accidentally left it. After he was gone, he (Colonel R.) opened the paper and found some very insulting remarks about Mr. Jefferson’s Mulatto Children. The Col. said he felt provoked. Peter and Sam Carr were lying not far off under a shade tree. He took the paper and put it in Peters hands, pointing out the article. Peter read it, tears coursing down his cheeks, and then handed it to Sam. Sam also shed tears. Peter exclaimed, “arnt you and I a couple of pretty fellows to bring this disgrace on poor old uncle who has always fed us! We ought to be —— by ——!”

I could give fifty more facts were there time, and were there any need of it, to show Mr. Jefferson’s innocence of this and all similar offenses against propriety. . . . Mr. Jefferson was deeply attached to the Carrs—especially to Peter. He was extremely indulgent to them and the idea of watching them for faults or vices probably never occurred to him.

Monticello’s webpage about the Carr family says that Peter and Samuel Carr were born in 1770 and 1771, respectively. By 27 Feb 1793, according to a letter from their cousin Martha, Peter had moved out of his mother’s house and Samuel was looking for an estate as well. According to The Carr Family Records, a spotty genealogy published in 1894, Peter and Samuel Carr lived on adjoining estates called Carr’s Retreat and Dunlora. As near as I can tell through Google Maps, they were about six or seven miles from Monticello.

In April 1799 Jefferson told his sister that both cousins had just had children: “Peter Carr had a son and Sam a daughter.” Peter declined to enter public life, though his family reportedly thought he should. Samuel eventually served brief terms in both houses of the Virginia legislature and was a colonel of the state militia during the War of 1812. According to Andrew Burstein’s Jefferson’s Secret, Samuel also helped T. J. Randolph manage his unreliable father’s finances.

It’s clear from this letter that Randolph wanted Randall to understand that Peter Carr was the father of all of Sally Hemings’s children, and that almost everyone at Monticello knew that: “from these connections sprang the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. . . their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised.” Randolph offered no opening for thinking that any other man was having sex with Hemings and could thus have fathered any of her children.

Peter Carr couldn’t have impregnated Sally Hemings in France, however. And according to the gossip-seeking journalist James Callender, she was pregnant when she came back from Paris with Jefferson. (Hemings’s son Madison would also state that his mother had been pregnant at that time.) Thus, Randolph’s statement about Peter Carr couldn’t refute Callender’s first and biggest accusation against the President; it could only address the gossip that spread as the Hemings children grew up at Monticello through 1826. Perhaps Randolph was confident that the slave-labor plantation’s account books contained no record of Hemings giving birth in 1790; after all, he inherited those documents from his grandfather.

TOMORROW: The other thing Thomas Jefferson Randolph wanted.

(The miniature portrait of Jefferson above, from Monticello, is by John Trumbull.)

T. J. Randolph and His Grandfather’s Breathing

Yesterday I quoted a passage from an 1868 letter from Henry S. Randall, a biographer of Thomas Jefferson, to a younger writer, passing on what the President’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph had told him about the enslaved worker Sally Hemings. Here’s another tidbit:

He said Mr. Jefferson never locked the door of his room by day: and that he (Col. R.) slept within sound of his breathing at night.

Thus, by evoking the authority of someone who had lived alongside Jefferson in Monticello, Randolph was offering evidence that the President couldn’t have slept with Hemings. From that same letter we know that Randolph had taken it upon himself to “defend the character of [his] grandfather,” and was speaking to a sympathetic author who believed and passed on his remarks. But was he speaking accurately?

Last year Bloomberg posted an interview by Manuela Hoelterhoff of Alan Pell Crawford on his new book, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. It included this exchange:

Hoelterhoff: When you studied the ground plan [of Monticello], you noticed a secret passage to the slave quarters.

Crawford: During the childbearing years of Sally Hemings—the chambermaid with whom he probably had this long-term sexual relationship—he moved her to a room beneath the house itself and then at some point installed a staircase that would lead to his private chambers at Monticello.

I included the floor plan of the house in part to refute a claim made by his grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, that he would have known anything that went on inside Jefferson’s bedroom, because he slept within the sound of his snoring. I show there’s no such bedroom that would be within the sound of anything that went on inside Jefferson’s bedchambers.

Crawford uses the word “snoring” to give Randolph the benefit of the doubt—perhaps the “breathing” Randolph claimed to have heard at night was on the loud side. But it seems that Randolph’s bedroom still couldn’t have been close enough. So that’s the second claim which Randall recalled hearing from Randolph that we now know to be false.

In the overall interview, I was struck by Crawford’s tone of sympathy for the elder Jefferson’s situation, living off the labor of hundreds of other people yet still unable to live within his means.

TOMORROW: Thomas Jefferson Randolph points his finger.

T. J. Randolph and the Missing Fifteen Months

Earlier in the week I offered a link to Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, online courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. That notebook and other careful accounts from Jefferson’s slave-labor plantations were in the custody of the President’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph (1792-1875, shown here courtesy of Monticello) from 1826 until 1848, and then changed hands as the M.H.S.’s finding aid describes.

Randolph cited those documents when he tried to refute the rumors that had circulated since at least 1802 that his grandfather had had children with his enslaved maid Sally Hemings. That attempted refutation comes to us through Henry S. Randall (1811-1876), who wrote a three-volume biography of the President published in 1858. On 1 June 1868, Randall told another biographer several stories he’d heard from Randolph concerning Hemings and her children. The Frontline website offers a transcript of that letter.

The part that relates to Jefferson’s papers says:

Mr. Jefferson’s oldest daughter, Mrs. Gov. [i.e., Martha Jefferson] Randolph, took the Dusky Sally stories much to heart. But she never spoke to her sons but once on the subject. Not long before her death she called two of them—the Colonel [i.e., Thomas Jefferson Randolph] and George Wythe Randolph [1816-1867]—to her. She asked the Colonel if he remembered when “——— Henings (the slave who most resembled Mr. Jefferson) was born.” He said he could answer by referring to the book containing the list of slaves.

He turned to the book and found that the slave was born at the time supposed by Mrs. Randolph. She then directed her sons attention to the fact that Mr. Jefferson and Sally Henings could not have met—were far distant from each other—for fifteen months prior to such birth. She bade her sons remember this fact, and always to defend the character of their grandfather.

It so happened when I was afterwards examining an old account book of the Jeffersons I came pop on the original entry of this slaves birth: and I was then able from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation—but those circumstances have faded from my memory. I have no doubt I could recover them however did Mr. Jefferson’s vindication in the least depend upon them.

Note that the Randolphs, Randall, and by implication Parton were all interested in Jefferson’s “vindication” from the rumors. We know what they wanted to see in the records, and what they wanted other people to believe about those records.

Randall was vague about which enslaved man he was investigating. Many people interpret the phrase “Henings (the slave who most resembled Mr. Jefferson)” to refer to Eston Hemings, who later took the name Eston Jefferson; at the very least, lots of people who knew the man in Ohio said he looked like Thomas Jefferson. That would put the birth that Randolph and Randall looked up in 1808. But it doesn’t really matter which of Sally Hemings’s documented sons they might have been thinking of.

That’s because neither Randolph nor Randall was accurate. Perhaps they were both mistaken about Thomas Jefferson’s whereabouts for the entire fifteen months before Sally Hemings gave birth that time. But we know better—and from the very sources those men were consulting, the President’s own records.

Dumas Malone wrote the most thorough twentieth-century biography of Jefferson, in six volumes. As part of his research, Malone used Jefferson’s papers to figure out where the man was on every day of his later adult life. He strongly denied the possibility of Jefferson-Hemings children in an essay reprinted in his fourth volume (where I first read the story, about twenty years ago). Annette Gordon-Reed’s book on the issue has shown Malone’s statement of the facts and analysis to be incomplete and slanted, but as a researcher he was thorough.

As Winthrop Jordan wrote in White Over Black (1968), “though he was away from Monticello a total of roughly two-thirds of this period [when Sally Hemings is documented as having had children], Jefferson was at home nine months prior to each birth.” (Jordan did his own calculations of Jefferson’s whereabouts when, and Malone’s research later confirmed them.) Jefferson’s records also never show Hemings being away from Monticello after 1789, and he and his overseers kept careful track of their human property. (That was the whole point of slave records, after all.) There’s thus no evidence for the fifteen-month separation that the Randolph family and Randall claimed to have (“pop”) spotted.

Meanwhile, Sally Hemings’s son Madison had no access to any of those Jefferson family documents, nor control over them. He had no way to make up a story that matched the data inside them. He couldn’t add to them, or erase information from them. He couldn’t claim their authority for his statements about his family. Yet Madison Hemings’s account of his and his siblings’ parentage fits the documentary and biological evidence better than T. J. Randolph’s and Henry S. Randall’s.

TOMORROW: Another claim from Thomas Jefferson Randolph.