President Jefferson’s Flock

Thomas Jefferson was always interested in improving American agriculture, and his own farming enterprises, though he wasn’t always successful.

In 1794, after stepping down as Secretary of State, Jefferson had his managers at Monticello buy a flock of forty ewes. Robert Morris gave him a ram smuggled from Spain. On becoming President, Jefferson gained access to other exotic sheep—a Bengal ewe in 1805, a Barbary Broadtail ram and ewe in 1806.

In June 1807 a man named James D. Barry offered the President a ram of the Shetland breed (also found in other parts of northern Europe). Jefferson replied:

Th: Jefferson presents his compliments and thanks to mr Barry for his offer of the ram which he accepts, not from personal motives, but merely with a view to secure the breed to our country, of which another chance might not happen in a century.

he is sending off the ram which runs at present with his ewes, and is engaging a person to attend the flock constantly as a shepherd, to secure them against accident, and he counts on producing the breed of the ram pure & full-blooded in four generations, according to the common estimation.

should mr Barry hereafter wish for the breed Th:J. will feel a duty & pleasure in furnishing him. he will send for him tomorrow morning with mr Barry’s permission.

Barry replied on 25 June:

James D Barry presents his compliments to the President of the U.S.

it has been his wish ever since he got the ram to give him to some gentleman who would attend to propagatg. the breed which he thinks will be a useful one and will suit the soil & Climate of this Country.

it is with pleasure he sends him by the bearer, Knowing that there is no person in this Country who would be more disposed or who has it more in his power to secure the breed than the President—

Four days later, President Jefferson wrote to his granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph, then ten years old, about his growing flock:

I am now possessed of individuals of four of the most remarkeable varieties of the race of the sheep. if you turn to your books of natural history, you will find among these
1. the Spanish sheep or Marino.
2. the Iceland sheep, or Ovis Polycerata.
3. the Barbary sheep, or Ovis laticunda &
4. the Senegal sheep, or that of Bengal which is the same.

I have lately recieved a ram of the 2d. kind, who has 4. horns, a round & beautiful animal, rather small.

the 3d. or broadtailed is remarkable for it’s flavor. I lately had a quarter sent me which I found the highest flavored lamb I had ever tasted. the 4th. or Senegal is supposed to be the original stock of the sheep. it’s flavor is said to be equal to that of Venison.

tho’ I possess individuals of one sex only of the 2d. 3d. & 4th. kinds, yet 4. crossings are understood by naturalists to produce the true breed. I mean to pay great attention to them, pro bono publico. (call on [your older brother] Jefferson to translate your Latin)

While Jefferson talked about breeding these sheep for the public good, he accepted the gifts as his own property. He expected to make money from his flock first and ultimately to benefit the country by providing a stock of well-bred sheep and an example for other farmers.

He didn’t know that his new ram would be a killer.

TOMORROW: “The concise history of a monster.”

Historical Diaries Panel at Plymouth, 13 May

On Tuesday, 13 May, I’ll be at the Plymouth Public Library as part of a panel discussion on using diaries in historical research. This event will run from 7:00 to 8:30 P.M. in the Otto Fehlow Meeting Room, and is free and open to the public.

The other panelists will be Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit, and Ondine Le Blanc, Director of Publications at the Massachusetts Historical Society and thus one of the people behind the publication of Ellen Coolidge’s travel diary.

I’ll describe my work on boys’ diaries in the Revolutionary period, including those of John Quincy Adams, Peter Thacher, and Quincy Thaxter. I also plan to share secrets from the diary of John Rowe.

Donna Curtin, Executive Director of the Plymouth Antiquarian Society, will moderate the discussion and question session to follow.

As long as I’m talking a bit about me, here are links to a couple of articles that appeared on the web last week:

• I’m continuing to review episodes of the Turn television series for Den of Geek, and also wrote a profile of John Graves Simcoe, the real British officer behind [far behind—almost invisible in the distance behind] one of that show’s main villains. For more on Simcoe, check out Todd Braisted’s terrific article on Rachel Smith’s excellent new blog, Turn to a Historian.
• At the Journal of the American Revolution, Ray Raphael and I teamed up to write a pair of articles about the figure of a musket-toting woman shown above. Can A.P. U.S. History test-takers fairly deduce anything about that image without context? And where did it originate?

Muffins at Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter in Queen Victoria’s England: The Travel Diary of Ellen Wayles Coolidge, 1838-1839, edited by Ann Lucas Birle and Lisa A. Francavilla, is a book from the Massachusetts Historical Society. (Other authors call the diarist Ellen Randolph Coolidge, using her maiden name.)

Soon after arriving in London, Coolidge wrote a long journal entry for Monday, 9 July 1838, which reports:

We breakfast about ten and dine at seven, taking coffee immediately after and tea when we call for it—at any hour. Our breakfast consists of black tea, comme ça, butter la la—having no ice upon it; but delicious muffins, light, white, spongy just such as we had, in former days, at Monticello, when the cook happened to be sober. Such as I once heard a little boy desire his mother to “butter on the back, stick holes in with a fork, and squeeze down in the plate till the juice run out.” Add to these, new-laid eggs with the date of their production written on them with a pencil, and very fine, large, ripe strawberries.

The little boy was Coolidge’s little brother Benjamin Franklin Randolph, born in 1808. Others retold the anecdote. At some point he might have been sick of hearing it.

Ellen Coolidge’s grandfather also enjoyed Monticello’s muffins in that period. As President, Thomas Jefferson wrote home to his daughter: “Pray enable yourself to direct us here how to make muffins in Peter’s method. My cook here cannot succeed at all in them, and they are a great luxury to me.”

Birle and Francavilla write:

The cook [whom Coolidge remembered] may have been Peter Hemings (1770–after 1834), whose recipe for muffins Jefferson preferred, or possibly Edith Fossett (1787-1854), who trained and cooked at the President’s House [in Philadelphia] and became head cook at Monticello in 1809, after Peter Hemings departed.

Hemings didn’t “depart” Monticello—like Fossett, he was enslaved, and departing would have been difficult. Rather, Hemings became Monticello’s brewer instead of its cook. Some connection with beer might explain Ellen Coolidge’s reference to the cook as less than constantly sober. Later Hemings supported himself and his family as a tailor.

Monticello has whole pages on the muffins, including the original recipe and a modern version.

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.