Assessing “Bradshaw’s Supposititious Epitaph”

As I quoted yesterday, around 1828 Nicholas Philip Trist, husband of one of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters, found an old chest in the former President’s attic.

In an appendix to his three-volume biography of Jefferson, Henry S. Randall quoted Trist’s description of taking a manuscript from that chest:

The epitaph on [John] Bradshaw, written on a narrow slip of thin paper, was a fine specimen. This has gone to France, through Gen. La Fayette, for M. De Lyon, a young friend of his who accompanied him on his triumphal visit to our country, and was with him at Monticello. De Lyon (who afterwards did his part in the “three days”) having expressed an earnest desire to possess a piece of Mr. J.’s MS., I had promised to make his wish known at some suitable moment. But, having postponed doing so until too late, and being struck with the appropriateness of this epitaph as a present for a pupil of La Fayette (and, through him, to the mind of “Young France”), I asked and obtained Mr. [Thomas Jefferson] Randolph’s consent to its receiving that destination.

’Tis evident, that the motto which we find on one of Mr. J.’s seals was taken from this epitaph, which, as we see from the note appended thereto, was supposed to be one of Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin’s spirit-stirring inspirations.

Because a note on the same paper in Jefferson’s handwriting stated:

From many circumstances, there is reason to believe there does not exist any such inscription as the above [in Jamaica], and that it was written by Dr. Franklin, in whose hands it was first seen.

Randall therefore titled his appendix “Bradshaw’s Supposititious Epitaph.”

(Speaking of suppositions, I can’t find any companion of Lafayette named “De Lyon.” Eyewitness accounts of the marquis’s trip to Monticello mention his son George Washington de Lafayette and his secretary, Auguste Levasseur. The latter was wounded during France’s 1830 revolution, sometimes called “the three glorious days,” so probably Trist just remembered that man’s name wrong.)

In the paper trail for “Bradshaw’s Epitaph,” most or all of the original documents have disappeared. We don’t have Jefferson’s copy of the epitaph, including the note at the bottom which Trist believed Jefferson had written himself. We have only Trist’s memo about the document. But let’s assume he produced an accurate transcription.

According to Trist, he found Jefferson’s copy of “Bradshaw’s Epitaph” in a box of papers from the late 1770s that had been stowed away and forgotten. Jefferson never added the letters in that box to his carefully filed correspondence. Thus, there’s no indication that he ever opened the box after 1777, the date of the last letter inside. So Jefferson must have expressed his suspicion that Franklin wrote “Bradshaw’s Epitaph” around that time.

But we know that Jefferson repeated the statement “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God” later in life. He had it engraved on an official Virginia medal in 1780. He used it as a motto on his personal seal after 1790. In 1823 he referred to the line in writing as “the motto of one, I believe, of the regicides of Charles I”—not as a stirring remark that Franklin came up with early in the Revolutionary War.

One possible explanation is that Jefferson concluded that Franklin had indeed made up the story of Bradshaw’s monument and composed the epitaph, but decided that he liked its last line so much that he’d ignore that hoaxing.

Jefferson is famous for having compartmentalized parts of his life and his thinking. Nevertheless, I don’t think he of all people would have been comfortable presenting that motto as historical when he knew it wasn’t. Adopting a stirring anti-tyrannical saying because it sounds good is one thing; telling a correspondent that it was a regicide’s motto is another. Why not just credit wise Dr. Franklin with composing the motto?

I therefore think Jefferson changed his mind about the epitaph between when he wrote about his doubt in the late 1770s and later. Maybe he talked to other Patriots and found they didn’t share his skepticism. Maybe he gained new information, perhaps in speaking with Franklin himself. He may not have been correct, but whatever happened, Jefferson’s early suspicions about the epitaph were washed away—until Henry S. Randall published that long-hidden note in 1858.

TOMORROW: More reasons to doubt.

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.

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.”

“Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed?”

Until I read this week’s New York Times article on Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, I didn’t realize how that book treats the work of Annette Gordon-Reed.

As I wrote yesterday, Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy sparked the recent boom in books about the third President’s conflicted attitudes toward slavery. Her The Hemingses of Monticello, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is a major study of American slavery, not just slavery at Monticello.

So how does Wiencek discuss Gordon-Reed’s work? Master of the Mountain mentions her books only three times. Two endnotes mention (but don’t quote) transcription errors in the first edition of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Those are undoubtedly sensitive spots for Gordon-Reed since a Jefferson descendant who disliked that book tried to use those errors to have her fired from New York University in July 2001. The Times reports:

David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’”

Wiencek told the newspaper “that the transcription errors were minor,” but his endnotes don’t leave that impression.

The third reference to Gordon-Reed’s work is this passage:

Many writers on slavery today have emphasized the “agency” of the enslaved people, insisting that we pay heed to the efforts of the slaves to resist their condition and assert their humanity under a dehumanizing system. But as slaves gain “agency” in historical analyses, the masters seem to lose it. As the slaves become heroic figures, triumphing over their condition, slave owners recede as historical actors and are replaced by a faceless system of “context” and “forces.” So we end up with slavery somehow afloat in a world in which nobody is responsible.

One historian writes about Monticello’s slaves as if they had no master: “There is every indication that they grasped the baleful situation they had been born into, and knew that forces were actively working to keep them down.”

And there’s an endnote pointing to page 405 of Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello. That sentence comes from a paragraph about how Sally Hemings’s son Madison learned to read. The same paragraph refers to Jefferson by name and calls his grandchildren Madison’s “white nieces and nephews, who were his age and going to a school that he knew he could never attend, but wanted to.” That’s not a picture of a “faceless system”—it puts specific faces on the system and tells us exactly who was “responsible” for Madison Hemings’s oppression and who benefited from it.

That’s why Prof. Jan Lewis of Rutgers told the Times, “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them. Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I suspect that treatment was a big reason why Gordon-Reed and Lewis published their critical assessments of Master of the Mountain so quickly after its publication, and in online venues (Slate and The Daily Beast) where those reviews could run immediately. Ordinarily the wheels of scholarship grind slow. But this was personal.*

Reading Wiencek’s response to those critical reviews on the Smithsonian website, I think he further mischaracterized Gordon-Reed’s work:

I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson’s “plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory.”

If Master of the Mountain had “systematically” addressed Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson, it really should have cited her work more than three times. And this is the actual passage from The Hemingses of Monticello that Wiencek partially quoted in his riposte:

Building the nation was Jefferson’s true obsession [as President], not the end of slavery and definitely not the racial question.

As he retreated from the antislavery rhetoric of his youth, and grew comfortable in his role as the champion of the common man (the common white man), Jefferson, like others of his type, began to accommodate himself to the institution of slavery. As was discussed earlier, Lucia Stanton has detailed his plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory. He also brought in overseers who eschewed violence in favor of incentives as a way of motivating enslaved worked; for unexplained reasons, however, the men did not remain in his service. Jefferson was again, in all of this, ahead of his time—on the leading edge of adopting the sort of paternalism that would in the coming decades turn his white grandchildren’s generation into full-throated apologists for the peculiar institution.

Gordon-Reed published that book in 2008, during the sunset of George W. Bush’s Presidency. How can anyone think that she used the phrase “kinder, gentler” without irony? Wiencek appears to have missed not only that sentence’s tone but also how it expresses Jefferson’s perception, not Gordon-Reed’s: “his plans for his version…”

Where is the “approval” that Wiencek perceives from Gordon-Reed? Where is her portrayal of Jefferson as a “kindly master”? The only time The Hemingses of Monticello uses the word “kindly” for Jefferson is in describing how his acknowledged grandchildren perceived him. And that paragraph ends, “Kindly, doting grandfathers can be sexual beings, too…” Gordon-Reed assesses the master of Monticello like this:

It may be difficult from our vantage point to believe that Jefferson had an internal sense of justice and fairness, depending as he did on a labor system that was constitutively unjust and unfair. By holding upward of two hundred “souls,” as he called them, in bondage, he worked injustice and unfairness in their lives every single day. . . . But Jefferson did have his own sense of fairness within the confines of his inhumane way of life…

It appears that Wiencek perceives any attempt to understand Jefferson’s thinking instead of simply calling him monstrous as “approval.” For fifteen years Gordon-Reed has been attacked by reactionary critics who felt she was out to denigrate Jefferson when she studied his contradictions. Now Wiencek brands that same work as the most prominent attempt to gloss over Jefferson’s racism.

* Speaking of personal, I should say that I’ve chatted with Gordon-Reed after a couple of her talks over the past decade and exchanged a few emails with Wiencek years back, but I’m not a friend or colleague of either.

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.

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.

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.