The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (105 page)

35.
See, generally, Sutton,
Inoculator
.

36.
Ibid., foldout insert at end of the book.

37.
Ibid.

38.
Fenn,
Pox Americana
, 34–35. Adams was inoculated along with his brother. The men shared the experience with nine other patients, who he said suffered more than he. When he broke out in the pox, he stopped writing to Abigail, fearful of transmitting any infected material on the pages of his letter. Abigail’s inoculation was far less of an ordeal.

39.
Sutton,
Inoculator
, 80–83.

40.
Malone,
Jefferson
, 1:245.

41.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 245.

42.
Yvon Bizardel and Howard C. Rice Jr., "Poor in Love Mr. Short,"
WMQ
, 3d ser., 21 (1963): 516–33, esp. 517–18.

1.
Howard C. Rice,
L’Hôtel de Langeac: Jefferson’s Paris Residence, 1785–1789
(Paris, 1947), 7–8. See TJ to James Madison, Sept. 25, 1788, in
Papers
, 12:202, discussing the expectation that he would maintain the same "stile of living" that Franklin had established and that his governmental allowance gave him "500 guineas a year less to do it."

2.
Rice,
Hôtel de Langeac
, 8, 13–14.

3.
Ibid., 11, 13; McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello,
211.

4.
Malone,
Jefferson
, 2:20;
MB
, 674 n. 83

5.
Eugene Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York, 1972), 328–65; John W. Blassingame, "Status and Social Structure in the Slave Community: Evidence from New Sources,"
Perspectives and Irony in American Slavery
, ed. Harry P. Owens (Jackson, Miss., 1976); Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 353–58. See, generally, Stephanie M. H. Camp, "The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Woman in the Plantation South,"
Journal of Southern History
68 (2002): 3, recounting enslaved men’s and women’s efforts to create a space for themselves "away from slaveholding eyes" where they could be themselves among their own.

6.
Farm Book
, 77. Stanton,
Free Some Day,
106,

7.
Stanton,
Free Some Day
, 151.

8.
Marie de Botidoux to Martha Jefferson, Nov. 1789–Jan. 10, 1790, Special Collections, ViU.

9.
Maria Jefferson to Kitty Church, May 7, 1789,
Papers
, 16:xxxi.

10.
Fairchilds,
Domestic Enemies,
54–58, 68–69.

11.
David Garrioch,
The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690–1830
(Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 309–10.

12.
See photograph in first insert.

13.
Martha Jefferson to Eliza House Trist, in
Papers
, 8:437.

14.
Garrioch,
Making of Revolutionary Paris
, 22; Alistair Horne,
Seven Ages of Paris
(New York, 2002); Colin Jones,
Paris, Biography of a City
(London, 2004);

15.
TJ to Montmorin, July 8, 1789,
Papers
, 15:260.

16.
Garrioch,
Making of Revolutionary Paris
, 23.

17.
Ibid.

18.
McLaughlin,
Jefferson and Monticello
, 211.

19.
Eugen Weber,
My France: Politics, Culture, Myth
(Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 93.

20.
Fairchilds,
Domestic Enemies
, 105–6, notes "the difficulties faced with language" and describes how the stereotype of the inarticulate servant formed the basis of many comic scenes in plays and the literature of the day.

21.
Petit to TJ, Aug. 3, 1790,
Papers
, 17:298; Petit to TJ, July 28, 1792, ibid., 24:262.

22.
Fairchilds,
Domestic Enemies
, 50–51. Despite the government’s geopolitical contests, "‘À l’anglaise’ was the fashion in the Parisian beau monde."

23.
From Perrault,
Papers
, 14:426.

24.
Rice,
Hôtel de Langeac
, 10, 13.

25.
MB
, 690.

26.
Ibid., 718; Fairchild,
Domestic Enemies
, 54–58;
MB
, 730 n. 47.

27.
MB
, 686 n. 20.

28.
TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, March 28, 1787,
Papers
, 11:251.

29.
Pierson,
Jefferson at Monticello
, 107.

30.
See, generally, Sabattier,
Figaro et son maître
; Gutton,
Domestiques et serviteurs
; Fairchild,
Domestic Enemies
; Maza,
Servants and Masters
, on wage rates and positions.

31.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 248.

32.
See Maza,
Servants and Masters
, 110–11, on prejudices against female servants.

33.
Virginia Cope, "‘Verily Believed Myself to Be a Free Woman’: Harriet Jacobs’s Journey into Capitalism,"
African American Review
38 (2004): 5–20.

34.
Fairchild,
Domestic Enemies
, 54–58.

35.
Ibid., 56–58, wage tables; Pierre Boulle, "Les Gens de couleur à Paris à la veille de la Révolution," 162–63.

36.
Bear,
The Hemings Family
, 9.

37.
Mary Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Oct. (?), 1790, LOC 11992. This letter was more likely written at the beginning of Sept., as both parties were at Monticello during the end of Sept. and entire month of Oct.

38.
Martha Randolph’s will, April 18, 1834, Family Letters Project.

39.
Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson
, 234.

40.
Francis D. Cogliano,
Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy
(Charlottesville, 2006), 74–105.

41.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, chap. 3.

42.
MB
, 731, entry for April 29, 1789.

43.
Brodie,
Thomas Jefferson
, 233.

44.
MB
, 716, entry for Oct. 7, 1788.

45.
Stanton,
Free Some Day
, 109.

46.
TJ to James Madison, Jan. 13, 1821,
Republic of Letters
, 3:1828.

47.
TJ to William Short, Jan. 22, 1788,
Papers
, 15:483.

48.
Martha Jefferson Randolph to Ann (Nancy) Cary Randolph Morris, May 26, 1827, Family Letters Project.

49.
R. Premaratna et al., "Acute Hearing Loss Due to Scrub Typhus: A Forgotton Complication of a Reemerging Disease,"
Clinical Infectious Diseases
42 (2006): e6–e8.

50.
Scholars have speculated that a bout with typhus caused Beethoven’s deafness. Tony Miksanek, "Diagnosing a Genius: The Life and Death of Beethoven,"
Journal of the American Medical Association
297 (2007): 2643–44.

51.
Ellen Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, Family Letters Project. See also Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 259. Readers should note that there was an error in the transcription of this letter in the earliest editions of the book that was corrected in later printings. It formed no part of my analysis and discussion in the main text. The full letter itself appeared only in the appendix to the work. The relevant passage is the quoted material in the text to which this endnote refers. I devoted a chapter (pp. 78–104) of my book to TJ’s grandchildren’s alternative vision of life at Monticello. Without rehashing that discussion, a couple of things are worth mentioning.
     
In my first take, I focused primarily on what I thought, and still think, was the most important information conveyed in Coolidge’s account: that Samuel Carr had fathered all of SH’s children. My analysis at the time (later borne out by DNA tests on descendants) made clear to me that Coolidge’s statement was untrue. Coolidge’s letter nevertheless remains important because the DNA results reveal the level of desperation that TJ’s white family felt about his relationship with SH—that they would resort to picking relatives to name as her lover. As I think of it now, the passage in which Coolidge claimed that no female slave had ever gone into TJ’s room when he was there and that anyone who went into his room would have been seen by others also lays bare their anxiety. It is just the kind of "never" or "always" formulation that should provoke skepticism.
     
Coolidge was presenting herself as an eyewitness to SH’s access to her grandfather, offering that because she lived at Monticello (and was a legal descendant and thus had the right to tell the "official" family story), she could be trusted to know that they were never alone in his room. That it was impossible for her to have known that struck me then, and strikes me now, as patently obvious. Unless she was physically attached to him or SH, it was not humanly possible for Coolidge, or anyone else besides TJ and SH, to know whether they were ever alone in a room together over the near two decades that the pair was having children together. Coolidge was a contemporary of SH’s children, the first two of whom were conceived before she was born and the others when she was an infant or a child herself. She could not possibly have known whether SH was in TJ’s room or not when those children were conceived. Coolidge and her siblings spent large amounts of time at Monticello during their childhoods, moving there permanently in 1809 after all SH’s children were born. By the time the last child, Eston, whose descendant was the subject of the DNA test, was conceived in 1807, Coolidge was at least old enough—eleven—to be observant of her world. Coolidge did not, as an eleven-year-old girl, spend her time running back and forth between the outside and interior entrances to her grandfather’s bedroom twenty-four hours a day making sure that no one went inside. For that is what she would have to do in order to know the thing she said she knew and reconstruct, at age sixty-two, the memory of her eleven-year-old self having done that impossible thing. Nor would TJ’s guests—who were nowhere near as numerous during his preretirement years, the period when SH was conceiving her children—be standing by the indoor and outdoor entrances to TJ’s bedroom morning, noon, and night, watching to see whether anyone went inside.

52.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 259.

1.
I’ve borrowed this image from Carlyle,
The French Revolution
, 59, describing the fiscal policy of "Comptroller Calonne."

2.
See Doyle,
Origins,
45–53.