The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (112 page)

52.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 246. The oral history of the very numerous and prominent members of the Woodson family maintains that the child Hemings bore in 1790 did not die, as Madison Hemings said. They believe their ancestor Thomas Woodson was that child and that he was sent away from Monticello in 1802, after the public exposure of TJ’s liaison with SH. My own analysis of the matter (ibid., 67–77) tended to support Madison Hemings’s version of his family’s story: SH had a child in 1790, but that child did not live. There are no records of a child named Thomas linked to SH in TJ’s Farm Book, even in the years before SH and TJ’s relationship was exposed to the public. TJ was not keeping the Farm Book between 1790 and 1794, which explains why there was no record of a birth to SH in 1790. Once he resumed making notations in the Farm Book—again well before Callender’s exposé and when he thought he had retired from public life—he listed the names and birthdates of all of SH’s children except an unnamed daughter who did not survive infancy. That child was mentioned in a letter to his son-in-law in 1799. Other Jefferson documents are revealing, as discussed in note 15 to chap. 10. Jefferson began his program of vaccinations against smallpox at Monticello in 1801. He kept a separate record, apart from the Farm Book, detailing his progress. Unlike today, with our modern storage capacity, the timing of vaccinations on the mountain depended upon the availability of the cowpox virus. Jefferson vaccinated his children Beverley and Harriet in 1802, and Madison and Eston in 1816. All four are listed as children of Sally Hemings. There is no Hemings child named Tom on the list, as he certainly would have been had he existed. Again, these vaccinations began well before Callender ever wrote about a child named Tom at Monticello. The DNA testing conducted on the Hemings, Jefferson, Carr, and Woodson descendants in 1998 found a connection between the Hemings family member and the Jeffersons tested, no connection between the Hemings family and the Carrs, and no connection between the Woodsons and any of the other families who were tested. The
Nature
article announcing the results of the DNA test needlessly confused the issue by giving the impression that it was absolutely clear that SH bore a child in 1790 who grew up to become Thomas Woodson. The article completely ignored both Madison Hemings’s statement that his older sibling had died as an infant, and the fact that TJ’s records contain no mention of a child named Thomas who belonged to SH. That is why there was no DNA match. The supreme, and very telling, irony is that the article accepted SH’s maternity of a child with no scientific or contemporary documentary evidence from Monticello, or known members of her family, supporting the idea that she had a child named Thomas Woodson. That notion was put forth in the midst of a study that was done because the mountain of contemporary evidence supporting TJ’s paternity of SH’s children was deemed insufficient—only scientific corroboration of his paternity would be good enough.
      "Irony" is perhaps not the word to use to describe how this matter unfolded. It is, in fact, perfectly in keeping with past and present racial hierarchies for blacks’ stories to be accepted when they affect only other black people, but to treat their stories with super, super skepticism when they say things about white people that other whites find to be problematic. Thus, blacks can say who their black ancestors were and be "believed" on their word alone. Their statements about their white ancestry have to be backed up by scientific proof or support from the white ancestor or that ancestor’s other white family members. Even before the DNA analysis, the weight of the evidence was against the idea that SH had a son born in 1790 who lived long enough to have descendants whose DNA could be tested in 1998. With that as the backdrop, the DNA results were not at all a surprise to me. At the same time, it seems clear that the Woodson family is connected to the Hemingses. The story is too strong, and from too many disparate sources—people who did not even know each other—for there not to be some connection. The only question that remains is exactly what that connection is.

53.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 73–74.

54.
Ellen Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 14, 1858, Family Letters Project.

55.
Nell Irvin Painter,
Southern History across the Color Line
(Chapel Hill, 2002), 82. Sorting through all this is a difficult, but necessary, task. In that same work Painter writes of the skill with which "Aristocrats" (still speaking in the context of southern slavery) kept secrets and notes how extremely devoted they were to keeping up appearances. All too often, Painter argues, historians have accepted the well-constructed and controlled images contained in the documents created by elite families. Troublesome sexual behavior, alcoholism, family violence, incest, and mental illness that remain hidden in these pages, or only obliquely referred to, surface in oral histories or the comments of persons less close to the situation and, in a few cases, court records. It is the difficult task of historians to "examine sources more critically" and to "transcend complete reliance on the written record" (pp. 37–38).

56.
Ellen Randolph to Martha Randolph, Sept. 13, 1820, Family Letters Project.

57.
Maria J. Eppes to TJ, April 21, 1802,
The Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson
, ed. Edwin M. Betts and James A. Bear Jr. (1966; reprint, Columbia, Mo., 1986), 224.

1.
MB
, 750, 752, 753; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, March 28, 1790,
Papers
, 16:277–78; Campbell, "Life of Isaac Jefferson," 568.

2.
TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, March 28, 1790,
Papers
, 16:277–78.

3.
MB
, 753 (Jefferson purchased only two tickets to Baltimore), 754 ("gave Bob exp. To Philada").

4.
MB
, 754 n. 17.

5.
Malone,
Jefferson
, 2:9.

6.
Morris,
Southern Slavery and the Law
, 338–39.

7.
See chap. 7.

8.
Sara S. Hughes, "Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810,"
WMQ
, 3d ser., 35 (1978): 260–86; Morris,
Southern Slavery and the Law
, 339.

9.
Frederick Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself
(1845; reprint, Whitefish, Mont., 2004), 69.

10.
Philip D. Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 284–96. A lively debate has taken place about the nature of paternalism—whether it truly existed and how and whether it matters if it did. There is more of a consensus that the nature of the relations between slaves and masters changed over time and that before the America Revolution slaveholders tended to be unsentimental patriarchs who understood that they were dealing with a hostile labor force, rather than sentimental paternalists who, having decided to accommodate themselves to slavery, sought to justify it by styling themselves as "benevolent" fathers to enslaved men, women, and children. For exemplars of differing schools of thought about the nature of slaveholders, see James Oakes,
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York, 1982) and
Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South
(New York, 1990); Eugene D. Genovese,
The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South
, 2d ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1989); Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,
Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism
(New York, 1983); Mark M. Smith, "Time, Slavery and Plantation Capitalism in the Antebellum American South,"
Past and Present
, no. 150 (Feb. 1996): 142–68. Perhaps the most famous portrayal of paternalism, arguing that slavery was essentially a benevolent system, was advanced by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, in
American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime
(Baton Rouge, 1966).

11.
While there is much to dispute about his excoriation of TJ in
The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–1800
(Chicago, 1996), Conor Cruise O’Brien, with his keen intelligence, observational skills, and sharp writing style, zeros in on one of the less explored aspects of TJ’s personality: he loved to be in a home where he was surrounded by his "children and house slaves," with which the latter, O’Brien says, he had "veiled and equivocal relationships." Whatever negative things he had to say about mixing the blood of black and white, TJ deliberately chose to live surrounded by mixed-race people whom he relied upon for virtually all his needs.

12.
Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
, 69.

13.
Stanton,
Free Some Day
, 73–78, 79–82; TJ to Reuben Perry, April 16, 1812,
Farm Book
, 34–35. Deed to Reuben Perry, [Sept. 3, 1812]. Stanton notes that the deed is misdated in the Betts edition of the Farm Book; it should be 1811.

14.
MB
, 754–55.

15.
Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York to 1898
(New York, 1999).

16.
TJ to Benjamin Rush, Sept. 23, 1800,
Papers
, 32:167; TJ to Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, June 13, 1790,
Papers
, 16:489.

17.
Graham Russell Hodges,
Root and Branch: Africans in New York and New Jersey, 1613–1863
(Chapel Hill, 1999).

18.
Burrows and Wallace,
Gotham
, 350.

19.
Ibid., 249.

20.
Ibid., 348.

21.
Paul A. Gilje, "Between Slavery and Freedom: New York African Americans in the Early Republic,"
Reviews in American History
20 (June 1992): 163–67.

22.
MB
, 756; TJ placed an advertisement in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1791 for "a Genteel servant who can shave and dress well, attend a gentleman on horseback, wait at table and be well recommended,"
MB
, 815 n. 33.

23.
For TJ’s references to his illness, see TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 9, 1790,
Papers
, 16:416; TJ to Martha Randolph, May 16, 1790, ibid., 429; TJ to Mary Jefferson, May 23, 1790, ibid., 435; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, May 23, 1790, ibid., 436; TJ to William Short, May 27, 1790, ibid., 443, TJ to Peter Carr, June 13, 1790, ibid., 487, TJ to Elizabeth Eppes, June 13, 1790, ibid., 489, Nicholas Lewis, June 13, 1790, ibid., 492.

24.
MB
, 756 n. 32.

25.
MB
, 757 n. 33; TJ to Thomas Mann Randolph, March 18, 1790,
Papers
, 16:278, TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, April 4, 1790, ibid., 300. See also
MB
, 755 n. 23; 758 ("removed to Maiden Lane No. 57").

26.
MB
, 758 n. 42; Bear,
The Hemings Family
, 7.

27.
TJ to William Short, April 6, 1790,
Papers
, 16:319.

28.
Malone,
Jefferson
, 2:257.

29.
See, generally,
MB
, 758–65, containing numerous references to giving "James for hhd. exp."

30.
MB
, 762. See, e.g.,
MB
, 725.

31.
MB
, 763. In May he noted, "Francois Seche comes into my service on same terms as Jacob Cook," a few days before he wrote of Cook when he came into his employ, "He clothe himself & wash"—pays for his own washing (p. 757). That same month he gave "James for pr. Shoes 9/" and bought another pair in June (p. 759). Before Robert Hemings left, he also bought shoes for him (p. 757). The following months saw a daily dispensing of money to Hemings for the expense of running the household and numerous other transactions that are not always specified. Some of the payments were for his salary on account or in partial payments. Others payments were just for spending money. "Gave James for himself 32/" (p. 759), "James…necessaries for himself 18/9" (p. 764). Just before they left New York, he gave James £3 14s.