The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (42 page)

VI

Sometime in 1874, Thomas Jefferson Randolph received in the mail a copy of Israel Jefferson’s recollections in the
Pike County Republican
. The founder’s grandson was still living on his farm, Edgehill, four miles from Monticello. Randolph wrote a six-page letter responding to Israel’s claims. According to Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, a record, Randolph noted acerbically, “in Mr. J’s handwriting,” Israel was born on December 28, 1800. Mr. Jefferson left for Washington on December 1, 1800. Israel was describing as his earliest recollection something that happened twenty-eight days before he was born.

As for Israel becoming a waiter at Jefferson’s table in 1804 (when he was four years old), Randolph acidly reported that from 1801 to 1809 Israel and his entire family were on the list of slaves leased to a Mr. Craven, who had a farm some distance from Monticello. Again he was quoting from the Farm Book, “in Mr. J’s writing.” A record of February 10, 1810, places Israel among Jefferson’s farm workers, not at the Monticello house. When he went to work in the house (at an unspecified future date) he labored as a “scullion” in the kitchen. It was unlikely that he would know anything
about the private life of Mr. Jefferson. “Israel was never employed in any post of trust or confidence about the house at Monticello.”

Another reason why Randolph rejected Israel’s confirmation of Madison Hemings’s story was the living arrangements inside Monticello: “Mr. Jefferson and his daughter with her large family occupied the same wing of the building. The private access to their apartments was contiguous.” There was no possibility of Mr. Jefferson conducting a clandestine love affair with Sally Hemings with any hope of secrecy. That was why “every member of this family repelled with indignation this calumny.”

Turning to the motive for Wetmore’s version of Israel’s and Madison Hemings’s stories, Randolph asked, “Can it be other than the necessity which the[se] writers [northern abolitionists] feel to pander to that morbid hatred of the southern white man which devours with obscene malignity every calumny or absurdity which can blacken or degrade his character?”

Thomas Jefferson Randolph never mailed this letter. Further study of the
Pike County Republican
probably convinced him it would be a waste of a stamp. The letter was found decades later in the files of the University of Virginia library.
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VII

Madison Hemings’s Wetmore-ghosted story and Israel Jefferson’s dubious confirmation of it vanished from the public mind. The Democratic Party, struggling to escape the stigma of favoring slavery and failing to give more than half-hearted support to the Civil War, turned to Thomas Jefferson as their savior. William Jennings Bryan, the orator who virtually took over the party in 1896 and was nominated for president three times, constantly invoked his name. In the 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt became convinced that he and Jefferson shared a political destiny. FDR participated vigorously in a fundraising campaign to purchase Monticello and make it a national shrine. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation took possession of Monticello on July 5, 1926, the day after the national celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt joined the foundation’s board and remained a member to the end of his life.
¹⁵

In 1929, the stock market crashed and FDR emerged as the leader of the Democratic Party and the spokesman of Jefferson’s ideals.
¹⁶
He ordered
White House aides to make sure that a wreath was laid on Jefferson’s grave at Monticello every year during his presidency. He constantly quoted Jefferson in his speeches. In 1938, the mint issued the Jefferson nickel and the U.S. Post Office issued the Jefferson three-cent stamp. On April 13, 1943, the two hundredth anniversary of the man from Monticello’s birth, President Roosevelt dedicated the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the edge of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. World War II made the occasion doubly meaningful. “Today,” FDR said, “in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.” It was, he declared “a debt long overdue.”

Jefferson took his place in the ultimate American pantheon, within sight of George Washington’s soaring monument and Abraham Lincoln’s brooding seated statue. It began to look more and more like James Parton was right. Jefferson and America were one and the same glorious spiritual entity.

VIII

Thirty years later, Samuel F. Wetmore’s ghostwritten account of Madison Hemings’s recollections experienced a rebirth. The historical currents that had levitated Thomas Jefferson’s reputation for more than a century underwent a drastic reversal in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. For many people, America became a flawed superpower and Jefferson, the symbol of her greatness, no longer merited unquestioning respect. A series of biographers, novelists, and movie producers accepted Madison’s story as true and portrayed Jefferson as Sally Hemings’s lover, while a chorus of historians insisted they were wrong. Readers interested in this evolution will find a detailed account of it in the Appendix.

In 1997, historian Joseph Ellis summed up the prevailing view of the scholarly community: “Short of digging up Jefferson and doing DNA testing on him and Hemings descendants,” they had come as close to the truth as the available evidence allowed. The stage was set for the media explosion.

IX

At a Charlottesville, Virginia, dinner party in 1996, wealthy Winifred Bennett asked Dr. Eugene Foster whether DNA could be used to resolve the uncertainty surrounding Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Fos
ter had recently retired after many years as a professor of pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He knew that scientists had made large strides in the science of genetics. One of the breakthroughs was the identification of individual Y chromosomes in male DNA. Over generations, these tiny entities develop distinctive mutations, which become the genetic hallmarks of a particular family. If an individual’s Y chromosomes matched those of another individual, the chances were good that they shared a common ancestor.
¹⁷

The procedure resembles seeking an exact match from DNA found in blood or other body substances to decide paternity lawsuits and convict criminals, especially sex offenders. In such cases the matches or mismatches are virtually unchallengeable in court. The odds in favor of certainty are well over a million to one. But DNA identification of an ancestor through Y chromosomes does not come close to such exactitude. The most it can deliver is a probability. This crucial point was ignored in the media explosion.

Dr. Foster expressed an interest in obtaining DNA samples of Jefferson and Hemings descendants. Mrs. Bennett said she would pay the costs. Since Thomas Jefferson had no sons, it was necessary to find other male Jeffersons with the family’s chromosomes. Foster contacted Herbert Barger, a leading member of the Jefferson Family Association, who supplied him with phone numbers for seven descendants of Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s uncle. One of them agreed to give samples of his blood.

Next came the task of finding male descendants of Sally Hemings. Barger suggested contacting the Thomas Woodson Family Association, which had 1,400 members who claimed descent from Jefferson through their ancestor, the young slave identified by James Thomson Callender in his 1802 exposé as resembling Jefferson so closely, sarcastic neighbors called him “Master Tom.” (The Woodson name came from a later owner.) Barger also found descendants of Peter Carr and his brother Samuel; the latter had been named by a Jefferson granddaughter as Sally’s lover. Next, Barger helped Foster find a descendant of Eston Hemings. Unfortunately, there were no known male descendants of Madison Hemings.

Dr. Foster flew to England with the blood samples and had them analyzed by British DNA specialists. He summarized the results in his brief article in
Nature
. But Foster did not write the article’s headline: JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE’S LAST CHILD. Those words, chosen by
Nature
’s editor, triggered the media explosion.

Few people bothered to evaluate the significance of two additional conclusions from the DNA tests. The Y chromosomes of five descendants of Thomas Woodson failed to match the Jefferson DNA. Did this mean “Master Tom” had been fathered by someone else? The DNA of the descendants of those prime suspects, the Carr brothers, also failed to match the Jefferson DNA. At first glance, this failure seemed to refute the assertions of Thomas Jefferson Randolph and other members of the Jefferson family. But this conclusion would turn out to need further evaluation.
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X

On November 9, 1998, four days after the
Nature
article appeared in print, Dr. Foster published a letter in the
New York Times
. Earnestly, with a hint of muted indignation, he stated that “the genetic findings my collaborators and I reported in the scientific journal
Nature
do not prove that Thomas Jefferson was the father of one of Sally Hemings’s children. We never made that claim.” Apparently, Dr. Foster was laying heretofore invisible stress on the word “prove.” He insisted that he had repeatedly said before the tests began that they would “not prove anything conclusively.” All he ever hoped to do was provide some “objective evidence that would bear on the controversy.” He and his fellow researchers “had not changed our position.”
¹⁹

Three days before Dr. Foster’s letter appeared, Thomas B. Moore, a lawyer with a wide background in medical litigation, wrote an even more critical letter to the
New York Times
. On the basis of the evidence Foster presented, Moore declared, “no court of law would hold that Thomas Jefferson had a child by Sally Hemings.” The most Foster’s evidence could prove, Moore maintained, was that “sometime over the last 300 years or so, a descendant of Jefferson’s grandfather had a relationship that produced a male child who is an ancestor of one of the living and tested male descendants of Sally Hemings.” This could have happened “in the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries.” Foster began his letter to the
Times
by agreeing with Moore. No one seemed to realize it, but James Thomson Callender’s 1802 story had entered the ambiguous wonderland of statistical probability.
²⁰

XI

At a November 1, 1998, press conference, Daniel P. Jordan, president of The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, said that he had seen Dr. Foster’s article only “forty-eight hours ago.” The foundation would need “more time to evaluate it carefully.” Fourteen months later, on January 26, 2000, the foundation issued a report by a research committee that declared Thomas Jefferson was the father, not only of Eston Hemings but of all of Sally Hemings’s children. They based their conclusion on Madison Hemings’s story and on the fact that Jefferson was at Monticello when Sally conceived each of her children. The committee bolstered their conclusion with a statistical study by staff archaeologist Fraser D. Neiman that concluded the probability of Jefferson’s guilt was a near certainty—99 percent.

The committee admitted that “many aspects of this likely relationship remain unclear.” The nature of the relationship, the longevity of Sally’s first child, and the identity of Thomas Woodson were among the mysteries. Finally, “the implications of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson should be explored to enrich the understanding and interpretation of Jefferson and the entire Monticello community.” One of these implications soon became apparent. President Daniel P. Jordan announced that the word “Memorial” was being dropped from the foundation’s title. Apparently, the foundation no longer thought Thomas Jefferson was worthy of being “memorialized” by them—and presumably by the American people.
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XII

Behind the scenes, an angry confrontation was taking place at Monticello. One member of the research committee, Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn, retired professor of clinical medicine at the University of Virginia, had written a minority report, disagreeing with the majority conclusion. Dr. Wallenborn’s opinion was not mentioned in the press release announcing Jefferson’s guilt. This omission led to some heated exchanges between Wallenborn and Daniel Jordan. An obviously reluctant Jordan finally released the report in April 2000, two months after the majority report.
With it came a fierce rebuttal from Lucia C. Stanton, Monticello’s senior research historian.

The lone dissenter admitted there was “significant historical evidence” that Jefferson could be the father of Eston Hemings.” But Dr. Wallenborn argued there was “significant historical evidence of equal stature” that indicates Jefferson was not Eston’s father, and was also not the father of Sally Hemings’s other children. Wallenborn maintained that the Carr brothers were by no means eliminated by the DNA test on Eston Hemings’s descendant. One of them could still have been Sally’s lover and fathered some or all of her other children. He noted that the Carrs had been identified as Sally’s lovers not only by Jefferson family members but by Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon. As for the statistical study, Wallenborn dismissed it because it lacked information on Sally Hemings’s whereabouts at the times of her conceptions and where Randolph Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, and other males with Jefferson DNA were at these times.

Lucia C. Stanton refuted Wallenborn’s arguments in a style that radiated contempt. Her four-page statement was organized under headings that dismissed each argument before it was discussed:
1. Jefferson denied the relationship (and by implication, Jefferson would not lie). 2. Edmund Bacon denied the relationship (and by implication, Bacon would not lie). 3. Thomas Jefferson Randolph denied the relationship (and by implication, Thomas Jefferson Randolph would not lie).
Stanton is a respected scholar who has written a fascinating book,
Free Some Day
, about the lives of Monticello’s slaves. The tone of her rebuttal is a good example of the overheated atmosphere that pervaded Monticello at this time.
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XIII