The Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (51 page)

During these five years of continual admiration, Dolley grew frail. When an old friend sent her the first rose of the summer from her garden, Dolley thanked her extravagantly and then added that she had risen that
morning with the sun and “felt as if I could fly with the aid of a sweet breeze then blowing, but now at 10 o’clock I am so ready for a nap I may not sign my name to this.”
³³
On July 8, 1849, Dolley was unable to rise from her bed. For several days, she slipped in and out of consciousness. When she awoke, her friend Eliza Collins Lee said, she would “smile her loving smile, put her arms out to embrace those she loved, and who were near her, and gently relapse into the rest that was peace.”
³⁴

Dolley Madison died on July 12, 1849, at the age of eighty-one. President Zachary Taylor cancelled all government business and ordered a state funeral. The crowd was stupendous. All the mourners seemed to sense they were saying farewell to a woman who had not only lived history but made it. Another seventy years would pass before women won the right to vote and became accepted members of the political community. But Dolley’s example remains a landmark on this long, torturous road. She demonstrated what women can bring to the often acrimonious world of American politics—good humor and tolerance of opposing points of view. Equally important is the virtue that won her respect as well as affection: her courage. Above all, Dolley epitomized the significance of a woman’s love in the lives of men who sought history’s most elusive prize, fame.

S
amuel F. Wetmore’s ghostwritten account of Madison Hemings’s recollections did not entirely disappear after its 1873 publication in the
Pike County Republican
. The African-American historian Arthur Calhoun concluded the story was “probably true” in his 1917
Social History of the American Family
. W.E.B. Du Bois, a central figure in the evolution of African-American identity, cited it as true in his 1935 book
Black Reconstruction
. In 1954,
Ebony
magazine ran a photo essay, “Thomas Jefferson’s Negro Grandchildren,” about a group of African-Americans who said they were descended from Jefferson. Many were descendants of Sally Hemings. Others claimed Joe Fosset, son of Mary Hemings, Sally’s sister, as their ancestor and asserted Jefferson was Joe’s father. The magazine abandoned its usually moderate tone as it discussed the subject. The
Ebony
writer heaped sarcasm on white historians, claiming they were well aware that Jefferson had fathered numerous “slave concubines” by Sally and other members of the Hemings family.
¹

In 1960, Jefferson scholar Merrill D. Peterson printed a summary of the Madison Hemings story in his landmark book,
The Jefferson Image in the American Mind
. He found it “more credible” than most recollections of Jefferson. But he ultimately concluded the “miscegenation legend,” as he called it, was not true. Peterson cited a story about an African-American carpenter named Robert Jefferson, who died in Ohio in 1882. This Jefferson had been a house slave who belonged to a man named Christian in
Charlestown, Virginia. He was born in 1803 and claimed that his mother repeatedly told him Jefferson was his father and he “had no reason to doubt her word.” Peterson decided Madison’s story was refuted by too many “incredible” black claims like Robert Jefferson’s and “by the overwhelming evidence” of Jefferson’s personal life.
²

In 1968, historian Winthrop Jordan wrote another landmark book,
White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812
. Jordan, a descendant of abolitionists, included more than a few paragraphs about Thomas Jefferson. He dismissed the story of Sally Hemings as stained by “the utter disreputability of the source” (James Thomson Callender). But he noted that Jefferson had been at Monticello nine months before the births of each of Sally’s children.
³

In 1974, historian Douglas Adair, long head of the Institute for Early American Culture at Williamsburg, came to Jefferson’s defense in a posthumous book of essays titled
Fame and the Founding Fathers
. Included was a hitherto unpublished essay, “The Jefferson Scandals.” Adair had done considerable research into the private lives of Jefferson’s nephews, Samuel and Peter Carr. He emphatically backed Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s testimony that they were guilty. Adair found that the older brother, Peter, had enjoyed a long-running relationship with Sally Hemings, so intense that it left him incapable of a happy marriage. The testimony of an overseer, Edmund Bacon, who worked at Monticello from 1806 to 1822, seemed to confirm this assertion. Bacon said he had seen ___ (he discreetly omitted the name) coming out of Sally’s cabin on “many a morning.” Adair believed he was talking about Peter Carr. His brother, Samuel Carr, had been the lover of Sally’s niece, Betty, the child of her half sister, Mary.

Adair condemned with special vehemence the idea that sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings had conceived her first child when she was living in Jefferson’s Paris residence. That would have meant Jefferson had traveled home from France with his teenage daughters “in the tight enforced intimacy of shipboard…with his pregnant mulatto mistress as the fourth member of the family group.” He was even more skeptical that Sally became “the overruling passion” of Jefferson’s later life—that Jefferson’s desire for her approached the “obsessive”—making him “oblivious to and contemptuous of the public opinion of the great world and the private judgments of his intimate family.” This did not jibe with the “thin-skinned censure-
allergic Virginian” that he and other historians found when they studied Jefferson’s political life.

If this story were true, Adair concluded, it would require everyone “not merely to change some shadings” in the portrait of Jefferson, but to “reverse the picture of him as an honorable man, painted by both the contemporaries who knew him well and the multitude of later scholars who have studied with care every stage in his career.”
⁴

Outside the scholarly community, Douglas Adair’s exoneration of Jefferson was scarcely noticed. Several months before its publication, historian Fawn Brodie published
Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History
. Brodie was a psychobiographer best known for her controversial life of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. The details she reported about Smith’s sex life and other matters earned her an excommunication from the church.

Brodie’s
Intimate History
accepted Madison Hemings’s narrative as true. She described it as “the most important single document” relating to the story of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Her psychosexual study of Jefferson concluded that his affair with Sally was “a serious passion that brought both parties much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.”

One reviewer called the book “a psychoanalytic history of Jefferson’s complex mind and motivations” and praised it as a “compelling, compassionate case history.” Numerous scholars disagreed. David Herbert Donald, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard, accused Brodie of trying to portray Jefferson as “a secret swinger” and suggested that the title of her book should have been
By Sex Obsessed
. He thought Brodie refused to believe that the real Jefferson was “somewhat monkish, abstemious, continent and virtually passionless.”

Garry Wills, professor of history at Northwestern University and the author of several books on or related to Jefferson, was even tougher on Brodie. “Two vast things, each wondrous in itself, combine to make this book a prodigy,” Wills wrote. “The author’s industry—and her ignorance.”
⁵
Wills was outdone by Julian Boyd, the editor of the Jefferson Papers, who had spent thirty years of his life studying all of Jefferson’s “recorded actions.” He called Brodie’s Jefferson a fiction created by those who “so eagerly embrace the concept of collective guilt, who project views of the rights of women and blacks into the past.”
⁶

In spite of these denunciations, Brodie’s book was a publishing success. She was interviewed on the
Today
show, and her version of Jefferson and Sally soon created what the media call “a buzz.” The book was on the
New York Times
bestseller list for thirteen weeks and sold 80,000 copies in hardback and 270,000 in paperback.
The Los Angeles Times
named Brodie Woman of the Year.
⁷

The success of Brodie’s book cast a shadow on the 1976 celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One scholar wrote a troubled letter to Dumas Malone, the nation’s leading Jefferson scholar, bemoaning the way
Ebony
was “spreading the Hemings canard all over their bicentennial issue and blacks hereabouts are reading it gleefully.” In numerous articles around this time,
Ebony
regularly cited Brodie’s book as the source for their denunciations of Jefferson. They accepted Brodie’s contention that it was a love story, but claimed this only “intensified his [Jefferson’s] hypocrisy.”

Dumas Malone, close to completing his six-volume Jefferson biography, joined the fray with an article in the
Journal of Southern History
debunking Madison Hemings’s story. Malone ended his article with a quotation from the editor of the
Waverly Watchman
, Pike County’s Democratic newspaper. That sharp-tongued partisan compared Madison Hemings’s claim to Jefferson’s paternity to “a pedigree printed on the numerous stud horse bills” each spring. “No matter how scrubby the stock,” the owners invented “an exalted lineage for their property.” Such offensive language infuriated blacks already suspicious of the white Jefferson scholars’ establishment—and alienated white sympathizers.
⁸

In 1979, Barbara Chase-Riboud published
Sally Hemings, A Novel
. The Philadelphia-born author, who is also a gifted sculptor, accepted Fawn Brodie’s premise of a deeply serious, caring relationship and created a story that opened in 1830 in Albermarle County not far from Monticello. Sally Hemings was free and living with her two freed sons, Eston and Madison. From there the story is told from several points of view and moves back and forth in time, with many pages devoted to Paris, where Jefferson supposedly fell in love with Sally.

According to the fictional Sally, Martha and Maria Jefferson were fully aware of the affair. Like Sally, they were in awe of Thomas Jefferson and never dreamed of objecting to the liaison. The novel closed with Jefferson dead and Sally freed by Martha after a bitter, mutually abusive exchange.
A few months later, Sally watched while all Monticello’s blacks except some of the Hemings clan were sold at auction to pay Jefferson’s debts. Sally bitterly regretted her inability to buy her sister Critta’s children; she felt the scene was “my condemnation to everlasting hell.”

The novel was the target of negative remarks from several historians. Chase-Riboud fired back in an interview in the
New York Times
: “These men have an overwhelming investment in Thomas Jefferson, they’ve spent their whole lives writing about this man. I have a similar emotional investment in Sally Hemings…I find it extraordinary that certified historians are rebutting a novel.”

Some of these scholars were soon doing much more than rebutting her book. When they learned that CBS-TV and later NBC-TV were considering a miniseries based on the novel, they launched a letter-writing campaign to persuade the network to abandon the project. Both networks dropped the idea. These Jefferson defenders did not seem to realize that they were perilously close to violating the First Amendment. Barbara Chase-Riboud, out several hundred thousand dollars and understandably vexed, deplored some people’s “presumed rights to interpret American history.”

The 1990s began with a proclamation by the columnist George Will that suggested there was no need to worry about Sally Hemings or Thomas Jefferson’s problems with slavery. Mr. Will named Jefferson the “man of the millennium.” The Sage of Monticello summed up “the American idea” in his character—confident, serene, tolerant, curious—the epitome of a free man. His whole life, as a politician and statesman, a scientist, educator, and architect, bore witness to his extraordinary and unique greatness. With the collapse of communism and America’s emergence as the world’s only superpower, was James Parton’s Jefferson going global?

In the scholarly community, very different thoughts were germinating. In 1993, the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, historians under the leadership of Peter S. Onuf, who had succeeded Merrill Peterson as Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, convened a six-day Jeffersonian Legacies Conference. Mr. Onuf marshaled a wide range of scholars for the task of understanding “not only Jefferson in his own world” but also “his influence in shaping ours.” The tone of the meeting was, in the words of one participant, “unreverential.” Few speakers tried to defend Jefferson. Instead, his role in the history of race and slavery was frequently attacked.

Rhys Isaac of La Trobe University in Australia castigated the conclave for being too kind to Jefferson, who in his view had left America a legacy of inequality for blacks, women, and native Americans. Paul Finkelman, a visiting professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, acidly noted Jefferson’s anguish when the Missouri Compromise crisis of 1820 raised the specter of civil war and disunion. Jefferson called it “an act of…treason against the hopes of the world.” Finkelman said treason had indeed been committed in the land of the free—by Thomas Jefferson. The speaker who got the most press attention was Robert Cooley, a descendant of Sally Hemings. He told the scholars that they should take the Hemings oral tradition seriously. The lack of documentary evidence was hardly surprising, he said; Jefferson’s white children made sure any incriminating records were destroyed after his death. No one challenged Mr. Cooley’s assertions.
⁹

Interest in Sally Hemings remained intense in many quarters of the cultural world. In 1995, Disney/Touchstone released a motion picture,
Jefferson in Paris
, starring Nick Nolte as Jefferson. The producers were Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, a team famed for historical dramas. The film accepted the Madison Hemings story of Sally becoming Jefferson’s concubine in Paris.

Many scholars were beginning to feel overwhelmed by the seemingly relentless media determination to assume the Jefferson and Sally story was true. Andrew Burstein, professor of history at the University of Tulsa, exclaimed, “I’m becoming an endangered species, a Jeffersonian scholar that accepts the traditional notion that maybe a large number of Virginia slave owners did go to bed with their slaves but maybe Thomas Jefferson was not one of them.”
¹⁰

Another holdout was Joseph Ellis. His 1997 book
American Sphinx, The Character of Thomas Jefferson
ranged over Jefferson’s long life, studying him at various periods. Ellis’s approach reflected the new, unreverential attitude of the scholarly community. He cast an often jaundiced eye on the evolution of Jefferson as a national icon. Ellis debunked Jefferson’s supposed originality, pointing out how often he borrowed resounding phrases and lofty ideas from other people. In his political career he was often guilty of duplicity, especially in his statements about his relationship with James Thomson Callender. But Ellis drew the line when it came to Sally Hemings. “The accusations of sexual promiscuity defy most of the established patterns of Jefferson’s emotional life,” he wrote.
¹¹