Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past (Sexuality Studies) (14 page)

The reaction of many Americans was to ignore the issue entirely. For his
three-volume account published in the 1850s, Randall interviewed Jefferson's
family and chose to leave aside old scandals, including Herrings. He "boasted
privately to Sparks" that he had learned from the family that Jefferson's nephew
Peter Carr was the father of Hemings's children 96 Randall does refer to Callender, calling him a "blackguard" but little else. In the preface, he explains
that he would not just repeat charges from partisan newspapers because to
do so would just give them more voice. Some Victorian biographers, such as
Morse, allude to the controversy, but none airs the specific charges or takes
the story at face value. Morse refers to it as "the pitiful story of Callender's
malicious defamation" without mentioning Herrings by name. And Morse
defensively does not explicitly address the story: "His many tales were scandalous and revolting to the last degree. Naturally, these slanders will not bear
repetition here; for they were worse than mere charges of simple amours."»

As scholars have shown, by most Americans the Herrings story remained
either ignored or coolly noted 98 There has been great resistance to the story
of Jefferson's fathering children with Herrings-far greater than any resistance to the characterizations of his other romantic relationships (all of
which are equally lacking in strong documentary evidence). Oftentimes the
story would simply be alluded to with no explicit mention of Herrings at
all. His being emotionally withdrawn, one turn-of-the-twentieth-century
biographer explains, came only "after he had been through the fiery ordeal
of politics, had been beat upon as fierce a storm of abuse and slander as
ever assailed a statesmen so essentially pure, so absolutely patriotic, so consistently unselfish and benevolent."99 A chapter entitled "Moral and Religious Views" notes the Callender newspaper charges but describes Callender
as personally and politically begrudged and dismisses Madison Hemings's
claim that he was Jefferson's son. The author quips, "In early days, and up to
a recent period, nearly every mulatto by the name of Jefferson in Albemarle
County, and they were numerous, claimed descent from the Sage of Monticello, which gratified their pride but seriously damaged his reputation.""' For the author, the justification of his dismissal was not based on Jefferson's
character but rather alleged documentary evidence that Jefferson had at one
point produced a birth record that showed that Madison Herrings could not
be his son and implied that the overseer was the father by his confession to
a clergyman. One early-twentieth-century biographer who writes that the
individual who broke the story, Callender, engaged in a "campaign of calumny" places this information in a footnote: "A low class Richmond paper,
edited by Callender, throve for a time on the circumstantial lies which he
circulated against Jefferson's private life and character"-again, not mentioning Hemings by name.10'

By mid-century, the story of Jefferson's enslaved children was being used
by both friend and foe of integration. Some did not deny the story but rather
used it as an object lesson in the dangers of "racial mixing." Others used the
story as a reminder of a long history of exploitation at the hands of white
slave-owners."' In the 1950s, the Herrings story gained traction during the
African American civil rights movement, appearing in Ebony magazine in
1954.103 The article, entitled "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren,"
depicts Jefferson as the father of all the slaves whom he had freed in his will,
including five who were the children of "several comely slave concubines
who were great favorites at his Monticello house.""'

But many others, however, explicitly reference the relationship only
to dismiss it. Typical of those who reject the veracity of the scandal is a
heavy finger pointing directly at the "unscrupulous hack" Callender, who
in 1802 published the first words in print about Jefferson and Herrings in
the Richmond Recorder: "Federalist newspapers all over the country gleefully
circulated the libel, and the legend was born. It has been resurfacing ever
since.""' Similarly, a mid-twentieth-century biographer explains, "Among
other accusations Callender declared that Jefferson, when appointed minister to France, had taken to Paris with him in 1784 a black woman named
Sarah or Sally, and that her son, Tom, bore `a striking though sable resemblance' to the President." The author explains in a footnote that "Sarah or
Sally" "was a bright mulatto girl whose father, according to Monticello gossip, was an unknown white man. She escorted Maria Jefferson to Paris."106
The 1964 book on the "romantic side" of the Founding Fathers includes an
extensive discussion of the Walker scandal and the Cosway affair. Yet in
discussing Callender, the author includes only one sentence on Herrings.
After describing Callender as a "notorious scandalmonger," he adds, "He
added a variation concerning Jefferson's conduct with one of his attractive
slave women. 11117 Another biographer in typical fashion describes Callender
as an "unattractive human" and explains that "most of the scandalous sto ties about Jefferson that have circulated through the years go back to this
wretched journalist, and almost without exception they were false. The story
of a slave mistress is the most notorious, and it is wholly without foundation
in fact.""' In another example, "to drag the President in his own mire, Callender added industrious circulation of all the malicious stories about Jefferson's personal life that he could pick up or invent, including the vilest of all
the canards-one about intimate relations with a female slave.""'

In addition to singling out the political motives of Callender, a second
prong of the defense hinges on Jefferson's character: "In light of overwhelming evidence that Jefferson was a loving and solicitous father, the claim that
he seduced a sixteen-year-old slave girl and traveled in the intimate company
of his two young daughters with her in an advanced state of pregnancy cannot be believed." 110 Similarly, one 1970s biographer writes, "If this account
can be believed, Jefferson emerges as the seducer of a young, innocent,
attractive colored girl, hardly out of puberty, who yearned only to be free
and to remain in a country where she would not be despised as a `Negress'
and humiliated as a slave." This account captures the typical view in a comprehensive manner:

For Jefferson to have conducted a clandestine love affair with a slave
woman and to have raised his children as slaves is completely at variance with his character, insofar as it can be determined by his acts
and words, the strict moral code by which he professed to live and
which he constantly enjoined upon others, especially young men
and women, and his conception of women and their place in society.
He was not a womanizer; in his relations with the opposite sex he
was temperate to the point of continence. On the occasion when he
was tempted to transgress the bounds of discretion and propriety,
he curbed his sexual desire-with the result that the love affair did
not go beyond a romantic friendship. After the death of his wife, his
"affairs of the heart" did not usually involve more than his affections.

Individuals who avoid or deny the Herrings relationship also emphasize the
love between Cosway and Jefferson while he was in Paris. This account manages to accomplish both goals with one line: "The woman with whom Jefferson
conducted his most intimate romantic liaison in Paris met, in most respects,
the exacting standards he always maintained in affairs of the heart."

For many biographers who reject the relationship yet acknowledge that a
relative of Jefferson was the culprit, the allegation indicates a distinct lack of
proper masculine authority so expected in a Founding Father like Jefferson. At best, one who notes that Jefferson was likely not engaged in the relationship points out, "If Jefferson can convincingly be absolved of the charge of
being the father of five mulatto children, the fact remains that at Monticello
he presided over a scene of miscegenation.""'

Some biographers revert to the earlier depiction of Jefferson as able to
control his sexual passions-essentially, the view of him as chaste widower.
As John C.Miller writes (in an exhaustive list), "Almost certainly, after his
wife's death, he sublimated the sexual drive in such activities as music-`the
favorite passion of my soul'; architecture-building Monticello took over
thirty years; gardening and farming; exercise (he spent one to three hours a
day on horseback); reading science, and philosophy; his love for his daughters and grandchildren and delight in the company of his friends.""'

In the late twentieth century, as popular depictions of Herrings and Jefferson as lovers gained mainstream traction, Jefferson image makers would
become more vehement in their denial of the possibility of a HemingsJefferson relationship. This 1970s account explains, "It was impossible for
Jefferson to carry on a romance or even a friendship without constant letterwriting." The author continues, "Jefferson's real love-letters were written to
his daughters and to his wife, Martha, not to Sally Herrings or to any other
woman." And, he reiterates, "The ten years of unalloyed happiness with
Martha had made it impossible for him really to love another woman."4

Over the course of several decades at the end of the twentieth century,
popular and academic blockbusters would reintroduce the American public
to the Hemings Jefferson relationship. The most influential popular depictions of Jefferson as Hemings's lover begin in 1975 with Professor Fawn
Brodie's best-selling psychological biography, re-released in 2010 with an
introduction by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed. That same year, Ebony
carried a feature on Jefferson that depicts him as a man of contradictions
who "fell in love with" Hemings. The article also asserts that Jefferson "had
other concubines" and includes a photo of a Chicago woman who descended
from one of those relationships.115 This was followed quickly by a best-selling
novel, Sally Hemings."6 The academy was slower than the public to warm
to the story. Historian Jordan's 1968 White over Black: American Attitudes
toward the Negro, 1550-1812 is one of the first to take the possible relationship seriously. The book won a National Book Award in 1969 and was
widely sold as a Penguin Books paperback."7 But the academic ice on the
issue of paternity would not truly begin to melt until Gordon-Reed's careful examination of the persistent academic resistance, which she shows has
largely relied on assumptions about Jefferson's character and has tossed historical inquiry aside in deference to his stature as a Founding Father.

What has also propelled the story forward is the depiction of romantic
love between the two. In the absence of documentation, chroniclers have
differed on how to characterize the relationship. The earliest nineteenthcentury accounts meant to damage the reputation of Jefferson portray this
affair as tending toward rape of an enslaved child, a description that works
in the hands of both Jefferson's political enemies and later abolitionists who
focused on the horrors of enslavement. Yet beginning in the 1970s, those
seeking to make the Herrings story accepted by mainstream audiences broke
with this interpretation to argue that a genuine bond of affection existed
between the two. This portrayal also holds appeal for recognizing the agency
of Herrings in the affair rather than depicting her as a helpless victim of Jefferson's lust."' Brodie, for example, writes, "If the story of the Sally Herrings
liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery
with an innocent slave victim, as the Federalists and later the abolitionists
insisted, but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave
woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.""9

Taking his cues from Brodie's book, which argues that love bonded Jefferson and Herrings, one 1970s biography by a professor of literature asserts
that the relationship was "a most touching and tender association." The
"gentleman" and the "lovely girl" who "fell in love" in France, he explains,
"lived together, in the face of all social prohibitions in their time and place,
for nearly four decades, in common law marriage." Depicting them as trailblazers, he concludes, "The difficulties of such a life, though great, were
endured with each other's support, even in slavery-ridden Virginia. It was
after all, their secret pursuit of happiness."20 This depiction of Jefferson and
Herrings as lovers across a forbidden color line is generally the one currently
employed in popular memory, making its way from biography to cinema. In
such films as Jefferson in Paris (1995), for example, Herrings lives with Jefferson, romantically sneaking in and out of his bedroom so as to avoid the
condemnation of their less enlightened family and friends.

In contrast to the decades of resistance in both popular and academic
writings, it has become more commonplace for this story to be mentioned
as established fact-and for both the rich and complex Jefferson personal
life and legacy and the Herrings family story to be reduced to the JeffersonHemings relationship, which has captivated public imagination. Thus, Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello has received popular and academic
praise, garnering a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. The Washington Post named it one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008, and although
its major accomplishment is the brilliant piecing together of the history of
the Herrings family, the blurb describing the recommended title zeroes in on only Herrings and Jefferson, noting that Gordon-Reed "convincingly
argues that Thomas Jefferson cohabited for more than 30 years with an
African-American woman with whom he conceived seven children." 121 Public response to the book reveals that long before its publication, the JeffersonHemings relationship was increasingly accepted. When Gordon-Reed was
on the popular political call-in show Washington journal on C-SPAN, for
example, she received no calls to challenge the basics of the story. Indeed,
on a program that is known for argument, including racial controversy, this
segment was noteworthy for its absence. Doubt about the Herrings story has
been largely overcome, with many Americans having accepted the new Jefferson in place of the old. In his review of The Hemingses of Monticello, Morgan writes, "Sally Herrings bore Jefferson six children. That is established as
fact, though it has been the subject of hot dispute."122