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Richmond's Burial Ground

Richmond's 1810 'A Burial Ground For Negroes' Value Set At $3 Million

Slaves' History Buried in Asphalt, Maria Glod, Washington Post, October 27, 2008.Barely audible over the whirr of traffic, Duron Chavis offered a prayer as he poured water into the earth at the edge of a parking lot between a train trestle and Interstate 95. "We are here to honor our ancestors," Chavis told a group that encircled him one moonlit night this month. "Unfortunately, African Americans have been separated from our blood. We're disconnected from our languages, disconnected from our culture."For the almost two dozen people gathered here, this nondescript slice of pavement represents a long-hidden heritage. Beneath the blacktop are the graves of slaves and free blacks from the 18th and 19th centuries. The city gallows once stood nearby, where a slave named Gabriel was hanged for planning a revolt. Everyone agrees that the cemetery will be commemorated. But exactly how to do that has led to debate in a city that was once the capital of the Confederacy and still struggles with those ghosts.The state's largest school, Virginia Commonwealth University, bought the parking lot this year and has agreed to carve out a piece of it for a public memorial. But a prominent anthropologist at the College of William & Mary, along with many residents, contends that the graves probably extend beyond the strip that the university is donating. They are leading a movement to identify and reclaim the entire site. "We want all of it," said Dieyah Rasheed, who lives in nearby Henrico County. "It is sacred to me as a black woman. My ancestors were buried there. They were the ones who built Richmond. They were the nurses. They were the maids. They were the field croppers. They deserve some honor and respect." The 250-year-old cemetery, used until about 1816, faded from public memory as the city grew up around it. But several years ago, a local historian stumbled on records of its existence. Gabriel was executed there after a failed 1800 rebellion, and some historians believe he could be buried there. Last year, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) symbolically pardoned Gabriel and said his "quest for freedom was part of a great American legacy." In recent years, the city has made efforts to commemorate the trials and contributions of slaves. The Richmond Slave Trail Commission has created a walking tour from the James River port where slaves arrived, to a slave jail that is being excavated. The trail also includes a slavery reconciliation statue that was unveiled last year.Still, some African Americans note the proliferation of memorials here to the Confederate past. Monument Avenue honors Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. One exception is a statue of black tennis great Arthur Ashe. The drive to preserve the cemetery gained momentum after VCU bought the three-acre downtown lot for $3 million in February. A few months later, as the university took steps to repave the lot and improve its lighting, a small grass-roots protest raised questions about the project's impact on a place of historical interest. Work was halted to allow the state to delve into the land's history.In June, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources concluded that much of the old cemetery and the site of the gallows lay under the interstate and that old records don't define the burial ground's limits. It's unclear how large the cemetery was. But some graves are believed to extend past the highway and into the parking lot, under 10 to 15 feet of fill. The department, drawing on the work of a local historian, also considered the possibility that the graveyard's edges could be defined by a label on an 1810 map that notes "Burial Ground for Negroes." VCU, citing that interpretation, has agreed to turn over a 50- by 200-foot piece of the lot, worth about $350,000, to the city for a memorial.But last month, Michael L. Blakey, director of William and Mary's Institute for Historical Biology, said there was no reason to assume the mapmaker's label encompassed the entire cemetery. Blakey called the estimation of the boundary "implausibly small." He estimated that there could be graves under most, even all, of the parking lot, and recommended digging archaeological trenches, which would not disturb the remains, to determine the cemetery's scope. "If it is important to the community," Blakey said, "there is a way to know the truth about the extent of the burials."VCU officials said they recognize the site's historical and spiritual importance, and that is why they are ceding land for a memorial. But the only practical option is to use the remainder of the lot for student and staff parking because the university is relying on parking fees to pay for the purchase, said Don Gehring, VCU's vice president for government relations and health policy. "We have reached a consensus that this is the most reasonable way to memorialize the site and recognize its significance and at the same time go forward with our purpose for parking," Gehring said. He said VCU would sell the property -- for the $3 million it is paying -- to anyone who wants to preserve the entire site.

Kathleen Kilpatrick, director of the historic resources department, said her staff reviewed available records and research to study the cemetery. "Nothing short of archaeology will determine the actual boundaries," she said. "But I don't want to lose sight of the larger goal, which is how best to memorialize the site. The issue is where we go from here to get it right, to honor the people there and to educate the public." She said the department has agreed to work with the Slave Trail Commission to raise money to buy the land. To some in the community, ownership of the land is a much deeper question than who holds the deed. "That land does not belong to Virginia Commonwealth University. It belongs to the black community of this city and this country," Phil Wilayto, a member of the Defenders for Freedom, Justice & Equality, a community group pushing for preservation, said this month at a community meeting. "If this was George Washington's mother buried here, it wouldn't be a parking lot. It would be a nice grassy area," said Chavis, of Richmond. "Though we have moved forward, with Obama running for president, there are still these issues that are with us."Richmond's is not the first such cemetery to be rediscovered. Freedmen's Cemetery in Alexandria, which opened in 1864 to bury former slaves, was forgotten for years but is now commemorated with a park. At the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan, uncovered in the early 1990s in a construction project, more than 400 skeletons were examined and then reburied at a site that has become a memorial.Blakey, who was scientific director of the excavation and preservation for the New York burial ground, said the decision to excavate and study the Richmond remains should be the community's. Much of the recorded history of slaves was written by owners who considered them property, not people. But the New York graves, Blakey said, offered a glimpse of humanity. "A story is written in things that were placed in the ground," Blakey said. "There is real reverence. Small things matter: the choice that was made to leave a silver earbob in a child's coffin rather than to keep it and use it for the living. That small act has great meaning."Doug Egerton, a Le Moyne College history professor and author of a book about Gabriel, said the slave was 24 when he plotted to win freedom for slaves by seizing the capital and taking Governor James Monroe hostage. A furious storm disrupted his plan and the plot was uncovered. Gabriel stood more than six feet, unusually tall for the time, Egerton said, and his remains could be under the lot."I think in many ways finding the bodies, learning what we can and placing them back with some kind of dignity and honor would be a real signal that Richmond can come together," Egerton said. He noted that there is a statue of George Washington not far from the graveyard. "There's no reason we can't honor Washington on his pedestal, and a mile away honor these people who also fought for freedom."

Text Source: Slaves History Buried In Asphalt, Washington Post, October 27, 2008

Michael L. Blakey, a College of William & Mary professor, discusses the site of the burial ground at a community meeting this month in Richmond.

CWL asks, "Who owned the cemetery in 1810?" and can the chain of ownership be documented to 2008? Also, can't a parking lot at a downtown institution of higher education, where parking with limited/controlled access is nearly non-existent, be viewed as equal access to education for descendants of slaves who are enrolled students?

CWL recommends: African American Cemeteries online

Lumpkin's Slave Jail

Upcoming Event at the Virginia Historical Society

Recent discoveries from the archaeological dig at Lumpkin's Slave Jail will be discussed at Virginia Historical Society (VHS).

The 2008 excavation found the site of the notorious jail complex, collected many artifacts, and revealed a number of well preserved features.

On Saturday, February 28, 2009, from 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., the community is invited to attend a conference about Richmond's African Americanhistory. Hidden Things Brought to Light: Finding Lumpkin's Jail andLocating the Burial Ground for Negroes takes place at the VHS and is free and open to the public.Speakers at the half-day conference will present recent scholarship ontwo downtown Richmond historical sites, the Burial Ground for Negroes and Lumpkin's Slave Jail, both of which have special importance for the history of African Americans in Virginia.

Speakers include:

• Jeffrey Ruggles, curator of prints and photographs at the VHS, will speak about the historical background of the Shockoe slavery sites.
• Matthew R. Laird, Ph.D., historian at The James River Institute for Archaeology, Inc., and principal investigator for the Lumpkin's Slave Jail dig, will discuss recent discoveries from the archaeological site.
• Dr. Christopher Stevenson, an archaeologist with the Virginia Departmentof Historic Resources, will speak about locating the Burial Ground for Negroes in the present-day landscape.
• Dr. Lauranett Lee, curator of African American history at the VHS, will moderate the event.

Graham T. Dozier Managing Editor of Publications Virginia Historical Society Post Office address: Box 7311 Richmond, VA 23221 Street address: 428 N. Boulevard Richmond, VA 23220phone: 804.342.9640 fax: 804.342.9697 http://www.vahistorical.org

Sir Thomas Lipton's Autobiography

Sir Thomas Lipton once worked the tobacco fields of Samuel Clay near Wilson Depot in Dinwiddie County, after the Civil War in 1866 & 1867. Thomas Lipton was then a young man, age 16, working his first job on Clay's plantation and were he was injuried that Fall...

See page 60-68.

Any one with additional information on Samual Clay or Thomas Lipton in Dinwiddie and Nottoway Counties... ?

From his New York office author Michael D’Antonio, who wrote the best seller Hershey and A Ball, A Dog, and a Monkey: 1957 – The Space Race Begins, which was NPR’s Science Friday, “A Best Science Book of 2007” contacted historian Ronald Seagrave here in Dinwiddie in late November for assistance in developing material for his upcoming biography on Sir Thomas Lipton (1850-1931), the later founder of Lipton Tea. Between these two men they were able to prove that young Scotsmen Thomas Lipton who had been born on May 10, 1850, of Irish parents in Glasgow, Scotland had in fact come to Dinwiddie County in the summer of 1866 to obtain his first American job when he was a merely sixteen. Lipton had arrived in New York where he was offered a job on a tobacco plantation in Dinwiddie County, Virginia by a New York employment firm. Lipton had selected Virginia for his future employment based on its imagery appeal of the name alone. Seagrave was able to paint a visual image for D’Antonio of Lipton’s arrival at City Point and his travel to war torn Petersburg, then passing the battle scared grounds of Five Forks and on to Wilson Depot where he met his future employer Sam Clay. This was Lipton’s first job working as a replacement field hand, a position once held by a slave working Clay’s Nottoway and Dinwiddie fields from dawn to dark, six days a week, as a young Scot-Irish immigrate living in a former slave’s cabin and a straw bed. Several months into his employment he was cutting wood that autumn when the hatchet slipped and severely injured his right foot. When Samuel Clay learned of the accident he removed Lipton to his house. For weeks he suffered in agony, only relieved by the knowledge imparted by his doctor that he was not going to lose his leg. Seagrave was able to determine his physician was Dr. Henry E. Shore who owned a nearby Plantation. Dr. Shore was a well respected physician and son of Dr. John Shore, II, of Petersburg. As soon as Lipton could hobble about, again they insisted on Lipton taking things easy and even drove him to church with them on Sundays. Lipton forever held in the highest regard the kindness shown him by Samuel Clay and his wife. After a few weeks he toured Virginia, but then returned to New York City.
Later on in Sir Thomas Lipton's life he entertained at his Osidge home near London, a grand-daughter of his first American employer. Seagrave has yet to determine the name of this grand-daughter, nor the church they attended and would appreciate any additional information on this early Nottoway/Dinwiddie family.
Sir Lipton left much of his fortune to the city of Glasgow, to aid the poor, and to build hospitals. He was the oldest member on the rolls of Lodge Scotia No. 178 when he died in 1931. Seagrave stated he’ll never again drive on Rt. 460 pass Wilson while going to ‘Black and White’/Blackstone and not think of this young man working the tobacco field’s in that area and Lipton’s Tea. It goes to show you anything’s possible, no matter where you live, if you have drive and imagination. Seagrave believes that this area helped seed Lipton’s imagination for his future business. It was here he saw the value of international trade first hand and he was surrounded by former countrymen who had kept strong trading relationship with Great Britain. For nearly a century Petersburg has kept trading relationships alive with Great Britain and the Mason’s.
Thomas Lipton developed a unique style of shop-keeping and imaginative advertising. He also introduces the teabag and developed a small grocery store into an international business, making him a millionaire at the age of thirty.
First challenging the America’s Cup yachting trophy in 1899, he made five unsuccessful attempts, endearing himself to the American public, which gave him a gold cup after his last defeat in 1930.
Queen Victoria knighted Lipton in 1898 for his commercial success and philanthropy. He was created a baronet in 1902. During the Spanish-American war, and later during WWI, Lipton gave money and services to aid the wounded. Lipton’s motto was "Work hard, deal honestly, be enterprising, exercise careful judgment, and advertise freely but judiciously."

Update... March 29, 2009, Progress Index

DINWIDDIE — Dinwiddie’s Lipton saga continues.In previously unknown letters of Sir Thomas Lipton, the Scottish Tea Baron wrote about his life working on a plantation in Dinwiddie County in the years after the Civil War.After a story in The Progress-Index about the efforts of local historian Ronald Seagrave to learn more about Lipton’s time in the tobacco fields of central Virginia, Emporia resident Terry Botts contacted him to show him what Seagrave called “a historical sensation.”Behind a glass frame, Botts keeps a three-page letter dated Feb. 24, 1926, that Lipton sent Ambler Brook Moncure, who resided on Old Stage Road in Dinwiddie County at the time. Lipton sent the letter from his home at Southgate, Middlesex, England.
To historians like Seagrave, the letter is of high interest because Lipton gave few details about his time in the county in his personal diary.In November of last year, bestselling author Michael D’Antonio contacted Seagrave, hoping he would be able to help his monumental biography about the famous merchant and yachtsman.During his research, Seagrave learned that Lipton was 17 when he arrived in New York and took a job as slave replacement on the Samuel Clay plantation in Wilsons, which today is a small town off Route 460 in Dinwiddie County.Until now, it was always believed that Lipton left no written records about the nine months he worked on the farm from the summer of 1866 until early 1867, when a leg injury forced him to leave the job.In his letter to Moncure, Lipton seemed happy about being able to discuss his life in Virginia. “My Dear Mr. Moncure,” Lipton wrote. “I was very pleased indeed to receive your kind letter, it being the first communication I have had from Dinwiddie since I worked there.”Lipton went on to describe his experience. “I was engaged in New York to go to work for Sam Clay near Wilson’s Depot in Dinwiddie County, and on first arriving at the estate, I slept in a little hut, but my boss, Mr. Sam Clay, apparently thought so well of me that he afterwards took me into his big house.”Seagrave said that he found it interesting that Lipton would use a slave’s term — “big house” — in describing Clay’s residence.The letter also gave Seagrave more insight to the Clay’s family situation. “He wrote that both of Clay’s sons were killed in the Civil War,” Seagrave said. According to census records, the three sons were Patrick, Robert and Travis. Because the latter died prior to the 1860 census, Seagrave concluded that Lipton was referring to the other two sons.But he also found out that Patrick, the oldest son, established himself as a farmer after the war. There are no records of Robert’s whereabouts.Lipton also talked about Clay’s daughters. “But he had two young daughters, who treated me most kindly and made me feel quite at home.” He then wrote about his travels to Charleston and New Orleans. Then Lipton states, “The goal of my life, however, was to make money for the old folks at home, and when I had saved what I thought was sufficient I came home and open my first little shop, bring with me a barrel of flour and rocking chair for my mother.”Seagrave said Lipton gained much more than money during his early travels in America, because he witnessed international trade and commerce first-hand and later applied those concepts to the foundation of his own tea empire, which would become one of the most successful businesses of its kind in the world. Today, Lipton Tea owns about 10 percent of the world’s tea market, and the famous Lipton Iced Tea is available in more than 60 countries.Moncure, the letter’s recipient, responded on March 17, 1926, and invited Lipton to stay at his house in Wilsons, should he ever come back to visit Dinwiddie County. “Oh what pleasure it gave me to know that the Clay’s upheld the tradition of this old state by showing courtesy and kindness to a stranger among them,” he wrote.At last, the collection includes a typewritten letter, dated June 30, 1927, from Lipton’s private secretary, John Westwood, to Moncure, stating, “I am desired by Sir Thomas Lipton to acknowledge receipt of your letter on the 28th inst., and to thank you for same and should Sir Thomas be in your neighborhood at any time, he will be very pleased to give himself the pleasure of calling upon you.”Botts found the letters and a photograph signed by Lipton when a small museum closed down in 1995. “I knew that these were some rarities, so I bought them,” he said.

The ship Cyrus, 1824

The captain of the ship Cyrus was George Green Gary, who may have earlier owned George Gary's tavern.[1] Captain Gary married Pamela A. Gray on December 17, 1823 and then sailed on the Cyrus together to Liberia.[2] Pamela Gray was born on December 16, 1800, the daughter of Sterling and Nancy Gary, of Prince George County.[3] “Pamelia Gary” was listed as head of household living in center ward, in the 1840 Petersburg's census, amongst two males (10-15), two females (10-15), one female (15-20), and two females (30-40). She was buried in the southeastern section of Blandford Cemetery, behind the church. Her badly broken, damaged and eroded marble table stone which rests on a granite base was made by the Petersburg’s stonecutter James Davidson once read:

In remembrance of
Mrs. Pamela A. Gary
Widow of Capt. Geo. G. Gary
Who accompanied by the deceased
Transported in Ship Cyrus
With the first colonists from
Petersburg, Va. to Liberia in 1824
Her eventful life was closed
The 24th June 1848
In the 47th year of her age

In 2008, American Colonization scholar, Dr. Marie Tyler-McGraw stated, “It is interesting that the Cyrus was captained not by just any ship's captain, but by one who was from Petersburg and whose family thought that was significant enough to put on a tombstone.” The ship Cyrus may have been the ship Cyrus launched in 1800, built by Israel Thorndike and William Leach, in Salem, Massachusetts, a 305 ton vessel.[4] The Essex Institute, Peabody & Essex Museum recorded the, “Cyrus, Beverly, ship, 305 tons, Salem, 1800. Reg.. July 7, 1800. William Leach, Beverly, Isaac Thorndike, Beverly, Thomas Dickerson, Boston, owners; William Leach, master. [Commissioned as a privateer.]”[5] In the 1850s a merchant’s sloop named the George Gary sailed from Petersburg’s harbor.[6] Also shipped on the Cyrus from Petersburg were two hogsheads and a bundle of tobacco and one bundle of books and clothes.

Shortly after arriving the ACS agent in Liberia said the emigrants on the Cyrus “had formed in America a worthy and well-compacted neighborhood” and that they “moved together in everything,” especially in aiding one another.”[7]

Rev. Colston M. Waring, a black minister associated with the Petersburg’s Gillfield Baptist Church,[8] help organize the passenger that went on the ship Cyrus for Liberia, he was to determine its suitability for thwarted ambitions as well as a missionary field.[9] "The passengers on the ship Cyrus represented a cross-section of Virginia free blacks going to Liberia. Among them was John N. Lewis, age 13, traveling with his mother, Hannah Lewis, who was 5 feet 2 inches high, supposed to be about 35 years old, and with a brown complexion... She was emancipated with her seven children in Petersburg by Adam S. Nanstedler, on December 30, 1823.[10] All of these children were children of Adam S. Naustedler, a white man.[11] Mr. Naustedler appears to have been a most interesting individual, on December 7, 1814, he placed an ad along with his business partner Benjamin Moss in the Petersburg Daily Courier announcing their formation of Moss & Naustedler, commission Merchants and tobacco brokers.. The 1820 Petersburg’s census listed him as 45+ living with another male between (16-26), one of which was at this time, an un-naturalized foreigner; along with four male slaves under sixteen and one (14-26).

Naustedler led at times a small local Petersburg Jewish Congregation, and was originally from Augsburg, Germany. In remembrance, he was described as a man “profoundly versed in the Talmud and in the transitions, whose mind was stored with rabbinical lore and who was generally called 'Rabbi' by his friends and acquaintances."[12] In 1840, "A. S. Naustedler," was living alone in Center Ward, Petersburg, age 60-70."[13] His son, John N. Lewis would later become the colonial secretary, Lewis would write his father back in Petersburg from Liberia, without any know reply.

The Columbian Centinel, published as: Columbian Centinel American Federalist reported on August 8, 1824, that on August 3rd, 1824 the ship Cyrus was at Boston harbor and…
Reporting its former captain’s death as June 20, 1824. On August 7, 1824 the Columbian Centinel American Federalist, reported that Capt. George G. Gary of Petersburg, Va., died at sea, aboard the ship Cyrus, of Boston.

The Cyrus would be found stranded on Rainsford Island, which served as a quarantine station for the port of Boston, Massachusetts. She was sold for salvage in September 1824. The Boston Commercial Gazette reported the new captain as “Crafts.”

The Baltimore Patriot gave a more detail accounting on August 7, 1824 of those who died on board the Cyrus on its 68 day voyage from Rio Janeiro since she left the United States: George C(S)igourney, of Boston,[14] Captain Clark, on March 16, 1824; Parker Sperey, passenger, March 17, 1824; John Green, steward, March 18, 1824; William Austin, alis Haskins, March 24, 1824; Capt. Geary died on the passage home, on the June 20, 1824.

______________________
[1] R. Bolling Papers, biographical card files, card 14, Library of Virginia, “George Green Gary, b., d., master of the ship Cyrus, m. Dec. 1823, Prince George County, Pamela A. Gary.”
[2] R. Bolling Papers, biographical card files, card 14, Library of Virginia, “Pamela A Gary, b. December 16, 1800, Petersburg; daughter of Sterling Gray (1757-1824) and Nancy, of Prince George County; m. George Green Gary, December 17, 1823, Prince George County; d. June 24, 1848, Petersburg, cancer; burial June 25, 1848, Blandford Cemetery, on W. side of her square, south by E.A. Branch, Blandford Interment Records (1843-1871) page 23.”
[3] Sterling Gary was taxed for the first time in 1797 for 119 acres, in Prince George County. He was commissioned May 7, 1793 Ensign, in Capt. Robert Harrison's Co., Prince George Co. Militia. He died on September 25, 1824, just prior to his daughter’s marriage to Capt. Gray.
[4] Cutter, William Richard. Genealogical and Personal Memoirs Relating to the Families of Boston and Eastern Massachusetts, p. 1607.
[5] Essex Institute Historical Collections By Essex Institute, Peabody & Essex Museum, p. 62.
[6] Daily Democrat (Petersburg, Va.), November 21, 1855, page 2, column 6; Daily Democrat, November 30, 1855, page 3, column 1.
[7] Debra L. Newman, The Emergence of Liberian Women in the Nineteenth Century,” Ph.D. diss., Howard University, 1984, p. 137.
[8] Second oldest Black church in US. Established 1786. Re-built in the Romanesque Revival style between 1874-1879. Gillfield Baptist Church is the second oldest black congregation in Petersburg and one of the oldest in the country. Gillfield originated in the Davenport Church in Prince George County in 1786. In 1797, it was recognized as an autonomous institution with an integrated congregation. In 1800, the Davenport Church moved to Pocahontas and was renamed the Sandy Beach Church. In 1818, the church members purchased the lot on Perry Street in Gillfield where they built the first of four successive churches.
[9] Marie Tyler-McGraw. An African Republic: Black & White Virginians in the Making of Liberia, University of NC Press, 2007, P. 69.
[10] No. 1342, Registry of Free Negroes & Mulattoes, made & entered in the Clerk’s office of the Hustings Court of the Town of Petersburg Posterior to 1st January 1819, Library of Virginia microfilm no. 73
[11] John N. Lewis to Samuel Wilkinson, Monrovia, April 12, 1849, letter enclosed to “Mr. Adam S. Naustedler, my father who lives in Petersburg, Va.,” reel #154, RACS.
[12] Lee Shai Neissbach. Jewish Life in Small Town America, p. 216.
[13] Petersburg’s 1840 Census.
[14] Born September 25, 1805 son of Charles Sigourney & Mary Sarah Greenleaf., died March 18, 1824.

THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO

Reviewed by Fergus M. BordewichSunday, September 14, 2008, Washington Post
THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO
An American Family
By Annette Gordon-Reed
Norton. 798 pp. $35

Thomas Jefferson's contradictions have long baffled historians. His clarion assertion of human equality in the Declaration of Independence became the battle cry of the abolitionist movement. Yet he lived on the fruits of slave labor and never risked political capital (or his own comfort) to oppose the institution of slavery. He regarded blacks as odorous, intellectually inferior and incapable of creating art. Yet, as Annette Gordon-Reed convincingly argues in this monumental and original book, he cohabited for more than 30 years with an African American woman with whom he conceived seven children.
Liberating the woman known to Jefferson's smirking enemies as "dusky Sally" from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers.
In Sally Hemings's day, Gordon-Reed writes, she was "the most well-known enslaved person in America." Her connection to Jefferson was brutally exposed and mocked by his political opponents during his first presidency, while black churchmen in the early republic preached sermons on her "family situation." The publicity was sufficiently embarrassing that Jefferson's partisans and descendants crafted a sanitized and sexless version of life at Monticello that continued until our own day. Although controversy persists, recent DNA research has caused most historians to accept Jefferson's paternity of Hemings's children.
Gordon-Reed first probed the Jefferson-Hemings relationship in her 1997 book "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy." Now she deepens and widens her view to encompass the entire sprawling Hemings clan as actors on the stage of history. Members of the Hemings family came to Monticello as part of the inheritance of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles. They were the offspring of Martha's father and his enslaved concubine Elizabeth Hemings, and thus Martha's own siblings. (In a different society, they would never have been Jefferson's slaves at all and would instead have shared in the inheritance that Martha acquired from her father's estate; the same could later be said of Jefferson's own mixed-race children.) Gordon-Reed's exploration of the lives of other members of the Hemings family -- most notably Sally's mother, Elizabeth, and her brothers, Robert and James, who served as valets to Jefferson -- is also exhaustive and fascinating in its own right. But Sally is the most compelling if Martha Wayles Jefferson died in 1782. Thomas Jefferson would remain a nominal bachelor for the remainder of his long life. During his service as U.S. ambassador to France, which began in 1784, he summoned Hemings to Paris as an attendant for his youngest daughter, Polly. According to Gordon-Reed, the relationship became sexual in Paris, on the cusp of the French Revolution, when Hemings was 16 and Jefferson was 46. They remained together until Jefferson's death in 1826. Hemings left no written testimony, and Jefferson was careful to leave few traces of the true nature of their liaison.
"When it came to the care and deployment of his image, which if managed properly would leave him with the positive legacy of 'great man,' Jefferson was supremely disciplined and controlled," Gordon-Reed observes. Her deconstruction of this occluded relationship is a masterpiece of detective work. Although she employs a considerable amount of deductive reasoning, she resists facile speculation and relies on a very close reading of the surviving documentary record wedded to copious knowledge of slavery as it was practiced by members of Jefferson's social class at the time.
For instance, Gordon-Reed delves into the startlingly open relationship between Sally's oldest sister, Mary, and a prosperous Charlottesville merchant, Thomas Bell, to whom Jefferson had hired her out. A mutual attachment developed, and Mary eventually asked Jefferson to sell her to Bell; Jefferson agreed. "Within the extremely narrow constraints of what life offered her -- ownership by Thomas Jefferson or ownership by Thomas Bell -- Mary Hemings took an action that had enormous, lasting, and, in the end, quite favorable consequences for her, her two youngest children, and the Hemings family as a whole," writes Gordon-Reed. "She found in Bell a man willing to live openly with her, and to treat her and her children as if they were bound together as a legal family."
Gordon-Reed bravely attempts to untangle a particularly fraught question: Could genuine love exist between master and slave? With its acknowledgment that slavery's unequal balance of power "grossly distorted" the play of human emotions, her conclusion is necessarily subtle and may not satisfy those who require monochromatic answers. Had Hemings been merely a plaything, Gordon-Reed points out, Jefferson could have simply let her stay in France, where slavery had been abolished and a well-trained servant like her would have had little difficulty finding work. Instead, he wanted Hemings to return with him to Virginia so intensely that he was willing to bargain with her, by promising her personal privileges as well as eventual freedom for their offspring. Hemings, for her part, was "a smart, if overconfident, attractive teenage girl who understood very well how men saw her and was greatly impressed with her newly discovered power to move an infatuated middle-aged man."
Had sex been all that Jefferson wanted, he could have hidden her away at one of his several farms in Virginia. But he arranged his life at Monticello so that Hemings would be in it every day that he was there. She led a life as close to that of a wife as any enslaved woman could in antebellum Virginia. To Jefferson, Gordon-Reed plausibly argues, Hemings offered a "familiar presence, telling him what he needed to hear about what was happening on the farm, having sex, attending to his needs, being the person of his private world who listened to him complain or voice fears about matters that he might not want to reveal to others." She says of Hemings, "At the end of her life she would be able to say that she got the important things that she most wanted."
Defenders of slavery tirelessly promoted the canard that emancipation would lead to an epidemic of miscegenation that would ruin America's blood stock. The truth -- the great open secret of the antebellum South -- was that race-mixing was embedded, quite literally, in the culture of slaveholding, where masters' sexual exploitation of their female "property" was not a crime. Gordon-Reed writes, "The pervasive doctrine of white supremacy supposedly inoculated whites against the will to interracial mixing, but that doctrine proved to be unreliable when matched against the force of human sexuality." American slaves and their descendants, she says, "are the only victims of a historically recognized system of oppression who are made to carry the burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that things endemic to their oppression actually happened to them." In this magisterial book, she has succeeded not only in recovering the lives of an entire enslaved family, but also in showing them as creative agents intelligently maneuvering to achieve maximum advantage for themselves within the orbit of institutionalized slavery.
Jefferson kept his promise to Sally Hemings. All their children eventually went free. Of the four children who reached adulthood, three lived as whites. The fourth, Madison Hemings, married a woman so fair-skinned that some of their children were also able to pass for white. The Hemingses were, of course, in a class by themselves, as Gordon-Reed frequently underscores. The rest of Jefferson's many slaves were sold off to pay his debts. "The only route to freedom . . . was the possession of Wayles, Jefferson, or Hemings blood," writes Gordon-Reed. "No one else had a chance."
Fergus M. Bordewich's most recent book is "Washington: The Making of the American Capital."

President Tom’s Cabin

Jefferson, Hemings, and a disclaimed lineage.
by Jill Lepore September 22, 2008 in the New Yorker

For Annette Gordon-Reed, the real scandal wasn’t what Jefferson did; it was what historians did, in scanting the evidence for it.

In 1852, when Harriet Beecher Stowe finished “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” she wrote to a congressman, Horace Mann, who happened to be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s brother-in-law, to beg a favor. Might he know how to get a copy of her book to Charles Dickens? “Were the subject any other I should think this impertinent & Egotistical,” Stowe wrote, making of demurral a poor cloak for presumption. But she had reason to expect Dickens’s sympathy. A decade earlier, upon completing an unhappy tour of the United States, Dickens judged the country “the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty.” Seeing slavery at first hand left him sick. “I really don’t think I could have borne it any longer,” he confessed, after riding a train whose passengers included a mother and her weeping children, sold away from their father by a fiend whom Dickens satirized as yet another American “champion of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
It would be going too far to say that Charles Dickens had it in for the original champion of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Still, he rarely missed an opportunity to throw a dagger in Thomas Jefferson’s general direction, slurring, in his American novel, “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844), that “noble patriot . . . who dreamed of Freedom in a slave’s embrace.”
Discerning readers knew which patriot he meant. Dickens was quoting the Irish poet Thomas Moore, who visited the United States soon after a scurrilous Scots journalist named James Callender published, in the September, 1802, Richmond Recorder, long-standing rumors that Jefferson, who was President at the time, had fathered children by one of his slaves: “Her name is SALLY.” Moore, inspired, wrote a poem—The weary statesman for repose hath fled From halls of council to his negro’s shed, Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace, And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace!
—onto which Dickens, appalled, tacked an epilogue: “and waking sold her offspring and his own in public markets.”
James Callender drowned himself in the James River in 1803, but even unstable scandalmongers sometimes get a story straight. Thomas Jefferson did own a woman named Sally, Sally Hemings, and her children looked just like him. Writing four decades after Callender, Dickens did no more than add a seedy detail—the sexually sated author of the Declaration of Independence pocketing a tidy sum by peddling his own progeny lends the story an Oliverian twist—but even this wasn’t entirely Dickens’s invention. In 1838 or 1839, the London Morning Chronicle, where Dickens worked as a reporter, picked up a story that had been reprinted in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. An eyewitness claimed to have seen one of Jefferson’s children on the auction block at the most infamous slave market in America: “the DAUGHTER of THOMAS JEFFERSON SOLD in New Orleans, for ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS.”
Dickens probably believed this to be true. It was not. After Jefferson’s death, on July 4, 1826, his slaves were sold at auction. But that auction did not include Sally Hemings’s children, as Annette Gordon-Reed records in her commanding and important book, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (Norton; $35). Jefferson freed two of Hemings’s three surviving sons, Madison and Eston, in his will; the other son, Beverly, had already left Monticello. Hemings had a daughter, too, Harriet, who left Monticello in 1822, when she was twenty-one. “Harriet. Sally’s run,” Jefferson wrote in his “Farm Book,” where he kept track of his human property, a population that needed minding, since Jefferson was one of the largest slaveholders in Virginia. Harriet didn’t exactly run. “She was nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful,” recalled one of Jefferson’s overseers, who also said that Jefferson ordered him to give fifty dollars to the girl, and paid for her ride, by stage, to Philadelphia. A widely circulated rumor, reported by another literary English rambler, Frances Trollope (Anthony Trollope’s mother), in her 1832 “Domestic Manners of the Americans,” turns out to be well-founded: “When, as it sometimes happened, his children by Quadroon slaves were white enough to escape suspicion of their origin, he did not pursue them if they attempted to escape.”
But if the report that Jefferson’s daughter had been pawned off to the highest bidder wasn’t true, it still made a good story. At least, that’s what William Wells Brown thought when he wrote “Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter,” the first African-American novel, published in 1853, a year after “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” That year, Stowe toured England, where she met Dickens, and where Brown, who was living in London, rallying British sympathy for the American abolitionist movement, managed to get a glimpse of her. Brown knew a thing or two about what Stowe, in her Dickensian subtitle, called “Life Among the Lowly.” Stowe’s novel opens in Kentucky; Brown was born there. He worked for a Mississippi River slave trader, dyeing the hair of gray-haired slaves black, so that they might fetch a better price. His sister was sold away. In 1833, he and his mother tried to run; they were caught. His mother was sold down the river. The following year, Brown finally escaped, alone. In 1847, two years after the celebrated abolitionist Frederick Douglass published the story of his life, Brown told his own not entirely unvarnished tale, “Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself.” After Stowe’s novel made publishing history (it sold ten thousand copies in its first week), Brown decided to try his hand at fiction. What better plot than the shocking story that had animated the pen of Dickens himself?
Brown’s characters are different from Uncle Tom, Eliza, and Topsy, but they’re no less didactic, and his novel, like Stowe’s, follows their desperate fates, trial heaped upon tribulation, like so many ice floes crashing into the banks of the Mississippi. Clotel makes her escape by disguising herself as a swarthy gentleman. Captured, she is imprisoned in a “negro pen” in Washington, D.C. She flees, but, crossing a bridge from Washington to Virginia—“within plain sight of the President’s house”—she is once again trapped. With a last look toward Heaven, she leaps into the Potomac. “Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson,” writes Brown, toward the end of a novel in which he included a chapter titled “Truth Stranger Than Fiction.”
It has taken a very long time for historians to regard this story seriously, or even to begin to bother to sort out fact from fiction. Just why was the subject of Gordon-Reed’s 1997 tour de force, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” a book that was as much a painstaking investigation of the documentary record as a devastating brief on standards of evidence in historical research. For Gordon-Reed, a legal scholar, the real scandal wasn’t what happened between Jefferson and Hemings but how willing earlier generations of Jefferson biographers had been to ignore the implications of evidence right in front of them, even documents like Jefferson’s “Farm Book,” but, especially, testimony about things said and done by the Hemingses themselves. Behind the Jefferson-Hemings affair, Gordon-Reed wrote, lay yet another buried family tie: Sally Hemings was the half sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles. Taking a lawyer’s view of the case, Gordon-Reed pieced together the evidence and weighed it. She presented a strong case in support of the claim that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s children, and freed them, or let them go when they reached the age of twenty one, because Hemings had extracted from him, in 1789, at the beginning of their decades-long affair, a promise that he would do exactly that.
Gordon-Reed’s “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” was published the same year as Joseph Ellis’s stirring and elegiac biography “American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson,” in which Ellis asserted—intuited, actually, since there is no evidence for this—that Jefferson, who had got his wife pregnant six times in ten years, had never slept with the very beautiful Sally Hemings (who reportedly resembled his wife, a woman Jefferson adored), because “for most of his adult life,” and, presumably, especially after his wife died (when Jefferson was thirty-nine), “he lacked the capacity for the direct and physical expression of his sexual energies.” The man was a statue. “American Sphinx” won the National Book Award.
A year later, Eugene Foster, a retired University of Virginia pathologist, published in Nature the results of DNA tests he had undertaken, working with scientists in Oxford, Leicester, and Leiden. Foster tested the blood of the descendants of Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s uncle; Eston Hemings, Sally’s youngest son; and Thomas Woodson, who some believe was Sally’s eldest child. (The Y chromosome passes down through males virtually unaltered, but Jefferson’s only son by his wife died in infancy, which is why Foster had to find his Jeffersonian Y elsewhere.) The tests cast doubt on one relationship and proved another. Thomas Woodson’s descendants don’t have the Jefferson Y. Eston Hemings’s do. This doesn’t prove that Eston, let alone Sally Hemings’s other children, were fathered by Thomas Jefferson. It proves only that Eston’s father was a Jefferson. Alas, there just wasn’t another Jefferson handy, there at Monticello, and with a Y in his pocket, each time Hemings conceived. Ellis, in later editions of his biography, graciously conceded the argument. “Prior to the DNA evidence,” he wrote, “one might have reasonably concluded that Jefferson was living a paradox. Now it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that he was living a lie.” Dissenters persist, citing the circumstantial nature of the evidence. But today most historians agree with the conclusion of a research committee convened by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, at Monticello: Jefferson “most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’s children.”
Lost in the DNA-driven consensus, however, was Gordon-Reed’s point. It ought never to have taken a lab test to bolster a claim deducible from the documentary record. For a conference at Monticello and the University of Virginia in 1999, Gordon-Reed revisited the case:It is true that we do not and will never have the details of what went on between Jefferson and Hemings and their children. This does not mean that we have nothing to go on. Perhaps the most persistent, and ultimately damaging, feature of the original debate over whether the relationship existed at all was the tight rein placed upon the historical imagination. One was simply not to let one’s mind wander too freely over the matter. Brainstorming, drawing reasonable inferences from actions, attempting to piece together a plausible view of the matter were shunted into the category of illegitimate speculation, as grave an offense as outright lying.
Deductions and inferences can be wrong. But they’re not illicit; they’re how history, at its best, makes sense of a senseless world.
In Gordon-Reed’s new book, “The Hemingses of Monticello,” her single most revealing source is the memoir of Madison Hemings, printed by a newspaperman named S. F. Wetmore in an obscure Ohio paper called the Pike County Republican in 1873. (Wetmore likely first heard about Hemings from a census-taker in a neighboring county who, in the 1870 census, noted next to Madison Hemings’s name, “This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson.” Four months after Wetmore published Hemings’s story, a Jefferson biographer named James Parton, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, summarily dismissed it: “Mr. Hemings has been misinformed.”
Parton believed that Hemings was either a fraud or a fool. He did not seek him out; he did not consider what he said. He disregarded him. Gordon-Reed attributes such dismissals to a number of stereotypes: historians saw Hemings as an angry ex-slave with delusions of grandeur, a feebleminded, childlike pawn. Parton probably did see Hemings this way. But it is also true that Madison Hemings’s credibility had already been damaged, long before James Parton came along, by every nineteenth-century writer, black and white, who made use of the Jefferson-Hemings legend. Callender poked a hole. Dickens left a dent. William Wells Brown dealt a blow. Abolitionists wanted, urgently, desperately, to end slavery. Their aim was to arouse sympathy. They told very many stories. Picturing white men preying on black women was their stock-in-trade. Stowe went further: she turned black men into feckless, sexless children. (That’s one reason, but just one, that James Baldwin eviscerated “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in “Notes of a Native Son”; another was Stowe’s failure to address “the only important question” about slavery: “What it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.”) Purveying hackneyed stories at the expense of black men’s humanity came at another cost: who would believe Madison Hemings? (It didn’t help that Wetmore, in a shout-out to Stowe, titled the column in which he printed Hemings’s memoir “Life Among the Lowly.”) Answering slavery with sentimentality carried a price, too: who could imagine Jefferson’s daughter doing anything but dying?
For decades, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, the gavelling off of Thomas Jefferson’s children was a story that was either too awful to be true or too useful to be proved false. Sally Hemings lived in Charlottesville until her death, in about 1835. Eston Hemings, a violinist who later in life went by the name “Eston Hemings Jefferson,” died in Wisconsin in 1856. Madison Hemings, a carpenter, farmer, and father of nine, lived until 1877. An enterprising investigator might have looked any of them up, long before 1873, except . . . what if their stories weren’t as poignant as what he wanted to print?
Charles Dickens didn’t have much use for the supplicating author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It galled him when her work was compared to his. But what he really found infuriating was when she pried into the private lives of public men. “Wish Mrs. Stowe was in the pillory,” he cursed, when Stowe reported, in The Atlantic, on Byron’s romance with his half sister. (Dickens, who conducted an adulterous affair for thirteen years, tried mightily to keep it secret.) For all his contempt for that “noble patriot . . . who dreamed of Freedom in a slave’s embrace,” he seems never to have smeared Jefferson by name. Parton apparently shared his gentlemanly reticence. To dismiss Madison Hemings, Parton marshaled no more than a mysterious allusion to a letter that he had in his possession, written by yet another biographer, Henry Randall, in 1868. In an interview, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson, told Randall that Sally Hemings “had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins,” but this, Randolph implied, was because they were the children of Peter Carr, Jefferson’s nephew. (Randolph’s sister, Ellen Coolidge, alleged that Jefferson’s other nephew, Samuel Carr, was the father.) “The father of those children was a near relation of the Jeffersons,” Parton wrote, “who need not be named.”
Privacy is very much worth respecting, but not when one man’s desire for it destroys another man’s credibility. This isn’t just about Jefferson and Hemings. It’s about Parton’s assumption that Randolph, a white man, must have been telling the truth while Hemings—listed on that census as “mulatto”—was, at best, “misinformed.” Gordon-Reed, in her first book, began by establishing the authenticity of Madison Hemings’s memoir. Then, instead of taking Parton’s witnesses at their word, she cross-examined them. If Randolph didn’t have something more scandalous still to hide, why admit that he was related to the Hemingses? Jefferson was away from Monticello about two-thirds of the time; the Carr brothers were nearly always close at hand. The births of Hemings’s children always followed Jefferson’s visits by nine months. “Why could not Peter Carr or Samuel Carr get Sally Hemings pregnant when Thomas Jefferson was not at Monticello, not once in fifteen years?” Gordon-Reed asked. (The DNA results vindicated her. Foster tested the Carr Y, too. It didn’t match the Hemings blood.)
Gordon-Reed rested her case. Then she set about writing history. In “The Hemingses of Monticello,” she uses Madison Hemings’s memoir as the foundation for an elaborate reconstruction of an American epic, a century-long saga of the Hemings family, in slavery and freedom. She reasons from analogy. She speculates. She asks her reader to trust her knowledge of human nature. There’s no denying that a brick, here and there, could do with more mortar. Arguments from human nature can be persuasive, but when the wind blows they tend to totter. For one thing, “human nature” has a history; Enlightenment meditations on the subject, like David Hume’s 1739-40 “A Treatise of Human Nature,” surely influenced Jefferson’s views on race. (Hume wondered if blacks were less than fully human—“There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation”—because they could not make deductions.) For another, arguments from human nature are only as subtle and perceptive as the people who make them. Most of us are easily duped. “Error, Sir,” Laurence Sterne wrote in “Tristram Shandy” (one of Jefferson’s favorite books), “creeps in thro’ the minute holes, and small crevices, which human nature leaves unguarded.”
One measure of the boldness of Gordon-Reed’s reading of the evidence is Kevin J. Hayes’s “The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson” (Oxford; $34.95), a wide ranging and thoughtful biography of the sage of Monticello, by way of the books he bought and read. Hayes’s study, like Gordon-Reed’s, is the product of exhausting and illuminating research. But Hayes appears to have decided, early on, that Sally Hemings and her children had no role in, or influence on, the life and mind of Thomas Jefferson. In almost seven hundred pages, during which Hayes frequently comments on Jefferson’s private life—his Paris flirtation with Maria Cosway, for instance—the essence of what he has to say about Sally Hemings has to do with Callender’s 1802 report in the Richmond Recorder: “The story he published remains a part of the historical discourse and continues to fascinate the popular imagination.”
This kind of thing is discouraging. I guess I always figured that a man who carries on a secret, decades-long affair is not unaffected by the experience, whether or not there’s a memorial to him on the Washington Mall. It doesn’t define him. It doesn’t mean we should disinherit him. But it might have kept him up nights. If Gordon-Reed’s challenge is met, Thomas Jefferson is a man in need of a new biography. But first it’s the Hemingses’ turn.
“The Hemingses of Monticello” tells a family story, across the generations. Harriet Hemings had seven white great-grandparents; she was, in the idiom of the time, an “octoroon.” She was also, because of a precedent-defying seventeenth-century Virginia statute, Thomas Jefferson’s property. In 1655, a woman with an African mother and an English father successfully sued for her freedom by relying on English precedent, in which children inherit status from their father. Not long after, the House of Burgesses, eager to avoid another legal challenge, turned English law upside down, answering doubts about “whether children got by an Englishman upon a Negro woman should be slave or free” by reaching back to an archaic Roman rule, partus sequitur ventrem (you are what your mother was).
Generations passed. There was much begetting. In about 1735, Gordon-Reed recounts, an Englishman named Captain Hemings had sex with an enslaved “full-blooded African” whose name has not survived. She gave birth to a daughter. Hemings tried to buy the child, but her owner refused to sell, curious to see how the girl would turn out. Hemings hoped to steal her; he failed. In 1746, the girl, Elizabeth Hemings, was transferred to the plantation of an Englishman named John Wayles, when he married Martha Epps. (Hemings, who was about eleven years old, was part of the marriage settlement.) Wayles married three times; his first wife bore him a daughter, Martha, in 1748. After the death of his third wife, Wayles did not marry again. But, as Gordon-Reed relates, he did start having sex with Elizabeth Hemings, by whom he had six children, including a daughter, Sally, born in 1773. In 1772, Martha Wayles married Thomas Jefferson. After John Wayles’s death, the following year, Elizabeth Hemings and all of her children went to live at Monticello. In 1782, when Sally Hemings was still a child, Martha Jefferson died. Mrs. Jefferson, on her deathbed, extracted from her altogether bereft and nearly unmoored husband a promise that he would never remarry. In 1789, when sixteen-year-old Sally Hemings was living with forty-six-year-old Jefferson in Paris, she became pregnant. Madison Hemings said that the child “lived but a short time.” Woodson’s descendants claim that the boy grew up to be Thomas.
Gordon-Reed argues that Hemings made a deal with Jefferson. She knew that she could stay in Paris, where she would be free; slavery was illegal in France. She decided to return to Virginia because she missed her family. And Jefferson promised her that he would free all of her children when they reached the age of twenty-one. Maybe Hemings loved Jefferson; maybe he loved her, too. (In 1974, Fawn Brodie wrote a history supposing this to be the case, and more than one romance novel assumes the same.) Gordon-Reed knows that this question is important, since Jefferson and Hemings are more than people—they’re symbols, too. But symbols get you only so far. “The romance is not saying that they may have loved one another,” Gordon-Reed writes. “The romance is in thinking that it makes any difference if they did.”
Jefferson, the architect of our freedom, could not reckon slavery’s toll. “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he wrote in the early seventeen-eighties. “The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.” Neither could Jefferson imagine his life, or the Union, freed of slavery, without bloodshed. “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Moral impotence is a muffled, crippled agony. American sphinx? American Achilles.
Sally Hemings bore her last child in 1808, when she was about thirty-five. In 1815, the aging former President (who never admitted, publicly, anyway, that he was the father of Hemings’s children) wrote a letter in which he wrestled with a matter—a “mathematical problem”—that had long vexed him. Just how many “crossings” had to happen before a child with a full-blooded African ancestor could be called “white”?Let us express the pure blood of the white in the capital letters of the printed alphabet . . . and any given mixture of either, by way of abridgment in MS. letters. Let the first crossing be of a, a pure negro, with A, a pure white. The unit of blood of the issue being composed of the half of that of each parent, will be a/2 + A/2. Call it, for abbreviation, h (half blood).
The letter goes on for a while. Suffice it to say: b is the second crossing, q is a “quarteroon,” c is the third crossing. Let the third crossing be of q and C, their offspring will be q/2 + C/2 = a/8 + A/8 + B/4 + C/2, call this e (eighth), who having less than ¼ of a, or of pure negro blood, to wit 1/8 only, is no longer a mulatto, so that a third cross clears the blood.
To Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Hemings and her brothers were e. What more they meant to him probably does depend as much on your view of human nature as on the documentary record. After Harriet Hemings took a stagecoach to Philadelphia in 1822, she travelled on to the nation’s capital, where her brother Beverly lived as a white man. “She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman,” said Madison Hemings, the only one of Sally Hemings’s children to remain part of the African-American community. She thought it to her interest. He seems never to have forgiven her. “I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered,” Madison said. Finding her now would be difficult. “Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give but will not.”
Truth isn’t always stranger than nineteenth-century fiction, but usually it’s less melodramatic. Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, if she was his daughter, didn’t leap to a watery grave. As late as the eighteen-sixties, years after “Clotel” was published, she was still alive, pursuing whatever liberty, and happiness, she could find, within plain sight of the White House, after all.