310 History class

14

The Man in the Iron Mask

"I am of a mixed breed ... [a] Mongrel,” said an illustrious American in a speech in 1881. It was not Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washing­ ton but Samuel Clemens who made that claim. He was addressing the annual banquet of the Pilgrim Society, an organization founded on prin­ ciples of genealogical purity and dedicated to preserving the idea that America was a white man’s nation. Invited to address their gathering, Clemens skewered them, their forebears, and their triumphalism: “Those Pilgrims were a hard lot. They took good care of themselves, but they abolished everybody else’s ancestors.”

Gathering into one lineage all the outcasts of American history, Clemens stood before the Pilgrim sons presenting himself as the arche­ type of the true American, an amalgam of the wretched genealogical refuse of Indians, Quakers, witches, and Africans: “The first slave brought into New England out of Africa by your progenitors was an ancestor of mine—for I am of a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel. . . . [M]y complexion is the patient art of eight generations.”1 Clemens spoke figuratively—he was not literally the descendant of Quakers, witches, and slaves—but his metaphorical language was all the more powerful; he was speaking a truth about the country, an old truth long suppressed by a founding myth that had “abolished every­ body else’s ancestors.” But the abolition was incomplete, there were survivors, and they carried their parallel genealogies.

Clemens offered not a soothing dream of multiculturalism but a vision of violent genealogical conquest by which all identities but

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Anglo-Saxon had been eradicated. He was speaking not just about race but about power, and power’s yearning to cleanse itself. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all His laws.”2

Jefferson constantly moved the boundaries on his moral map to make the horrific tolerable to him. In the deleted passages of the Dec­ laration of Independence, he vehemently denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce” in which “men are bought and sold.” But not long after, finding it financially expedient, he sold slaves repeatedly, on a large scale. The execrable commerce somehow became less execrable. In the 1760s, Jefferson had argued a court case declaring it “wicked” that a white man be held in servitude just because deep in his lineage he had some black blood. The very idea of a white man held in bondage just like a black man struck him as a horrible, nightmarish entrapment, a foul species of evil. But by the 1790s, exactly that was going on at Monticello. Jefferson and his family could not conceive of themselves doing anything that was evil. So they redefined evil. A few favorite black people would be exceptionally well treated; a very few, those with kin­ ship ties, would be smuggled out one way or another. But in the mean­ time the family on the summit was haunted by the sight of white relatives in slavery to them.

In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas Jefferson. We know this not from what Jefferson’s detrac­ tors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hernings but another Hernings woman as well “had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.” Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr. Jefferson’s blood was Jeff’s blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to these people of a parallel world.

Jeff said the resemblance of one Hernings to Thomas Jefferson was “so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.” This is so specific, so vivid—“at some distance or in the dusk”—that Jeff had to be relating a likeness he had seen many times and could not shake the memory of.

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We can imagine one of these encounters, a scene at twilight with Jeff, age eighteen, walking out onto the terrace after dinner. The view to the west is glorious as the sun falls below the Blue Ridge Mountains, sixty miles in the hazy distance. Muffled sounds of conversation and music emanate from the house and mingle with the rising night sounds of the forest. The small town of Charlottesville lies in darkness in the valley below. From the terrace—the ambiguous boundary line between the Jefferson world above and the slave world below—Jeff gazes down onto a path and sees the tall figure of his grandfather striding purpose­ fully, head and shoulders erect, the famous profile clearly distinguish­ able even in the fading light. There’s something odd about the clothes, but no matter. We then hear a sound from behind Jeff, and he turns, startled, to see Mr. Jefferson approaching him from the house. Jeff looks down to see his grandfather still on the path, receding into the distance. He turns and the real grandfather is on the terrace with him. Mr. Jef­ ferson claps his hand on Jeff’s shoulder and comments on the soft beauty of a Virginia night in early spring. Jeff peers into the darkness, and the man below has vanished.

We can see Jefferson's double appearing at the periphery of a family event, standing at a respectful distance; or suddenly striding into view, not quite in focus; or seen from the terrace playing the fiddle with his head thrown back, just like Mr. Jefferson. We can see the Randolphs seeing the double, and we observe that they make no comment, appear to take no notice, unless perhaps a Randolph is alone and can give a long curious look without being noticed. This double was someone they could not avoid seeing but were not supposed to notice. In fact, Jeff Randolph saw the double many times. He haunted Monticello.

Jeff described an incident of the two realms colliding. The moment of collision would make a powerful little film because the camera is ad­ ept at capturing suspense and astonishment. The incident occurred at dinner in the elegant dining room. Jefferson was there, along with Jeff Randolph and his mother, Martha Randolph, and her other children, and a guest. We see and hear the people at the table as Mr. Jefferson discourses brilliantly. The camera rises slightly, and we see, moving si­ lently behind the diners, the double, bearing a fresh platter of food and heading for Mr. Jefferson. We see the double’s face and that of the hon­ ored guest as he listens intently to Mr. Jeffersons remarks. An inner

212 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

voice tells the guest, Don’t look, don’t raise your eyes, you do not want to know. But of course he looks up, and our hearts freeze. The camera focuses on Jeff for the reaction shot, since he in fact wrote about this very moment: “in one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvi­ ous to all.”

The guest must have been a Northerner or a foreigner. Local friends, drilled in the social protocol of the “peculiar institution,” noticed the slaves who resembled Mr. Jefferson but never breached protocol by mentioning them. A University of Virginia professor who often visited Monticello with a colleague said that they “saw what others saw” but never heard the topic discussed. “An awe and veneration was felt for Mr. Jefferson among his neighbors which . . . rendered it shameful to even talk about his name in such a connexion.” Still, what the professor saw vexed him, and he pondered the connection “in his own secret mind,” the locked and silent chamber.3

In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph took the biographer Henry Randall around Monticello, filling the writer’s astonished ear with stories of the parallel family who lived on the mountain. Jeff said that his grandfather made no attempt to conceal the resemblance between himself and his slaves. He told Randall that Sally Hernings “was a house servant and her children were brought up house servants—so that the likeness be­ tween master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who visited this political Mecca.”

The biographer was amazed at these revelations. Not being a South­ erner, he was unaccustomed to the notion of slaves resembling the master’s family. He could not comprehend that Jefferson tolerated this daily display of miscegenation. “Why on earth,” he asked, didn’t Jeffer­ son “put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight”? Jeff replied that his grandfather “never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance.” He went on to say that he had no doubt that his mother “would have been very glad to have them removed” but that ev­ eryone so “venerated” Jefferson that none dared to “broach such a topic to him.” Jefferson’s power was such that he imposed his own reality on this little familial empire. “What suited him, satisfied [us],” Ran­ dolph said.4

The Man in the Iron Mask 213

Jefferson exerted an extraordinary level of psychological control over his family to keep his version of reality in place and the parallel realm unexamined. His great-granddaughter Sarah Randolph said that Jeffer­ son never talked about anything he didn’t want to talk about. An un­ sympathetic acquaintance wrote not of reticence or taciturnity but of “that frigid indifference which forms the pride of his character.”5 Frigid indifference forms a useful shield for a public character against his po­ litical enemies, but Jefferson deployed it against his own daughter Mar­ tha, who was deeply upset by the sexual allegations against her father and wanted a straight answer—Yes or no?—an answer he would not deign to give.

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless father’s indifference, but Jefferson knew he could expect his daughter’s devotion and felt no need to make explanations. As a grown woman, Martha remained the daughter, and she never became a confidante, even when scandal en­ gulfed the family. She unburdened herself to her children. “My mother, as she has often told me, was very indignant, even exasperated,” the granddaughter Ellen wrote. One day Martha and Jefferson’s private secretary confronted Jefferson with a widely published, highly insulting poem about him and Hernings. In silence, Jefferson “smiled at their

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Jefferson could smile, but his daughter could not. She “took the Dusky Sally stories much to heart,” Jeff Randolph said. Jefferson’s si­ lence about his mixed-race children split them off from reality. Though it was a species of schizophrenia to which Southern families had be­ come accustomed, denial yielded not comfort but only anxiety, and from anxiety there erupted rage at the “yellow children,” who were blamed for it all.

Another moment arrived when the parallel world broke through the barrier. In 1822, Jefferson freed Sally Hemings’s two oldest children, Beverly and Harriet, then aged twenty-four and twenty-one. He did this furtively, through an intermediary (the ever-loyal Edmund Bacon), and without the required legal authorization, which would have attracted attention; but even so, he could not escape notice and suspicion. Bacon recalled the departure of Harriet: “He freed one girl some years before he died, and there was a great deal of talk about it. . . . by Mr. Jeffer­ sons direction I paid her stage fare to Philadelphia, and gave her fifty

214 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

dollars.”7 Harriet’s brother Beverly left the same year. Even though “there was a great deal of talk about it” in Charlottesville, at Monticello all was silence, or evasion. In the Farm Book, Jefferson wrote the words “run away [18]22” and “run. 22” next to their names.8 The $50, plus stage fare, that he gave Bacon for Harriet was a large sum, yet Jefferson made no note of it in his accounts.

The family detected Jefferson’s hidden hand at work, and they also knew that his entries about Harriet and Beverly in the Farm Book were just a cover story. Ellen said that it was her grandfather’s decision to al­ low the two Hemingses “to withdraw quietly from the plantation” and that “it was called running away.” Jefferson freed them because they were “sufficiently white to pass for white.”* It was his “principle” to do this, she said. The alternative—to acknowledge that these people were her grandfather’s children—was unthinkable: "The thing will not bear telling. There are such things, after all, as moral impossibilities.”

*Randall mistakenly used the spelling “Henings.” More important, his account is muddled on a major point: Sally Hernings had a niece named Betsy and a sister named Betty, and it remains unclear which woman Jeff had in mind; possibly Jeff’s statement was clear and Randall garbled the conversation in recalling it.

Jefferson went to his grave without giving his family any denial of the Hernings charges, so they had no weapon to fire and no shield for defense when stories about his mixed-race offspring continued to circu­ late, stories that always tormented his daughter Martha. On her death­ bed in 1836, Martha called her sons Jeff and George Wythe Randolph to her side. She enjoined them “always to defend the character of their grandfather.” She told Jeff to look in the Farm Book, where the birth dates of the slaves were kept, and directed him to find the birth of the slave “who most resembled Mr. Jefferson.” Jeff found the entry—and maddeningly for history did not disclose the identity of this man. Martha asserted that Hernings and Jefferson had been apart from each other for fifteen months before the birth of that child, and “she bade her sons remember this fact.”9

Martha had found comfort in fraud, because the Farm Book and other records show that Jefferson was present at Monticello every time Sally Hernings conceived, and there is no indication that Hernings was ever away from Monticello at those times. Challenging the Jeffersonian paternity of just one Hernings child in any case would not get her father

’Ellen went on to say: “I remember four instances of this, three young men and one girl, who walked away and staid away—their whereabouts was perfectly known but they were left to themselves—for they were white enough to pass for white.”

The Man in the Iron Mask 215

off the hook, but apparently Marthas intent was to give her children some deniability.10

In the 1960s a University of Virginia scholar scrutinized the entries in the Farm Book, counting to nine on his fingers as he tried and failed to duplicate Martha’s result. He wrote to another specialist, offering advice on how to draft a delicate footnote conceding as obliquely and obscurely as possible that Jeffersons daughter had not told the truth to her sons: “The only embarrassing thing to phrase will be a footnote pointing out that Martha was wrong in saying that Jefferson was not at Monticello 9 months before the birth of each of Sally’s children. Per­ haps you could say it this way: ‘In attempting to refute a libel, Martha made a misstatement.”'11

When Jeff Randolph took Henry Randall around Monticello in the 1850s and told him that two Hernings women had children who re­ sembled Jefferson, he also said that he knew the identities of the real fathers of the mixed-race Hernings children. Randall wrote down what Jeff told him:

Mr. Jefferson had two nephews, Peter Carr and Samuel Carr whom he brought up in his house. They were the sons of Mr. Jeffersons sister and her husband Dabney Carr. . . . Sally Henings was the mistress of Peter, and her sister Betsey* the mistress of Samuel—and from these connections sprang the progeny which resembled Mr. Jefferson. Both the Henings girls were light colored and decidedly goodlooking. . . . their connexion with the Carrs was perfectly notorious at Monticello, and scarcely disguised by the latter—never disavowed by them. Samuel’s pro­ ceedings were particularly open.12

Samuel Carr was a convenient scapegoat because, in fact, he did have a black family. He fathered several children with a free woman of color, Judath Barnett, and this black family lived in a settlement of free blacks north of Charlottesville that came to be known as Free State. Its very

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existence was a rebuke and a repudiation of Thomas Jefferson’s insis­ tence that free blacks could not live side by side with whites. By the time Jeff pinned the blame for the Hernings children on his Carr cousin, Samuel was in his grave, and his mixed-race family had decamped for more secure freedom in Ohio.

Possibly, Jeff Randolph knew the truth about his grandfather’s “pro­ ceedings” and kept it hidden from the women in the family. Jeff told his sister Ellen that Samuel and Peter Carr had admitted their guilt to him in a tearful confession sometime in the second decade of the nine­ teenth century. But if that were so, why didn’t Jeff tell his mother on her deathbed and relieve her torment?

Before we pass judgment on Jeff Randolph, there are additional factors to consider. Like his father, Colonel Thomas Mann Randolph, Jeff was forced into the role of buffer and middleman, handling the dirty business. Like his father, he was caught between Jefferson and the women in the family, who were blind in their devotion to Jefferson. He always had to consider the feelings of his mother and sisters while bowing to his grandfather, and simultaneously he had to make every­ thing run.

Jeff’s account hints at a sympathy for his enslaved relatives—a dan­ gerous sentiment for a slave master—and hints also at a divide in the family. His sister Ellen called these people—unquestionably her own blood kin—the “yellow children” and spoke of them with disdain as “a race of half-breeds. . . . The thing will not bear telling.”13 We sense feel­ ings of astonishing intensity and relentlessness. At Monticello the “yel­ low children” lived in the glare of those hostile feelings every day. No act of loyalty or devotion could mitigate those feelings, because for Ellen the mere existence of these children defiled the reputation of her grand­ father. This is strikingly different from Jeff, who spoke of the Hemingses neutrally, even sympathetically.

Jeff had connections to the African-American community his sister might not have known about, and at almost the same time he was mak­ ing his revelations to the biographer about the mixed-race children of Monticello, he offered crucial help to a Charlottesville “black” family trying to cross the legal line into whiteness. Around 1835 a free mulatto woman named Ann Foster, a property owner who lived near the Uni­ versity of Virginia, gave birth to a son she named Clayton Randolph

The Man in the Iron Mask 217

Foster. Her bestowing the name Randolph proves nothing by itself, but an obscure court record from the 1850s is intriguing: “Upon evidence of Thomas J. Randolph . . . Susan Catharine Foster and Clayton Ran­ dolph Foster, children of Ann Foster, are [declared by the court to be] not negroes in the meaning of the act of assembly.”14

To give such evidence, Jeff had to prove to the court s satisfaction that he had authoritative knowledge of sufficient white blood in the Fos­ ter lineage to have them declared “not negroes.” At the very least, Jeff knew this mixed-race family very well. He was less inclined than his sister to revile such people as “a race of half-breeds,” knowing as he did the peculiar geography of the parallel world that Jefferson’s ideology compelled them to deny.

Jeff offered the same help to the grandchildren of Mary Hernings Bell, doing what he could to rescue a few people from the system. These rescues present themselves as psychological mini-dramas, with hints of secret blood ties, hidden identities, and a redemptive climax; they suggest hidden grief endured by the masters, consciences we cannot perceive until we learn to read the secret signs.

The insanity of this world is apparent in the story of the Fosters, who walked into the Albemarle County courthouse as black people and left as whites, their true genealogy abolished. And the brutality of this world is apparent in the nature of the evidence Jefferson’s partisans of­ fered for his innocence of the charges James Callender had made against him. One of Jefferson’s supporters blithely admitted that rape was com­ mon at Monticello: “In gentlemen’s houses everywhere, we know that the virtue of unfortunate slaves is assailed with impunity. ... Is it strange, therefore, that a servant of Mr. Jefferson’s, at a home where so many strangers resort. . . should have a mulatto child? Certainly not.”15

Ellen Randolph made a similar admission. She wrote that young white men in the vicinity of Monticello regarded the slave quarter as their bordello: “There were dissipated young men in the neighborhood who sought the society of the mulâtresses and they . . . were not anx­ ious to establish any claim of paternity in the results of such associa­ tions.” Ellen may have been referring to her brother Jeff’s school friends, who were “intimate with the Negro women,” according to Edmund Bacon.16 The silent implication was that the black women were im­ moral, but Jeff Randolph defended the character of slaves: “There was

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as much decency of deportment and as few illegitimates [among the slaves] as among the laboring whites elsewhere; as many lived in wed­ lock from youth to age without reproach.”17

But in his grandfather’s case, Jeff Randolph and the partisans who followed him put on the iron mask of denial, knowing the immense symbolic importance of keeping the Founder pure. That image of purity has been a potent talisman, a charm against knowledge of a past in which virtue was assailed on all sides, a talisman against everything that can­ not bear telling.

15

“I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee”

Madison Hernings bequeathed a narrative that changed American his­ tory when he stated bluntly, in an 1873 newspaper interview, that Thomas Jefferson was “my father.” When his recollections came to wide atten­ tion in 1974 thanks to Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, they collided with the modern imperative to find redemption almost everywhere we look.1

In an extraordinary cultural transformation, the memoir that Mer­ rill Peterson had disparaged in the 1960s as “the Negroes’ pathetic wish for a little pride” has been refashioned into a comforting myth of a se­ cret cross-racial romance. Brodie washed Jefferson clean of any stain when she wrote, “If the story of the Sally Hernings liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery . . . but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much pri­ vate happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years.”2 She suggested that Jefferson was neither a “brooding celibate” nor, “as some blacks today believe,” a monstrous “débaucher.” In Brodie’s view Jefferson him­ self was a victim who endured as much travail as anyone over the affair: “It also brought suffering, shame, and even political paralysis in regard to Jefferson’s agitation for emancipation.” Turning to Sally Hernings, Brodie stressed the romantic, saying that Hernings “was certainly lonely in Paris, as well as supremely ready for the first great love of her life.”3

This is a story that deeply appeals to modern sensibilities; looking into Jefferson’s inner life will lead us to a redemptive vision: “His am­ bivalences seem less baffling; the heroic image remains untarnished

298 Notes to pages 209-215

than Sally Hernings.) Lewis must have left Monticello before TJ arrived on Au­ gust 4—so Lewis could not have been the father of Eston. Did Randolph act on the invitation to visit? In his letter TJ enclosed the $20 cash payment Randolph had asked for, indicating that TJ did not expect to see his brother at Monticello anytime soon. Visits very often leave some kind of trace—a note in the accounts for a sum of money paid, received, or lent; a follow-up “thank you for coming” let­ ter; or a mention in a letter to someone else that "Uncle Randolph has been here.” But no record refers to Randolph actually visiting Monticello in August or Sep­ tember 1807.

14. The Man in the Iron Mask 1. .http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/pilgrimsl.html 2. Quoted in Niebuhr, Irony of American History, p. 21. 3. Henry Randall to James Parton, June 1, 1868, transcribed in Brodie, Thomas Jef­

ferson, p. 497. 4. Ibid., pp. 494-96. 5. This was the notorious James Callender. Durey, With the Hammer of Truth,

p. 159. 6. Quoted in Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, p. 80. 7. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 102. I have omitted a portion of Bacon’s remarks,

which I will take up later. 8. Farm Book, plate 130. 9. Henry Randall to James Parton, transcribed in Brodie, Thomas Jefferson,

pp. 495-96. 10. Ibid. Cynthia Burton suggests that Hernings might have been away from Monti­

cello at a Carr farm, but her evidence is not compelling. Years later Jeff Randolph related what his mother had said to Randall, who passed Martha’s refutation along to another biographer, James Parton. Randall claimed to Parton that he had independently verified Martha’s research: “It so happened when I was afterwards examining an old account book of the Jeffersons I came pop on the original entry of this slaves birth: and I was then able from well known circumstances to prove the fifteen months separation . . .” Here, at that spot in Randall’s sentence, gen­ erations of scholars have held their breath, tantalized. Randall continued: “but those circumstances have faded from my memory. I have no doubt I could recover them however did Mr. Jefferson’s vindication in the least depend upon them.” The minutest inquiries into plantation records and calendars have failed to turn up the “well known circumstances.”

11. John Cook Wyllie to James A. Bear Jr., May 6, 1966, "Genealogy of Betty Hem­ mings Compiled by John Cook Wyllie, Genealogical Data Pertaining to Hernings,” Wyllie Papers.

12. There is confusion over which Carr brother was supposedly the lover of Sally Hernings. In this passage, Randall says that Jeff Randolph identified Peter Carr as Hemings’s lover; in Ellen Coolidge’s 1858 letter to her husband she identifies Samuel Carr. It is more likely that Samuel was the one they both had in mind. Ellen wrote her letter immediately after her conversation with Jeff when her mem­ ory of the details would have been fresh. Randall wrote his letter twelve years after

Notes to pages 216-226 299

i his conversation with Jeff Randolph, so it is likely Randall got the Carr brothers > mixed up. But to further complicate the issue, in an 1873 letter Jeff wrote, "The

paternity of these persons was admitted by two others,” meaning both of the Carr i brothers. '■ 13. Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, Family Let- ■ ters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., http://retirementseries

.dataformat.com. The transcription in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hernings, pp. 258-60, is erroneous and misleading.

14. Towler, "Albemarle County Court Orders,” Albemarle County Minute Book, 1856— ; 59, Oct. 6, 1857, p. 190. This record is among the fascinating discoveries made by ä Sam Tbwler in the Albemarle County courthouse. ,j 15. Richmond Examiner, Sept. 25, 1802, in McMurry and McMurry, Jefferson, .; Callender, and the Sally Story, pp. 53—54; Durey, With the Hammer of Truth, i P- ifil- ) 16. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 88. Jeff Randolph disputed Bacon’s story. j 17. Thomas Jefferson Randolph Memoirs, version 2, no. 1397.

15. “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 1. Hernings, “Life Among the Lowly.” The Brodie transcription, Thomas Jefferson,

! pp. 471-76, is the most reliable in print, with only minor, inconsequential errors. 2. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, p. 32. 3. Ibid., p. 228.

j 4. Ibid., p. 32. 5. Ibid., p. 30. 6. Trescott, “Hernings Affair,” pp. Bl, B6.

î 7. Dabney and Kukla, “Monticello Scandals,” p. 61. 8. Robert Towne dramatized and updated this brand of mastery in the film China­

town, when an aged tycoon, Noah Cross, in one coup seizes control of both the water supply and the young granddaughter he has incestuously fathered. When the detective Jake Gittes asks the magnate, who already has more wealth than he

i can possibly use, what more he could possibly desire, Cross replies, "The future, Mr. Gittes. The future.” At the moment when, in a horrifying spasm of violence,

I Cross wins everything he covets, he symbolically wraps his hand around the eyes of his daughter-granddaughter to shut out the knowledge of how she came to be

i and how she came into his possession; she must be made blind. 9. One scholar expressed doubt there was a “treaty” at all: Philip D. Morgan, "Inter­

racial Sex in the Chesapeake,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hernings and Thomas Jefferson, p. 84n45. Jon Kukla raises the possibility that the affair began not in France but at Monticello in 1793 or 1794: Mr. Jefferson's Women, pp. 125-33.

10. TJ to Martha Jefferson Randolph, June 8, 1797, in Papers, vol. 29. 11. Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory: Identity and the

Hernings Family,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hernings and Thomas Jefferson, p. 174.

12. Burton, Jefferson Vindicated, pp. 123-24. I am grateful to David Kalergis for his observation that Madison may have learned the word from Tristram Shandy.

13. Stanton and Swann-Wright, "Bonds of Memory,” p. 182n5.