310 History class

218 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

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

220 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

and his genius undiminished. And the semi-transparent shadows do tend to disappear.”4 Brodie averted her gaze from some of the truths her work had uncovered, and she also fell victim to an impulse she had de­ tected in other Jefferson biographers who “protect by nuance, by omis­ sion, by subtle repudiation, without being in the least aware of the strength of their internal commitment to canonization.”5 Determined to prove not just that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children but that he was in love with Hernings, Brodie took what she wanted from Madison’s recollections and ignored evidence that contradicted her thesis.

In Brodie’s wake came the novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose Sally Hernings: A Novel of 1979 enchanted millions of readers, seduced the press, and created an utterly fantastic image of Sally Hernings in the popular mind, perhaps indelibly. Chase-Riboud said, “I ended up admiring their love, their fierce defense of their children, how they were allowed to run away. . . . Plus she might have influenced him on his politics.”6 But Chase-Riboud was correct when she said that the Hernings story possesses "symbolic, almost mythic dimensions. Tragedy and secrecy, ambiguity and hypocrisy—all these elements combine in the story. It is truly an allegory of the social and psychic dramas of the races in America.”7

Madison Hemings’s recollections are much more than an item of evidence in the Hemings-Jefferson controversy. They take us deep into the psychology of slavery at Monticello. In telling his life story, Madison did not begin with his famous father, as one might expect. Instead, he went back to the remote past, unfolding a narrative as it had been told and retold in the Hernings family. It is a story of origins, of beginnings, and of the archetypes of the New World in distant times. It is a story of the first father and the beginning of amalgamation, the amazement of whites and blacks at the first mixed-race people, and the overthrow of the father. In just a few lines, it evokes the feel of myth.

A British mariner known only as Captain Hernings came to Vir­ ginia’s shores in the 1730s and fathered a child by a slave. When he learned of the existence of this child, a daughter, the captain tried to purchase her from her owner, John Wayles (Jefferson’s father-in-law), but Wayles “would not part with the child, though he was offered an extraordinarily large price for her.” It is notable that Madison begins his

“I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 221

story with the white ancestor who acknowledged paternity of his daugh­ ter, which Jefferson never did.

The captain persisted: “Being thwarted in the purchase, and deter­ mined to own his own flesh and blood he resolved to take the child by force or stealth.” Captain Hernings laid a plan to kidnap the child and her mother, but “leaky fellow servants” revealed the plot to Wayles, who locked the mother and child away in his house.* The captain sailed away from Virginia, never to see his daughter again. That daughter was Eliza­ beth Hernings, Madison’s grandmother, the matriarch of Monticello’s Hemingses.

*In this brief remark, Madison hints at divides within the slave community, with some willing to betray others to curry favor with the master.

These events had taken place more than a century and a quarter before Madison’s telling of them. The story must have been repeated many times in the Hernings family. It points to a deep, abiding sense of dislocation and loss and to the struggle of the slaves to comprehend people who regarded children as cash and severed blood ties with “no compunctions of conscience”:

I have been informed that it was not the extra value of that child over other slave children that induced Mr. Wales to refuse to sell it, for slave masters then, as in later days, had no compunctions of conscience which restrained them from parting mother and child of however tender age, but he was restrained by the fact that just about that time amalgamation began, and the child was so great a curiosity that its owner desired to raise it himself that he might see its outcome.

In the contest between the father and the master, the master wins and keeps the mixed-race child out of base curiosity, to observe it as if it were a joke of nature. The first master defeats the first father, makes him disappear, and sets himself in the father’s place. That is the dark heart of this foundation story. The master’s ultimate prize is to take the girl as his concubine and establish, perversely, a perpetual lineage in slavery. He fathers children with her and passes them to the next master: Wayles had six children by Elizabeth Hernings, and they went

222 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

into Jefferson’s inheritance. Mastery inverted the strongest bond of humanity—with the enslaver becoming the father—a vision alien to whites but part of the historical DNA of African-Americans.

Our human yearning for immortality expresses itself in children, but fathering children by a slave condemned the offspring to slavery, perpetuating not just the master’s lineage but the master’s power. It is the ultimate expression of mastery to hold power after death, because for the master life is power and power is life. Faulkner made this de­ mented species of power a central theme in Absalom, Absalom!, which tells in kaleidoscopic episodes the story of a determined plantation mas­ ter who exiles his son and depicts mastery not as a peculiarly Southern phenomenon but as the American enterprise gone mad.8

In Madison’s account, his mother broke the power of the masters when she broke the lineage of enslavement established by John Wayles. When his mother went to France as the companion of Jefferson’s daugh­ ter, she

became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enciente [pregnant] by him.* He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him.

The newspaper misspelled it; the correct spelling is enceinte.

So Jefferson offered her a deal to get her to return: “To induce her to do so, he promised her extraordinary privileges [emphasis added].” Fur­ thermore, he “made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years.” So she returned “in consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied.”9

“Extraordinary privileges” echoes the “extraordinarily large price” Captain Hernings had offered Wayles. Sally Hernings succeeds where Captain Hernings had failed. She lays hold of the future, but only by consenting to become the master’s concubine: she sacrifices herself for her children. What is missing from Madison’s account is a declaration of love. A transaction has taken place, not a love affair.

“I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 223

Madison was a forthright speaker; he did not shrink from saying that his grandmother had children by four different men. He reported bluntly that his mother became Jefferson’s "concubine,” a harsh word to use of one’s mother, and he used the same word of his grandmother’s relationship with John Wayles. Elsewhere in his recollections Madison describes in warm terms the emotional bond between Thomas Jeffer­ son and his wife, Martha: "intimacy sprang up between them which ripened into love.” This is vastly different from “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.”

Madison’s wife, Mary McCoy, was the granddaughter of a slave and a slave master. Madison described her lineage this way: “Her grand­ mother was a slave, and lived with her master, Stephen Hughes, near Charlottesville, as his wife. She was manumitted by him, which made their children free born.” He pointedly did not use the word “wife” in his account of his mothers relationship with Jefferson. Madison said that Jefferson was “affectionate” toward his grandchildren, but he did not say that about Jefferson’s relationship with his mother.

Jefferson maintained tight emotional control over his family on the summit. A descriptive letter to his daughter Martha has a commanding tone:

I now see our fireside formed into a groupe, no member of which has a fibre in their composition which can ever produce any jar­ ring or jealousies among us. No irregular passions, no dangerous bias, which may render problematical the future fortunes and happiness of our descendants.10

In contrast to that group clustered around the fireside, every time the Hernings children gazed up at the mansion, they confronted an ex­ istential either-or: I am lam not a Jefferson. I am lam not white / black. Madison’s account suggests that they endured a peculiarly deep estrange­ ment from Jefferson: “he was affectionate toward his white grandchil­ dren,” but toward his black offspring “he was very undemonstrative. . . . He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children.” Madison did not offer a single anecdote about Jefferson. His impressions of him were vague and general—distant glimpses of the master on his terrace and in the shops—and one wonders whether he

224 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

ever saw Jefferson up close or ever heard him say a word. In their ac­ counts the former slaves Israel Jefferson and Isaac Granger, especially the latter, tell more about Jefferson than his son does. Madison’s recol­ lections, aside from making his lineage known, “do not suggest that he identified with Jefferson in any way,” as the Monticello historian Lucia Stanton puts it.1!

In place of affection the Hernings children received their promised privileges. When they were very young, they were exempted from labor. Madison and his siblings “were permitted to stay about the great house,’ and only required to do such light work as going on errands. Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the home planta­ tion. . . . We were always permitted to be with our mother, who was well used.” Her only tasks were “to take care of his chamber and ward­ robe, look after us children and do such light work as sewing.” Madison regarded this as the fulfillment of the promise Jefferson made in Paris that Sally would receive extraordinary privileges. It also speaks to the harshness of life for Monticello’s ordinary slaves. Apparently, it was ex­ traordinary for children to be with their mothers.

Another of Madison’s remarks leaps out. The Hernings children knew that eventually they would be released, so they felt “free from the dread” of knowing they would be slaves all their lives “and were mea­ surably happy.” But the certainty of eventual freedom came with a price. All the Hernings siblings reached their twenties without marry­ ing or having children, which was unusual. But because they all knew that one day they would be leaving the mountain, they had to be free from encumbrances. Jefferson might not manumit a spouse; he might keep children, as he had kept some of Mary Hemings’s children.

Sally Hernings talked about her French trip all the time. “I have of­ ten heard her tell about it,” Edmund Bacon recalled. To him and other white listeners she is likely to have given a sanitized travelogue of the wonders of an ocean voyage, of the great city of London, where she stayed with John and Abigail Adams, of the great city of Paris, where she was free because there was no slavery. Her family would have known what choices Sally Hernings made in Paris and what she had given up.

Hernings brought back from Paris a mysterious token of her time there. It is hard to say exactly what it means. Excavating the site of Sally Hemings’s cabin on Mulberry Row, archaeologists found a French

“I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 225

ointment jar in household trash behind the cabin and estimated that it had been thrown away there in 1809. It is not so surprising that she would have held on to this little keepsake, but the puzzle is, why did she throw it away after holding on to it for twenty years? The year 1809 was when Hernings moved from that cabin to her room in the Monticello dependency; it was the year Jefferson retired from the presidency and the year when his extended white family settled in with him perma­ nently at Monticello. To Hernings, somehow the events of that year must have broken off something she associated with Paris, or represented an end, or a dashing of hopes that she finally realized were unrealistic. As the Randolphs gathered around the fireside with the paterfamilias, she grasped Jefferson’s feelings about his family ties. Her treaty would be fulfilled, but there would never be a recognition of her, only silence and denial.

Madison learned to read and write when he “induced” the white children to teach him. There is a clue in his recollections to a book they used in their lessons. A great deal of attention has focused on Madison’s use of the French word enceinte (pregnant), which Jefferson’s defenders have pounced on as evidence that his statement was written by the newspaper editor S. F. Wetmore. Madison might have learned the word from his mother, but a more intriguing possibility is that when Jef­ ferson’s grandchildren taught him, they used Jefferson’s favorite novel, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, where the word enceinte appears on an early page.12 The novel opens with a ribald joke about the moment of conception, but the joke would have carried a special double entendre in the mind of a child of Sally Hernings:

I WISH either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;. . . —Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world.

As Madison read those lines, he would only have to lift his eyes to his young Randolph tutor to get an idea of what a different figure he might

226 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

have made—someone known openly and honestly to the world as a sprig of Jefferson’s tree.

Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia that when he gazed into the faces of dark-skinned slaves, he saw nothing but “eternal mo­ notony . . . that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions.” But the light-skinned faces of his Hernings children—his own face barely veiled—would have unsettled him, so he kept them at a physical and emotional distance.

When Harriet Hernings left Monticello to head north forever in 1822, Jefferson had his overseer Bacon give her the traveling money.* He did not share a final, intimate moment with his daughter to hand her the money himself. Perhaps he had never acknowledged her exis­ tence and did not want to start then. He wrote “run” (for “runaway”) next to Harriet’s name in the Farm Book, so his daughter appeared in his records as a fugitive.

*Some of his children and their descendants passed for white and lost contact with their African-American kin. His son Thomas, serving as a white officer in the Union army, was cap­ tured and died in the Confederate prison at Andersonville.

Madison did not mention that his father talked to him about going free, but Jefferson did talk about manumission with at least two other slaves who were freed in his will: his butler, Burwell Colbert, and the blacksmith Joseph Fossett.

After Jefferson’s death Madison and Eston Hernings took their mother to live in Charlottesville, where their racial identity oscillated along the either-or axis according to the eyes and intentions of whites. The 1830 census taker listed all of them as white, but when a special census of free blacks was taken three years later, they were classified as mu­ latto.13 Their racial identity may have shifted because the special 1833 census, ordered by Virginia’s government after the Nat Turner uprising in 1831, enumerated free blacks for the purpose of determining how many of them were willing to immigrate to Africa. The census taker may have pushed them to leave by making them officially mulattoes.f

In providing some background to Madison’s memoir, Dumas Malone noted the fierce “anti-Negro sentiment” that Hernings confronted in his new home in Ohio: “The county seat was so hostile to black settlement that as late as 1888 ... a Negro had never been allowed to live within

‘Similarly, he had used a go-between for another personal transaction, sending his farm man­ ager to tell Mary Hernings he was taking two of her children. fOf the 452 free blacks in Albemarle County, none expressed the desire to leave the country of their birth.

“I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 227

the town limits.” This extreme hostility Madison endured in Ohio may explain the element of family tension in his memoir. He was the only surviving Hernings child willing to make a public statement about their origins, and he was the only Hemings-Jefferson offspring who still re­ garded himself as black.* Madison’s siblings had entered the realm of denial. Eston and his family had decided to cross over into the white world; Beverly and Harriet had long since crossed over, as Madison described in surprising detail:

Beverly left Monticello and went to Washington as a white man. He married a white woman in Maryland, and their only child, a daughter, was not known by the white folks to have any colored blood coursing in her veins. Beverly’s wife’s family were people in good circumstances.

Harriet married a white man in good standing in Washington City, whose name I could give, but will not, for prudential rea­ sons. She raised a family of children, and so far as I know they were never suspected of being tainted with African blood in the community where she lived or lives. . . . She thought it to her interest, on going to Washington, to assume the role of a white woman, and by her dress and conduct as such I am not aware that her identity as Harriet Hernings of Monticello has ever been discovered.14

Eston married a colored woman in Virginia, and moved from there to Ohio, and lived in Chillicothe several years. In the fall of 1852 he removed to Wisconsin, where he died a year or two afterwards. He left three children.

Proud of his African blood, Madison seemed disappointed and even bitter that his siblings passed into the white world, notably in his re­ mark that Harriet “thought it to her interest ... to assume the role of a white woman.” Because his siblings had all crossed the color line into whiteness and silence, this story and others like it were buried and

228 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

denied, even by the offspring of the hidden unions. The slave era was over, and the truth of that era would be lost if Madison did not speak up, as if to say, as Ishmael does in Moby-Dick: “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

After Jefferson’s death Sally Hernings moved into a house in Char­ lottesville with her sons Madison and Eston, then in their early twenties. They had been freed in Jefferson’s will, but she had not been; the will didn’t even mention her. In the appraisement of slaves after Jefferson’s death, Hernings, then just over fifty, had been adjudged an old woman of no value. Sally was “given her time” by Jefferson’s daughter, an infor­ mal, quasi-manumission by which Sally could legally remain in Virginia but was not required to provide any further service. In his will Jefferson asked his executors to petition the Virginia legislature to grant permis­ sion to Madison and Eston to remain in the state, which was done. Without this special permission, they would have been required to leave the commonwealth under the provisions of the 1806 removal law.

A year after Sally Hernings s death in 1835, the brothers left Char­ lottesville for Ohio with their wives and children. The Cleveland Amer­ ican reported the presence of an unnamed mixed-race child of Thomas Jefferson’s in 1845, stating, “Notwithstanding all the services and sacri­ fices of Jefferson in the establishment of the freedom of this country, his own son, now living in Ohio, is not allowed a vote, or an oath in a court of justice!”15 Though Eston won esteem by his skill as a musician and his sterling character, his race irredeemably condemned him. Ac­ cording to a newspaper article published after his death: “notwithstand­ ing all his accomplishments and deserts, a great gulf, an impassable gulf” separated Eston Hernings and white people, “even the lowest of them.” Another newspaper account was blunt: “a nigger was a nigger in those days and that settled it.”16

Eston crossed the line into whiteness around 1850. He moved his family from Ohio, where they were well known, to Madison, Wisconsin, where they were not, dropped the name Hernings for Jefferson, and passed as a white person, as did his wife and three children. Eston was remembered in one newspaper account as “Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent.” The account continued, “he was soon very well

7 Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 229

and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appear­ ance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody’s attention to him.”

He could not conceal his remarkable resemblance to Thomas Jef­ ferson. “It was rumored,” said one newspaper in 1902, “that he was a natural son of President Thomas Jefferson, a good many people ac­ cepted the story as truth, from the intrinsic evidence of his striking re­ semblance to Jefferson.”17 One of Eston’s acquaintances, on a trip to Washington with several other men from Ohio, was stunned when the group came to a statue of the third president: ‘“Gentlemen, who in Chillicothe looks the most like that statue?’ I asked. Instantly came the unanimous answer, ‘Why, Eston Hernings!’” The man who noticed Es­ ton’s “striking” likeness to the statue pointedly asked Eston about it, and Eston responded that his mother “belonged to Mr. Jefferson . . . and she never was married.”

A friend of Eston’s son Beverly either guessed a Thomas Jefferson connection or was told about it. When Beverly Jefferson died in 1908, the Chicago Tribune’s obituary did not mention descent from Jefferson, but shortly afterward it printed the following letter: “His death deserves more than a passing notice, as he was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson, father of the doctrines of the democratic party, hence one of the FFV [First Families of Virginia]. Beverly Jefferson was one of God’s noblemen— gentle, kindly, courteous, charitable. He was friendly to everybody in his home city, and he will be missed there quite as much or more, perhaps, than any other citizen.”18

Choosing the surname Jefferson might seem an odd way to hide one’s identity, but Eston’s features made it impossible to deny that he had some blood tie to the third president. His twentieth-century de­ scendants believed they were descended from an unnamed Jefferson “uncle,” most likely a cover story devised in the late nineteenth century to hide the family’s descent not so much from Thomas Jefferson as from Sally Hernings. If it became known they were descended from Hernings, they would no longer be white people, but colored.

The secrets buried in slavery time formed a minefield; the border­ land of the parallel worlds was literally deadly, as I discovered from an article dating to World War I from The Washington Post, “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp.” The article reported an incident involving one Alfred Lord, a white twenty-seven-

230 MASTER OF THE MOUNTAIN

year-old Ohio man drafted to serve in the army in the fall of 1917. “I’m ready,” he told a reporter as he climbed aboard a train in his hometown of Mineral City with 105 other young men, their departure hailed by a large, flag-waving crowd of well-wishers. When the army physician ex­ amined him at the induction camp in Chillicothe, something did not seem quite right: “the surgeon did not pass him. Instead he called in other surgeons. They, too, examined Lord. There were whispered con­ ferences. 'We are sorry to tell you this,’ one of the surgeons said, finally, ‘but there is evidence that there is negro blood in your veins. You will have to go into a negro regiment.’ Lord . . . although of dark complexion, always had thought himself white, and . . . had associated with white men all his life. . . . That night he committed suicide.”19 The article did not say what sign revealed his Negro blood. In any case, Lord changed in a blink from being one thing to being another, an instantaneous and fatal metamorphosis.

Eston’s son John Wayles Jefferson, white enough to attain the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Eighth Wisconsin Infantry, lived through such an instant of icy terror when he encountered a childhood friend who knew his carefully hidden background as a colored man in another state, another time. The acquaintance recalled that the colonel “begged me not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command.”20

When Monticello’s historians went to interview Hernings descen­ dants, they found photographs from the early twentieth century of Es­ ton’s grandson and a friend dressed as pickaninnies, wearing blackface and striking comical “colored” poses, including ogling white girls with the sort of leer that would get a real black man lynched. The grandson had been raised by his grandmother, Eston’s wife, who was born in Vir­ ginia under slavery. Either the photographs were savagely ironic—the make-believe pickaninny had no idea he was descended from slaves—or the young man did know and the little joke bespoke a savage self­ hatred.21

The brutal racial order split the Hernings family apart and drove some of them underground. The Monticello historians found that Mad­ ison’s son “disappeared and may be the source of stories among his sis­ ters’ descendants of a mysterious and silent visitor who looked like a white man, with white beard and blue, staring eyes. He slipped in and

7 Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 231

out of town to visit older family members but never formed ties with the younger generations.”22 The family said that two of Madison’s sons never married “perhaps because of concerns about revealing skin color” in their offspring. Some of the grandsons passed for white; their sisters remained black, and though they all lived-in southern Ohio they dared not meet—“we never heard from them,” one descendant told the histo­ rians. A great-grandson of Madison Hemings’s passed as a swarthy Eu­ ropean, “adopting a variety of European accents along with his fictitious identities.” In need of help and care in his final days, he sought out his sister, who took him in, to the bafflement of her children: “We didn’t understand who [he] was because [he] had an Italian accent. . . . And then we found out actually he was our uncle. And that [he] had crossed over, he had been white.”

Another descendant of Madison Hemings’s related a bitter moment in his grandmother’s life, when she was not notified of the death of her brother, who had passed for white and married a white woman years before. He had remained in touch, however, through cards and phone calls on certain meaningful occasions. His new family did not send word across the color line until months after he died, perhaps to ensure that no part of the black family appeared at the funeral. One descen­ dant told the historians, “The blacks don’t like it because you’re light­ skinned and the whites know you’re black so you’re just stuck there.” Another added, “They used to call us white niggers.”23

The distant figure of Jefferson hovers over this world like the god of a Deist universe, the supreme being who set events in motion and then departed, with his offspring “left to the guidance of a blind fatality,” struggling in the world their own father had created.

298 Notes to pages 209-215

than Sally Hemings.) 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 Hemings 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 Hemings,” Wyllie Papers.

12. There is confusion over which Carr brother was supposedly the lover of Sally Hemings. 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

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 brothers.

13. Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, Oct. 24, 1858, Family Let­ ters Digital Archive, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., . . The transcription in Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, pp. 258—60, is erroneous and misleading.

http://retirementseries dataformat.com

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 Sam Towler in the Albemarle County courthouse.

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, p. 161.

16. Bear, Jefferson at Monticello, p. 88. Jeff Randolph disputed Bacon’s story. 17. Thomas Jefferson Randolph Memoirs, version 2, no. 1397.

15. “I Only Am Escaped Alone to Tell Thee” 1. Hemings, “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. 4. Ibid., p. 32. 5. Ibid., p. 30. 6. Trescott, “Hemings Affair,” pp. Bl, B6. 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 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, 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 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 Hemings 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. Jeffersons 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

Hemings Family,” in Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings 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.

300 Notes to pages 227-238

14. There was a tradition among some African-American families from Charlottes­ ville that Harriet returned there after TJ's death and started a family, but the evidence they offered in the 1940s is extremely garbled and calls for further research. Pearl Graham, Notes on an Interview with Three Descendants of Thomas Jefferson, July 28, 1948, typescript graciously provided by Lucia Stanton. Graham, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hernings,” pp. 98-100. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, pp. 554-55n47.

15. Quotation from Cleveland American, reprinted in Liberator, Dec. 19, 1845, in Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 165.

16. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 164. 17. “A Sprig of Jefferson Was Eston Hernings,” Scioto Gazette, Aug. 1, 1902, quoted in

Frontline website “Jefferson’s Blood,” /jefferson/cron/1902sprig.html, also quoted in Leary, “Sally Hemings's Children,” pp. 172-73. According to this account, which appeared nearly fifty years after Eston’s death, “There came from Monticello, Virginia, to Chillicothe, a remark­ ably fine looking colored man and his family. Eston Hernings was of a light bronze color, a little over six feet tall, well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn.”

www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows

18. Fawn M. Brodie, “Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren,” Getting Word: The Newsletter (Winter 2007/2008), p. 2.

19. “Drafted Man, Classed as Colored, Commits Suicide in an Ohio Camp,” Sept. 29, 1917, p. 4; Sept. 30, 1917, p. 3.

20. Stanton and Swann-Wright, “Bonds of Memory,” p. 169. 21. Ibid., p. 162. 22. Ibid., pp. 166-67. 23. Ibid., p. 171.

16. “The Effect on Them Was Electrical” 1. Petition of the American Convention for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, quoted

in Adam Rothman, Slave Country, p. 27. 2. Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” p. 52; Ress, Governor Edward Coles, pp. 11-17. 3. Ress, Governor Edward Coles, p. 34. 4. Monroe, “Edward Coles, Patrician Emancipator,’’

1210502.html. www.lib.niu.edu/2005/iht

5. Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,” pp. 47-48. 6. Coles, “Emancipation,” Oct. 1827, p. 1. I am very grateful to Bruce Carveth for

generously providing copies of his Coles material. Coles knew he could ease his conscience simply by asking his father for some other property, but he reasoned that the effect would be merely to perpetuate the enslavement of his allotted in­ heritance “as if I had sold the portion of them which I should otherwise have inherited.”

7. He considered and abandoned the idea of keeping the freed people in Virginia, evading the removal law “by not having the free papers recorded,” and formalizing the emancipation in his will so that the freed people would be protected in case of his sudden death.

8. Coles, “Emancipation,” pp. 2-3.

Notes to pages 239-251 301

9. Coles, “Autobiography,” n.p. 10. Ibid. 11. Morse, American Geography, pp. 390—91. 12. Brissot de Warville, quoted in Poole and Buchanan, Anti-Slavery Opinions

Before the Year 1800, .www.gutenberg.org/files/23956/23956-h/23956-h.htm 13. Ress, Governor Edward Coles, pp. 42—43; Ketcham, “Dictates of Conscience,”

p. 52. 14. Coles to TJ, July 31, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7. 15. TJ to Coles, Aug. 25, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7. 16. Coles to TJ, Sept. 26, 1814, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 7. 17. Billy Wayson, lecture, Jefferson Library, International Center for Jefferson Stud­

ies, May 2011. 18. Short to TJ, Feb. 27, 1798, in Papers, vol. 30. 19. Kościuszko wrote three more wills in Europe after leaving the United States.

These dealt mainly with his property in Europe, though he did decide in 1806 to leave $3,700 from the U.S. funds to his American godson, Kościuszko Armstrong (son of John Armstrong Jr., U.S. minister to France). He corresponded with TJ in 1817 and reiterated that his intention to free slaves with his American funds re­ mained “fixed.” Kościuszko believed that his European wills would in no way af­ fect his American will, but TJ’s refusal to execute Kosciuszko’s will left it in limbo, an attractive prize for litigants. Armstrong and other claimants tried and failed to invalidate the emancipation will in a U.S. suit in 1823, giving TJ a sec­ ond chance, but he did nothing. Two decades later another suit succeeded, and the U.S. will was declared invalid by the Supreme Court. Had TJ acted as his friend had wished, several enslaved families would have been liberated and be­ come landowners in a free state. Mizwa, “Kosciuszko’s ‘Fortune’ in America and What Became of It,” pp. 1-3.

20. Turner, “Did Jefferson Sleep with Sally Hernings?” 21. Life and Ancestry of Warner Mifflin, pp. 84, 79, 85. 22. Freehling, Reintegration of American History, p. 188. 23. Richard Newman, “Good Communications Corrects Bad Manners,” in Ham­

mond and Mason, Contesting Slavery, p. 77. 24. Fogel, Slavery Debates, p. 39. 25. TJ to Benjamin Banneker, Aug. 30, 1791, in Papers, vol. 22. 26. Foster, Jeffersonian America, pp. 148-49. 27. TJ to Edmund Bacon, memorandum Fall 1806, in Farm Book, p. 25. 28. TJ to Grégoire, Feb. 25, 1809, in Peterson, Thomas Jefferson: Writings, p. 1202; TJ

to Joel Barlow, Oct. 8, 1809, in Papers, Retirement Series, vol. 1. 29. TJ to Burwell, Jan. 28, 1805, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,” www

. .monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation 30. Brown, "Senate Debate on the Breckinridge Bill,” p. 347. 31. TJ to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipation,”

.www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation 32. TJ to John Wayles Eppes, June 30, 1820, in Farm Book, p. 26. 33. TJ to Joel Yancey, Jan. 17, 1819, in Farm Book, p. 43. 34. TJ to Lydia Sigourney, July 18, 1824, in “Quotations on Slavery and Emancipa­

tion,” .www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-slavery-and-emancipation