Madison Hemings’s memoirs, Jefferson and the Carrs’ silence, the positive assertions of the Adamses who were in London, of Governeur Morris who was in Paris, and of neutral local investigative journalists all make the truth of Dr. He would have had to have done so from Maryland.
Why would Jefferson write most intimately that “Maria’s maid,” a code name for Hemings, was “well and safely delivered of a child” if the child was not his? This letter has yet to be published, but it is compelling evidence that Samuel Carr could not have fathered this daughter. Documentation assures us that Jefferson was with Hemings nine months before the birth of all her children, and when Jefferson was not there, there were no Hemings born. Neither ever lived at Monticello after 1796, during Hemings’s childbearing years.Ī letter exists in Jefferson’s own hand, dated December 19, 1799, and addressed to son-in-law Francis Eppes, announcing a hitherto unknown Hemings child, Thenia.
Documentation places both Carrs elsewhere. In 1802 the uncollaborated “family denial” that Samuel and/or Peter Carr fathered Hemings’s children was never mentioned or imagined. Callender only then decided to attack Jefferson through his slave “wife,” writing that “if (Jefferson) had not violated the sanctuary of the grave, Sally and her son Tom would still perhaps have slumbered in the tomb of silence.” This “Tom” was sent to live with his aunt, Jefferson’s sister, when the scandal broke in 1801, and took the name of her husband, Woodson. Durey explains that Callender revealed Hemings’s relationship because Jefferson, after posing as his mentor, coolly dropped him for his radicalism and allowed Federalist editors to attack him mercilessly even to accusing him of the death of his wife. The “questionable” half-truth of the “invention” of the story by a “lying disappointed office seeker” was demolished in 1991, by William Durey’s account of the complicated intimate and paternal relationship between (the accused) Callender and Jefferson in With the Hammer of the Truth. Hemings remained by Jefferson’s side until his death in 1826 and produced seven children: Thomas, 1790 Harriet I, 1796 Beverly, 1798 Thenia, 1799 Harriet II, 1801 Madison, 1805 Eston, 1808. She stayed almost two years and returned pregnant, according to the 1873 memoirs of her son Madison. (Hemings’s mother, Elizabeth, had given Jefferson’s father-in-law John Wayles seven children, the youngest being Sally Hemings.) This is probably why, in 1787, Hemings was sent to Paris with Jefferson’s daughter. So much for “child abuse.” Moreover, her presence in Jefferson’s life at that time may be the reason his letter index for 1788 has mysteriously disappeared, the only missing index of Jefferson’s years of letter writing.Īnother half-truth protects the extraordinary blood ties between Jefferson and Hemings which made her Jefferson’s own sister-in-law, half-sister to his dead wife, and aunt to his legitimate white daughters. Indeed, Hemings was between 14 and 15 when she arrived in Paris, but between 16 and 17 when she returned to Virginia, certainly, by eighteenth-century standards, a marriageable woman. Take a half-truth and use it to denigrate irrefutable evidence to the contrary as “questionable”: “If Jefferson did sleep with Sally in Paris, he ought to be charged with child abuse: the girl was only about (sic) fourteen.” The decisive factor here is the disparity of race and the rhetoric of miscegenation. Jefferson did, in his paradoxical, intellectually complex, inimitable way, as poignantly divided in his private life as he was between enlightenment and its shadow, racism. But neither I, nor Jefferson’s political enemies, nor James Callender, nor the English, nor the abolitionists, nor anyone else “invented” the story of Sally Hemings. Wood fails to note that I also speculated on the paragon between Jefferson, Hemings, and the French Revolution. In Sally Hemings, I vulgarized one of American history’s best-kept secrets and changed the image of Jefferson in the public mind. Wood’s derogatory remarks about me in what he agrees is a valid historical speculation in his review of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s book, I reply not as a novelist, but a specialist on this controversy.