The AFU and Urban Legend Archive Celebrities hemmings Select a topic - - - - - - - - Home Searches AFU FAQ - - - - - - - - AFU Animals Books Celebrities Classic Collegiate Death Disney Drugs Food GIF Language Legal Medical Misc Movies Politics Products Religion Science Sex Songs TV - - - - - - - - Other sites

From: dino@euclid.Colorado.EDU (dino)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: More American History: Tom Jefferson & Sally Hemmings
Date: 23 Aug 1996 10:41:20 GMT

A quick word of thanks to Barbara Mikkelson, who kindly provided the material from reference [3] below.

The movie "Jefferson in Paris" (starring Nick Nolte) had a lot of things pretty accurate... yes, Jefferson really did send a moose skeleton to Paris to impress the French with the size of American fauna; Jefferson really did fall and badly hurt his right hand, never playing the violin well again (though the movie had some details wrong, a minor peccadillo); and notably, Jefferson did have something of an affair with Maria Cosway...

But from the opening scene, it perpetuated a well-known (and widely believed) myth, which generally runs about as follows:

"Thomas Jefferson had an affair with a slave girl named Sally Hemmings, siring several children. Visitors to Monticello were stunned at the sight of slaves that were the spittin' image of ol' Tom himself!"

In the below, [1] refers to _Jefferson: A Life,_ by Willard Sterne Randall, [2] refers to the dubious _Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History,_ by Richard Shenkman, and [3] refers to _The Affairs of Dame Rumor_, by David J. Jacobson.

All pytos mine. We use *'s to frame things in italics in the original.

To start thing off, from [1], (paperback edition) we have on pp. 476 - 77 (Jefferson is in Paris):

With Polly from America came Sally Hemmings, the thirteen-year old sister of Jefferson's chef, James. ... Some writers have tried to paint her as the concubine of a lonely, lovesick Jefferson [my note: Jefferson's beloved wife had since died]. In *Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography*, the late Fawn Brodie [my note: remember this name; we'll meet her again] suggested that, when Jefferson traveled through France and Germany and eight times described soil as mulatto in his twenty-five sheets of notes, he was not referring, as he labeled the appropriate columns of his charts, to yellowish soil in the hills and valleys he traveled through but he was really thinking of the contours of Sally's body. And when he was taking notes on a new kind of mold-board plow that he invented shortly after the journey, he was really thinking of plowing the fertile Sally as soon as he returned to Paris. But *mulatto* is the precise term describing yellowish-brown soil. And when Jefferson used the term *mulatto* to describe soil during his French travels, Sally was still on a ship with Polly, accompanying her to France. If he had ever noticed or remembered her at all, Sally had been ten years old when Jefferson last visited Monticello hurriedly in 1784 to pack Jason Hemmings off to France with him. She was only eight when Jefferson had last visited Monticello and was mourning his wife's death. Unless Brodie was suggesting that Jefferson consoled himself by having an affair with an eight-year old child, the whole chain of suppositions is preposterous.

Jefferson had enemies, however, who, in his lifetime, broadcast stories of his cavorting through slave quarters on Mulberry Row. Chief among them was a disgruntled former employee, the worst sort of witness. James Callender had worked as a political writer in Philadelphia for years, selling his services free lance. During Jefferson's third campaign for president, Jefferson's enemies hired Callender and apparently leaked to him a highly charged account of his flirtation in 1768 with Betsy Walker and added for good measure lurid descriptions of Sally Hemmings's arrival from Paris pregnant with Jefferson's child, the first of many supposedly sired by her as the master of Monticello made her the mistress of his wifeless household. Historians dismissed Callender's charges for nearly two centuries until Fawn Brodie dusted off a highly innacurate and uncorroborated memoir by a man who described himself as Madison Jefferson, son of Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. The account, published by an abolitionist journalist only in the *Pike County* (Ohio) *Republican* in 1873 [my note: the supposed interview opens the movie "Jefferson in Paris"], where the aged former slave was homesteading, resembles uncorroborated slave narratives and cannot be credited. ... full of hearsay ... the would-be former house slave could not have seen or known about first-hand ... must be put down as mere gossip ... . Also offered as evidence by Brodie and other writers since her book was published in 1974 are a description of a host of mulattoes at Monticello who resembled Jefferson, and a declaration that one even played the fiddle!

President Jefferson refused to dignify Callender's charges publicly... admitted that he once made a fumbling pass at Mrs. Walker when he was very young but saying that this was the only incident they should credit in the slightest. Thus, he denied having a slave family with Sally Hemmings. And when Henry Randall journeyed to Monticello half a century later to interview Jefferson's family, Jefferson's grandaughter, Ellen Randolph, suggested that the father of Sally Hemming's children ... was Jefferson's nephew, Samuel, "the most good-natured Turk that ever was master at a black seraglio kept at other men's expense." Sally Hemmings's lover was, in other words, a son of Dabney Carr and Jefferson's sister Martha. It is impossible to believe that Jefferson abandoned his love for Maria Cosway to force his affections on the most beautiful slave girl, ...

Elsewhere, in [2], Richard Shenkman says:

... Whether it's true, however, is a matter of opinion. Biographer Fawn Brodie says it is; ....

I'll leave that for you to figure out. It is interesting to note that Shenkman says:

Whether he was attracted to Sally no one knows. But everyone says that she was beautiful, and she may have reminded him of his dead wife since they were almost certainly half sisters. Their father was John Wayles [my note: Jefferson's now-dead wife's father], Sally's original master.

But in [1], Randall, pg. 180, says:

...and a beautiful daughter named Sally, "mighty near white." Sally was the same age as Jefferson's oldest daughter, Patsy, and was to be her body servant. According to Isaac Jefferson, "Sally was very handsome: long straight hair down her back." Her father probably was Nelson Jones, a white carpenter at Monticello.

Randall gives as a reference "Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography." Shenkman gives Dumas Malone's "Jefferson the President: The First Term [1970], pp. 494-98, appendix 2; and Winthrop D. Jordan, "White Over Black [1969], pp. 461 - 69.

Yes, before someone else wastes bandwidth on it, Jefferson did give the Hemmings's some special treatment over other slaves, freeing Robert and Jason Hemmings before others. But what does this prove? I can't find when Sally was freed, if she was. On pp. 590 -91 of [1], we have:

Unlike Washington, who had been able to manumit his slaves by his will, Jefferson had now lost the ability to grant freedom to his slaves as his dying wish. But he could only plead with his creditors to be generous and grant his deathbed request to free five of his servants: [none of whom was Sally Hemmings].

Any input? Was she already free? Did Tom keep her as his honey? Inquiring minds want to know.

Jefferson was alive for feuds like the Missouri Compromise fight of 1820, and there is the old story, "Jefferson once had a dream that there would be a war between the states over slavery." I am still finishing the book, but can find no reference to this potential UL.

This being an election year with at least one candidate having had cast at him numerous charges of sexual infidelities, pot smoking, draft dodging, land fraud, et cetera, we close this post with a selection from the fine American tradition of mudslinging; elsewhere, [3] says:

     ... It was also [in tandem with seducing slaves, being the 
     Antichrist, a drunkard, wanting to burn all the Bibles, et cetera]  
     whispered that he [Jefferson] had seduced the daughter of a well-born 
     Virginian while enjoying the hospitality of her home.

     Whispers of Jefferson's indiscretions were nutured by the Federalists
     for some time after his election. The stories appeared in the press, 
     where they were dramatized in cartoons and expanded in editorials. 
     They were woven into verse and song...

                And thou, the scorn of every patriot's name,
                Thy country's ruin and thy country's shame!
                Go wretch! Resign the Presidential chair.
                Disclose thy secret measures, foul and fair.
                Go scan, philosophist, thy Sally's charms,
                And sink supinely in her sable arms.

     This was composed by a 14-year-old who later won fame and fortune 
     for his poetry. However, it was effusively disowned by William Cullen  
     Bryants and has almost never been included in his collected works.

On pp. 556 - 57 of [1], Randall notes a political attack by James Callender :

      ... Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is
      TOM. His slaves are said to bear a striking resemblance
      to those of the president himself. ... By this wench Sally, 
      our president has had several children. ... THE AFRICAN 
      VENUS is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.

Callender had never been to Monticello and relied on papers given him by Jefferson's political ememies. But one of America's most durable myths, unproven and unprovable...

dino <dino@imicom.or.jp>