The Highest Calling, page 9
DR: Sally Hemings had a sister who lived with a man in Charlottesville. They were not married but living together openly. Why couldn’t Thomas Jefferson be more open about it? Or why do you think he wasn’t?
AGR: Well, she was living there with him. I don’t know what else she could do besides what they were doing. The neighbors were saying, “They’re living together, they cohabit.” It was Mary Hemings who lived with Thomas Bell, a merchant and a friend of Jefferson’s. And they corresponded, visited each other, and so forth. When he died, he actually left Mary Hemings the house and property, which you can’t do for a slave, but you can do it if people in the community go along with it.
DR: So people often ask you, I’m sure, “How did Sally Hemings slip in to his bedroom?” You might describe how he set up his house so that nobody could actually go in to his bedroom unless they knew a certain code to the lock or they came in through a certain door.
AGR: Sally Hemings’s job, Madison Hemings and other people said, was to take care of Jefferson’s rooms. She was his chambermaid. She took care of his wardrobe and his room. So she was supposed to be there. There would be a reason to be coming in and out. But he had, in the early 1800s when he was president, built on to his bedroom—you can see it now if you go to Monticello—a sort of covered porch and steps. You could get in to Jefferson’s room from the outside. There are multiple ways to get in from the outside or from the inside. He could leave without people inside knowing that he had gone.
It’s an interesting setting up of his life. Very, very private. He had special locks on his door that could be locked remotely, and double blinds, and a sort of panel next to his bed. Extreme privacy. Margaret Bayard Smith, an author and historian of this period, said that nobody could get in to his room unless he let them in, because he was the person who had the key, and presumably Sally Hemings.
DR: His room was his bedroom. He had a little bathroom, and then he had his library.
AGR: The study. He conceived of this when he was in Paris. It’s built for maximum comfort for himself, not so much for other people. People talk about the narrow staircases at Monticello, but those rooms were built just for visitors. He didn’t know in the 1790s that his daughter was going to get married and that her husband was going to fail and that they would all have to move in to the house in 1809. That was not his thought. So it’s very private. Bachelor quarters. He’s pretty clearly not going to get married again.
DR: After Thomas Jefferson dies in 1826, historians begin to write about him. Do they mention Sally Hemings, or does that just go away, or do people assume that the father of her children was somebody else?
AGR: They mention it to suggest that it’s not true. Then one historian, Henry Randall, who was the most famous early biographer of Jefferson, tells another Jefferson biographer that he had seen a letter and talked to one of Jefferson’s grandchildren, who said, “The reason Sally Hemings’s children look just like Jefferson is that they are the children of his nephew.” One of the Carrs. Cousins look like one another. That’s the story they tell, so historians believed that. Part of my first book was to ask, “Why do you believe this?” If you’re looking at documents, in the course of telling this story, the grandchildren say multiple things that are not true. Typically that makes you distrust people. But it didn’t with earlier Jeffersonian historians. All they were focusing on was that he said he didn’t do it. An alternative story that was accepted in history then was that it was Jefferson’s nephew who fathered the children, even though there’s no connection with Sally Hemings.
DR: When you’re writing your first book, you go through documentary evidence. You do a lot of research and you say, “This seems unlikely that the historical acceptance of Carr as the father is true. It’s probably Thomas Jefferson.” But then the DNA evidence becomes available and shows what?
AGR: It shows a connection between the Hemings descendant that they tested and the Jefferson descendants. The Carrs are a totally different group of people.
Another family, a Black family, the Woodsons, had claimed descent from Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which I denied in my first book. I had some very sharp conversations with a member of that family about it. But DNA analysis showed that there was in fact no connection between the two of them.
DR: The DNA evidence comes out, and I guess that’s case closed. All the white descendants of Thomas Jefferson agree?
AGR: No, they didn’t agree. And many of them still don’t agree.
DR: Even today?
AGR: Even today, they say, “No, it must have been another Jefferson.” First it was the Carrs. When they picked the Carrs, of course Jefferson’s grandchildren couldn’t know that there would one day be a time when you could differentiate between maternal relatives and paternal relatives. So they picked the most convenient people. And the people who had been writing to me saying, “It’s the Carrs, it’s the Carrs,” the day after the DNA came out, they started saying, “Oh, it must be another Jefferson relative, because it just cannot be he who did this.”
DR: There are people who write books that say it was Jefferson’s brother, but based on other evidence that also seems unlikely.
AGR: The DNA evidence killed the Carr story, which is the story that the family had been telling. But it’s the other stuff as well—the pattern of her conceptions, the names of the children. They’re all named for Thomas Jefferson’s friends and favorite relatives. There are diary entries from some of his friends about all of it.
DR: Does the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which now owns Monticello, agree with your analysis?
AGR: Yes, they do. Now when you go to Monticello, in the film that they show it says, “Most historians believe that he was the father of all of her children.” That’s a part of the story. They are now going to be interpreting what they take to be her room for a particular time at Monticello. That is something they accept.
And I think most people in America, strangely enough, believed the original story (i.e., that it could not be the great man Thomas Jefferson) before my book and before the DNA evidence came out. I don’t think the foundation had much of a problem with it. It was mainly historians with an exalted view of Jefferson who were really upset about it.
DR: Thomas Jefferson wrote the famous sentence “All men are created equal,” and yet was a slave owner, and impregnated a slave and so forth. Is it because Thomas Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence that his having children with an enslaved person gets so much attention?
AGR: I think so, because of what he symbolizes. He is a symbol of America. And if you say that a symbol of America had children with an African American woman, a person who, even though she’s mainly white, would have been considered African American, then in a way it’s like saying the country is not really white. And that’s a lot for some people to take. The Founding Fathers are typically looked to as a way to justify excluding people. “Well, they weren’t talking about you.” These are our fathers, but if you have somebody who was an actual father of people who were nonwhite, that messes the story up.
DR: Thomas Jefferson died on July 4th, the same day as John Adams, on the 50th anniversary of the date of the Declaration. Did he honor his commitment to free the children of Sally Hemings?
AGR: Yes, he did. The two eldest, William Beverly and Harriet, he writes in the Farm Book that they ran away, but actually they left. He put Harriet on a stagecoach. Beverly left a few months before her. They go to Washington, and we don’t really know what happened to them. That’s something I would like to try to find out. Madison and Eston are freed in his will. Sally Hemings is not formally freed.
DR: Why?
AGR: He didn’t say why, but if you think of what would have happened if he did free her, you might understand why he wouldn’t do it. In 1806 a law was passed in Virginia saying that any enslaved person who was freed had to get permission from the legislature to remain in the state. So he would have had to write to the legislature—he did for the sons, but not for her—and he’d have to say, “Gentlemen of the legislature, would you allow Sally Hemings to stay in Virginia?” And, because she was over 45, he would have had to detail how he planned to take care of her. So then he would say, “And here’s the money and the land that I’m going to provide for her.” It would be a total admission that the affair had happened.
And I think he would have thought it would have been humiliating. Martha Randolph, his daughter, was the most important person in Jefferson’s life. There’s no question about it. And to humiliate her and her children by making these public statements when all he had to do was to say to Sally, “Go in to town and live the rest of your life,” which is what happened. In the 1830 census Hemings is listed as a free white woman. In the 1833 census she’s listed as a free colored woman. So there’s law on the books and there’s law in the way it works. And in that community, everybody knew who she was.
DR: Do we know much about her? Do we know what she looked like? Was she literate? Could she read and write?
AGR: We don’t know if she was literate. We know her brothers Robert and James were literate. There’s a long list of French cooking utensils that James wrote about in his own hand. Robert and Jefferson corresponded. All those letters are missing.
DR: Jefferson was fastidious about keeping track of all of his letters. He had a special machine, so he wrote a letter and there was another pen writing the same thing. We have copies of 14,000 or so of his letters?
AGR: About 19,000.
DR: Does he ever mention Sally Hemings?
AGR: Oh, yes.
DR: And what does he say about her?
AGR: Just mundane things, but not many things at all. Giving instructions about firewood to be taken to her place and other people’s places as well. She comes back from France and she pretty much disappears from the family records.
DR: His children by her passed as white. They were seven-eighths white.
AGR: By Virginia law they were white. It was not the one-drop rule. If you were seven-eighths white, you were considered to be white. The two eldest, as I said, go off to live as white people. The two youngest stay in the Black community, until Eston, the absolute youngest, doesn’t feel that his children can have many opportunities in Ohio. He was a violinist. He made his living as a musician. There are articles about him and his daughter who was a pianist and so forth. But there was only so far they could go. So he takes his family and moves to Madison, Wisconsin, changes his name from Eston Hemings to E. H. Eston Hemings Jefferson, and he goes by E. H. Jefferson. They become white. His sons become prominent in the Madison community.
DR: This is getting to the great paradox of America. We have a country where we started by saying that all men are created equal and everyone’s supposed to be able to pursue happiness. Yet the people who enslaved some of these people were the Founding Fathers. So how could people as intelligent as Thomas Jefferson, brilliant in so many different areas, how could they have been slave owners? How do you square those two things?
AGR: I don’t know that we have to. Jefferson knew slavery was wrong, but there are many things that we believe about our lives, intellectual ideas, that we can’t live up to, for emotional reasons, let’s say lack of character, lack of strength, or whatever. The people who freed slaves in the eighteenth century during Jefferson’s time were under the influence of religion, mainly. And he was not, not in the way that the Quakers were, or Evangelicals, Methodists, and Baptists.
DR: Some people question whether he was really Christian.
AGR: I think he was a Christian. He was a Christian in his own way.
DR: Didn’t he make his own Bible where he took out some of the miracles of Christ? He took out things that he didn’t believe?
AGR: He did do that. He left what he thought were Jesus’s pure teachings but not the things that people had put on to Jesus, that Jesus had never said he did.
DR: Jefferson’s view was that whites and Blacks, if they were equal, could not live together in society. His early view was that slavery was wrong but that Blacks should leave the country?
AGR: The liberal position for Jefferson, John Marshall, James Madison, and people of that time was that there should be emancipation and expatriation. At first, Jefferson thought that Blacks should go out West, and then, once it was clear that the West was going to be for white people, that there should be some other place. He said whites would never give up their prejudices against Blacks, Blacks would never forgive whites for what they had done, and there would be a race war. We kind of laugh at that except we kind of have had one. Racial conflict. We congratulate ourselves. We have come very far but it hasn’t been easy. It’s not easy now.
DR: You’ve studied Jefferson for many years. Do you admire him more now that you have researched him as much as you have, or do you admire him less now that you know more about him?
AGR: I admire things about him. As I get older, I realize how hard it is to do anything in the world. It’s tough to accomplish something. And he accomplished a lot. There was a lot that he didn’t accomplish. And I feel much more humbled thinking, “What is it that I’ve done in comparison?” He helped start a country. The idea was that the next generation of people would carry things forward. But to say, “All right, you start a country, you’re a vice president, you’re a president, you found a university, how come you didn’t end slavery?” is a bit much for me.
That’s our passion, and it should be our passion to think about race and slavery and all those things. But his passion was “We have started a country,” and he was always fearful that it wasn’t going to work. I was about to say, “We know it worked.”
DR: It has worked.
AGR: It has definitely worked. But he didn’t know that it was going to work. It’s clearer to me now how paranoid he was and how intent he was on making the experiment go. And all these other things he thought—“Okay, the slavery thing will take care of itself”—but how many times in life have I or other people thought, “If I could just get here, that other thing will take care of itself”?
DR: Suppose Thomas Jefferson were here and you had a chance to interview him. Would you say, “Is it true about Sally Hemings?” What would be the question you would ask him?
AGR: If he were here now, I would say, “What do you think about all this?” No, seriously, a question that he could answer on his own? I’d ask him if he was going to make white men send their slave children back to Africa. What would be the basis for it? Because when he’s writing the will, and he’s doing the petition to the legislature about letting the men that he is freeing stay in Virginia, he says, “This is where their family and their connections are.”
And that’s the answer to why every African American should stay in the United States. He knew that about the people in his life. “I’m not going to send Burwell Colbert and John Hemings back to Africa, because their mother’s and their father’s land is where they belong.” He understood that in his day-to-day life.
DR: Let’s talk about a few other facets of Jefferson’s life not related to Sally Hemings and slavery. He wrote the Declaration of Independence at the age of 33. Did he put a lot of time in to it? Some people say he sort of plagiarized what other people had written. What do you think?
AGR: He put a lot of time into it, and he didn’t commit plagiarism in the sense that we think of it today. He’s very clear in saying, “These are not ideas that I thought up myself.” What he was trying to do was to get the common sense of the people at that time, how they felt about things. Sure, there were influences. He didn’t see himself as an oracle bringing forth something new. This was stating principles that he thought were universal and would be clear.
DR: He said the Continental Congress mutilated what he had written, and he was very upset about their changes, though he sat mute and didn’t really object to what they were doing. But he didn’t admit that he was the author for many years. Is that right?
AGR: His authorship wasn’t really known until the 1790s, well after the Declaration was written in 1776. When we got parties, actual political parties, his authorship became a way of standing up to the idea that he was as good as George Washington, who was the head of the Federalist Party, that Jefferson was responsible for the Declaration. So it was useful at that time.
DR: On his tombstone, what does he choose to put as the first thing—Author of the Declaration of Independence?
AGR: That, and then the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and the founding of the University of Virginia.
DR: Because of the Hamilton musical, we hear more about Jefferson than maybe we did before. Was he really an archenemy of Hamilton’s? What was the basis for that?
AGR: At first, they were not enemies. But then he became an archenemy because he believed that Hamilton and the Federalist party were counterrevolutionaries. After you have a revolution, there’s a counterrevolution. These people, including Hamilton, wanted a president to serve for life, a senate that served for life. Jefferson thought, after we’ve gotten rid of a king, why would we do that? And Hamilton talked about the British constitution as the greatest thing ever. So they became enemies.
DR: In the first cabinet, Thomas Jefferson served as secretary of state under George Washington. But then Jefferson was getting people to stay negative things about George Washington while he was secretary of state. Wasn’t that not good to do?
AGR: Jefferson was a modern politician. He had a newspaper that was devoted to criticizing the administration. Right now he would be one of those unnamed sources in the New York Times that are trying to, they think, save the union in some way. People saw him as underhanded and deceptive, but he was really practicing tactics that we do quite openly today.
