On William Taft, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, and
How Presidents’ Reputations Change over Time
AMERICANS’ OBSESSION with the presidency has its limits. “It’s important to remember that we remember our presidents in a very cursory manner,” Mark Updegrove of the LBJ Library told me. “Clare Boothe Luce”—writer, two-term member of Congress, diplomat, and activist in the mid-twentieth century—“used to tell presidents that they were going to be remembered in one sentence. And she used to tell them, what will your sentence be?” He laughed as he recalled the story. “It got so bad that JFK started avoiding her at parties.”
Presidents can try to write their own sentences to sum up their careers for posterity, and sometimes they’re successful. More often the shorthand version of a president’s life ends up changing over time, and not always for the better. Lyndon Johnson, for example, wanted to be remembered for launching the War on Poverty and his other Great Society programs, but the war in Vietnam changed his sentence.
I got a lesson in how presidents are remembered in an unexpected place: Nationals Park, the Major League Baseball stadium in Washington. The Nats play up their capital connections in a big way, including a pregame video montage of presidents throwing out the first pitch at Major League games and presidential trivia questions on the big screen during the game. “Who was the First Lady of Baseball?” read one, with four possible answers listed below. “I’m gonna choose Florence Harding,” said the fan chosen to answer on our behalf. Unfortunately for the fan, the right answer was Grace Coolidge.
I was sitting in front of a group of four women in their twenties who had been following the baseball action pretty closely, but the trivia questions got them thinking out loud. “Wait,” one said to her companions. “Which one was the president who died like after thirty days? Was that Taft?” I couldn’t resist piping up. “You’re thinking of William Henry Harrison. He’s the one who died a month into his term.”
“Yeah, Harrison,” she said. “Not Taft. Taft was the really fat president.”
Of course she was right. But oh, the indignity! A long and distinguished career in public service, and it boils down to being remembered as the Fat President—the only one who weighed over 350 pounds, the only one with a body mass index in the clinical “obesity class 3.” I saw this over and over on my trips. The University of Cincinnati has a statue of Taft behind the law school, where he once served as dean; the sculptor had to add more heft to the likeness so visitors would recognize who it depicted. Taft is the only president to also serve as chief justice, but at one of the wax museums I visited, the scale next to the figure wasn’t the kind Lady Justice famously holds. A hotel in southern California has a chair specially built for Taft’s visit there in 1909; it looked like it could hold three regular-size people. (“Did you have to make the chair so large?” Taft reportedly asked.)
Taft’s big achievements always seemed to come with a mention of his big frame. “When he laughs,” wrote one reporter, “the surrounding furniture shakes and rumbles.” Even Theodore Roosevelt, one of Taft’s closest friends, wasn’t above using the man’s weight as a punch line. When associates worried about who would keep an eye out for problems while he was out of town, Roosevelt said, “Things will be all right. I have left Taft sitting on the lid.”
People were forever comparing Taft to Roosevelt, and the supposedly jolly fat man “sitting on the lid” paled in comparison. The charismatic Roosevelt charged up hills in battle, took on the captains of industry in the White House, and personified “the strenuous life” on his hikes and hunting trips. As for Taft? “I don’t think he had an ounce of charisma,” said Lewis Gould, who’s written several books about Taft’s life and career. “He really didn’t stir the heart the way Roosevelt did. Taft was seen as this genial, honest, competent guy, but he didn’t have the magic that Roosevelt had instinctively.” Taft was a golfer, not a Rough Rider, and he liked to think through issues more like a judge than a politician. And the issues he chose to tackle, like tariff policy and the organization of the courts, didn’t grab headlines the way Roosevelt did with his efforts to clean up the meatpacking industry and build the Panama Canal.
18. Newspapers ridiculed photographs of William Howard Taft on the golf course, which were perhaps less than flattering; a century later, he’s still remembered as the “fat president.”
Then again, Taft didn’t want to chase headlines. “I simply can’t do that sort of thing,” he said. “That isn’t my method. I must wait for time and the result of my labors to vindicate me naturally.” But the opposition didn’t wait: as Taft deliberated, they called him lazy. Roosevelt brought about the teddy bear, thanks to a story about one of his hunting trips; the idea for a highly unsuccessful Taft toy, the Billy Possum, came from a banquet. And they ridiculed photos of the president on the golf course, which weren’t flattering to his size. “Taft just had no idea of how to market himself in a way that made him seem interesting and attractive,” said Gould. “Golf was an aristocratic game played by wealthy fat cats, and the fattest of the fat cats was the president himself.”
Taft was a stress eater in office, and as the critics’ voices grew louder, he gained weight, which medical historians now believe led to his developing a case of sleep apnea. Taft started falling asleep in important meetings, which convinced more people that he wasn’t up to the job. In 1912, as Taft ran for reelection, Roosevelt decided to launch a comeback and seek a third term against his old friend; TR’s third-party campaign split the Republican vote and opened the White House door for the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson. Taft finished a distant third.
Taft’s postpresidency was much more successful. After spending several years lecturing and teaching, Taft was nominated by Warren Harding for the job he’d always wanted most, chief justice of the United States. He made the high court more efficient, clearing a backlog of cases, and he successfully lobbied Congress to build a separate building for the judicial branch; previously the justices had to work in the Capitol. He reconciled with his old friend Theodore Roosevelt, and his health improved, too: Taft lost seventy pounds in his first year out of office and kept it off for the rest of his life. “I can truthfully say that I never felt any younger in all my life,” he told reporters. “Too much flesh is bad for any man.” He died in 1930, after nearly a decade as chief justice. Thousands attended his funeral in Washington, and many more listened in on radio; it was the first presidential funeral to be broadcast. As Taft was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, Will Rogers lionized him as the consummate public servant. “We are parting with three hundred pounds of solid charity to everybody, and love and affection for all his fellow men.”
This is the crucial point: Americans remembered Taft’s weight first and foremost, even as they recognized his gifts. It’s worth noting that Taft, the Fat President, was born a year earlier than Roosevelt, the Strenuous President, but he ended up outliving TR by more than a decade. But Taft gets short shrift in the comparison because the era in which they lived was when society’s attitudes toward weight made a big shift. “Size in those days was a sign of gravitas and maturity,” Lewis Gould says, “in ways now that we would see him as obese.” For centuries, artists and thinkers had characterized “flesh” in positive terms, because it meant a person had avoided malnutrition and hunger. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, food became more accessible, and medical research started showing the negative health risks connected with obesity. Big was no longer beautiful, and those who were big were characterized as lazy and greedy, clumsy and dumb.
Take, for example, the most famous story about Taft—the one in which he supposedly got stuck in the White House bathtub. This story didn’t circulate until after Taft had died, and its first appearance came in a book by a longtime White House usher, Ike Hoover, whose memoir dished dirt on a number of presidents. Researchers say there’s no documentary evidence other than Hoover’s book about a bathtub story, and anyway, the White House had installed a tub so large that even someone of Taft’s size couldn’t have gotten stuck in it. But the story of Taft and the bathtub fit what society already believed about weight.
As Taft’s size became a bigger part of his story, the rest of the man was diminished. Taft could, and did, crack jokes at his own expense, even about his weight. He personally released to the press the famous telegrams in which he wired a friend to say he’d gone horseback riding and had “stood [the] trip well,” only to have the friend wire back, “How is the horse?” But Taft’s son Charlie said that the jolly fat man image was “a complete misrepresentation. . . . He was not that kind of genial [person]. . . . His humor had a point to it all the time.” William Howard Taft was witty and perceptive, but the culture says large men can’t be perceptive, so it reduces his wittiness into self-deprecating fat jokes. Taft’s descendants have served as senators and mayors, but they’ve been overshadowed by the Roosevelts, Kennedys, Bushes, and Adamses—all of whom, of course, happened to be thinner.
Taft isn’t the only president to be obese—Forbes magazine once ranked the presidents by body mass index, and while Taft was at the top of the list, Grover Cleveland, Zachary Taylor, and William McKinley all had BMIs in the “obesity class 1” range. Even Teddy Roosevelt put on enough weight by the end of his term to qualify as obese. Society’s attitudes on obesity have grown more negative since the rise of mass media; only one president in the television age, Bill Clinton, has had any kind of weight issues, and he ended up making a very public show of dieting and exercising.
All of this may be about to change, albeit slowly. As the obesity rate has risen, public attitudes about size seem to have softened, at least a little. There’s also increased recognition in the public health community that hectoring people about being overweight doesn’t suddenly make them lose pounds. For me, the best sign is that William Howard Taft has started to reemerge in pop culture, joining Theodore Roosevelt, Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln as one of the Washington Nationals’ famous Racing Presidents mascots. These five start each evening’s race on the big screen, running through some historic landmarks, including the William Howard Taft Boyhood Home in Ohio, before emerging from the center field wall and barreling down the warning track.
Taft didn’t win the running of the presidents on the night I visited Nationals Park, but he didn’t lose because of his size. The Baltimore mascot, the Oriole Bird, had interjected himself into the race and knocked three of the other presidents silly. Fourth-place Taft was so incensed by the injustice that he grabbed the Oriole Bird and wrestled him to the grass. It knocked him out of contention—Thomas Jefferson strolled across the finish line and began a surprisingly funky victory dance—but the Nats fans cheered Taft for taking one for the team.
ONE THING is clear walking up to Andrew Jackson’s Nashville home, the Hermitage: our seventh president wanted the world to see him as the genteel Tennessee squire he occasionally was, rather than the shrewd but uncouth frontiersman he more often was. The Hermitage was largely designed to round off Old Hickory’s rough edges: an elegant, tree-lined “War Road” leads to the house, with signs noting that “each tree came from a battlefield where Andrew Jackson fought,” and the large white columns in front of the house are made of wood but painted to look like expensive marble.
But Jackson would be Jackson no matter what his house looked like; legend has it that Old Hickory’s funeral featured an impromptu and highly profane eulogy by his pet parrot, Poll, who “commenced swearing so loud and long as to disturb the people and had to be carried from the house.”
Younger visitors to the Hermitage can take a kid-friendly audio tour narrated by Poll, who gives his side of the story: “Parrots do love to talk. But that day I said too much. Have you ever had a temper tantrum and felt bad about it later? Well, that’s what happened to me. I loved the general and when he died no one could calm me down. Some things I said were in parrot, some were in English, and some in Spanish. Certain things were not so polite. I’m afraid that many things were better suited to the ears of sailors than the many ladies who had gathered to pay their respects. They finally had to lock me up in a room inside until I could control myself. After that day I promised never to use bad language again.”
The Hermitage audio tours also include a great deal of information about the hundreds of enslaved people who lived and worked on the plantation. Dead presidents have unexpectedly become an important resource for studying the lives of those in slavery, because presidential houses have been unusually well maintained. “That’s especially true in the case of the Hermitage,” says Marsha Mullin, chief curator and vice president of museum services. “It’s never had anyone else live here—the land hadn’t been developed in any way. It’s remarkably well preserved. Another factor is that there’s so much more written material,” which helps researchers who go back over the land find artifacts connected to enslaved people there.
Even so, the physical evidence of those individuals is slim. The slave quarters themselves are long gone, and there are only slivers of evidence of what life was like; for example, scholars uncovered fish bones and fishing tools, suggesting the enslaved people were allowed to catch their own fish. To find the remnants of African American cemeteries, researchers look not for headstones—there usually weren’t any—but for flat impressions in the grass, signs of coffins that collapsed due to time and deterioration.
Judging by the outlines in the grass, these houses were remarkably tiny buildings. It looked like you could fit all three in the main hallway of Jackson’s house. It was probably the saddest moment on all my travels, to stand there and think of how one man was remembered with a giant house and tons of artifacts while hundreds of people whom he enslaved were remembered with the faintest of ruins and a few fish bones. I walked back toward the rear of Jackson’s house; Andrew and Rachel are buried in the back corner of the garden.
Just off to the south side of the cupola is a small headstone, surrounded by a small black chain: “Uncle Alfred. Sept. 4, 1901. 99 years. Faithful servant of Andrew Jackson.”
Alfred was born at the Hermitage and worked in slavery there for decades. The tombstone makes it sound like Alfred was Jackson’s personal servant, but Marsha Mullin says “it’s a little unclear what his job was,” adding that it probably had more to do with horses and carriages. Alfred, she says, “may have enhanced his role in his later storytelling.” Alfred stayed on in a cabin behind the main house even after Jackson’s death and after the Thirteenth Amendment did away with slavery. He rented twenty-four acres at the Hermitage to grow food and to sell butter and cotton. His wife, Gracie, worked for the Jackson descendants as well.
Alfred was still on hand when a group known as the Ladies’ Hermitage Association won state sanction to own and operate the Hermitage as a museum. As this group began restoring the house and the grounds, Alfred found a new calling: as Mullin puts it, “he became basically the first tour guide.” Hermitage visitors often wanted their picture taken with him and drank in his stories about life with the famous general.
Much of what we know about Alfred comes from a book called Preservation of the Hermitage, 1889–1915, which describes him in tour guide mode. Much of it is in language that’s considered racist today; Alfred comes off as a kind of rustic savant—his nickname, “Uncle” Alfred, brings to mind the stereotypes associated with Uncle Remus. The author, Mary Dorris, writes Alfred’s dialogue in a sort of pidgin slave dialect: “Dis center table was presented to General Jackson an’ Mis’ Jackson in 1815 by de citizens of New Orleans,” she has him saying to visitors. “It is one o’ de things saved when de house got burned down in 1834.” The author also notes, in a patronizing way, that Alfred’s strong suit was his dates. “He would give dates for everything, remembering marvelously, and was generally correct”—though, of course, she points out how Alfred occasionally mixed up his facts about the house and its history.
Still, Alfred comes off as smart and charismatic, a good storyteller who could read visitors well. A white tutor to the Jackson children once gave Alfred the tired line about how life in slavery wasn’t all bad, since he got room and board for free. “How would you like to be a slave?” Alfred replied. The man didn’t answer.
The Hermitage fell on hard times as the years went on, and after the death of Andrew Jackson Jr. in 1865, many Hermitage items went up for auction to settle debts. Alfred ended up buying some of them, including a mirror that had belonged to the Jacksons. This purchase, curator Mullin says, led to the most interesting part of Alfred’s story: “He basically traded the mirror back to [the Ladies’ Hermitage Association]—in exchange for a promise that he would be buried next to the Jacksons.”
Mullin says we don’t know precisely why this was Alfred’s sole condition for the deal. His biological family wasn’t buried in the garden—in fact, Hermitage researchers don’t know where Gracie is buried. Mary Dorris’s book suggests two ideas. One is that Alfred had become such a beloved figure that the ladies of the association were glad to have the chance to honor him. Mullin says this isn’t likely—after all, “these were southern ladies in the nineteenth century” and wouldn’t likely have put an African American man near a white burial ground. The other idea Dorris’s book floats is that Alfred was a snob:
In his way Uncle Alfred was a haughty aristocrat. He had always been a faithful and trusted servant in a wealthy and prominent family, which, coupled with the fact that “old marster” was President of the United States, warranted him in thinking “a powerful sight o’ hisself,” as he expressed it.
Dorris suggests Alfred saw some of the other enslaved people as “second class,” and wanted to distinguish himself and his deep personal connections to the Jacksons and the Hermitage with a burial away from the other former slaves. “Whatever the reason,” Mullin says, “they honored the deal and had his funeral in the mansion and buried him next to the Jacksons in the garden.”
Whether he intended it or not, Alfred’s deal made a powerful statement for all the enslaved people on this plantation and the others. Sites like the Hermitage do meaningful work to bring to light the contributions of the enslaved people, but it’s easy for visitors to choose not to look. You don’t have to go down that extra path to the slave quarters, or to see Alfred’s cabin behind the giant mansion. You can skip past the section about slavery on the audio player. But if you want to see the president’s tomb, you can’t overlook Alfred. You can’t pretend he’s not there. If you want to see the final resting place of Andrew Jackson, to see his house and to pay your respects to his tomb, you’ll have to see the grave of a man he enslaved, too.
Andrew Jackson may have been unschooled and unrefined, but he was shrewd and knew how to get what he wanted. The tomb next to his suggests he wasn’t the only one.
WHAT WE know about the enslaved community at the Hermitage is being compiled into something called the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. The project, which started up in January 2000, combines the historical paper trail with archaeological findings to create a centralized storehouse of information about enslaved people in the American South and the Caribbean. The work isn’t quick and it isn’t easy, but over time we’ll have a fuller picture of this world than we’ve ever had.
What a change from the early days of the country, when one solution to the slavery problem was literally to send it away. The colonization movement—as in “start a colony in Africa and send the slaves there”—appealed to white northerners as a way to effectively end the institution of slavery, while southerners thought colonization would head off a future in which people of African descent, enslaved or free, would overwhelm whites with sheer numbers, which they believed would end in a bloody race war. Virginia’s presidents were especially enthusiastic about the possibilities. James Madison served as one of the first presidents of the American Colonization Society and left it two thousand dollars in his will. James Monroe championed the movement while president; when the ACS set up the West African colony of Liberia in 1822 for some twelve thousand emancipated people, they named the capital city Monrovia—the same Monrovia that has been the subject of long-running tensions between the America-Liberians and native West Africans, multiple civil wars, foreign exploitation, coup d’etats, and, most recently, the worst Ebola outbreak on record. Not all of this is due to the colonization movement, but it sure didn’t help.
But it’s easy to see why people were looking for an answer: in addition to being morally indefensible, slavery was proving economically unsound as well. Virginia was early America’s economic engine, population center, and intellectual powerhouse, but by the 1820s the Commonwealth was in decline, in large part because of the high costs, many inefficiencies, and growing national unease around bondage. Thomas Jefferson, the most prominent voice for America’s country mice and an inveterate Virginia booster, backed colonization, but he also wanted to create a world-class university to level the playing field for his state. The university, he thought, would allow (white) Virginia to once again produce the best minds, which would even out the deficiencies with the North and keep the state self-sufficient. Jefferson spent his final years working to raise funds and public support for the school, often while in a sickbed and pumped full of laudanum. Jefferson even used his grave marker as part of this effort; he left exact details for a nine-foot-tall obelisk, on top of a cube-shaped base, with this inscription and “not a word more”:
Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the Declaration of American Independence
of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom
& Father of the University of Virginia.
It’s often noted that Jefferson didn’t include his presidency on the obelisk, but the more interesting question is why he did include the university, which was only getting off the ground at the time of his death, as one of the three achievements of which he was proudest. For Jefferson, it was just as important as the other two: the university was the means by which Jefferson’s beloved home state could turn itself around. In fact, one of his last public appearances was at an event for the university, in which he toasted his guest, the Marquis de Lafayette, by saying of the school, “Could I live to see it once enjoy the patronage and cherishment of our public authorities with undivided voice, I should die without a doubt of the future fortunes of my native State, and in the consoling contemplation of the happy influence of this institution on its character, its virtue, its prosperity, and safety.” In death he put his prestige and historical reputation to work on the school’s behalf. “Father of the University of Virginia” was his last sales pitch to new students.
I was describing some of my other presidential grave visits to a Monticello staff member as we walked back from the burial ground toward the main house. “You know our story, right?” she asked. It’s a memorable story, and hardly the one the third president had inscribed on his stone obelisk. But no president’s legacy goes unquestioned, especially not a president with so many varied interests, so much talent and such significant flaws. In the post–Civil War world, race has remained the central question in our national narrative, and as the acclaimed historian John Hope Franklin noted, Jefferson’s feelings and actions regarding race seem to personify the country’s own struggles with these difficult questions. “Thomas Jefferson was a person who declared that all men were created equal, and at the same time he owned slaves,” Franklin said in an interview with PBS in 1997. “Jefferson set standards for himself that make it impossible to reconcile these two things.”
Each generation asks new questions of Jefferson’s life and legacy. Over time, the questions have gotten tougher, and interestingly, they lead right back to the burial ground at Monticello. There is a tall black iron gate around the cemetery, complete with an intricate family coat of arms on the entrance, and a small gold sign: “This graveyard plot is the private property of Thomas Jefferson’s descendants.” The Jefferson family held on to the graveyard when they sold Monticello in 1836; today it’s managed by a descendants group called the Monticello Association, which cleans the graves and grounds and sees to it that descendants can be buried with their famous ancestor.
Who qualifies as a descendant—and, by extension, who can be laid in the graveyard with Thomas Jefferson—is up to the members of the Monticello Association. And those decisions resonate far outside the big black cemetery gates.
The best illustration of this is the story of an African American man named Robert H. Cooley III, who was on hand at the University of Virginia on October 17, 1992. It was day four of the “Jeffersonian Legacies” conference, which organizers had promised would undo the many myths and misconceptions surrounding the third president, especially over slavery. Robert Cooley had felt a deep connection to the world of slavery at Monticello since his grandfather had taken him aside as a kid and told him what the Cooleys called “the family secret.” “I was ten years old,” Cooley said in 1995. “He said, ‘You are a part of a special family. And you are a special person. Through your mother and me, and my mother and so on, you are a descendant of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.’
“I didn’t know who Sally Hemings was,” Cooley said, “but I knew who Jefferson was. And, for a moment, I was very thrilled by that revelation.”
But Cooley’s grandfather wasn’t finished. “He went on to say, however, this is a family secret. And we don’t discuss it outside the family. I said, why not? And he said, because people won’t believe you, first of all. And it’s really not anybody’s business.”
Cooley took the story—and his grandfather’s advice—to heart. He earned two Bronze Stars in Vietnam and, despite the prejudices of the time, became a prominent lawyer and judge in Virginia. “The army has a law school on the grounds of the University of Virginia,” he recalled. “When I went into the library and sat down, the kids got up and left, the students, in protest. . . . And I thought, you know, what irony. My great-great-grandfather founded this university.”
Cooley also served as president and general counsel of the Thomas Woodson Family Association, which holds that Woodson was the first child born to Jefferson and Hemings and was either allowed or told to leave Monticello for a life in Ohio. (Other oral traditions suggest the first child died in infancy.)
During one “Jeffersonian Legacies” seminar, scholar after scholar spoke about the long-running story that Jefferson had fathered children by Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman at Monticello. Cooley said later his body started to “tingle” during the discussions, so much so that he couldn’t help but speak up. And so he did. “Sally Hemings is the seventh great-grandmother of mine,” he told the audience. “It’s not a story. It’s true. There are hundreds of us.”
At that “the whole place went silent,” he said.
Cooley’s grandfather was right: some people—at least the white ones—didn’t believe the stories about Thomas Jefferson fathering children by Sally Hemings. The rumors started in the early 1800s, when a political mudslinger called James Callender went public with some of the president’s supposed secrets. “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. . . . By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it.” Callendar’s story came at a time where Jefferson’s critics were leveling all kinds of incredible charges at him, so people outside of the “neighbourhood” largely read the story as the usual character assassination. And Callendar’s credibility was suspect in part because he went to the press after trying to shake Jefferson down for a postmaster’s job.
Decades later, abolitionists would turn to the Jefferson/Hemings story to illustrate the evils of the institution, but their accounts weren’t ironclad either, because, in addition to using the story to further their goals, the details were different in each account. One abolitionist newspaper accused Jefferson of not only fathering children with an enslaved woman, but then putting those children up for auction: “The DAUGHTER of THOMAS JEFFERSON SOLD in New Orleans,” the Liberator wrote, in indignant capitals, “for ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS.” It wasn’t true. Other accounts were admittedly fictional, like William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel; or, the President’s Daughter, whose title character leapt to her death in the Potomac River rather than return to slavery. “Thus died Clotel,” Brown wrote, “the daughter of Thomas Jefferson.” The book, one of the first novels by an African American to be published, did well with the public but didn’t convince those studying Jefferson that the claims were true.
Then again, historians didn’t believe accounts from real people, either. Madison Hemings told an Ohio newspaper in 1873 that Sally Hemings had come to France while Jefferson served as a diplomat there, and that it was in Paris that “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enciente [sic] by him.” His account was dismissed outright because Madison Hemings had been enslaved. Scholars compared what they saw as unreliable sources to Jefferson and his character and concluded that he didn’t seem the type to take up with Sally Hemings. And the family had its own explanation for the Hemings kids; in letters they pointed to Peter Carr, one of Jefferson’s friends and a frequent Monticello guest, as the father of her children.
Attitudes started to change in the mid-twentieth century. For one thing, historians rediscovered, and reconsidered, two important documents: the personal account of Madison Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book. Researchers had rejected Hemings’s account because of his background and because it had been presented as oral history, without documentary evidence to support it. But in a time when Americans were confronting issues of race and equality, a number of scholars remembered that enslaved people had to pass history on through oral tradition, because they had been denied the chance to read and write. And, they added, the Jefferson family’s speculation about Peter Carr had just as little supporting evidence as Madison Hemings’s account. Why was one considered valid and the other not?
The Farm Book, meanwhile, was full of details about life at Monticello, but in some cases it was notable for what wasn’t included. The writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid has noted that in the Farm Book, Jefferson’s crops “come to table,” with no mention of who put them there. “There’s no involvement of labor, there’s no soiling of . . . there’s no soil at all. It’s as if it’s Eden. It doesn’t have any evil in it.”
Monticello itself is like this. In designing his house, Jefferson had emulated the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio, who advised the following: “Contrive a building in such a manner that the finest and most noble parts of it be the most exposed to public view, and the less agreeable disposed in by places, and removed from sight as much as possible.” Jefferson removed from sight the activity of the enslaved workers. Monticello is built into the side of a hill; Jefferson could walk guests out onto the north terrace to peer through a telescope at the University of Virginia, and they might never know that underneath them, enslaved people were carrying out the essential tasks of the house. In the dining room, Jefferson could put an empty wine bottle into a dumbwaiter, and a fresh one would appear. If you wanted to pretend the wine had just “come to table,” you could.
So researchers began to look at what wasn’t in the documentary record, like oral histories, reconsidered what was, and reached some intriguing and important conclusions. Fawn Brodie’s 1974 best seller Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History delved into Jefferson’s inner life (too much for some historians’ tastes) and introduced those who hadn’t heard the oral histories to the story of Sally Hemings, who accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to Paris and came back to Virginia pregnant barely two years later. She was where Jefferson was each time she conceived, she looked after Jefferson’s bedchamber (a private sanctuary even his acknowledged family rarely saw), and she sought—and received—freedom for her children when they turned twenty-one. Two decades later, the prizewinning historian Annette Gordon-Reed delved deeper into Jefferson’s history. In her books Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, she questioned some of the biggest historical assumptions about Jefferson, like a common claim that, his extensive slave-owning notwithstanding, the president’s morals were somehow too pure for him to have a sexual or romantic relationship with an enslaved woman. Depictions of Jefferson and Hemings in popular fiction and television miniseries were heavy on speculation but captured the popular imagination. The stories about children at Monticello weren’t accepted as truth, but they weren’t being so quickly dismissed, either.
All the while, Robert Cooley III continued to speak up about his history and heritage. So did others: a woman called Minnie Shumate Woodson organized the family history into a book, which led to a Woodson descendants reunion, which reinforced Cooley’s desire to see his ancestors recognized. “Monticello has been noted as the finest example of American architecture,” Cooley said in his interview for Ken Burns’s documentary about Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson received the highest award from the American Institute of Architects. But black people built this building. And so we have a share in that celebrity. We have a share in America. We were the bulldozers. We were the ones who built the building, who made the gardens that Mr. Jefferson loved so much.” “Official” Jefferson descendants took issue with Cooley’s story, but he kept telling it—even to then-President Bill Clinton, who said he believed it. And in 1998, Cooley said in a television interview that, once the world recognized his family as Jefferson descendants, he hoped to be buried in Monticello’s graveyard.
No one in the family thought much of the comment at the time. But just a few weeks later, on July 20, Robert Cooley unexpectedly died. He was fifty-eight. It was left to one of his daughters, Michele Cooley-Quille, to call the Monticello Association and ask if her father’s last wish could be fulfilled. The Monticello Association turned her down; Cooley-Quille said an official told her the graveyard was “not prepared to admit Hemings descendants.” Robert Cooley was buried in the veterans section of Forest Lawn, a private cemetery in Richmond.
As the family carried out that burial, Eugene Foster, a retired pathologist, was conducting a research project that would upend the debate of which Robert Cooley had been such a prominent part. “A friend wondered if DNA might be used to solve the Jefferson/Hemings controversy,” Foster recalled in a 2000 interview. “After reading about it for a year, I concluded that it was probably not possible. . . . A parent passes on only half or less of his or her DNA to the children, so with each generation, it begins to disappear. So even if we knew what was specifically characteristic of Thomas Jefferson’s DNA, we would have very little chance of finding it in people who are his descendants or think they’re his descendants.”
But a former colleague suggested Foster take another look: new Y-chromosome research, he said, suggested he might be able to do some testing after all. “Y-chromosomal DNA is passed unchanged from generation to generation, from father to son only,” Foster said. “No one had thought of using it for these purposes, because it had not been thought to have enough variation.” With DNA samples from the right people, Foster realized, he could look at the Y chromosomes and see if they matched.
None of Jefferson’s recognized sons had lived to adulthood, so Foster obtained DNA samples from descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s uncle Field Jefferson. “We found that, of the five people in this line, they all had the same Y-chromosomal type, which meant that we had identified the Jefferson family chromosome,” he said. “In conjunction with historical evidence, that piece of evidence could be used to arrive at an opinion as to whether Thomas Jefferson was the father of the various people in dispute.” Foster took the Jefferson DNA data and compared it to a series of samples taken from the “people in dispute”: a descendant of Sally Hemings’s son Eston, five descendants of Thomas Woodson’s sons, and three relatives of Peter Carr, the man whom Thomas Jefferson’s immediate family had suggested as the father of the Hemings children. Foster also took samples from several longtime Virginia families, as a control group, and sent everything he’d collected to geneticists at the University of Oxford in England for analysis.
Foster had found something stunning: the Y chromosome markers in the samples from Eston Hemings’s descendants matched the “Jefferson chromosome” Foster had identified. Just as importantly, the testing found no match between the Hemings and Carr samples; the DNA had ruled out the Jefferson family’s story about who had fathered Sally Hemings’s children. The possibility of these results being random, the researchers said, was less than 1 percent—and that was without considering the historical evidence along with the genetics. The findings, Foster wrote, meant a Jefferson male had almost certainly fathered Eston Hemings.
The study found no direct link between Jefferson DNA and descendants of Thomas Woodson, including Robert Cooley III and his daughter Michele Cooley-Quille. But in many ways it had confirmed the oral histories that the Woodson descendants had passed down for hundreds of years: that Hemingses and Jeffersons were related. “I know that in the end—and I don’t know when that end will be—Daddy’s mission and his quest will be successful,” Cooley-Quille said. “That’s why the DNA stuff doesn’t worry me, because we know who we are.”
The publication of Foster’s research in the journal Nature in late 1998 was a watershed moment in the debate over Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. This was partly because the headline that accompanied the study read “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child”; Foster quickly clarified that his study showed a link between the Hemings family and a Jefferson male, but not which one: “Thomas Jefferson can neither be definitely excluded nor solely implicated.” Nonetheless, he largely concurred with the conclusion. “From the historical knowledge we have,” he wrote, “we cannot conclude that . . . any other member of the Jefferson family was as likely as Thomas Jefferson to have fathered Eston Hemings.” Many news articles treated the report as proof of a liaison between a president and an enslaved woman. Public attitudes continued to shift in favor of the story, and historians who had been skeptical of the Hemings connection before the DNA study now declared themselves convinced of its truth.
But would the members of the Monticello Association, the keepers of the Jefferson burial ground, be convinced? One of the acknowledged Jefferson family members, Lucian Truscott IV, decided it was time to find out. Shortly after Foster’s report was made public, Truscott appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s television show with Jefferson-and-Hemings descendants and made an invitation to the men and women he now saw as his cousins: “It’s time to stop testing all that stuff and just open up the Monticello Association,” he said. “Go with us to the Monticello Association meeting in May.”
And they did. About thirty-five Hemings descendants were among the two hundred or so participants in the eighty-sixth annual meeting of the Monticello Association. There were dozens of reporters waiting outside for news; the normally low-key group was suddenly being treated as a symbol of American race relations at the end of the twentieth century. “The things that are being asked of this little family association are bigger than anything it’s ever had to do before,” said Joy Rotch Boissevain, who looked after the Jefferson family cemetery. “In the past, its most important concerns have been repairing the graveyard fence and where to go to dinner on Saturday night at the annual meeting.”
Now it had Eugene Foster explaining his DNA findings, and several Hemings descendants speaking, and Michele Cooley-Quille formally applying for membership in the association. “I think the Hemings had the impression that they were going [to] simply bulldoze their way into the Monticello Association without any resistance whatsoever,” said John Works, a former association president. When it came time to consider the membership requests, Works called for a members-only discussion and vote; he says it was only to “try to make a distinction between a social gathering and the start of a business meeting.” But it amplified the tension. “It was absolutely awful,” said Shay Banks-Young, a descendant of Madison Hemings. “I was really disgusted that someone would invite me to something and then turn around and act like I crashed their party.”
The motion failed, and the discussion went on. Michele Cooley-Quille recalled that the mood in the room changed “from tension to excitement to humor to animosity.” Lucian Truscott IV proposed admitting the Hemings descendants as honorary members for the time being, but the chair refused to put the idea to a vote. So Truscott went to the press, denouncing his relatives as “chicken” and accusing them of being motivated by racism. Another acknowledged descendant walked through the crowd of reporters to challenge Truscott. “We’d like more thorough research,” she said. “We’re not racists. We’re snobs.”
The president of the association, Robert Gillespie, called for the association to take time and study both the Hemings evidence and its own criteria for membership. “More evidence is coming forward, and we invite it,” he said. “But let’s make sure we make the correct decision, not a quick decision.” In the meantime, the public debate continued, and it remained largely contentious. For example, in April 2001 President George W. Bush invited descendants from all lines to the White House for a Jefferson birthday celebration. A few blocks away, a new group known as the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society—which stated as one of its purposes “to stand always in opposition to those who would seek to undermine the integrity of Thomas Jefferson”—released a report in which some scholars found reason for “serious skepticism” of the Hemings story and others declared it “almost certainly false.” Those who discount Thomas Jefferson as the likely father of Sally Hemings’s children point to his brother Randolph as the most likely candidate for paternity.
“Each side has assumed the worst about each other,” University of Virginia historian Edward Ayers said in 2007 about the struggle, and it’s been an ongoing one. Over the years, Michele Cooley-Quille said there were “dedicated deniers” in the Monticello Association. John Works said defending Thomas Jefferson against claims that he fathered children by an enslaved woman “has come to mean defending what America means, and we feel compelled to rise to that defense.” Replying to that line of argument, Lucian Truscott wrote, “It’s hard for me to understand how you do further damage to the reputation of a man who owned slaves.” When a historian proposed exhuming a descendant of Madison Hemings to conduct another genetic study, the descendants said no. “My family doesn’t need to prove themselves,” Shay Banks-Young said. “If they want to dig up Thomas Jefferson at the same time, maybe I’ll reconsider.” Finally, in 2002, the members of the Monticello Association voted 67 to 5 against admitting Hemings descendants as members, saying they had not proven their Jefferson lineage.
That meant the gates of the Jefferson family cemetery would stay closed to those descendants, but they found the doors to Monticello wide open: the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation not only accepted the evidence connecting the president to Sally Hemings and her son Eston, but its researchers concluded that Jefferson was “most likely the father of all six of Sally Hemings’ children appearing in Jefferson’s records.” The Hemings side of the family began holding its own reunions at Monticello, with Lucian Truscott and a few other acknowledged descendants joining them. “I think a lot of my family would have more fun if they came to this one,” descendant David Works said.
A separate event for Hemings descendants isn’t what Robert Cooley III and so many others had envisioned or hoped for. But maybe the story of the Jeffersons and Hemingses, which has been unfolding since 1802, isn’t finished unfolding yet. Shay Banks-Young, who described the 1999 Monticello Association meeting as “awful,” also called it an important first effort. “I have experienced so many things based on the racial attitudes of America all my life,” she told the New York Times. “I sure didn’t expect this to be different. But I’m hopeful more might come of this, and it will. A mile begins with a single step.”