Jefferson's Secrets

The slave who went by the name of Israel Jefferson was in his late twenties when Thomas Jefferson died. From a young age, he had served as a waiter at Monticello and generally lit the fire in his master’s bedroom. Anticipating his own fate after July 4, 1826, Israel later recalled: “His death was an affair of great moment and uncertainty to us slaves.” Israel was sold from the auction block, as were at least 150 others. Although his siblings were forcibly taken in various directions, he was relatively fortunate in that he was purchased by Thomas Walker Gilmer, of a family dear to his deceased master; about ten years later, after Israel’s wife, also a slave, died, he married a free, biracial woman, who purchased his freedom. Preparing to leave Virginia for Ohio with his “free papers,” Israel was asked by a clerk at the Albemarle County Courthouse whether he wanted to keep his original surname, Gillette. Convinced by the clerk that it would give him “more dignity to be called after so eminent a man,” he “consented to adopt” the name of Jefferson.

Israel, who attained literacy after beginning life as a free man, also recalled having been present when the aging Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette visited Jefferson at Monticello in 1824. The Frenchman had often decried the continuation of slavery in the land he had helped in the fight for liberation from colonial status, and Israel took pride in having been at the reins of their carriage on one occasion when Lafayette apparently took up the matter of freedom and bondage with his distinguished host. In this and other ways, Israel said, Jefferson’s private life, “till the day of his death, was very familiar to me.” He asserted that one particular story going back to 1802 was indeed true, and that Thomas Jefferson had been “on the most intimate terms” with his chambermaid.²

Most Americans now believe that slave-owning Thomas Jefferson was the father of biracial children, and that he possibly had a warm, if not loving, relationship with one of those slaves, Sally Hemings. This belief is, for some, a simple way to dismiss Jefferson as a hypocrite for treasuring and owning a woman at the same time. For others, it is an effort to show that the contentious president did not necessarily belittle all blacks. For others still, it is an unconscious desire to endow Jefferson with bourgeois values and emotions. And there are many more possible scenarios.

It has been Thomas Jefferson’s unsought historic role to invite controversy. With his medical understandings and literary imagination as prelude, this and the following chapter combine to reexamine the nature of his racism and to clarify the limits of his emotional connection to Sally Hemings. Once again, it turns out that the most revealing texts date to his understudied retirement years.

I begin this discussion with a brief personal preface. Since the publication of the DNA test results of 1998,³ establishing that “a Jefferson” fathered at least one biracial child at Monticello, it now seems that I took an unacceptable shortcut in The Inner Jefferson, which was a book about Jefferson’s literary self-construction and touched only briefly on the issue of slavery. Because there was little to go on in the public record, I allowed conventional notions of sexual propriety to describe the mind of Jefferson. Absence of information does not equal celibacy, of course; yet, without other textual evidence, Jefferson’s implicit denial (and his family’s explicit denial) of sexual activity in the decades after the death of his wife seemed plausible.

I did take note of the oral history passed down through generations of once enslaved families in Monticello’s neighborhood. This history, widely accepted by the African American community, challenged the Jefferson family denial. I recognized that this alternative picture had to be taken seriously, but it was not “hard” evidence either; and indeed, DNA has so far discredited critical portions of that oral history.⁴ That said, even in questioning the oral history, I remained troubled by the apparent failure of Martha Jefferson Randolph to clarify for her family a truth she must have known—the paternity of domestic servant Sally Hemings’s children. Hemings never became pregnant when Jefferson was away from home—and he frequently was.

Yet the crux of the problem, for me, was contending with Hemings’s conceptions of 1805 and 1808, the births of sons Madison and Eston. Thomas Jefferson was in his second term as president at that time, sixty-five years old when Eston was born.^a The troublesome allegations of his connection to Sally Hemings had been published earlier, in 1802, when he was nearly sixty. He was a popular president who had pestering political enemies and remained under close scrutiny. What could explain the readiness of a man who was a grandfather many times over to father two more children with a woman he owned? Love was one possible answer, sexual desire another, egoistic impulse a third. Yet Jefferson’s intimates consistently described him as undemonstrative and, at least publicly, restrained; contraceptive knowledge existed if he was inclined to hide his extramarital sex life from inquiring minds. As an eighteenth-century man, why would he want additional descendants who were not heirs?

Such ruminations had led me to consider the traditional explanation credible: that a white man or men close to Jefferson, who routinely visited Monticello but only when Jefferson was there, fathered Sally Hemings’s children. The DNA match, however, verifies a genetic relationship between Sally’s youngest son and a Jefferson, that is, a male descendant of Field Jefferson, who was the third president’s uncle.

For most, Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’s children has now been convincingly established, yet there are those who insist on reminding us that it has not been absolutely established. The president’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph confided to biographer Henry S. Randall in the mid-1850s that Jefferson’s favorite nephew Peter Carr (who died in 1814) was the father of Sally Hemings’s children—this was the explanation most historians believed until 1998. Now, the grandson’s explanation seems impossible. In matching Jefferson’s genetic type, DNA eliminated the Carr family.

But even the paternity of Sally Hemings’s last child, Eston, has been contested by those close to the investigation who would prefer to believe that Thomas’s historically unimpressive younger brother, Randolph Jefferson, an occasional visitor to Monticello who played his fiddle in the slave quarters, or his sons, were at least as “likely” candidates. Randolph was widowed in 1796 and did not remarry until 1808, by a curious coincidence the same year that Sally Hemings last gave birth.⁵ The problem with this scenario, however, is that no one—no white Jefferson descendant, no historian—ever suggested Randolph’s name until a defense of Thomas Jefferson’s celibacy was mounted immediately after the DNA findings were publicized. A new candidate suddenly had to be found.

Nor, technically, is it yet proven that all the Hemings children had the same father, although Madison Hemings, the most authoritative source of the Hemings family tradition, reported in 1873 that he heard this in no uncertain terms from his mother’s lips. He stated: (1) as a teenager in Paris, his mother “became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine”; (2) “We [Madison and his siblings] were the only children of his by a slave woman”; (3) although “uniformly kind to all,” Jefferson “was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children”; (4) “We were all permitted to be with our mother, who was well used” and given only moderate tasks to perform within “the great house”; and (5) “I learned to read by inducing the white children,” that is, Jefferson’s grandchildren.⁶

That a key portion of Madison’s testimony is now widely accepted as true, owing to the DNA results, strongly supports the pre-DNA argument of the law professor Annette Gordon-Reed that Madison Hemings was a man of veracity and sound memory.⁷ His testimony, given to an Ohio newspaperman, tells us what his mother told him. And she had less reason to lie about a relationship than the publicly scrutinized Thomas Jefferson did.

By the terms of Jefferson’s March 1826 will, along with their uncle, the carpenter Johnny Hemings, Madison and Eston Hemings were freed (after ostensibly serving as Johnny’s apprentice until they attained their majority). At Jefferson’s extraordinary request, the brothers were given permission by the Virginia legislature in 1826 to remain in the state after winning freedom—an 1806 law had decreed that emancipated slaves otherwise had to leave Virginia within a year.

In 1835, after the death of their mother, Madison and Eston separately migrated to Ohio. Both brothers married biracial women. As a freeman, Madison retained the Hemings name, but Eston eventually took the Jefferson name and, in Madison, Wisconsin, passed for white. Their older brother and sister, Beverley (born 1798) and Harriet (born 1801), had earlier been permitted by Jefferson to “run away,” in 1822, after attaining their majority. Both passed for white (Harriet was called “nearly as white as anybody”), and subsequently married whites.⁸

We must go back 196 years before the DNA test for the earliest publicity given to the Hemings children’s paternity—to an account that has been written about often. James T. Callender was a disreputable, hard-drinking, but frequently truthtelling independent columnist, and an utter foe of miscegenation. He was acting out of political spite when he sensationally announced in a Richmond, Virginia, newspaper in the autumn of 1802 that President Thomas Jefferson kept a “concubine” named Sally Hemings, who was his slave. “Dusky Sally,” “the African Venus,” had borne Jefferson several children, he said. Jefferson haters seized on the characterization and mocked their president with great glee.

As part of the same campaign, another potentially damaging charge emerged. This one questioned Jefferson’s sexual restraint. More than thirty years earlier—indeed, before he was married—the young lawyer had made advances toward Betsey Walker, a neighbor’s wife. When confronted, Jefferson settled the matter privately with the offended husband; later, he wrote to his attorney general and his secretary of the navy: “I plead guilty to one of their [his political enemies’] charges, that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady.... It is the only one founded in truth among all their allegations against me.”⁹

All their allegations? Depending upon how one interprets Jefferson’s statement, he might have been denying the Sally Hemings charge. In 1824, a former associate of Callender’s sent Jefferson a flattering letter that chastised the longdead columnist for “unwarrantable indiscretions” begun amid “paroxysms of inebriety.” In his reply, the eighty-one-year-old Jefferson grumbled: “He was a poor creature, sensible [i.e., oversensitive], hypocondriac, drunken, pennyless & unprincipled.”¹⁰ Recalling the eighteenth-century meaning of hypocondriac, Jefferson is claiming that Callender was “disordered in the imagination,” clinically disturbed or hysterical, as well as unethical. These remarks constitute the closest the historical record has to a response from Jefferson. Otherwise, we possess no information to suggest that he ever discussed the details of Callender’s accusation.¹¹

The problem before us now remains one of will and imagination. How did Jefferson assess his options? That question lies at the heart of this and the next chapter. To reframe the cultural environment in which Jefferson moved requires new information with regard to Jefferson’s feelings about race and sex—it requires unearthing sources that historians (myself included) have missed. Finally, I have undertaken this more exhaustive study of the Jefferson-Hemings matter because I believe it is essential for students of history to understand how one who presented a sexually repressed persona (as that which emerges from Jefferson’s correspondence) could have acted in a sexually forward manner. In my earlier scholarship, while able to locate an aggressive political partisan hidden within his harmonizing prose, I did not go far enough beyond Jefferson’s portrait of himself as a sexless widower. I was guided as well by the remarks of others among his contemporaries, who interacted with Jefferson and who alike saw him as self-possessed, moralistic, and (compared to most of his peers) even prudish. He was consistently described as soft and gracious in his demeanor. But demeanor, or appearance, we know, is not always essence. There is always more to know about human motivation. What follows is an attempt to explore all of the possibilities with critical detachment.¹²

But Jefferson’s “real world” was involved in more than a linguistic battle over the future of slavery. About the time that Boston was the focus of Revolutionary agitation, and in months between Lexington and Concord and the Declaration of Independence, white assemblies across the South broadcast bulletins calling for action to combat “instigated insurrections,” the common expression for slave rebellions that they expected the British to engineer. During that season of heated conflict, the last royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, removed the colony’s store of gunpowder to a waiting warship. He left open the possibility, as one local physician recorded, that slaves would “reduce ... to ashes” the colonial capital of Williamsburg. As impassioned words were exchanged, the patriot-run Virginia Gazette began to satirize the royal governor, a noted philanderer, for his supposed taste for African ladies. A quarter-century later, Jefferson would read similar poetic productions aimed at his taste for an “African Venus.”

In the autumn of 1775, operating from offshore, Lord Dunmore made good on his threat to proclaim freedom for patriots’ slaves who joined his army. Scores did, and the erstwhile governor contemplated adding Ohio Indians to his racially mixed company. Some of the blacks under Dunmore defeated a white militia contingent near Norfolk; the commander was captured by his own former slaves. Planters continued to publicize incidents of “impertinent behaviour,” loss of property, and of whites suffering bodily harm. Jefferson took these panicky reports with him to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Diseases and a lack of resources eventually sank Dunmore’s bold plan. For a time, Virginia was spared.

Later in the war, when Jefferson was Virginia’s governor, the traitor Benedict Arnold invaded the state along its interior waterways. Virginia then contained more than 50 percent of America’s black population. As a mobilized force, Virginia’s slaves could easily have threatened the plantation community. So from the beginning to the end of the war, whites were afraid of the devastation that was likely to ensue if the British were to call for liberation. During Arnold’s invasion, stories spread among slave communities that this was what might soon happen. As British forces neared, more and more slaves became aggressive, determined to flee their plantations and join the invader. Violence would have escalated had the British not become ambivalent about the potential of this slave army: In certain instances, it welcomed slave fugitives; at other times, it turned them away, or even returned them to their owners. In 1781, whites patrolled the rivers as best they could, trembling at the prospect of what might happen if the British suddenly resolved to let chaos reign. This historic moment of uncertainty had to have been on Jefferson’s mind as he was laying out his notions about race relations, that year, in Notes on Virginia. He lost thirty slaves of his own to the British.¹⁴

Notes on Virginia was also an effort to compile a scientific catalogue of Virginia’s geographic features, climate, natural resources, plant and animal life, a history of its Indian settlements, and rational efforts to extend liberty. It was intended as an enlightened, encyclopedic study of an emerging polity, a taxonomy providing America with an idealized national identity, though the subject was Virginia alone. Knowing how comprehensive Jefferson’s aims were helps us understand the vital ambition underlying his textual performance.¹⁵

Jefferson went through life classifying the world’s peoples according to a moral anthropology that is foreign to us. This explains why subsequent generations have found it increasingly difficult to pin him down on the question of race. Can he be called a liberal and a racist at once? Are such terms at all useful to us in chronicling the range of views among his generation? Though they help us to frame his general sentiments, it is best said that there are other, more accurate measures of Jefferson’s thought, because the ideology we know as racial tolerance (within a pluralistic, largely middle-class society) did not exist until the twentieth century.

As a humanist, Jefferson abhorred the very idea of slavery, but he practiced it all his life; his mentor and “most affectionate friend,” the gentle, broadminded legal scholar George Wythe, taught slaves to read and write and later freed them. Wythe did not believe in the natural inferiority of the African, but Jefferson held that blacks did not equal whites in mind or body.¹⁶ Thus, class back-ground or regional identity was not the only determinant of Jefferson’s racism; his attachment to the books in his library mattered, too, for they—especially natural history and medical science—led him to his characterizations and conclusions as much as economic self-interest did.

His liberalism was overturned, his racism promoted, by sensations, especially. Jefferson’s personal reaction to black bodies generated his most pronounced racist vocabulary. In the Notes, wary of the influx of unwholesome ideas occasioned by America’s continuing population from abroad (meaning Europe), he wrote generally: “It is for the happiness of those united in society to harmonize as much as possible in matters which they must of necessity transact together.” He could write of harmony when variations of “white” were in his mind. But on the subject of American blacks, he more famously decreed why it was that closer interaction was improbable and undesirable: the deficiencies he found in Africans’ physical, if not moral, constitution.

He thought, for one, that he was proving “a difference of race” in physiology. Blacks, he wrote, “secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odor”; “In imagination they are dull, tasteless and anomalous”; “They are more ardent after their female; but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient”; their men appreciated the white woman’s beauty, just as “uniformly” as, in Africa, “the Oranootan” preferred “the black women over those of his own species.”

It should be no surprise, by now, that Jefferson established differences within his racial science on the basis of physiological categories, sensations, and sexual inclinations. In an effort to show the depth of his involvement in the study of human variation, he went beyond the assumptions of most of his peers—at least in his use of vivid language. But the orangutan example was not Jefferson’s invention: It had been bandied about by others for at least a century. His friend Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, though an opponent of slavery, would not long after publish a piece surmising that Africans’ skin pigmentation was the result of widespread leprosy. In a liberal moment, and with a rhetorical bow to the scientific method, Jefferson allowed that his notions of black inferiority were merely tentative and would have to be proved through submission to “the Anatomical knife.” The metaphor means less than it suggests, however, because we know that Jefferson lacked real faith in eighteenth-century surgery.¹⁷

A no less pertinent corollary to Jefferson’s impressions about race involves the prevailing “science” of physiognomy, that which presumed moral inclinations to be detectable in facial features. To adherents of physiognomic science, a person with “a nose curved at the root” was “born to command;” a long neck was “declaratory of gentleness;” blue eyes were “generally more significant of weakness, effeminacy, and yielding than brown and black,” and so forth.

These kinds of suppositions were commonly expressed throughout Jefferson’s life, but the most celebrated and oft-quoted interpreter of human characteristics was the Swiss physiognomist Johann Casper Lavater (1741–1801), whose work remained influential in America from the 1790s through Jefferson’s last years. Lavater’s theory held that most children inherited their firm bones and muscles from their fathers, and their nerves from their mothers. “It is undeniable,” Lavater wrote, “that there is a national physiognomy, as well as national character.... All English women whom I have known ... are inclined to be tall, slender, soft, and as distant from all that is harsh, rigorous, or stubborn, as heaven is from earth.” According to Lavater, such cultural characteristics were indelible.

In fiction especially, but in society generally, animation of countenance was thought to betray sensations of the heart. It was easy, for one so inclined, to reach the same conclusions about blacks as Jefferson had. As Lavater noted: “If the lips are thick and fleshy, this is a sign of sensuality and of slothfulness”; and, “When the sides of the nose are flexible ... it betrays a proneness to sensuality.” In his 1807 Essay on the Truth of Physiognomy, Charles Caldwell, a medical student of Dr. Caspar Wistar’s and Dr. Rush’s (whose odd racial science we have just alluded to), thought it striking how Desdemona justified her choice of the “swarthy” Othello; it was a rare instance in which the power of physiognomy actually transcended one’s natural color preference: “I was insensible of his dark complexion,” she says, “so wholly were my senses absorbed in the manly and noble expression of his countenance.”

A later correspondent of Jefferson’s (while serving as editor of a literary magazine, on his way to becoming a famous medical thinker), the opinionated Caldwell continued speculating on white superiority into the 1830s. Proud of America’s temperate situation, he declared: “Caucasian natives of the United States are superior in natural endowments to their European ancestors.... Those Negroes born and reared in this country are, in both body and mind, very strikingly superior to their African progenitors.” Thus, in the mind of the solicitous Jefferson and comparably resourceful people, credible cultural indices close at hand made it easy to find Caucasian attributes “rising and ripening,” as Caldwell put it, and the African countenance comparatively uninviting; and this is what led otherwise generous-spirited citizens to concur with the view that racial separation was for the good of all. Liberal scientists were, by our standards, profoundly racist.¹⁸

We have returned, then, to the vocabulary of medicine. It is not without reason that, in his Notes, Jefferson chose to evaluate the relationship between African Americans and European Americans according to glandular secretions, nervous responsiveness, and a capacity for sympathy; or that he differentiated between city dwellers and farmers according to the effect of the air they breathed. With the environment as stimulant, human interaction consisted in “a perpetual turmoil of sensations,” as the mid-eighteenth-century French medical theorist Théophile de Bordeu put it. Eroticizing the disastrously unequal relationship he perceived between master and slave, Jefferson in essence used Bordeu’s language: The “commerce” between white and black was “a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions ... unremitting despotism ... degrading submissions.”

He knew well at this time of the interracial sex (and rape) that occurred on Virginia plantations. In neurophysiological terms, Jefferson associated slavery’s “boisterous passions” with male urges; one could not think of sexual relations initiated by despotic masters and unregulated overseers without identifying the male sex organ as the irritable body part responsible for the spasm, the convulsive reaction, the provocation. As Bordeu put it, “the convulsions and tremors that precede this [seminal] excretion” were an irresistible force shared by all animal life.

The destructive impulse engendered by the institution of slavery was being passed down from white father to white son, Jefferson mourned, in secondhand sympathy for the enslaved. Amid that “intemperance of passion ... the parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” Jefferson’s titillating prose tells all: Allusions to sensations, irritability, and excessive stimulation indicate that he fully knows what slavery is. He would know even better, after his years in France among medical reformers and liberal philosophers, why slavery should be stopped. But that was not the same as knowing how to emancipate without sending the white majority into a panic.¹⁹

Although in Philadelphia in the 1790s Jefferson witnessed a thriving free black population that generated little racist hostility, it was also true that prominent members of the New York Manumission Society at that time still owned slaves. In fact, between the American Revolution and the Civil War, racist ideology hardened and hysterical stories about interracial sex multiplied, as assumptions became cruder and more exaggerated. For the majority of whites, racial subordination was understood as normal, one of the “immutable laws of nature.” In the northern states, even as slavery disappeared through legislation, free blacks were artificially held back in restrictive apprenticeships and even subtler forms of degradation and segregation. As abolition grew into a national issue, northern critics of race mixing or “amalgamation” would as vociferously as southern whites pronounce on the simian features of the African skull and the ridiculous prospects accompanying black attempts at gentility in a racially integrated society. Many assumed that the female abolitionists were prompted in their advocacy by a perverse desire for sex with a black man. And so, white supremacy (triggered in part by sexual anxieties) was alive and well, North and South, and would remain so. Blacks were not trusted. They were discouraged from seeking the advantages that whites aggressively reserved for themselves. A climate had long existed in which blacks or Mexicans or Jews could always be imagined stupid or lazy or sneaky or treacherous.

It is much easier to see Jefferson as well-meaning in the context of his time and place when we record the impulsive racist utterances that were commonplace, both before and after his lifetime. One example is religious symbolism. It was not unusual to hear southerners rattle on about black inferiority in the eyes of God. Not to be deprived of their voice, slaves and free blacks alike insisted, in return, that they were equal to whites in the eyes of God. In 1810, the ex-slave and minister Daniel Coker published “Dialogue Between a Virginian and an African Minister,” and demonstrated skill in using the Bible as an antislavery text. But white preachers for the most part heeded the warnings of white planters as to the danger of giving blacks “ideas.” Pro-slavery advocates’ efforts to indoctrinate slaves, to make them more docile by manipulating the Christian message, did not succeed. Whites’ fears rose accordingly.

It is in the nature of the individual to accommodate oneself to a less than ideal situation, to seek a supportable level of comfort with imperfection. For this reason, slavery ground down some whites who at one time might have preferred to speak out. There were, of course, prominent examples of southern slave owners who sacrificed financial comfort to advance abolition. Others, for a variety of motives, agreed to free their slaves upon their deaths. But must we judge Thomas Jefferson entirely on whether he was, ultimately, as munificent as the most susceptible, most compassionate southerner? Must he be all racist or all liberator? That seems too dismissive. His pseudoscience mirrored that of others, equally well educated, who measured skulls to determine the relationship between race and intelligence. And why should we expect him to be any less likely to dismiss black prospects for social equality than the apparent majority of northerners? Lest we regard progress as a strictly chronological phenomenon, the pre-Revolutionary period was probably less fixated on the desire to whiten North America than was the early nineteenth century.

Pressures existed. Slaveholders sought to maintain a standard of living in an uncertain market. This is what made them especially concerned with the monetary value of their human property; and, as unpalatable as it is to us, this is also what made them interested in slaves as “breeders.” Many slave owners became speculators in slave fertility, and they felt no moral qualms about this added dimension to the problem of slave ownership. “Negro raising” caused white planter families to focus attention on issues of profitability instead of issues of humanity. In this vein, one naturally questions the motive behind many masters’ concern for their slaves’ health. The less frugal managers among the planter set regularly sold slaves to pay bills. Even the kinder, gentler masters were occasionally put in this position.

The Virginia Republican elite was convinced, by and large, that slavery was “an evil of great magnitude,” to quote a representative statement. But the same Virginian would say that slavery was less pernicious than abolition would be if imposed upon the state without consideration for the social disruption it would cause. And Jefferson agreed. Convinced that slaves enjoyed more comfortable conditions than most poor whites and free people of color, and knew incomparably better circumstances than “their savage ancestors, naked and starved, roaming through the wilds of Africa like the wild beasts,” self-satisfied slave owners insisted that they were making the best of an inheritance. They were not, they insisted, accountable for a system of labor introduced by the British during colonial rule. In time, as they continued to maintain a sense of “duty” toward the enslaved, masters figured they would find a suitable place for the emancipated—but they would do this on their own terms, not by compulsion.²¹

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever,” Jefferson wrote with regard to race enslavement.²² Notes on Virginia was hailed as bold in the mid-1780s, not because of its racial science, but rather because it embarrassed his white brethren; it did not shy from irritating those southern leaders who refused to recognize a God that would not rest until slavery was eliminated. Jefferson did, after all, say, in no uncertain terms, that slavery was “unremitting despotism.” The justice-seeking on both sides of the Atlantic prodded Jefferson to work harder at finding a humane solution, but they did not question his motives. John Adams wrote admiringly to the author in 1785: “The Passages upon slavery, are worth Diamonds.”²³

That said, Jefferson’s objectionable pseudoscience rightly diminishes him in the eyes of history for one inescapable reason: He did not grow over time. We can see that in spite of moral protestations—in adjudging slavery a crime against humanity—a thinker who conveyed the views he did in Notes was unlikely to take meaningful steps toward enacting racial justice, even on a scale within the reach of his generation, unless he questioned his original assumptions with respect to blacks’ physical attributes or their capacity to acquire taste and express love. But Jefferson did not doubt himself on this score, nor on the impossibility of an integrated society, indicating to one correspondent in 1815 that he had yet to see a more “sound,” a more “practicable” plan for a resolution to the race issue than the removal plan he had proposed three decades earlier in Notes.²⁴

During his presidency, he joyfully presided over the termination of the ocean-going slave trade, sealing off U.S. ports from further imports of Africans. But he did nothing to arrest the course of the domestic slave trade. His most heralded foreign policy achievement, the Louisiana Purchase, added greatly to the slave economy. Jefferson cannot alone be blamed for this, but neither did he exercise moral leadership when an opportunity presented itself. Instead of seeing an independent black republic in Haiti as a prospective home for American blacks, he refused to consider diplomatic recognition to the slaves who overturned French colonialism, and even encouraged France to re-invade. Taken together, these constitute damning evidence of moral ambivalence.²⁵

As a young, activist politician in the 1780s, he had championed the states’ cession of territory west of the Ohio River to the national government, for which he helped to legislate a ban on slavery. But in retirement, the social reformer reversed himself. His reading of the 1819 Missouri controversy is perhaps his most nearsighted and least flexible political reaction during these years. As Congress debated whether to bar slavery from new states formed from the Louisiana Purchase (Missouri, in this case), Jefferson construed the measure in two ways: first, as an effort among northern members of his own Republican Party to shift power away from the “Virginia Dynasty” that had allowed Jefferson’s neighbors James Madison and James Monroe to succeed him as president; and second, as an imposition upon the southern states’ right to eradicate slavery on their own terms, and in their own time. Additional pressures contributed to the problem. After a short burst of prosperity following the War of 1812, Virginians were now witness to a declining state economy; it hit planters and other personally invested local leaders hard. Even without the Missouri issue, they felt burdened and ill at ease.²⁶

Jefferson was worried about freedom, the freedom of white citizens from intrusive big government. Even Madison, usually more expansive in his liberalism, agreed with Jefferson at this moment that the North was engineering a power play, not a humane policy for the sake of African Americans. The “uncontrolled dispersion” of slaves westward would do more, Madison told Monroe, to advance their eventual emancipation. For Jefferson, too, only a union of the states in which each state was equal to the others—a union without jealousies, a union in which cumulative power was harmoniously configured—only a union with conciliatory objectives could influence and abide a state-bystate remedy for the evil of slavery.²⁷

We wonder, having in mind the course of events that led to the Civil War, how Jefferson could adopt this dilatory posture. After all, he was asking the politically impossible in desiring a union without jealousies as the precondition for an end to slavery. But we must again consider the larger context. Jefferson could not know that there would be a war between the states, nor how bloody and costly it would be. Nor did he consider the slavery problem a singular problem, the way we do as students of history. Though it makes little sense to us, he was unable to separate slavery from the larger threat he perceived of an externally imposed tyranny and the restricting of white southerners’ ability to maneuver, migrate, and grow.

In Jefferson’s view, there were indignities more exceptional, more encompassing, than those routinely suffered by the underclass of black Americans. As a white man accustomed to the exercise of power, one who looked up at the weather vane to predict the nation’s political direction, he perceived other threats to tranquil felicity that took precedence. The relevant vocabulary is already present in an 1811 letter, in which Jefferson complained of a British despotism that was slow to recede from the Atlantic world:

What in short, is the whole system of Europe towards America but an atrocious and insulting tyranny? One hemisphere of the earth, separated from the other by wide seas on both sides, having a different system of interests flowing from different climates, different soils, different productions, different modes of existence, and its own local relations and duties, is made subservient to all the petty interests of the other, to their laws, their regulations, their passions and wars, and interdicted from social intercourse, from the interchange of mutual duties and comforts with their neighbors, enjoined on all men by the laws of nature. Happily these abuses of human rights are drawing to a close on both our continents.²⁸

This was his model. For Jefferson, white-on-white political tyranny had not yet disappeared, and had to be—and would be—overcome first. The world would be right when London reviewed its conduct. The world would be right when northern politicians ceased to promote a powerful central government that aimed to squash southern culture by imposing a national standard based on dominant northern economic interests and urban sensibilities. The world would be right when localities were free to nurture themselves in accord with their native climate and social environment and generous impulses.

James Madison joined his friend in explaining to the world that colonial-era slavery was far more pernicious than it had become in the years since independence. The lives of slaves had much improved, and would continue to improve, until a proper solution was found. Nationalists such as Robert Walsh, a Philadelphian who opposed the extension of slavery into Missouri, nonetheless drew upon Madison’s perspective and countered British newspaper attacks upon the institution: The U.S. slave population was now doubling every twenty-six years, Walsh observed, arguing that healthy post-Revolutionary conditions explained the phenomenon. It was better to live as an American slave than as a British laborer. The fact remained, he and others proclaimed, that the American republic embodied a quality of freedom that England did not; oligarchic rule within Britain made the common people free in a technical sense only. Add to that London’s aggressive commercial policies and maritime dominance. Where was there mercy shown in the halls of power in Britain? Americans’ intense hatred of political tyranny presented a hopeful model of government to the world, separate and apart from the nagging (inherited) problem of race enslavement.²⁹

Whether it was England or the northern states of his own country that impinged, Jefferson was adamant in desiring to ward off all outside “tyranny.” His white yeoman constituency, his agrarian ideal, appeared to be under attack. It was apparent after 1800 that agriculture no longer paid the same dividends for his social class, but that did not dissuade Jefferson from embracing the past. Bolstered by justifications he devised as a result of his extensive reading in medical science and natural history, fed by his personal revulsion toward “blackness,” he was able to apply his long-cultivated pastoralism to his politically fashioned racism. For him, the South defined its wealth in a sprawling countryside, resisting the unhygienic ways of the increasingly populous northern cities: The South would remain closer to nature; the North, modeling its growth after cities such as London, would descend into “luxury” and inactivity. What Jefferson did not see as clearly, of course, was northerners’ fears that the “Virginia Dynasty” of presidents insured southern dominance. As the years went by, the lives of black Americans ceased to take precedence in Jefferson’s mind because (or at least in part because) comparative sociological conditions in the North and South unnerved him. Retrograde slavery, like it or not, empowered the South.

The seeds of national self-destruction were already present, but a timely compromise in Congress slowed the march toward civil war. In a bizarre twist, Missouri achieved statehood in 1820 as a slave protectorate, and so preserved a mythological pastoral republic, sheltered from the threat of the combined North, which, as Jefferson saw it, disguised its commercial avarice (almost British in character), and paid mere lip service to the interests of southern slaves.

And then there was the lurid imagination. For years after Jefferson’s Notes examined racial difference, the mere existence of free blacks and runaways constantly “threatened” whites’ sense of security. In 1822, a free black leader in his mid-fifties, Denmark Vesey, conceived a slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina, meant to carry the oppressed to freedom in Haiti, which had won its struggle for independence from France two decades before. When word of Vesey’s plan leaked, the local authority rounded up the conspirators. There followed impassioned trials, court-sanctioned hangings, and surgical mutilations. Relations among white families and the slaves they owned turned ever more fearful. Though Vesey had plotted not race war but a mass exodus, it was the extreme thought of black men bent on indiscriminate murder and, worse, wild sexual desire for aristocratic white women, that haunted the South.³⁰

Jefferson’s clear dilemma in confronting the race issue was tied to his identification with a class of men. These were the neighbors he grew up admiring, the friends he made in college and afterward, and the political allies who could acknowledge, along with him, the South’s distinctive character. His description of northern and southern qualities to the French Marquis de Chastellux in 1785 remained essentially unchanged in later years: He credited northerners with independence and industry, but called them a “chicaning” and “hypocritical” people; southerners were at once “fiery” and “indolent,” but he loved them for their “generous” and “candid” personality. Morally, he felt perfectly comfortable in the South, and distrusted the North.³¹

From as early as 1798, because he was so much in the public eye, Jefferson the white supremacist was subject to lampooning from northern critics. In that year, readers of the Connecticut Courant were treated to a satirical poem examining his musings in Notes on Virginia. The Federalist newspaper questioned his tepid embrace of the black mathematician Benjamin Banneker, who in 1791 had sent on an almanac based on his own complex computations in an effort to prompt Jefferson to readjust his theory of racial inequality. In the course of his spirited burlesque, the Connecticut versifier mocked the Virginian’s bizarre evolutionary thinking in figuring the slaves “a race beneath the whites”:

So far beneath, he thinks it good,
To exile all their brotherhood,
Lest blood be stained in love’s embraces,
And beauty fade from Southern faces:
Yet traces not their lineage back,
To Adam white, nor Adam black
But thinks, perhaps, Eve’s hand-maid had ’em
By some strange oran-outang Adam.³³

White Connecticut lacked Virginia’s racial anxiety, and so the Courant could painlessly point to Jefferson’s ultimate fear, never far from the surface of debate: the fear of mixed race Americans darkening and sullying the continent. Though he equivocated in a letter to Banneker—“No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men”—Jefferson wanted, again in Professor Onuf’s words, “to secure the sexual frontier between two nations.”³⁴

Jefferson was not open to Banneker’s evidence, nor did he give credit to the prodigy Phillis Wheatley, a slave who learned English in mere months and published ingenious, if imitative, poetry in her teens.³⁵ Of the ex-slave Ignatius Sancho, a sentimental correspondent of the novelist Laurence Sterne, Jefferson found only incoherence, extravagance, and a lack of restraint in his published letters; he refused to believe blacks capable of reflective literature. Yet Sancho was a veritable ambassador of enlightened sensibility: “May you know no pains but of sensibility!” he wrote to a young female, quintessentially. “And may you be ever able to relieve where you wish!—May the wise and good esteem you more than I do—and the object of your heart love you—as well as you love a good and kind action!”³⁶ Jefferson made it clear that he thought it impossible for blacks ever to approach love in the same tasteful, elevated spirit of romance that well-bred whites enjoyed. He surveyed the sexual frontier between the races, and wished it to be fixed and walled off.

In the autumn of 1809, as he was settling in to his retirement, Jefferson critiqued a book that highlighted the literary accomplishments of blacks around the world. He asserted that anyone so credulous as to believe blacks capable of good writing could be easily dismissed: The author had thrown together “every story he could find of men of color,” not distinguishing “degree of mixture” among the various authors. A true black could not rise to the level of a mulatto. Banneker, Jefferson went on, may have had a bit of spherical trigonometry, but otherwise he must have had help from a white mathematician to complete his almanac. And yet, Jefferson smugly insisted, “it was impossible for doubt to have been more tenderly or hesitatingly expressed than that was in the Notes of Virginia.” Doubt? Here Jefferson looks entirely deceitful. He meant that he had written: “I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks ... are inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind” (italics supplied). But, of course, Jefferson’s “suspicion” is not healthy skepticism; in reading the least self-censored of his correspondence one is hard pressed to avoid the conclusion that his only doubt on the subject of race relations was that anyone could teach him anything new.³⁷

There is no way to mince words: Jefferson considered blacks ill suited to live free among whites. He frequently used the word harmony in his political prescriptions for national union; but racial harmony was impossible for him to project, or to embrace as a political ideal. Jefferson’s distaste for blacks ran deep, though he did not consider it personal. He regarded the “problem” philosophically. Yet he held views that comported with those of most of his white neighbors and other proper Virginia gentlemen who could anticipate, as he did, the terror that a hostile slave population might someday unleash.

For Jefferson, an insider’s view of slavery limited his range of responses. He understood slavery as only one who had adapted to it could. He viscerally understood what most white liberals did not: the physical impulses and vulgar assumptions associated with slavery. Large numbers of white men figured they could do whatever they wanted with anyone’s slaves; and in these circumstances, black men and women, politically ineffectual as they were, could only look on in utter disgust. The novelist James Baldwin told of this kind of racist brutality, through the eyes of a pretty young Harlem woman, as she came to grips with an inheritance of emotional imprisonment and assumptions about her sexuality:

How I hated them, the way they looked, and the things they’d say, all dressed up in their damn white skin, and their clothes just so, and their weak, white pricks jumping in their drawers. You could do any damn thing with them if you just led them along, because they wanted to do something dirty and they knew that you knew how.³⁸

During Jefferson’s retirement years, the colonization of blacks abroad came to represent a noble dream in the minds of many whites. The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816. A spirit of philanthropy distinguished the vision of northern clergy who thought of ennobling American blacks by returning them to Africa to build a black republic; many southern leaders embraced the same philanthropy, perhaps with genuine thoughts of African Americans’ welfare, but always figuring at the same time that colonization would rid society of dangerous elements.³⁹

The spirit of beneficent paternalism that strengthened colonization as an idea also sustained the slave owner’s positive self-image. Self-congratulatory remarks about the comparative “mildness” of American slavery easily grew to encompass the presumption that democracy flourished perfectly well among whites who practiced slavery. Jefferson invoked that “mildness” rationale when it suited his purposes. Before 1826, while Jefferson survived, slavery’s apologists blatantly targeted oppressed free laborers in the North and the English underclass as proof that the system was “good” for blacks, and the motives of slave owners unselfish.

It is entirely appropriate for us to weigh the moral burden we ought to put on Jefferson for having embraced the role of master. We do not like his attitude and no one can defend slavery, but that does not mean we should automatically affirm that the intelligence and wherewithal to create a just biracial or multiracial society existed in, say, 1809, when Jefferson retired to private life, and that he could have formulated such a society as efficiently as he went about conceiving his university. Though select individuals did emancipate their slaves, no one in a position of power was articulating a large-scale plan for a healthy postemancipation society. That is why Jefferson’s myopic choice—to accommodate mild, benevolent slavery or to work for mass deportation and colonization—continued to strike him as the most “practicable” plan.

If, privately, he took to heart his own dictum that each generation should be independent of the preceding, and able to fashion progress on its own terms, he might have examined slavery in a different way. He wrote in 1816: “Laws and institutions must go hand and hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times.” Good theory, but not put into practice. Thomas Jefferson could have approached the institution of slavery as he had the laws of Virginia immediately after his return from Philadelphia in 1776, when he worked to replace English edicts with republican principles. But when it came to racial justice, “manners and opinions” had not changed sufficiently—including his own.⁴⁰

Did Jefferson have options from which he turned away? Certainly, but the debt-laden planter was nowhere near daring enough to free his slaves and make a symbolic personal sacrifice, such as would set a standard for future times. Still, we must recognize that the problem of slavery was much bigger than any one man. The political realists of America could not carry sympathy far enough to integrate society, nor were they willing to take their radical Revolutionary language beyond where they had already taken it. As important, the patriarchal family remained the model of social relations in most places. All of these are mitigating factors, suggesting that we should not damn Jefferson and leave it at that. There was effusive sentiment but no agreement within religious circles—let alone between North and South—on how to proceed. The slavery stalemate had to be worked out on a massive scale—a cross-sectional consensus needed to form—and it was not in Thomas Jefferson’s constitution to build this kind of consensus.

He appreciated life as a perfectly natural mix of sensations (feelings) and intellect. From this starting point, he made moral sense of his world. “Moral sense of his world” may sound a bit jarring when we classify him as a slave owner: Even a well-intentioned one is hard for history to love. This is why we need to recognize that as deficient as he was, Jefferson never set out wanting to represent, above all others in his generation, the common white belief in black inferiority. We magnify his limits as a political actor by forcing his racism to define him. We would probably contextualize his racism better if racial injustice did not still blatantly manifest itself in our lifetime.

Though he made many unfortunate concessions to unattractive, unenlightened, and long since discredited social views, Jefferson behaved as he did because his world allowed it. The shrill sound of racism carried far and wide; and the notion that black-white unions were an aberration of nature extended well beyond his designing mind.

At Monticello and Poplar Forest, he concerned himself with the distribution of food, clothing, shelter, and other necessary supplies. During his retirement years, he routinely asked his overseers to confirm for him that his slaves had blankets and beds sufficient for their comfort. He might show disappointment with a slave who did not possess the work habits he expected, but, if physiognomy accounts for anything, he did not terrify anyone. He thought kindness and reciprocity—and incentives—succeeded better than a menacing temper. Jefferson preferred a show of politeness in lieu of interracial equality.

Here are two brief sketches of the master’s mindset: In 1818, when his rheumatism prevented a planned visit to Poplar Forest, Jefferson wrote to his overseer Joel Yancey in urgent tones, and gave clear instructions that he was to insure adequate supplies: “What your home-spun [cotton, wool, flax, and hemp] falls short of clothing for the people must be supplied by mr Robertson. I will state below who are to have [new] blankets, and who beds this year.” Adding pork distribution, Jefferson demonstrated that he took a personal interest in the slaves who lived at this distance from Monticello when he listed by name twenty-one recipients of blankets, and separately instructed Yancey: “Maria’s having now a child, I promised her a house to be built this winter. Be so good as to have it done. Place it along the garden fence on the road Eastward from Hanah’s house.” It was that very week that Han[n]ah learned, apparently from overseer Yancey, of her master’s indisposition. “I am sorry to hear you was so unwell you could not come[.] It greive me many time.”

The following year, while Jefferson remained at Monticello, Johnny Hemings, his talented, ever-trusted carpenter—and his eyes and ears—was securing the windows at Poplar Forest and keeping him abreast of slaves’ activities. Jefferson relied on Hemings’s reports as much to prevent disruption of production, and arrest poor work habits and poor supervision, as to guarantee contentment among the enslaved population. “Write to me every Wednesday,” Jefferson instructed Hemings.⁴²

These were not exactly what we might call fond communications, but they were certainly considerate. In 1825, he closed a letter to his bound but largely self-regulated carpenter: “Your friends here [at Monticello] are well, and I wish you well.”⁴³ It is worth noting, too, that Jefferson recorded his correspondence with John Hemings in his Summary Journal of Letters, an official log ordinarily reserved for his most significant correspondence with respectable gentlemen.

Jefferson saw to the training of many of his slaves by specialists: He was responsible for creating skilled cabinetmakers, blacksmiths, brewers, bricklayers, spinners, and weavers—artisans who spent little time laboring in the fields, though they might help at harvest time. The Monticello artisans were able to earn extra money doing occasional jobs for local free artisans.

Yet Jefferson was capable of insensitive behavior on occasion. He could be demanding, and even cruel, in his paternalistic manipulations. To prevent his slaves from proposing marriage to slaves living on other plantations, which might have yielded complications, he offered material incentives to all who found love at Monticello. As president, he brought slave Fanny Gillette, who was trained in the French style of cooking, to Washington; her husband, wagon driver Davy Hern, was left behind at Monticello. Long-distance marriage proved a strain, and Davy feared what his wife was up to. On one of Davy’s rare visits to the President’s House, Davy and Fanny fell to arguing; and as their marital problems escalated, Jefferson ordered his overseer to Washington expressly to take the Herns to Alexandria’s slave market to be sold. He may never have intended to separate the couple—we cannot know the full story—but he succeeded in quieting their feud by the use of a threat: Davy and Fanny “wept, and begged, and made good promises,” before Jefferson agreed to rescind his order.⁴⁴

Jefferson also found it easy to participate in slave trading, though he preferred to keep it familial, or at least, among friends. When he first retired from public life in the mid-1790s, for a brief three years before assuming the vice presidency, he gave his energy to rebuilding his mountain estate and restoring domestic manufacture there. His younger sister Anna’s husband, Hastings Marks, living to the east in Louisa County, expressed a desire to sell thirty-fouryear-old Nance, a weaver, a Hemings, and Sally’s older half-sister, who had been given to Mrs. Marks upon marriage. Writing to a planter, neighbor to the Markses, who had done favors for him in the past, Jefferson “presumed to sollicit” this gentleman to act as intermediary and to purchase Nance for Jefferson “at whatever price you shall think her really worth.” In describing Nance, Jefferson assigned a value in terms we would find crude: “I believe [she] has ceased to breed.” As a decent man of his time and place (if such activity can be put in relative terms at all), Jefferson allowed that he would be willing to purchase, along with Nance, her teenage daughter, “if she insists on it, and my sister desires it.” But, for reasons of economy, presumably, he refused to purchase Nance’s teenage son, and keep the family intact.⁴⁵

Jefferson’s daughter Martha expressed her perspective in a letter to her daughter Ellen in 1825, when the family’s finances necessitated the sale of some slaves on the Edgehill property (near Monticello), and made the broader sale of slaves first appear inevitable:

The negroes may be disposed of to people that we know, in many instances friends, and neighbours.... My mind is greatly relieved by this arrangement. The discomfort of slavery I have borne all my life, but it’s sorrows in all their bitterness I had never before conceived. The sale of Susan [her daughter Virginia’s maid] was only a prelude in my imagination to the scenes which the 8th [date of proposed public sale] would exhibit in the Negro buyers, and the advertisement would have been the signal to have collected them from every part of the state. How much trouble and distress y[ou] have been spared my beloved Ellen by your removal, for nothing can prosper under such a system of injustice.⁴⁶

Devoted as she was to her father, it is hard to conceive that Martha Randolph would have expressed herself this way had she not been reflecting, as well, Thomas Jefferson’s view. Indeed, Ellen happened to write her grandfather from Boston the day after her mother composed the letter to her; and Ellen put the sentiment most succinctly: “[New England] has given me an idea of prosperity and improvement, such as I fear our Southern States cannot hope for, whilst the canker of slavery eats into their hearts, and diseases the whole body by this ulcer at the core.” The medical metaphors should sound familiar, too, given her grandfather’s preferences.⁴⁷

He may have been a race separatist, but Jefferson was frequently directed by an unselfish impulse, as when he wrote in 1815: “The mind of the master is to be apprised by reflection, and strengthened by the energies of conscience, against the obstacles of self interest to an acquiescence in the rights of others; that of the slave is to be prepared by instruction and habit for self-government and for the honest pursuits of industry and social duty.” Who is to say that Jefferson did not feel a sincere obligation to oppressed individuals? It appears to have been his honest hope that conscience should prevail over self-interest, and that separation would not occur before self-sufficiency was taught and dignity restored to the slave.⁴⁸

Though a flawed philosopher, Jefferson correctly saw the institution of slavery as a dehumanizing and morally, as well as politically, corrosive system. As a “physician,” he wished to treat the festering sore, but his tools were little better than the instruments of medicine of his time. And so he rationalized—if perhaps too easily. As a member of the ruling race, he fretted over economic conditions under slavery, but he expected far worse for America if abolition were to occur without provision for the happiness of the whites who owned the land. In the end, of course, he did little more to end slavery than agree to discuss the subject in reasoned, rather than emotionally charged, language. It is somewhat ironic, then, that abolitionists in the years before the Civil War could claim Jefferson as a “prime mover” behind their crusade, for it was he whose decisive language introduced many of them to the truism that slavery was evil and indefensible—he knew precisely what to say, though he turned out to be the most timid of abolitionists.⁴⁹

We still want to ask why a man so immersed in scientific knowledge, and bent on questioning established rules of conduct, should have been so comfortable with racial stereotypes. After all, as a general rule with him, problems required dispassionate study. They were addressed by testing principles, as in a scientific examination. He wrote to Dr. Hosea Humphrey in 1816 of the ideal circumstance: “The freer the enquiry, the more favorable to truth.” To a progressive mind, there can be no better watchword. Yet Jefferson’s very next sentence marked the shame of his refusal to re-encounter race relations: “But when a whole system is proposed to be reformed, the undertaking is for the young, not for the old.”⁵⁰

Here lies the key to our criticism of Thomas Jefferson, the uncertain slavery opponent. In retirement, he was unwilling to devote his foremost energies to public causes beyond the university he was to see rising in his view from Monticello. At a certain point in his life he was able, to his own satisfaction and for his own sense of peace, to transfer responsibility to the rising generation. Should we fault him for retiring from that issue which, from our tortured modern perspective, we see as the most crucial and unresolved moral dilemma that still links our American society to his? Yes, but a qualified yes. We should fault him for missing the opportunity to prove—and improve—himself.

The most famous example of Jefferson’s mixed message on the subject of slavery in his retirement years is the 1814 exchange with his Albemarle County neighbor, Edward Coles. He was President Madison’s private secretary and a remarkable young man of insight and action, justice and humanity, who not only emancipated his slaves, but also brought them to freedom by establishing them on land in Illinois, where he later became governor. In 1814, as he conceived the effort, Coles thought he could count on Jefferson to lend support, because Jefferson was, of course, a reasonable man.

Jefferson had been an idealist at Coles’s age, but now he was more cautious than encouraging. “The love of justice and the love of country plead equally the cause of these people,” he opened his letter to Coles, but before long he was qualifying that miscegenation was a real and present danger: “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.” The sexual frontier again comes to the forefront of his mind.

To Coles, Jefferson rationalized his inaction not in plain English but in Latin: “Trementibus œquo humeris et inutile ferrum cingi,” or “Shoulders trembling from old age, he put on useless iron.” The phrase is an abbreviated line from Vergil’s Aeneid recalling the fall of Troy. It excludes the always evocative word convulsaque (“convulsed”) of the previous clause in the original, and therefore requires a full translation to retrieve Jefferson’s context: “As he viewed the reduction of the taken city, and the convulsed thresholds of the buildings, and the middle of the enemy within its structures, the older man in vain put long unused weapons upon his shoulders; trembling from old age, putting on useless iron and about to die, he was carried into the crowded enemy.”⁵¹

Proud Priam, king of Troy, was killed as his city burned and his family helplessly looked on. Jefferson, alarmed by the convulsive potential of the slavery issue, may have been aging, like the Trojan, but there was no burning city around him.⁵² It is questionable whether Jefferson would ever have been perceived as a ridiculous relic in useless armor if he had bravely tried to raise a hand against slavery. But he found the issue too delicate, too fraught with political danger. He had retired. “This enterprise is for the young,” he told Coles. “It shall have all my prayers & these are the only weapons of an old man.”

It needs to be said that of all the species of letters Jefferson received and replied to during his retirement years, a large proportion of them found him rationalizing his inaction. It was not just slavery that he resisted committing to; literally hundreds of petitioning correspondents who sympathized with him in political or moral principle and asked his support were met with the same kind of ambivalence.

“The only exact testimony of a man is his actions,” Jefferson pronounced in 1815, on a subject other than slavery. Yet he easily, perhaps too easily, justified his inaction by recollecting a time in his career when he did speak out. Only months before the exchange with Edward Coles, he explained to his protégé Joseph Carrington Cabell that he did not want his thoughts on public affairs to be known, except when it came to advancing public education: “I frankly confide to yourself these opinions, or rather no-opinions, of mine, but would not wish to have them go any further. I want to be quiet: and altho’ some circumstances now and then excite me to notice them, I feel safe, and happier in leaving every thing to those whose turn it is to take care of them.” This would be his policy, he said, “as long as I breathe.”⁵³

Jefferson continued to see himself as appropriately sensitive, and practical, if quieter in his advocacies. As Cabell lobbied the Virginia legislature in support of Jefferson’s plan for a university, the shadowy presence thanked the younger man for honoring his wishes: “I am much indebted to you for keeping me in the back-ground.” Excepting the period of debate over Missouri (1819–1820), when he launched into a flurry of private correspondence defending his section’s pro-slavery stand, Jefferson approached southern slavery as he did most other thorny issues: If his generation had failed to arrive at a workable solution, it should step aside and allow others to take the lead. He drew upon a medical metaphor in 1815 to explain slavery’s persistence: “Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the northern States it was merely superficial, and easily corrected. In the southern it is incorporated with the whole system, and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process.” The curative or therapeutic process, he is saying, needed more energy than his remaining years allotted him.⁵⁴

Jefferson’s 1821 memoir, sometimes referred to as his Autobiography, consists of pages written in anticipation of a friendly biographer. It is a text that Jefferson undertook not for self-publication, but as a more modest and indirect means of declaring himself to history. In the middle of this carefully constructed work, Jefferson unhesitatingly inserted a line that rang out with respect for the enslaved people of his country: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” It could have been stretched in large letters across a banner at the head of a compassionate parade. The man who wrote this was seven years older than the one who had been lukewarm in his support of Coles, and perhaps in the justness of its tone he was consciously seeking history’s praise. But it is interesting, too, how on this subject he could segue so easily from charitable and humanistic to more arbitrary language, for the very next two lines are just as meaningful: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” He believed what he was writing. From Revolutionary times to old age, he consistently judged that emancipation without a permanent separation of the races was contrary to the republic’s interest.⁵⁵

We must appreciate the full weight of the historic irony encompassed in Jefferson’s language: His scientific racism, his cool calculation, were employed as part of a strategy that would allow him to bide his time when he refused to do more to end slavery. In fact, though, in aiming to avoid pain, he caused pain. In conserving his energy, he undermined his own cause of tranquil felicity across American society. Even as he compiled such sublime statements as the “book of fate” passage above, he could not escape the potential of violence emanating from his own more damaging rhetoric.

It was, in fine, the mixed message of eighteenth-century science and medicine. He was a Revolutionary when in his prime, perhaps an abolitionist at heart, who forecast a freedom that he was too afraid to envision fully once he had embarked upon a more thorough study of medicine, physiology, and natural history. The medical Enlightenment actually supported the growth of a racist ideology in America: The books Jefferson read, distinguishing male and female traits, urban and pastoral conditions, brain activity and controlled sentiment, supplied him with a more racist vocabulary than he might otherwise have developed. His intense reading on these subjects made him a bolder amateur anatomist (he was not a true cultural anthropologist); he reached conclusions based on stark determinations within the Linnaean taxonomy. He classified by way of mere surface appearance, and ignorantly speculated on deficiencies within. With the illusory character of Jefferson’s naturalism, blacks became a lower, less reflective order of humanity.⁵⁶

He misapplied science to politics because he craved certainty in politics. He appeared to be trying to retrieve through a philosophical exercise that happy state of nature where pastoral peace and contentment might remove America from the ravages of time, and where politics could be managed (through a massive colonization program) so as to eliminate the threat of race war.⁵⁷ In service to his ideal, and reticent to abandon his fellows, his white slave-holding brethren, Jefferson allowed his aesthetic judgments about skin color combinations and his bleak observations about degraded slaves’ behavior to overwhelm his humane impulses.

Practically speaking, Jefferson’s attitude was, in fact, not far from that of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln did not wish to interfere with slavery where it already existed, though he wished that slavery would be ended as soon as possible. Lincoln, like Jefferson, did not propose radical action, nor did he envision blacks and whites as political equals. That is why context is so important. History does not always provide the gratifying antecedents we seek.

Wright was the young British author of the highly complimentary Views of Society and Manners in America (1821), which Jefferson had read. “You and I,” Lafayette wrote to Jefferson a month before their momentous reunion, “are the two Men in the World the Esteem of whom she values the Most.” Wright had shown in her book that she was, at least at that juncture, sensitive to Jefferson’s argument in the Notes on Virginia that blacks and whites had a long history of ill will to overcome, an antagonism that was perhaps ineradicable. She expressed sympathy with the principle of colonization—returning educated ex-slaves to Africa to establish their own republic—and even defended southerners by pointing to the way foreigners visiting America (far more than American-born whites) displayed an “absolute disgust at being served by black hands.” Uncomfortable with slavery, she was nonetheless convinced, as Jefferson was, that “there must inevitably exist a barrier between the American and the negro,” because even whites’ wholesale “repentance” could not “obliterate in a moment the wrongs of years,” or transform slaves into the political equals of whites.⁵⁹

But on this, her second visit to America, Fanny Wright resolved to take action personally. By the time she reached Monticello, she was already starting to revise her mild critique. Though unfailingly polite to Jefferson, she would, in 1827, publicly endorse interracial sex as the appropriate solution to America’s race problem, and thereby damn herself in the eyes of more and more who found her extravagance in speech rash and reckless. She helped found the biracial utopian community of Nashoba, in western Tennessee, and infamously rejected the unequal institution of marriage. Ellen Randolph (not yet Coolidge), who met the nearly six-foot-tall Fanny at Monticello in 1824, reviled her a few years later as “this unsexed thing who dares to scorn her God. ... I feel mortified, as a woman, as having formerly been a personal acquaintance.” Even in 1824, Fanny Wright must have been, for Jefferson, an extreme symbol: She was Ellen carried too far, a woman of impressive stature and intellectual attainments, who lacked the domestic detachment of the Virginia lady. Ellen knew how to show reserve in a man’s world; Fanny felt differently, and refused to be held back by her sex.⁶⁰

The devotion of Frances Wright to the Marquis de Lafayette was unusual enough. In 1822–1823, she lavished praise and affection on the old warrior in a barrage of letters: “My paternal friend whom I love better than friend ever loved friend or daughter father”; “You are my teacher, my conscience”; “I am alone without you”; “I am only half alive when away from you.” By then, she was widely believed to be his mistress, which incensed his family, and caused her to suggest that he either adopt her or marry her. As they prepared to embark for America in 1824 (along with her sister Camilla, for the sake of propriety), Fanny wrote without restraint that she wished she and the marquis might remain in the United States permanently, to avoid the recriminations of Lafayette’s French family. It appears that as he set out on his triumphal return to America, the marquis was as unconcerned with possible damage to his own reputation as Miss Wright was to hers.⁶¹

Jefferson had long since shed his prudery, and had found what was for him a satisfactory means of dealing with Callender’s revelations about his private life, but the rumors about the venerable Lafayette and the irrepressible Miss Wright must have affected him in some way when he encountered them together. Lafayette was sixty-six (virtually the age Jefferson was when Eston Hemings was born), and Fanny was twenty-nine—almost the same distance in years as that separating Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The Frenchman and the Virginian spoke of bougies and catheters—of caring for the prostate gland. How deep did their confidences go? Did they allude in any way to sex and much younger women?

Unfortunately, there exists no transcript of what was said over supper at Monticello when, in Fanny Wright’s presence, Lafayette and Jefferson revisited the slavery question. They had been discussing it—Lafayette passionately so—for several years. “All know that permitting the slaves of the South to spread into the West will not add one being to that unfortunate condition,” Jefferson had assured, amid the heat of the Missouri crisis in 1820. “The boisterous sea of liberty indeed is never without a wave.” He optimistically reported that the spread of slavery westward was a dilution of the problem, not an intensification of it, and would actually “increase the happiness” of human property. Lafayette, unmoved, replied: “Are You Sure, My dear friend, that Extending the principle of Slavery to the New Raised States is a Method to facilitate the Means of Getting Rid of it? I would Have thought that by Spreading the prejudices, Habits, and Calculations of planters over a larger Surface You Rather Encrease the difficulties of final liberation.”⁶²

A year later, Lafayette was still stuck on Jefferson’s awkward logic: “Let me Confess, my dear friend, I Have Not Been Convinced, and the less as I think More of it, By Your Argument in favor of dissemination.” Suggesting that his geographical distance gave him a clearer perspective, the Frenchman added candidly that when called upon to defend the moral superiority of America’s government among critical Europeans, he never quite knew how to counter this one charge: “This wide Blot on American Philant[h]ropy is ever thrown in My face when I indulge my Patriotism in Encomiums, otherwise Undisputable. To see that plague Cured, while I live, is Next to impossibility, But I would like, Before I die, to Be assured that progressive and earnest Measures Have Been adopted to attain, in due time, So desirable So necessary an object.” But again, Jefferson sought to convince his old friend that the spread of slavery west was not really about slavery; rather, he persisted, northern politicians had used “the trick of hypocrisy” to invent an issue while surreptitiously moving to consolidate the national government and destroy states’ rights and constitutional protections, “which must immediately generate monarchy.” In Jefferson’s troubled mind, “the people of the North went blindfold into the snare ... until they became sensible they were injuring instead of aiding the real interests of the slaves.”⁶³

Lafayette’s aide, Auguste Levasseur, remarked upon the “good appearance and gaiety” of the Monticello work force, but the visitors, as a group, were undeterred in their thorough condemnation of slavery. In preparing an address to be delivered at the banquet honoring Lafayette, Jefferson curiously altered one line as he went over his draft. Recalling the visiting general’s Revolutionary exploits, he changed the phrase “releasing us from foreign dominion” to “freeing us from foreign bondage.” Was this done with Lafayette’s sensibility in mind? Perhaps.⁶⁴

Not long after making the acquaintance of the Jefferson-Randolph clan, Fanny Wright wrote from Washington to her late hostess, Martha Randolph, that “the days passed at Monticello will ever be treasured up in my memory as in that of my sister as among the most interesting of our lives.” Afterward, as she headed west to demonstrate the extent of her commitment to social justice, she and Jefferson continued their conversation. Knowing “how deeply” her moral objective engaged his attention, she wished for him to evaluate the Nashoba plan, her personal crusade to defeat “that one great national evil” threatening “this proud citadel of human liberty.” She expressed concern that he might consider her “presumptuous,” but still she entreated him to authorize what she was already doing. The Memphis area settlement was an even bolder proposal than that of Edward Coles in 1814, which Jefferson had only lukewarmly cheered on.⁶⁵

Jefferson adopted an apologetic tone in his reply to the feminist adventurer. He opened by protesting that his health was “very low.” Her letter had found him too preoccupied with failing health—“at the age of 82. with one foot in the grave and the other uplifted to follow”—to address what he acknowledged had been “thro’ life” that enterprise for bettering the human condition which had caused him the “greatest anxieties.” Now housebound, he insisted that he was an “inefficient counselor, one scarcely able to think or to write.”

Nevertheless, he summoned as much liberality as he was able to muster at this stage of life: “The abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried.” Once again, while professing his own neutrality as a scientist, he returned to the style he had adopted in his Notes so many years before:

An opinion is hazarded by some, but proved by none, that moral urgencies are not sufficient to induce [the man of colour] to labor; that nothing can do this but physical coercion. But this is a solecism to suppose a race of animals created, without sufficient foresight and energy to preserve their own existence. ... We are not sufficiently acquainted with all the nations of Africa to say that there may not be some, in which habits of industry are established, and the arts practiced which are necessary to render life comfortable.⁶⁶

For the rest of the time that remained to him, Jefferson would be pricked by creative and morally assertive members of the next generation who expected a bit more of him than he was prepared to give. Edward Everett was more subtle and understanding of Jefferson’s views than some others. A noted Greek scholar and a new member of Congress from Massachusetts who had become a regular correspondent, Everett wrote in April 1826 that he was wrestling with the concept of consent: whether “the kind and merciful master, who feeds & clothes and from birth till death supports his slave, has not the right to his obedience, in a State of Society, where a General Emancipation is allowed to be impracticable.” He surmised that the comments Jefferson made in Notes on Virginia expressing sympathy for the plight of slaves could no longer be voiced in parts of the South.⁶⁷

The Ohioan James Heaton wrote the same week as Everett; he introduced himself thus: “a plain man, a native Virginian, an admirer of your character, who feels an interest in your fame.” Heaton hoped for a final testament in Jefferson’s hand, to be directed to a nation eager for moral guidance from him:

It has for many years been conjectured, that you would favor the world, at some period, with a political treatise, having for one object the abolition of slavery. If Heaven, in mercy to the blacks, and safety to the whites, and unfading honor to your already great name and fame, should so move you, to leave but one single page to that effect; many of your devoted friends, and political disciples firmly believe, it would have a more certain, calm, permanent, and irresistible effect than any, and all things, said, and written thereon.

Jefferson’s reply to the Ohioan was predictably weak: “A good cause is often injured more by ill-timed efforts of it’s friends than by the arguments of it’s enemies. ... The revolution in public opinion which this case requires, is not to be expected in a day, or perhaps in an age. But time, which outlives all things, will outlive this evil also.” On this one question, it appears, Jefferson met the expectations of too few of his contemporaries, just as he fails to measure up to the retrospective wishes of modern Americans.⁶⁸

At rustic Nashoba, Fanny Wright gave her all. “Her whole heart and soul were occupied by the hope of raising the African to the level of European intellect,” wrote the proper Englishwoman Frances Trollope, who was there at the end of 1827. Fanny was an eloquent speaker, her “rich and thrilling” voice an unexpected force at a time when women were ordinarily proscribed from public speaking. As time passed, the charismatic radical would draw crowds from Cincinnati to Boston.⁶⁹

Meanwhile, in France, Lafayette wrote Jefferson the last letter the Virginian would receive from him. Mentioning with pleasure the ongoing efforts of his young companion at Nashoba, the French nobleman once more prodded: “My dear Jefferson, the more I see, I Hear, I think, and I feel on the subject the greater Appears to me, for the white still more if possible than the Colored population of the Southern States, the importance and Urgency of Measures pointing towards the Gradual Emancipation of Slavery.” Lafayette could not have been clearer.⁷⁰

In one of the most revealing passages in Notes, Jefferson expressed his fear of “the extermination of the one or the other race.” He explained that when the “deep-rooted prejudices” held by whites came face-to-face with the “ten thousand recollections” held by viciously exploited blacks, it was—what word did Jefferson choose?—convulsions, that would provoke the catastrophic race war he foresaw sometime in America’s future, if a solution to the problem was not found. But what was it that triggered his use of “convulsions” here? His next thought informs us: color of the skin, color of the blood, color of the bile,“or some other secretion.” In this critically important discussion, he was drawn to consider bodily fluids, racial comparisons of beauty, and “mixtures [producing] expressions of every passion.”⁷³

The outwardly mild Jefferson’s inwardly pronounced emotions were again cast in the language of philosophical medicine. Coupling mind and body, he showed that he did not just believe blacks’ minds undeveloped, but their features unappealing and bodies defective. And he raised the uncomfortable notion that blacks would never warrant equality with whites in either political society or the private sphere. Because of their colored bodies. He was preoccupied with the physical body.

This tells us that if Sally Hemings became his sexual partner at some point during the decade after he wrote his Notes, and gave birth to his children, she must not have represented blackness (in his words “eternal monotony”) to Jefferson. When he chose to speculate on race, he was clear in his mind that “cleaning the issue of Negro blood,” as he put it, occurred when a quadroon (one-fourth black, like Sally) bore a white man’s child; and that the emancipation of slaves ought to be accompanied by a gradual but certain “deportation” beyond U.S. borders of those whose blood remained African.⁷⁴

Blood relations loomed large in the thinking of Jefferson’s generation, as in the potent reference to “consanguinity” in the Declaration of Independence:

Excerpt from Jefferson’s letter to attorney Francis Gray, March 4, 1815, explaining how Virginians understood the “cleaning,” or removal, of negro blood over the course of generations. Answering a query concerning the legal definition of “mulatto,” Jefferson determined that 3/16 black was no longer mulatto, indicating that Sally Hemings had produced, in his mind, white sons and daughters. “This does not reestablish freedom,” Jefferson went on to state. “But if e [a person with less than 1/4 ‘pure negro blood’] be emancipated, he becomes a free white man.” Library of Congress.

The British had somehow betrayed their consanguineous colonial bloodbrothers. Blood was easily spilled in war, and blood was easily “corrupted” through interracial sex; in both instances, blood symbolized power. As Michel Foucault has explained, modern thinking has substituted sex for blood (as the biological instrument of production) in symbolizing this kind of power. Sex became “the stamp of individuality” in the nineteenth century, as it marked “the life of the body and the life of the species.” Sex became more crucial to society’s measure of itself, and continues to be so, linked as it is to larger issues of health, vitality, and domination. But for Jefferson, the moral implications of sexual behavior were still less of a concern than the fantasy and symbolism of the bequest of blood.⁷⁵

It was Virginia’s law, as well, that made the problem of blood mixing so intractable. Boundaries separating the races in the South were supposed to be clearly demarcated, and all for the comfort of the ruling whites. The system was meant, at least in part, to maintain the “purity” of white women, that is, to keep them from intimate relations with nonwhites. At the same time, the nature of power in the South made it impossible to prevent white men—of varying social standing—from having sexual relations with black and mulatto women. Long before Jefferson pronounced on the issue, familiar stereotypes (race-specific biological determinism) rationalized white male reactive behavior: African women were endowed with an unusually passionate, sexually aggressive nature; African men were virile, potent, and dangerous. The expansion of free black communities in Virginia and elsewhere in the years following the Revolution only intensified perceptions of the threat to racial distinctiveness.⁷⁶

In Jefferson’s Virginia, enslaved women of varying shades found themselves the object of their masters’ lust, and many eventually consented, often in exchange for material or other benefits, to becoming a mistress or a concubine. But there were other, equally pervasive, reasons for white anxiety. Keeping white women “pure” proved elusive, if not impossible. The courts heard a great variety of cases relative to honor, virtue, and whiteness—cases of adultery across the color line: a white husband who found his wife in bed with a free man of color, a white wife who felt degraded when her husband treated his enslaved mistress and children as family members. Because of the frequency of these cases, laws prohibiting fornication and interracial marriage were categorical, and 17.6 percent of all divorces granted by Virginia’s legislature concerned adultery across the color line.⁷⁷

Perhaps the extent of sexual exploitation, like the persistence of racial prejudice, is to be read as an indictment of Jefferson, and of everyone else who knew as much as he knew about southern culture and let it go on. But it should be clear by now that this discussion is not intended to indict Jefferson alone, or above all. To protect the existing power structure and reduce anxiety, the courts litigated whiteness; Jefferson, fully understanding the law, insulated himself from this debate, as best as he could, on his mountain. There he imagined his freedom to be unbounded. Sally Hemings was a house servant, her social status and that of her brothers and sisters fixed, and her color, in this environment, in the eye of the beholder.

In purely genealogical terms, Sally Hemings was almost certainly, as is often noted, the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife. Patty Jefferson’s father, John Wayles, had taken Sally’s mother, Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, as his acknowledged mistress or unacknowledged concubine, after having outlived two white wives. Patty was born to Wayles and his first wife, Martha Eppes, in 1748; Sally was born to Wayles and the half-black, half-white Betty Hemings in 1773 and was nine, a prepubescent, when Patty died at Monticello. She was only months younger than Martha, the Jeffersons’ eldest. Sally Hemings was thirty years younger than Thomas Jefferson.

We can more or less deduce her skin tone. All the Hemingses were described, in memoirs and newspaper stories over the years, as variations of “near white.” The slave Isaac Jefferson, born at Monticello, referred to Sally as “mighty near white ... , very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” Her older brothers James and Robert he called “bright mulattos.” “Bright” meant light-skinned. Their mother, Betty, was also “bright mulatto.”⁷⁸

We have to ignore the northern satirists who, in 1802–1803, spoofed the sitting president. The dominant image of their bawdy songs about “Monticellian Sally” was the biracial slave’s essential blackness. “Black is love’s proper hue,” is how the cruelly imaginative versifier put words in Jefferson’s mouth. “Her skin is sable,” lips thick, and Jefferson will not be embarrassed though “My virgin daughters—see! they weep—Their mother’s place supply.” Part of the reason that history came to depict Sally Hemings in African tones was that the only publicity she received (after Callender’s initial report) was fictionalized. Jefferson’s emotion was construed in such a way as to mock him; to achieve their effect, antimiscegenation scandalmongers had to invent Sally’s color as well as her position as Jefferson’s substitute wife.⁷⁹

Did Jefferson imagine Sally Hemings as one-quarter black or three-quarters white, that is, “mighty near white,” as Isaac Jefferson remarked in his as-told-to memoir? Given Thomas Jefferson’s hygienically sensitive view of the body, the answer is, I contend, the latter. He put Sally Hemings’s racial traits in an entirely different category from those attributes (including “color of the blood ... or other secretion,” and “strong and disagreeable odor”) that sickened him in the Notes. This assumes, of course, that Jefferson’s stated aversion to blackness was what he really felt, and did not merely constitute a rhetorical argument designed for political purposes, or to convince the medically enlightened of Europe as to the scientific underpinnings of his thesis.⁸⁰

If we take him at his word, in this instance, and accept as fact that black skin repelled him, Sally Hemings was not a register of skin pigmentation but something else. She may have been “dusky” to the satirists who had never seen her, but to Jefferson, who had known her from her early years, she was anything but an anthropological stereotype. Her presence may have caused him to feel his own privilege, but it did not make him imagine Africa.

“turmoil of sensations”

Crude Assumptions

“a suspicion only”

Useless Iron

Lafayette’s Companion

The Importance of Skin