Jefferson's Secrets

We know enough about Jefferson’s worldview to state that his marriage to Patty, from January 1, 1772, to September 6, 1782, was a match made between social equals that was sustained by mutual commitment and real affection. His intimacy with educated and accomplished white women during his five years in Europe (most notably his “flirtation” with the Anglo-Italian painter Maria Cosway) may or may not have involved sexual relations. The veiled language he and his female correspondents used keeps us guessing. Most of these letters subsist on conventional warmth; a few hint at ardor. Before the DNA “solution,” there was as much to suggest sublimation and celibacy as sexual activity on Jefferson’s part.²

For Jefferson’s generation, women’s bodies were mysteriously formed and capable of dangerous disturbances. Female flesh, for this reason, was frequently used in exaggerated depictions of social upheaval and threats to civility (especially as drawn in caricature).³ The latent power associated with men’s sexual sensations was still to a large degree self-monitored. No external control arrested the activities of a man of Jefferson’s social status.

A moral man—such as the widower Jefferson was constructed—honored womanhood by burying sexual activity that threatened to complicate his relationship with his immediate family. His closest affections were meant to be reserved for them. Yet male desire was just as “real” to the people of his time and place as female self-control. So the bookish elder Jefferson, weighed down by a demanding schedule of intellectual work while writing to his learned friends around the world, presumably made it appear that he had had little time to develop emotional connections beyond those that bound him to his daughter and her children, his nephews and visiting cousins, and select young men of Albemarle County—the corps of protégés who were helping him establish the university. As far as this circle of friends and relatives could tell, he was the most physical when he exercised on horseback, a daily ritual he undertook after morning letter writing was behind him. He convinced his family that he was not a sexual being.

The published Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson captures the closeness of father and daughters and grandchildren—the Enlightenment family. The young ones made claims on his time. They were educated with tenderness; they studied hard; they enjoyed toys and pets, and read for pleasure, and felt indulged.⁴ Thomas Jefferson loved and honored that family with “pure affection,” as he said often. To Martha, in 1793, craving a retirement from the hostile politics inside George Washington’s cabinet, he expressed his intention to spend the rest of his days with her: “When I see you it will be never to part again.” In the months leading up to his final retirement, in 1808–1809, he signed off a letter to his eldest grandson with unusual solemnity: “God bless you, and prosper your pursuits.” And to Ellen, always with special sentiment: “To yourself I am all love.” Similarly, to Cornelia: “Kiss Ellen and all the children for me.”⁵

At this meaningful time in his life, the strength of family ties promoted health and well-being. Encouraged as his administration wound down, Martha wrote to her father, the president: “As the period of your labours draws near, My heart beats with inexpressible anxiety and impatience. Adieu again My ever Dear and honoured Parent. That the evening of your life may pass in serene and unclouded tranquility is the daily prayer ... [and] the dearest and most sacred duty of your devoted child.” After this, her father restated: “I look with infinite joy to the moment when I shall be ultimately moored in the midst of my affections.” He signed off, “My love to the children and most of all to yourself.”⁶

Given the custodial nature of the work she did, Sally Hemings had to be one of the most visible persons inside the walls of Monticello in all seasons, a servant who understood her role. This being so, she could never have risen to be Jefferson’s “substitute wife,” as the most hopeful egalitarians wish to believe. Wives are not instructed to masquerade as domestics. Though middle-class wives of this period performed tiring household chores, southern plantation wives had servants. Jefferson’s feelings toward Sally Hemings, no matter the duration of their physical intimacy, cannot be analogous to marital affection, first because of the work she did, and second, because Jefferson was not open about the relationship. There were eighteenth-century men who loved, had children with, and went on to marry their servants, but Jefferson does not belong in this category.

How Sally Hemings was dressed was only one of many visual status reminders dictating feelings of subordination. Presumably her time, as well as the space she occupied, was not her own. Jefferson appears not even to have taught her to read and write; otherwise Madison Hemings and his siblings would not have been compelled to “induce” (Madison’s characterization) Jefferson’s white grandchildren to impart these basic skills. If these factors demonstrate that Jefferson did not “love” Sally Hemings in the conventional sense, then what more plausibly might have been his feelings? The best available evidence suggests two things: If Jefferson was having sexual relations with his servant, they were undertaken to satisfy his personal appetite and, as a result of his medical conditioning, to preserve his health.

Some historians wish to credit Sally, even at a young age, with greater agency. As evidence, they cite Madison Hemings’s statement that his mother initially refused to return with Jefferson to Virginia, as he was preparing to leave France in 1789. “To induce her to do so,” he recounted, Jefferson “promised her extraordinary privileges.” These are not spelled out, other than the “treaty” by which Sally’s children would be freed at age twenty-one.

She and her older brother James, who was trained in Paris as a chef, knew that they could have successfully sued for their freedom in France, and that by returning to Virginia, they would remain, legally, enslaved. Jefferson’s motives in convincing James, twenty-four, and Sally, sixteen, to return with him are unclear: Whose welfare did he have in mind? James was an accomplished cook and would prepare his brother Peter to succeed him in Monticello’s kitchen. Offering him a regular salary, Jefferson found a way to retain James until 1796—just months after Sally bore her first (recorded) child—which means that James saw fit to wait a good number of years, until after this momentous event, before earning his freedom.⁸

Sally did not negotiate her freedom at any time. At sixteen, and having lived in France as maidservant to the Jefferson daughters for only eighteen months, it was already a considerable coup to exact Jefferson’s promise to allow the children they might have together to enjoy independent adult lives. What other tangible reward did she obtain? She did only light work, and may have held a special place in the hearts of the white grandchildren who helped Madison and his siblings become literate. But in the end, there was no place for her in the Monticello economy other than as a maidservant. Jefferson does not mention her in any extant letters to his daughter Martha—if he did, or if he wrote to Sally directly, these letters were all destroyed. Nothing in evidence even remotely suggests Jefferson’s warmth toward her. He evidently got what he wanted at little cost to his comfort when he “negotiated” with James and Sally in Paris—he retained their continued services.

He apparently was not given to explain his action, either. He was protected by his daughter Martha, who had to have recoiled whenever her father the president was attacked in the press. His grandchildren, too, persisted in denying the possibility of an alternate family. Either they refused to face the Hemingses’ truth or they could not imagine the reality of it. But Martha, who knew Sally Hemings from birth and remained in close contact, had to know who the father or fathers of her several children were.⁹ (“Father” makes more sense than “fathers”: As Madison Hemings testified, his mother informed him that Jefferson did not have children with any other woman he owned.) As an adept household manager, Martha would have been a person devoid of curiosity had she not possessed the answer to the paternity question.¹⁰

Now let us discuss the factors governing Jefferson’s behavior. We know that he labored for the sustenance and the success of family members, and denied himself comparable feelings of emotional attachment to Sally Hemings and her children. In accepting that he did not transcend his historical moment, we must explain his relative lack of affection for the Hemingses according to cultural assumptions as unfamiliar to us as his recurrence to a vocabulary drawn from eighteenth-century neurophysiology. Without giving them his name, he took care of Sally’s children in his own way, and thought it sufficient. In anticipating their emancipation after his death, he gave no more of himself than it took to provide for their general comfort and independence.

It rarely happens that a girl reaches the age of puberty, without soon acquiring such intelligence as is capable of leading her to the means of penetrating into the mysteries of love. Her imagination induces her to improve every occasion of gratifying her curiosity ... and in the end [she] becomes a victim to the fierceness of desire.

Treating sexual knowledge among young women as a poison, Bienville added that girls were routinely corrupted by servants or “false friends.”¹² It was for this reason that the medical literature in Jefferson’s library (as well as the works of novelists such as Maria Edgeworth) recommended attempts to monitor and restrain female sexuality: If elite women had the presence of mind to ward off sexual thoughts, they could preserve their virtue until marriage, and then enter the maternal stage of life. As Dr. Rush adjudged, women could capitalize on their nature-given “delicacy and modesty,” which made them more keenly aware, instinctively, of the “dishonor” caused by “want of chastity.”¹³

The sexual fidelity of wives insured predictability of descent and inheritance. On the other hand, lower-class women had less space in which to display modesty—it was less expected—and their bastard children did not as automatically upset society. In the words of one analyst of the sexual order, “What needed to be suppressed was fertility and poverty, not sexuality.” This is key to our understanding.¹⁴

Jefferson the Francophile was exposed to flexible French notions in matters of sex, though for some time historians have assumed he was not entirely pleased by them (that is, if we confine our evidence to his pose in letters from France during the 1780s). Yet we already know that when he formed ideas and shaped language he based many of his conclusions on a medical sensibility; so why should his sexual imagination have profited any less from that sensibility? Medical theorists, though for the most part clinically ineffective, studied every conceivable human disease and nervous condition. They cared about melancholy, psychosomatic manifestations, and excess eroticism as much as they cared about smallpox, gout, and consumption. Despite (or perhaps because of) people’s vulnerability to mortal diseases, families heeded medical reports with the same diligence as people do today.

Sexual curiosity is certainly not a new phenomenon. Though we do not know the actual extent to which Jefferson was influenced by those who wrote about sexual energy and (for lack of a better term) the aesthetic involved in selecting a sexual partner, we know enough to pay attention to something else: “the nervous origins of imagination” (a definitive phrase of his time). That imagination was either “healthy” or “diseased,” of course, and well-read individuals such as Jefferson found in the works of Dr. Tissot, and those of Tissot’s school of thought, descriptions of people of their social class whose energies were drained by some combination of poor diet, sedentary habits, external environment, and physiological defect. Middle age was a time of anxious prevention, and standard advice books might recommend, for example, that “there is nothing in the world more refreshing to those that are bilious than the caresses of women.”¹⁵

As a reader of medical treatises who corresponded frequently with medical professionals, Jefferson would be familiar with the role of sex in maintaining a healthy balance to the body’s internal forces. Sex was seen much as diet was, part of a regimen of self-control, and important to understand if one was to enjoy a productive life. Sexual intercourse was good if practiced in moderation, bad if abstained from completely or experienced too frequently. Alternately known, in Dr. Tissot’s works, as “the genital liquor,” “the Essential Oil,” and “most perfect and important of all the animal liquors,” semen was thought to support one’s nervous constitution. The suddenness of ejaculation—the loss of this vital fluid at a moment of excitement—caused a change within that required replenishment. For this reason, too, masturbation (“onanism,” as it was known), or immoderate sexual activity, weakened the nerves over time and led to melancholy.¹⁶

Jefferson’s taking of Sally Hemings as a concubine would have offered him a nearby sexual outlet, fulfilling Tissot’s urgent call for accomplished, intellectual men to forego the wasteful activity of masturbation. The Swiss physician even asserted—allowing Jefferson to justify further the correctness of his course—that spermatic fluid was as healthy for the female who received it as it was unhealthy for the man who wasted it through masturbation. His servant’s exclusive attention to him would also have protected him against venereal disease, which was then quite prevalent. Thus, their monogamy did not have to represent a loving commitment, but rather her implicit agreement to safeguard his sexual health. If this picture is accurate, Jefferson would have been able to resist having intimate contact with married women after his return from Europe in 1790, which attraction had been “an issue” for him in France in the 1780s, and in Virginia in the 1760s, before his marriage.¹⁷

Lust may be absent from Jefferson’s preserved correspondence, and confined largely to literary satire and the suitably serious medical treatises he owned and read, but as a post-Revolutionary widower seeking to avoid the melancholy and attendant ills that the medical theorists projected, he unquestionably understood the options available to him outside of remarriage. It is reasonable to think that Jefferson took care to locate a solution to his sexual idleness through forms of exercise and comfort. We know that he regularly followed the dictates of philosophic medicine when he limited his consumption of meat and alcohol.

Let us, then, adjust our expectations from Jefferson to coincide with the mental processes common to sexually active intellectuals of his day. If he accepted that the sedentary life was destructive of health, and that all seminal emission was, as Tissot described, “a very violent action, which borders upon convulsion, and which thereby surprisingly weakens, and prejudices the whole nervous system,” he would also have seen masturbation as the most “pernicious,” as well as embarrassing, form of sexual gratification. In contrast, sex with a healthy and attractive female was productive of “joy,” which “aids digestion, animates circulation,” and “restores strength.” It seems pertinent to add that Sally Hemings was considered physically attractive, and Tissot and his colleagues judged that sexual relations with a beautiful woman did not “exhaust so much as with an ugly woman.”¹⁸

The Jefferson-Hemings puzzle may boil down to something quite conventional. Assuming that Jefferson was persuaded by the respected physiologists whose work he owned, he would have looked upon his servant much as an English aristocrat who sought pleasure with a young, fertile, white, technically free but utterly dependent servant in his household. Power, in both situations, was very real. Sally’s condition of servitude relative to other slaves, like that of all the Hemings family generally, was mitigated by light skin and the genetic connection to Jefferson’s father-in-law. But only a tabloid fascination with amorous drama should lead us to conceive of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship as a great love story, long hidden from the general public and now suddenly revealed by forensic detectives.¹⁹

There was a significant amount of sexual experimentation by well-to-do men in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, apart from prostitution. In England especially, maidservants were subject to the advances of men much older than themselves; when these women became pregnant, so long as their bastard children were properly cared for, the morals of the unacknowledged fathers were not publicly questioned. Sterne, the young Jefferson’s favorite author, constantly taunted his readers with sexual innuendo, and concludes A Sentimental Journey with a famous nonending, in which sex may or may not be the result of a fortuitous encounter with a maidservant, in a shared bedroom, in total darkness: “So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s—”²⁰

Though he frowned on prostitution and extramarital sex that was flaunted, Jefferson did not, in his ample correspondence, construe liaisons that were kept discreet as morally objectionable. For him, everything seemed to hinge on discretion. In the society in which he traveled, well-bred women who were not taken unfair advantage of were fair game. Admittedly, we know less of how he felt about socially unequal pairings.

We do know, at least, that the female body was constructed as an inferior body. It was easily stimulated and sexualized. “Normal” femininity was, in essence, victimhood, and “normal” masculinity, if not tempered by conscience, was marked by sexual aggressiveness. Plots in literature featured young girls away from home and without their parents’ guiding influence, helpless before the empty promises of deceitful men who taunted them with the prospect of stability. In these tales, and in the minds of men in need of sex, sexual and economic vulnerability were joined. The poor were dependent, and sex was typically negotiated.²¹

This, then, is really a story about sexual urges and the treatment of the unacknowledged children of secret unions. We must cast the net wide if we are to encompass the boundaries of sexual knowledge in Jefferson’s America. The United States, even in its early years, was part of an interconnected world. Patriotic writers and orators declared America’s uniqueness and moral superiority and were slow to acknowledge what the country borrowed from other cultures. But their newspapers and the legal training that elite men received say otherwise. Educated Americans knew, for instance, that in England, a bastard was a bastard for life, and that the common law was generally meant to protect traditions of inheritance. But in colonial Latin America (including Florida and Louisiana) at the end of the eighteenth century, legitimacy and illegitimacy, and racial definitions themselves, were fairly fluid.

For political as well as commercial reasons, Americans, especially in the South, were intensely interested in what was occurring in the Spanish possessions on their doorstep. There, individuals could be known as illegitimate in private (privado) and at the same time considered legitimate in public (publico); women could be privately pregnant and publicly virgins. There, too, Africans brought over in chains were living free in proportionately greater numbers than in Jefferson’s Virginia; and the native population, long in decline, was beginning to reestablish itself. Spanish-Indian unions produced what were described as “totally white” offspring, though they were not permitted to be called “Spanish” until the fourth generation. These racial permutations demanded that government adopt a flexible approach to the granting of gracias al sacar, or decrees of legitimation.

Hispanic Americans did not adhere to the taboos of their northern neighbors. Birth status was not indelible. Illegitimate offspring could claim honor, recognition, and political standing if publicly acknowledged by their elite birth parent, and even a bastard who was not accorded public recognition might enjoy the free exhibition of affection by the elite parent without that parent’s being made to feel morally suspect. Widowers frequently produced illegitimate offspring, and notably with mixed-race women. By the end of the eighteenth century, mobility for the racially mixed was made legally easier, though the purchase price for “whiteness” rose.

Thus color mattered in colonial Latin America, but it bore less emotional weight than civic condition. A popular saying, “Rather the mistress of a white man than the wife of a negro,” indicated a desire to lighten the next generation. But “passing,” in the Latin American sense, was not strictly a matter of looking “white enough” to cross into white society; it was more about attaining public acceptance—honor.²²

Did Americans completely reject these “foreign” qualities? The common term for a person of mixed race in Virginia was a Spanish word, mulatto. And, of course, the importance of honor that prevailed in Hispanic America was not lost on the South.²³ Jefferson’s culture was not in all ways as insular as later, dreamier depictions of the South suggest, nor were the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries precisely as virtue-bound as authorized publications and mainstream fiction proclaimed.

Public reputation built up over many years of service must have made it not just possible but extremely tempting for a gentleman with sexual secrets to walk that fine line between ignoring evidence others saw and actively managing an ever-expanding lie. Jefferson’s rural circumstances made it possible for him to suppose that his private world could be protected. Gentlemen—even his northern visitors—would have considered it in bad taste to publicize, let alone eroticize, what they may have suspected was going on between Jefferson and his house servant. That is how James Callender’s onetime collaborator could write in 1824 of his falling out with the discredited columnist who had resorted to “unwarrantable indiscretions” begun amid “paroxysms of inebriety.” Dr. Dunglison refused to give the Sally Hemings story credence. Straight-laced John Adams shook his head over the extent of interracial sex on southern plantations, but reportedly did not believe Callender’s charge, either.²⁴ And the vulgar Callender never visited Monticello to see with his own eyes. Jefferson was protected, though not, of course, completely protected. The rumors were “out there.”

In this respect, Jefferson’s Greek studies may provide further clues to his sexual imagination. In a pathbreaking book, Thomas Jefferson, American Humanist, written more than a half-century ago, Karl Lehmann explored the power that Greek literature and philosophy held over its greatest early American devotee. The teacher with the most influence over young Jefferson, lawyer-humanist George Wythe, shared his lifelong adoration of the Greek language. And when he was finally able to devote less time to political matters, Jefferson read in Greek throughout his retirement: Homer, Plato (whose work he openly disparaged), the biographer Diogenes Laertius, the playwright Euripides, a host of lyric poets. He studied the teachings of Jesus in Greek. Over and over, he recommended Xenophon, whose Memorabilia contained, he said, the only “genuine” account of Socrates. That text happened also to stress men’s physical conditioning and natural desires, along with character of mind: “When he was asked what he thought was the best occupation for a man [Socrates] replied, ‘Effective action.’”²⁶

The Greeks understood intellectual freedom in a way that had never ceased to impress Jefferson. They wrote of human beings in a world of trial and setbacks, who somehow rose above; they taught a man his proper temperament. In Jefferson’s time, because of how the Greeks contested fate, and the Romans described republican simplicity, men invoked the lessons of antiquity to bolster their authority in an argument, or to display their philosophical enthusiasm, or to reinforce their virility in a written performance. For those who moved in Jefferson’s intellectual circle, self-confidence, authenticity, moral assertiveness, and taste all had classical definitions. Here, too, Jefferson found candor and truth telling. Lehmann wrote that Jefferson saw the Greeks “driven by a spontaneous, deep-rooted emotional belief in the perfectibility of man.”²⁷

I think myself more indebted to my father for this, than for all the other luxuries his cares and affections have placed within my reach: and more now than when younger, and more susceptible of delights from other sources. When the decays of age have enfeebled the useful energies of the mind, the classic pages fill up the vacuum of ennui, and become sweet composers to that rest of the grave into which we are all, sooner or later, to descend.²⁸

In the same letter, Jefferson spoke with a kind of nostalgia for Greek, that “finest of human languages.” He viewed his late years’ reading as part of a search, the guiding spirit in a final journey to the grave. (His almost maudlin tone in the letter accompanies a rare mention of his father, who died when Jefferson was only fourteen.) Rejoicing to find a correspondent sharing in his enthusiasm for the recovery of something so tenuous as the “antient pronunciation” of Greek, Jefferson exhibited a fervor he was never ashamed to own up to. He praised “the Luxury of reading the Greek & Roman authors in all the beauties of their originals.” Latin he read devotedly, but the “remains” of Greek were his measure of beauty.

Allowing for a certain hyperbole as part of his epistolary art, Jefferson could hardly discuss ancient Greece without being sentimental. Offering tribute to the sensuous Greeks was one of the ways he reached out to elite women. When he wrote to Maria Cosway, he likened himself to Aeneas, and described his European travel as “a peep into Elysium.” As Lehmann emphasized, Jefferson adored Greek as the source of greatness in poetry. Its elegance and richness of sound, its seductive euphony, never ceased to draw him in.²⁹

He composed his wife’s epitaph in Greek. He sealed their life together with a quote from Homer’s Iliad, pronouncing that their flame of friendship would “burn on through death.”³⁰ To the Greeks, as he fully knew, marriage came with conjugal responsibilities. The wife was meant to bear a man’s “legitimate” children and to remain faithful. But marriage did not restrict a man sexually to one woman. (This is not to suggest that Jefferson was unfaithful to his wife during their ten-year marriage.) In words attributed to Demosthenes, concubines were kept “for the daily care of our persons.” Men were reared to exercise command over their selves and their land, to train their bodies, and to exhibit a hospitable spirit toward the citizens of the region. It all sounds very Jeffersonian. Women, given bodies less resistant to the elements, were to contribute to the household economy from within; men concentrated their energies on the outdoors. Men took risks and expended, domesticated women received and preserved what men created. That was the governing balance initiated by the Greeks.

Did Jefferson, without a wife, make adjustments, in more or less the Greek mode, when he reconstituted his life at Monticello in the 1790s, after returning with his two daughters, and Sally Hemings, from his five years in Europe? According to Xenophon’s Œconomicus, the husband was duty-bound to uphold the preeminence of the wife, as Jefferson did, even after Patty’s death, in symbolically retaining her deathbed adieu and a lock of her hair to remind him of his commitment. Madison Hemings refers to his mother quite plainly as Jefferson’s “concubine.” Sally Hemings, if this is true, did nothing to challenge the Greek marital order.

The Greeks prided themselves on raising girls to be chaste and sheltered, protected from the male gaze, yet their writers and artists avowed sex to be a frolicking entertainment for well-to-do men. Masturbation, erections, and a variety of sexual acts, heterosexual and homosexual, were made light of openly. But even as lust was acknowledged, it was not anarchically embraced: The Greeks had rules governing their sexuality. For one, prostitution gave their men a sexual outlet other than adulterous relationships with other men’s wives (which might be punished by death). Houses of prostitution were regulated by committee, set fees established, and taxes paid by brothel owners. The prostitutes themselves were slaves.³¹

In brothels depicted on Greek vases, unengaged sex workers are shown immersed in domestic production. Sally Hemings sewed at Monticello, and housebound Greek sex workers spun wool, because their owners did not wish them to remain idle and unproductive as they awaited their assignations. (The difference, of course, is that Sally Hemings appears to have had only the singular sexual obligation of accommodating her master on occasion.) The common denominator is that domestic labor meant restriction, and sex was potentially just another chore for the unfree.

It is critical to remember that the “treaty” of Paris between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, as Madison Hemings termed it, was a treaty of sexual commerce: Jefferson promised lenient, indulgent treatment in return for sexual favors. Surely, if Jefferson’s biracial son thought that his parents’ relationship had a love component, he would have used words other than “treaty” and “concubine” to describe it. Indeed, there was no pretense of love in Madison’s statement, no declaration of love when Jefferson asked Sally Hemings to return, with her brother the chef, to Virginia.³²

In ancient Greece, what apparently intrigued men of ordinary privilege was not so much the thought of a wife’s propriety and virtue but the vision of an available sex object, sitting at the spinning wheel. In search of gratification and amusement, they wandered across class lines. The same kind of temptation existed for young Virginian males. On the other hand, we must note that though extramarital sex was undisguised, success in resisting its attraction was also an attribute of the ideal Greek male.³³

Equally important for our consideration, men in Greek culture were taught not to consider women as their moral equals. Rather, women were a kind of property, and marriage a transfer of goods from one family to another. Female infanticide was not unknown. The Greeks also supposed, as the eighteenth-century did, that women, though “weaker,” possessed a kind of mystique. Women were believed to reap greater pleasure from sex than men were able to; they were seen as slaves of their desire. Oversexed wives were to be feared. For reasons related to these prejudices, Aristotle wrote: “Young women are more wanton, once they have experience with sex.” He recommended that men marry, at thirty-seven, to women of eighteen.³⁴

Jefferson knew of Greek life in all its detail. He admired the Greeks better perhaps than did anyone else of his time and place. Of course, he did not abandon his own culture to live like an ancient Greek, but he justified his political and religious doctrines by referring to Athenian values. So it is not unthinkable that the Greeks gave some shape to his unrevealed sexual views as well.

In the Greek mode, concubinage was an understandable action on the part of a widower, though statistically a concubine was more often an enslaved woman purchased by a man who was not yet married. Yet Aristotle himself was a prominent example of a widower with a concubine, Herpyllis. She bore him a boy and a girl, all three of whom were named in his will; Herpyllis was therein praised by Aristotle for the “steady affection” she gave him, and was permitted to marry after his death “if she desire[d].” Among the Greeks, a concubine who was kept for the production of free children was thought to be assuming a positive social role. Might Jefferson have felt the same, given that so many of his peers looked eagerly to antiquity for masculine models?³⁵

Bastardy (notheia) was well documented in ancient Greece. Children conceived outside of wedlock, whether through adultery, concubinage, or by unmarried couples, were not entitled to citizenship, unless as children of concubines their fathers treated them as members of the household (oikos), which meant qualitatively more than merely living on the father’s property. It involved a ritual of acceptance.³⁶

The implication regarding the emotionally excluded children of Sally Hemings is obvious. Jefferson had no intention of going public with regard to the Hemings children. The bastard child of a Greek man and his concubine did not receive his patronym; the Hemingses similarly retained their mother’s surname, although Eston took the name “Jefferson” years after Jefferson’s death. At the same time, a nothos (bastard), under Solon’s law, though the son of a man and his long-time concubine, had no obligation to his father; so in all respects, the bond between the two was of little consequence. When Beverley and Harriet Hemings left Monticello in 1822 and melted into white society, they apparently stopped communicating with the white Jeffersons.³⁷

Jefferson was a persistent stylist of language, a neologist and etymologist. It was Socrates who first imagined the connection between language, nature, and the body, noting that anthropôs (man) was derived from a phrase indicating upright posture.³⁸ Jefferson’s exactness, his studies of historical authenticity, his love of architecture, are all Greek qualities. His avid interest in acquiring fine wines, balancing elements of a moderate, healthy diet with exquisite taste and exceptional variety (he grew thirty-nine types of peas), suggests that food was more than necessity; it seduced his palate.

“I too am an Epicurean,” he wrote in 1819 to William Short. “I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing every thing rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.”³⁹ Epicureanism was not about selfish pleasure seeking, though it was (and still is) often so presented. Dr. Tissot wrote, meaningfully: “Epicurus, that respectable man, who knew better than any one that man could be happy only by pleasure, but who at the same time limited this pleasure by such a rule as a Christian hero would not disapprove of ... has been shockingly distorted and blackened.” The way of Epicurus was unobtrusive living, cultivation of friendship, and a total dismissal of those superstitious beliefs that mystified instead of enlightening the human mind. As he was described by Diogenes Laertius, Epicurus retired to a garden outside Athens and entertained guests in a democratic fashion.⁴⁰

Epicurus preceded Jefferson in onceptualizing happiness in terms of sensations. Reason itself was responsive to sensation (aisthesis) and feeling (pathé), which led to a cultivated serenity and peace of mind (“tranquil permanent felicity”). In simple terms, sensation helped human beings appreciate the art of living. Among the Greeks, Epicurus was the philosopher most concerned with human emotions and unconscious motivations, and the social implications of these things. The Epicurean was, meaningfully for us, a diagnostician, immersed in the pursuit of bodily health and removal of bodily pain. Indeed, Epicurus charged: “Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated.”⁴¹

Epicurus was not, however, an advocate of free love. Most of what he wrote on human sexuality was lost, and what remains clearly shows that he privileged the pleasure in friendship over the pleasure in sexual contact. He was concerned, too, lest passion remove peace of mind; the simpler the enjoyment of life, the better. Withdrawal from public competition—so critical a component of Jefferson’s retirement persona—was one step in that direction.⁴²

Whether it was Epicurus, Aristotle, or a composite of philosophers and trained physicians, ancient and modern, who spoke most convincingly to Jefferson in his concern with human desires, the Greek example regarding concubinage, bastardy, and the oikos may have helped persuade him to separate emotionally from Sally Hemings’s children. But the principal appeal of Epicureanism was something greater: the ennobling of sensual pleasures, of right passions, and the notion that inner peace was attained through enjoyment of the world rather than an ascetic withdrawal from it. (Withdrawal from public competition was not the same as ascetic withdrawal.)

As a lawgiver, philosophically inclined, Jefferson must not for a moment have doubted the propriety of his sex life (whatever it was) on the mountaintop. His anxieties were not the same as ours. As a lawgiver, too, he had interests that related to sex and procreation, but which appear obscure to us. In ancient Greece and in Jefferson’s Virginia, the legal code was primarily concerned with the protection of bloodlines, for fear of social disorder. As we shall soon see, this fact of early American society and economy could not but have been on Jefferson’s mind when he gave his love to his white children and grandchildren, and did only his honorable duty with respect to the Hemingses.

A few weeks later, the New Englander followed up with a deeper reading of Theognis, asking: “Now, my Friend, who are the άριστοι [aristocrats]? Philosophy may Answer ‘The Wise and Good.’ But the World, Mankind, have by their practice always answered, ‘the rich the beautiful and well born.’ And Philosophers themselves in marrying their Children prefer the rich the handsome and the well descended to the wise and good.”⁴⁴

Adams was not delving into sex here, but in his response Jefferson did. He had already written Adams that in his view aristocracy was an ingredient in an unstable political stew: “The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro’ all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the άριστοι should prevail, were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions.” But the “convulsions” he now had in mind were not strictly political:

The passage you quote from Theognis, I think has an ethical rather than a political object. The whole piece is a moral exhortation, ... a reproof to man, who, while with his domestic animals he is curious to improve the race by employing always the finest male, pays no attention to the improvement of his own race, but intermarries with the vicious, the ugly, or the old, for considerations of wealth or ambition.⁴⁵

To Jefferson, social chaos was abetted by undesirable (but seemingly inevitable) pairings. Human nature had to be accommodated. He saw in Theognis that erotic sensations predominated: The recklessness of the human spirit was manifest in an unpredictable world governed by men whose aims were not always clear but whose responsiveness to the ambiguous god Eros was.⁴⁶

Jefferson went deeper into his Greek to advance the ethic laid down by Theognis. He translated from the little known Pythagorean philosopher Ocellus Lucanus⁴⁷ that “interprocreation” ought to be done according to right principles: “We do not commix for the sake of pleasure, but of the procreation of children. For the powers, the organs and desires for coition have not been given by god to man for the sake of pleasure, but for the procreation of the race.” Was the desire to procreate how he characterized his own intent in having sex with his concubine? It is hard to tell, because Jefferson’s next words undercut that suggestion: Nature, “not trusting to this moral and abstract motive, seems to have provided more securely for the perpetuation of the species by making it the effect of the oestrum [continual state of sexual excitability]⁴⁸ implanted in the constitution of both sexes.” Lustful sex, he is saying, rules human behavior whether we like it or not.

Let us also underscore what Jefferson, stating his facts with detachment, is conceding: He is (or, at least, affects being) unconcerned that his society will become dangerously corrupted as the result of a natural process of degeneration. He has answered Adams’s appeal to Theognis with his certainty that “the commerce of love,” an “unhallowed impulse,” cannot be resisted. Sex happens. The privileged in society may persist in orchestrating reproduction in line with their selfish preferences; but even so, neither “healthiness” nor “virtue” ultimately matters in human breeding practices.

Nor does Jefferson show surprise that this should be so. “Natural” sex comes guilt-free in a male-dominated, Greek-influenced culture. The male seed is allpowerful. In his discussion of Epicurean pleasure, Dr. Tissot wrote that Epicurus “looked upon the seed as part of the soul and body.” There was no guilt here, for the Greeks or for Thomas Jefferson.⁴⁹

Jefferson is untroubled that the procreative fantasies of Theognis and Ocellus remained unfulfilled. It would be naïve to expect men and women to approach sex rationally. This was the way the world had always been and, he presumed, the way the world would always be. Theognis wished to breed the best male with the best females of the “Haram” so as to “produce a race of veritable άριστοι.” Jefferson agrees in theory, because according to his eugenic science, “the moral and physical qualities of man” are passed on “in a certain degree” from father to son. But he is also guided by nature as he understands it, and nature is defined by the ungovernable inclinations of human attraction that would never allow Theognis’s ideal to be realized; and so, Jefferson concludes, it is necessary to “continue acquiescence” to the degeneration of the race that so long ago troubled Theognis, “and to content ourselves with the accidental aristoi produced by the fortuitous concourse of breeders.”⁵⁰

His procreative activity with Sally Hemings tells us that Jefferson was “content” with the “fortuitous” result of his private sexual behavior. To answer the puzzling question of how he could have fathered two children with his concubine after the Callender revelations, we can suggest that he did so, in part, because he saw nothing immoral in following nature. In addition, he presumed he would be able to return in his postpresidential years to the splendid seclusion he had enjoyed on his mountain before Callender. No doubt Jefferson had feelings for Sally Hemings, but these were not so deep that he was prompted to im-prove her social position. Many modern Americans want to reject this idea and instead be persuaded that Jefferson and Hemings loved one another—they do so because the Greek model (or the Latin American model) accepts sexuality beyond marriage and gives institutional form to a kind of procreation that our society has taught us to find distasteful.

Excerpt from letter of Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, on a man’s natural inclination to mate with someone other than his socially ideal partner. Referencing the Greek poet Theognis, Jefferson acquiesced, under the principle of “degeneration of the race of men,” to “the fortuitous concourse of breeders.” Library of Congress.

Jefferson visited Marseilles once, in 1787, and was entertained by Cathalan, his wife, and grown daughter. The American minister agreed to send a copy of his then newly published Notes on Virginia.⁵¹ Though the two men did not see one another after Jefferson’s departure from France, over the years they carried on a rather considerable—and rather comfortable—correspondence relating mainly to commercial matters. Jefferson, who continued to purchase French wine through the able consul, professed a warm regard for the Frenchman. In Jefferson’s view, Cathalan had always discharged his professional obligations honorably.

In 1817, however, toward the end of his career, Cathalan’s reputation came under a dark cloud. His morals were called into question by an American named Fitch, who was living in France and who, in Jefferson’s well-chosen words, “began to gape after his office.” Rumors that focused on an alleged sexual indiscretion reached the U.S. ambassador in Paris, and were then conveyed to President James Monroe. Monroe consulted Jefferson, not wishing to remove Cathalan unless the former president concurred that removal was warranted.

Letters sailed across the Atlantic for months. Monroe was troubled by statements that “impute to him a scandalous life, as to women.” Jefferson investigated the charges and determined them to be mere “insinuations,” “loose and general, ... no fact being specified which can be laid hold of and brought to the test of proof.” He addressed the moral question in plain terms, learning about Cathalan’s domestic situation while comparing American with French views on the subject:

The charge of passion for women is a very equivocal one in that country. After the loss of his wife, his only daughter & her husband continued to live with him till 2. or 3. years ago, when he married a 2d wife.... It is possible that, before his 2d marriage, he may have indulged himself with women: perhaps, since that, he may not have withstood the gallantries of the country. Of this I know nothing. But you know how little is thought of it there, while to Americans generally, it does appear scandalous; and especially, may be with the commentaries, the exaggerations, and industrious circulation of matter by his friend mr Fitch. I do not think however the wisdom of our government will add to it’s other cares that of making themselves guardians of the chastity of all their officers, at home and abroad; or of erecting themselves into a court Christian, to take cognizance of the amours imputed to them truly or falsely. Rumors of this kind may furnish sufficient cause for refusing an office; but to take it away requires, in the forum of justice, particular specifications, proof, defence&asubstantial corpus delecti.⁵²

It is necessary to quote at length, because several issues are being addressed, and a complete context is helpful. First, the Cathalan matter arose a good many years after Jefferson’s private life was made the subject of political lampoon; we cannot know for certain just how sensitized he had become as a result of that scandal. It is worth noting that a few years before the Sally Hemings allegations, James Madison had shared his glee with Jefferson over Alexander Hamilton’s “ingenious folly”—a public confession to “an irregular and indelicate amour.” Their Federalist adversary, while married, had seen fit to admit to an affair with another man’s wife. He published a long and convoluted pamphlet in which he asserted his public morality and declared that he had used his own funds—not the government’s—in paying hush money to the offended husband. In that instance, Madison had written: “Next to the error of publishing at all, is that of forgetting that simplicity and candour are the only dress which prudence would put on innocence.”⁵³ Jefferson makes clear in his letter to President Monroe (concerning Cathalan) that the sexual activities of a public official, as a rule, are best spoken of quietly and not raised as a political issue.

Second, Jefferson is able to relate to Cathalan’s situation as a widower. During the period between his marriages, the consul had quite possibly taken advantage of the less restrictive ways of French society and, to use Jefferson’s phrase, “indulged himself.” Jefferson understands temptation. He also understands that masculine behavior is culturally influenced. As much as interracial sex occurred routinely on Virginia plantations, and among free blacks and whites throughout the South in spite of legal and moral strictures, Cathalan “may not have withstood” French “gallantries.”

Third, Jefferson is exhibiting impatience with the aggressive judgments of a certain breed of American—holier than thou, one might say, given Jefferson’s reference to “a court Christian” that some would establish in order to “take cognizance of” alleged sexual transgressions. In writing to Monroe in 1818, he adopts a very different posture from that of the mid-1780s when, in France, the widower Jefferson cautioned young men against coming to Europe and losing that certain moral purity he attributed to American tastes and conditions. Jefferson had invented a generic traveler for his purpose: “He is led by the strongest of all the human passions into a spirit for female intrigue destructive of his own and others happiness, or a passion for whores destructive of his health.”⁵⁴ Jefferson in retirement writes rather differently. He shows no sign of wishing to judge other men’s sexual mores when no one is being hurt.

His recommendation to President Monroe is meant to convey discretion. It is a reasoned allegiance stopping just short of blind loyalty to his old friend Cathalan. Do not court fate by appointing a man with a questionable history to a consular post, he advises the president, but neither should the government take on the role of moral policeman. Sex that takes place in private is not the public’s business.⁵⁵ In the end, Jefferson was happy to inform Cathalan: “You are safe in your office during my life, & the continuance of the present administration, if you chuse to hold it.” Cathalan died a short time later.

The Cathalan scandal, minor in the scheme of things, was kept from the American public. As it was, personal attacks, intentional insults, and politically charged rumors never came as a surprise to the ex-president. Jefferson had been forced to endure them time and again, which explains his readiness to respond to the accusation against Cathalan. When the miscegenation charge initiated by Callender made the rounds in 1802–1803, Jefferson had done his best to ignore it. More personal mockery than political challenge, it eventually disappeared from the press. But Jefferson’s refusal to address an inquiry into his sex life does not mean his family completely escaped the hurt of it.

Once again, granddaughter Ellen serves as a guide to the emotional life of her grandfather in his retirement years. She takes us into the world of Monticello, this time by raising additional possibilities and concerns with respect to the Jefferson-Hemings issue. Ellen had a personal maid named Sally from 1809 to 1825. She may have been Sally Hemings’s niece or she may have been a slave belonging to the household of Ellen’s father—we do not know for certain. Ellen’s extraordinary comments about Sally belong, at any rate, to the ongoing debate over who knew what, or more particularly, who hid what.

Over the years many have asked why Jefferson, in his will, freed the two Hemings children who remained at Monticello, Madison and Eston, and did not free their mother. At her age, Sally Hemings’s monetary value was insignificant. In wanting to keep her name out of his will, did the master of Monticello consign her to a longer term of bondage? She was effectively freed sometime between 1827 and 1830. Something was going on behind the scenes, and possibly in circumvention of the law.

Ellen’s maid was given a choice in 1825. A state law passed while Jefferson was president stipulated that a manumitted slave had to leave Virginia within one year; she could either accept formal emancipation and find a home in a northern state, or she could remain in Virginia as a slave. But Ellen’s maid re-fused to agree to one or the other option; she wanted both freedom and the right to remain in Virginia. And so she seems to have remained a slave until her protectors at Monticello worked out a plan that satisfied her.

The evidence exists in a series of letters. The first is a remarkable appeal from Washington, D.C., that Ellen wrote to her mother in June 1825 while en route to Boston with her new husband, Joseph Coolidge. Ellen writes of the apparently quiet effort underway in Washington to sell Sally:

Mr [George] Bulfinch the lawyer [a relative of Joseph Coolidge] is drawing up a power of attorney which Joseph will sign empowering Jefferson [i.e., Jeff Randolph] to dispose of Sally & to protect her. Her own wishes you know my dear mother must direct the disposition that is made of her for I would not for the world that after living with me fifteen years any kind of violence should be done to her feelings. If she wishes to be sold let her chuse her own master, if to be hired she should have the same liberty, or at least not be sent any where where she is unwilling to go. but why should I say any thing to you on this subject who are the very soul of gentleness & humanity.⁵⁷

To the outside world, the plantation elite generally displayed a remote, aloof posture with regard to their slaves’ desire for freedom and public standing, as we shall see momentarily in the case of Ellen; but within the immediate family a different emotional picture emerges, marked by sincere, humane, and ongoing efforts—heartfelt concern. In the year leading up to Jefferson’s death, then, prompted by Ellen’s departure for the North, a committee was deciding her maidservant’s fate. Sally was apparently not interested in joining Ellen’s new household as a free woman, an employee of the house—or else the Jefferson-Randolph clan never seriously considered this option. If Ellen Coolidge, in traditionally anti-Jefferson Boston, employed a biracial maidservant named Sally (quite possibly a Hemings), no matter what her age, might this prompt a new round of sexual satire? Meanwhile, as her youngest sons approached the age of twenty-one, the elder Sally Hemings was not to remain at Monticello much longer either.

In 1827, Ellen’s Sally served as nurse to the infant child of a University of Virginia professor of mathematics, Thomas Key, an Englishman. When the Keys packed up and left the country a short time later, Mary Jefferson Randolph updated her sister Ellen:

Sally is going into Dr. Emmets service when he returns from New York with his bride. I do not know what grounds she counts upon remaining in the State for the law forbidding it, was expressly explained to her when she had her choice between freedom and continuing to belong to you [Ellen]. The price given for her is considered a very good one in these times.⁵⁸

John P. Emmet was a professor of natural history at the university, an American citizen whose father had been an Irish patriot. Professor Key apparently intended to free Sally, but his sudden departure, and ambiguity surrounding the implementation of state law, left her fate unresolved; entering Professor Emmet’s “service” as his new wife’s maid, Ellen’s Sally would, once again, be employed in one of the pavilions on the lawn of the university. But with what legal status?

This uncertainty is implied in Mary Randolph’s letter, in the statement, “what grounds she counts upon remaining in the State for the law forbidding it, was expressly explained to her.” That recognition of the legal requirement that an emancipated slave had to leave Virginia within one year means that Sally was continuing to exist in limbo. Most likely, Emmet had purchased her services with the understanding (obligation?) that he would free her after her term of service was completed. A year later, she was earning an independent living making clothes.⁵⁹

In 1825, Sally Hemings was fifty-two, and would, like Ellen’s Sally, remain in Virginia. In 1826, when Madison and Eston were granted the unusual right by the state legislature to remain in Virginia after becoming free, nothing was done by Sally Hemings’s owners to call public attention to her. By 1830, according to that year’s census, she was living as a free woman in a house in Charlottesville, with her sons, where she remained until her death in 1835. But it is just as possible that the most talked about and least understood not-quite-white slave woman, whose image was never captured, was left unfree according to law at the end of her life. Like Ellen’s Sally, she may have lacked the requisite paper but was recognized locally as a free woman, and not bothered.⁶⁰

No one unrelated to the Hemingses was freed upon Jefferson’s death. Why would Ellen’s Sally have expected to be freed by the Jefferson-Randolph clan? If she were a Hemings, her bloodline would have made it reasonable for her to presume such a “right”—in which case she may indeed have been the youngest daughter of Sally Hemings’s sister Thenia, who died in 1795. The fact that Sally did not become Ellen’s maid until 1809, the year Ellen moved permanently to Monticello to live with her grandfather, lends circumstantial support to such a conclusion.

We do know that Jefferson’s prized granddaughter, Ellen Wayles Randolph, remained concerned with her maidservant’s fate after moving to Boston, and indeed, continued to inquire about her, at least through 1835, according to existing records, when she wondered whether her former maid would consider accompanying her on an ocean voyage. We can only conclude that Ellen’s emotional connection to the servants and servant children living at Monticello was deep and sincere. And most remarkably, thirty years after Ellen moved north, Madison Hemings, now in Ohio, named his youngest daughter “Ellen Wayles Hemings.” It was the only one of his children whose name bore any connection to his former master’s white family. That simple fact speaks volumes. And, like the third president, she had red hair.⁶¹

Now the mystery deepens. In 1858, as Henry Randall’s highly sympathetic three-volume biography of Jefferson was published in New York (a biography written in close cooperation with Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Randolph Coolidge), Ellen visited her brother in Virginia. From Edgehill, Jeff’s home just down the road from Monticello, she wrote to her husband, Joseph, in Boston, a rather bewildering letter—bewildering because it seems contrived—and because a portion of it is, by Ellen’s reckoning, contrived.

The first section of Ellen’s letter deals with the rumor that Thomas Jefferson sold into slavery his own biracial children:

I have been talking freely with my brother Jefferson on the subject of the “yellow children” and will give you the substance of our conversation, with my subsequent reflections. It is difficult to prove a negative. It is impossible to prove that Mr. Jefferson never had a coloured mistress or coloured children and that these children were never sold as slaves. The latter part of the charge however is disposed by it’s atrocity, and it’s utter disagreement with the general character and conduct of Mr. Jefferson, acknowledged to be a humane man and eminently a kind master.... It was his principle (I know that of my own knowledge) to allow such of his slaves as were sufficiently white to pass for white men, to withdraw quietly from the plantation; it was called running away, but they were never reclaimed. I remember four instances of this, three young men and one girl, who walked away and staid away—their whereabouts was perfectly known but they were left to themselves—for they were white enough to pass for white.

So she acknowledges a familiarity with the kind of sexual activity that took place at Monticello, but she goes on to explain that the white fathers came from among the Irish workmen who were constantly present and from “dissipated young men in the neighborhood who sought the society of the mulatresses”—though the women they got pregnant “were much better pleased to have it supposed that such children were their master’s.” One ex-Monticello slave, “black as a crow,” was sold after Jefferson’s death, took his late master’s surname, and gave the impression that Thomas Jefferson was his father. There were also, of course, those with political motives—“Mr. Jefferson’s traducers”—who could be counted on to make up lies. Ellen, over the years, had thought up a host of explanations in defense of her grandfather’s good name. Recall that the same explanation for mulattos on the mountaintop had been given to the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, and put in his published account of a 1796 visit.

Ellen raises the key question for us: “How comes it that his immoralities were never suspected by his own family?” To answer, she supplies evidence that it was improbable if not impossible that her grandfather was having sex:

His apartments [section of the house where his bedroom was] had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.

Reared to consider sex with a servant as “immoralities,” Ellen insisted that the grandpapa she knew so well and whose style she imitated, a man so “tender, considerate, refined,” would be the least likely person driven “to rear a race of half-breeds,” to “carry on his low amours,” while so closely watched by an adoring family.

Next she mentions Sally Hemings by name—but not familiarly, as she should have. She refers instead to “one woman known ... as ‘dusky Sally,’” whom Ellen now comfortably identifies as “pretty notoriously the mistress of a married man, a near relation of Mr. Jefferson’s.” Sally, she adds, was “lady’s maid” to both Martha and Maria Jefferson in Paris in 1787–1789—once again ignoring the opportunity to indicate her own very special relationship with the Hemings family. And she concludes the thought with these words: “Again I ask is it likely that so fond so anxious a father ... [should] have selected the female attendant of his own pure children to become his paramour! The thing will not bear telling. There are things, after all, as moral impossibilities.”

Reading the above, one ought to find it quite improbable that the moralizing Ellen knew anything about her widower grandfather’s sexual activities. She is repeating what her mother’s pose indicated, what her older brother told her directly. And it seems to coincide with what she herself saw growing up. As to the alleged culprit—the unnamed “near relation”—she ends one page of her letter and begins another with a parenthetical whisper to her husband:

I have written thus far thinking you might chuse to communicate my letter to Mr. Bulfinch. Now I will tell you in confidence what Jefferson [her brother] told me under the like condition. Mr. Southall and himself being young men together, heard Mr. Peter Carr say with a laugh, that “the old gentleman [Thomas Jefferson] had to bear the blame of his and Sam’s [Peter’s brother’s] misdeeds.” There is a general impression that the four children of Sally Hemmings [sic] were all the children of Col. [Sam] Carr, the most notorious good-natured Turk that ever was master of a black seraglio kept at other men’s expence.

Thus, Peter and Samuel Carr, sons of Thomas Jefferson’s sister, were, until the DNA findings, presumed by most historians to have been—one or the other of the brothers, at any rate—father of Sally Hemings’s several children. Jeff Randolph repeated the same “secret” to biographer Henry Randall, singling out Peter.

Ellen’s language throughout the letter is strong, insistent, and what we would now call insensitive, with racially and sexually charged epithets: “a notorious villain,” “master of a black seraglio” (“a house of women kept for debauchery,” according to Johnson’s Dictionary), “a race of half-breeds,” “low amours.” Her defense is based on a morality she had learned growing up at Monticello. So if Sally Hemings was in fact the sexual partner of Thomas Jefferson, Ellen did not know—or else she would not have used such moralistic language to paint a picture of a “moral impossibility.”

We already know from Madison Hemings that the white grandchildren (most likely led by the erudite Ellen) taught him and his siblings to read and write.⁶² We know that Madison named a daughter after Ellen: Ellen Wayles Hemings was not born until 1856. Thus we can only assume that Ellen and Madison corresponded warmly from time to time during the intervening decades after she moved to Boston and he left Charlottesville. How else would the memory of Ellen’s kindness have weighed so heavily on Madison when he selected his daughter’s name? Why would Ellen, who must have genuinely cared for Madison and Eston, appear so cold in the contrived letter, unless that letter was completely contrived, even its moralizing language?

So what seems fairly certain at first—her combined innocence and moral outrage—all of a sudden looks questionable. There is yet another possibility: What if Ellen adored Madison, and perhaps even adored Sally, without knowing her grandfather’s true relationship to them? What if Ellen and her siblings truly believed that the Carr boys, mixed up in interracial sex on the mountaintop, were indeed the likeliest suspects in Sally’s conceptions? The possibilities—the convolutions—read like the pages of William Faulkner’s novel of family, race, secrets, and consequences, Absalom, Absalom! The very existence of the octoroon children as a “threatful portent,” to borrow Faulkner’s phrase, suggests to him that the white planter family would be able to go through life at once knowing and not knowing; and the octoroon children would never have spoken of themselves as slaves. So much about their position in the social order was not referred to directly.⁶³

The historian Jan Lewis has published the most interesting, most informed conjecture in this regard. She examines the statements of Ellen and Jeff and finds it revealing that Ellen’s story about the Carr brothers has Peter laughing about their supposed sexual behavior, yet Jeff’s has Peter shamefacedly crying. “The lies are elaborate,” Lewis observes, rightly fascinated that the Carr connection was a secret kept inside the Jefferson-Randolph family until modern times, functioning as their own special mantra for maintaining a believable fiction. Laughing or crying, the Carr boys convey an essential meaning with regard to the southern white imagination: That kind of sex, whoever practiced it, made the Jefferson-Randolph clan agitated and uncomfortable.

They kept their Jefferson on his godlike pedestal. The family could not permit itself to abandon a moral narrative, their common memory of the dignified forebear who was, in Ellen’s words, incapable of “insulting the sanctity of home.” Yet the DNA findings have led us to draw a different conclusion: Grandpapa lied to them. In “protecting” his grandchildren from the knowledge of something they might find unpleasant, in refusing to reveal his sexual past, he led his sensitive grandson and granddaughter to define him as “pure” and, as adults, to smooth out the historic record by every means at their disposal. Their misdirection to Henry Randall was set in motion by Jefferson himself—he, by omission, had done most of the doctoring. Is it possible, Lewis momentously asks, that the Hemingses knew who their father was, and the white grandchildren did not?⁶⁴

What did Ellen know? This is a hard question to answer. It does appear, though, that in distancing Sally Hemings’s brood from the truly meaningful activities of the household, while his white grandchildren took notice of them on their own and unofficially taught Madison and Eston to read and write, Jefferson did not give Ellen or her siblings clear reason to suspect that Grandpapa was the slave children’s father. We may find it difficult to imagine that one as astute as Ellen asked no questions and heard no offhand comments about the Hemings children’s paternity. But the way of life on the mountaintop may have created such a condition. Bearing in mind that she was merely a toddler at the time of Callender, we just cannot know for certain at this point whether she knew more than she said.

Of course, there is another puzzling question: What did Ellen’s mother say or not say? There is less of a chance that Martha Jefferson Randolph was unaware of intimacy between her father and Sally Hemings. Having been born within months of each other, Martha and Sally had known each other since childhood. They were in France together, and spent weeks onboard a sailing vessel returning to America, a harrowing voyage none could forget. They were both at Monticello most of the time when Jefferson was there during his presidency; and Martha and her children had moved back permanently upon Jefferson’s retirement in 1809.

If Jefferson lied to his family, Martha appears to have been complicit in her father’s lie. She would have helped him lie (by omission) to her children for the greater good of preserving in them a certain kind of innocence, while preserving his reputation as a man who traveled farthest when he traveled in his mind, who lived amid books, planted flowers, designed a university; he was, for them, a soulful, endearing older man who lived beyond physical urges. Perhaps he justified his actions based on male privilege, Enlightenment medical thinking, his reading of the Greek ethos, plantation norms, and other cultural factors, but he did not think he could incorporate these ideas into the emotional world of his grandchildren—Maria Edgeworth’s ideal community. Still, motherless Martha, his trusted companion for so many of his widowed years, understood how he had suffered, publicly and privately, and rationalized along with him.

According to Jeff Randolph, his mother made no reference to the Callender charges until a short time before her death (which came only months after Sally’s death). And she made that reference only as an effort to demonstrate to her sons how to exonerate their grandfather before the bar of history. She cited evidence (unfortunately, it was not specified in Jeff’s statement) of one particular Hemings child whose conception ostensibly did not coincide with Jefferson’s time at Monticello. What is interesting here, if Jeff is to be believed, is that Martha went so many years without addressing the scandal in the presence of her children.⁶⁵

That Jefferson paid little direct attention to the Hemings children may have been one factor in allowing him to invite guests to the mountaintop without disrupting his studied effort to achieve “tranquil permanent felicity.” If we judge by the anecdotal evidence presented by those who knew him, no man was more discreet in his behavior. In his retirement, Jefferson tried his best to stay out of the public eye and the opposition press. As long as he succeeded in doing this, he would remain too absorbed in good deeds to be any longer thought of in such terms as the late scandalmonger James T. Callender had once exploited for a vengeful purpose. But one wealthy Virginia planter, John Hartwell Cocke, an original member of the university’s Board of Visitors, apparently knew something, and could not forget.

Cocke was in his mid-forties during Jefferson’s last years, when he helped to oversee construction of the university’s dominating structure, the Rotunda. Since his first wife’s death in 1816, he had adopted a zealous, evangelical Presbyterian worldview. He held stern expectations from other men, and stood far from the religious liberalism of the Enlightenment-bred Jefferson. Believing that his conduct in life would inspire imitation, Cocke had put himself forward as a God-fearing messenger of moral reform, and became deeply engaged in the transformation of the institution of slavery. Some of his emotional energy was channeled into the African Education Society and American Colonization Society, whose plans for the resettlement of blacks in Liberia had grown, in a way, from Jefferson’s early proposition in Notes on Virginia.⁶⁶ But Cocke’s association with particular Jeffersonian projects did not make him “Jeffersonian” in the Epicurean sense. This committed Christian, an effusive diary writer, twice noted with despondence that Jefferson had failed to set a moral example for other planters.

In 1853, hearing of a pair of North Carolinian planters who had sent away “illegitimate spawns” of the institution of slavery, Cocke was reminded of the many similar occurrences in his “beloved” Virginia: “Nor is it to be wonderd at,” he wrote, “when Mr Jeffersons notorious example is considered.” To the apologists who continued to find good points in the institution of slavery, Cocke added that he thought men with recognizable names who had fathered mulatto children “must be confronted with undeniable facts—however disgusting the exhibit.” In the second such diary entry, six years later, Cocke again bemoaned the consequences of slavery: “The defenders of the Institution—omit to look at the feature—that all Batchelors—or a large majority at least—keep as a substitute for a wife—some individual of their own Slaves. In Virginia—this damnable practice—prevails as much as any where—and probably more—as Mr Jeffersons example can be pleaded for its defence.”⁶⁷

This would appear to be strong contemporaneous evidence, a foretaste of the DNA evidence (if less objective). In the diaries, Cocke’s persona is emotional, at times fanatical, and often brutal in tone. He does not indicate how he knows firsthand of Jefferson’s complicity in race mixing—whether he had even seen Sally Hemings or the Hemings children. Certainly he knew the content of the Callender articles, as a young adult, out of college and newly married when they were published.

Cocke’s diaries of the mid-1850s are no less unforgiving in his accusatory language toward other sinners. As a temperance advocate, he jotted to himself ten days before his first notation about Jefferson: “The pastor who is a wine bibber will henceforth gather few Sheep into the fold of the great shepherd.” This devout Presbyterian felt antagonistic toward Jefferson’s undemanding Unitarianism, a feeling that had built over decades. The week of Jefferson’s death in 1826, knowing Cocke’s strong religious views, a friend wrote to him suggesting that they might want to lobby for a replacement for Jefferson on the university’s Board of Visitors who better satisfied the “friends of Religion.”⁶⁸

Jefferson’s alleged “atheism” caused perhaps as many Americans of his time to think ill of him as his liberal political philosophy did. So we cannot, without pause, consider Cocke an unimpeachable observer on the subject of Thomas Jefferson’s private conduct. His involvement with the university, his proximity to Jefferson, strongly suggests his veracity; but we cannot be 100 percent certain that he knew and did not merely assume. Certainties are hard to come by. At any rate, Cocke is the only elite Virginian with direct ties to Jefferson who committed to writing his convictions with regard to Jefferson’s sex life.

Here is a recap of the evidence presented: (1) Jefferson’s medicalized sensibility directed him to behave in accordance with the regimen recommended to men of letters, which included a semi-vegetarian diet, physical exercise, and regular sexual activity; (2) Jefferson’s taxonomic work on race and his aversion to blackness suggests that he thought of the “nearly white” Sally Hemings more in accordance with her class identity; her racial background, though undeniable, was sufficiently suppressed so as to enable feelings of attraction to develop; (3) Jefferson’s fascination with the Greek way—its language, literature, and morals—may have contributed to his acceptance of extramarital sex that was not adultery (as a widower taking a young concubine), especially in combination with the relative isolation of his mountaintop estate and the sexual freedom southern planters had reserved to themselves across generations.

Questions will persist. Even if we think we now know something about Jefferson’s sense of male prerogative, we can do no more than speculate about the real moral boundaries within which he considered his feelings toward this particular servant. It still seems odd that as president, when he was, in a sense, the nation’s most visible citizen, he would have risked further embarrassment by continuing to father children by his servant. Did he feel protected from further outside intrusions upon his private life? Did he think he would never have to explain to his grandchildren, over whom he doted? The explanations given do not cover every contingency. And it is important to add that no human being behaves rationally all the time. We can try to make Thomas Jefferson make sense; but in suiting our needs, we may unknowingly detour from historical truth.

To understand an alien psychology is a daunting challenge. We may imagine him capable of it, but Thomas Jefferson exhibited no particular signs of a guilty conscience. Why should we think that he personalized every moral concern and moral responsibility in the same way our society expects of us? He exercised his mental faculties in ways we no longer relate to. We would probably never have occasion to regard ancient Greek notions of bloodlines and procreative choices as meaningful; but he and his peers did.

What about telling truths and telling lies? Was the ethical line in Jefferson’s day drawn just where it is today? Presumably it was, but perhaps not quite as we imagine. It is more than a little curious that he deliberately hid his chronic diarrhea from his immediate family for many years.⁷⁰ If he was embarrassed to talk about diarrhea, how, then, did he handle his sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, if he had one and it was longstanding? As a skilled and committed household manager, could his daughter Martha have failed to inquire, when Sally Hemings became pregnant, who was responsible? It is beyond comprehension that she could have remained oblivious. The best we can do is to presume that however her father rationalized his behavior to her, he and she together, perhaps with her son Jefferson as a willing co-conspirator, led her younger children to accept the Carr brothers scenario.

Relations across color and class lines were not constant. It is unlikely that we will ever be able to discover the whole emotional truth. But there are contingent matters worth our relating to Jefferson’s private history, to wit: If he and Sally Hemings were having sexual relations for decades, can consent remain at issue? Here again, we need to examine southern prejudices as Jefferson knew them, and to take note of the adjudication of sex-related cases in the courts as a symptom of prevailing attitudes.

Southern white women were generally seen as having sexual desires—it was in the North that the feminine ideal of “passionlessness” found more ready acceptance. Although in the South an unmarried white woman’s chastity was assumed and expected, it was also understood that the actions of an “unsullied” woman could not be compared to the actions of one who was no longer a virgin and might, therefore, be inviting a sexual encounter. A woman who had succumbed to sexual desire once might do so again.

The race, as well as class, of an individual charged with rape or attempted rape was decisive in southern courts, as was the race and class of the victim. The rape of a black woman was not a capital offense; the rape of a white woman was. A white woman of low social status was more likely seen as prone to indulge in unconventional or interracial sex. Furthermore, if the race (white, black, or mixed) of the alleged female victim was not immediately apparent and came into dispute, an indictment might not stand up.

Forcible sex was ill defined, and typically linked to the character of the alleged victim. Rules often changed. Even male slaves’ rape convictions were overturned in significant numbers, owing in part (incredibly, to us) to the court’s recognition that the defendant had a meaningful economic value to his owner. At the same time, southern jurists were careful to maintain strict courtroom procedures, because they wished to portray the institution of slavery as humane. But the uncertain guidelines we are describing could only have added to the intensity of that racially based sexual anxiety southern whites felt.⁷¹

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello was part of a culture that feared “disorder,” a world unto itself in which the plantation owner made his own rules. Law and society almost always protected the planter if he chose to have sex, wanted or unwanted, with a woman he legally owned. Largely for their own purposes, whites stereotyped slaves, male and female, as promiscuous. And because slaves did not enjoy the legal rights or share in the obligations that marriage brought, a slave owner had the final say about the partnering of his slaves. Jefferson’s universally attested mildness makes it appear unlikely that he would physically overpower a woman, yet subtle psychological pressure is impossible to estimate. The point is that we cannot know the extent to which he pursued intimacy with Sally Hemings—or whether she gave signals indicating a willingness to satisfy his sexual and/or emotional needs.⁷²

What could their attachment have been like? As one scholar of the eighteenth-century French mode has written, “The deeper bond between master and servant was forged within the household. It is in the hallways, the antechambers, the bedrooms and kitchens ... that we must go looking for the roots of fidelité.” The shrewd master used rewards and punishments, as well as affection and authority, to win cooperation or devotion. Was it like that here? In dealing with Sally Hemings, thirty years his junior, Jefferson must have acted with premeditation—but to what effect, precisely? Attitudes and gestures spoke a language, unavailable to us, that the two of them understood. In France, technically free female servants, “hoarded” by their masters, lived in a kind of sexual limbo; some stayed aloof when they went beyond the master’s property, adopting a self-protective method to ward off insult from those who would imagine them as quasi-prostitutes. We simply do not know what kind of mobility Sally Hemings had, in Charlottesville or beyond. Except for her time in France, she has never been pictured away from the mountaintop.⁷³

It is entirely possible that Jefferson convinced young Sally Hemings—or she concluded on her own—that, as her grandmother had been the concubine of a sea captain named Hemings, and her mother Betty had been the mulatto concubine of Jefferson’s father-in-law John Wayles, that she, too, could enjoy a decent life as concubine of the master of Monticello. However she may have expressed her needs and desires in 1789, as a teenager, there is no reason not to believe that she continued to display a lively commitment to her own best interests in later years.

The Hemingses were favored at Monticello. But to what degree were they made to feel black or white? This, again, is a hard question to answer with any confidence. To be sure, they were enslaved, and thoroughly understood the legal difference between free persons of color and themselves. Presumably, they were very much conscious at the same time of the advantage that their light skin and relation to the Wayles and Jefferson lineages afforded them. To the master, they were, above all, privileged and trusted servants, and they were defined at Monticello by the contributions they made. Some possessed the wherewithal to sustain themselves economically and were eventually (but not easily) given their freedom. Yet, Jefferson apparently did not care to educate Sally, and he planned for her to remain in servitude for as long as he lived; her children were given vocational training and a practical education meant to serve them as free artisans. But Sally was never more than a servant. Though three-quarters white, she would never have a public identity, never rise beyond caring for her master’s bedchamber and linens.

Without knowing more about Sally Hemings’s real personality and the nature of the privacy she and Thomas Jefferson shared, it warrants repeating that no evidence exists on which to conjure a loving intimacy. The word Madison Hemings uses is “concubine,” a word that, in this period, implied not only low status but also a relationship based on the man’s sexual need and nothing more emotionally meaningful. It is only the imaginations of modern champions of interracial harmony that attribute to Jefferson a progressive ideology and, in turn, his acceptance of Sally Hemings as a putative social equal.⁷⁴

That sounds fairly definitive, but we must recognize that key aspects of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship were known only to the parties themselves. If Jefferson withheld essential (factual) truth from history, how much more (emotional) truth did he withhold? As in the ambiguity expressed in the French example of master-servant relations above, he may indeed have treated Sally Hemings with respect and affectionate concern during their private moments, away from the white family; the apparent fact that she bore not just one but several of his children over a period of at least thirteen years indicates that he may have enjoyed the knowledge that he was fathering children who would produce descendants. Even if he did not give outward signs, he may have privately felt a special bond with these children—and with their mother. In this sense, Annette Gordon-Reed is encompassing the full range of possibilities when she reminds us that Sally Hemings’s father was the father of Jefferson’s lamented wife as well. The long-term emotional impact of this connection on Thomas Jefferson cannot be summarily denied. As a child, Sally even had a sufficient amount of time to bond with Patty Jefferson before the latter’s death in 1782.⁷⁵

These caveats aside, the most reasonable cultural explanation still appears to be that Jefferson found a healthy, fruitful female to bear children for him, whom he supported just as an ancient Greek man of honor, or a colonial Latin American man of honor, would have done. What in modern times appears as the selfish pursuit of physical gratification was easily rationalized by the medical literature of Jefferson’s age. Sally Hemings helped him to preserve his body’s health, even as he approached an energetic old age.

Ultimately, the taboo of interracial sex meant less in this relationship, because the strict racial boundaries that Jefferson prescribed in his Notes on Virginia were for America at large, and not for Jefferson in his private world. The protected plantation population was “family”—his personal records consistently denoted all in his care, black and white alike, as family. Within this family, there were degrees of attachment and degrees of practical power and opportunity, all of which were implicitly understood. The emotional connections, whatever they were, were very real. But this does not help us fathom whether the Hemingses felt more comfortable among the white Jeffersons or with the black field hands. In whose company did they break into smiles or reveal private concerns with greater ease? In their subordinate role on Jefferson’s plantation, what sense of prospect did they grow up with?

It is quite conceivable that in Jefferson’s private world, race meant something different than what it meant to him in theory. The all too easy indictment of Jefferson as a hypocrite for advocating racial separation while keeping a concubine who was one-quarter black becomes as careless a statement as calling him a hypocrite for writing “All men are created equal.” We cannot expect the eighteenth-century liberal to speak the language we speak, to envision racial equality, or to have put an immediate and absolute end to slavery, when others could not, and when in practical terms American society has yet to become colorblind two centuries later.

To say these things is by no means to be an apologist for Jefferson’s behavior. We can certainly ask—and ought to—why he did not do more to advance the cause of justice for blacks, free and enslaved. It was certainly within the realm, within the reach, of his everyday world that he could have championed black Americans for real. He made contradictory statements, and refused to clear them up. We must accept that no one statement attributed to Jefferson can encompass the full range of his beliefs. We can criticize him for his indecision, or expose his limited skills in interpreting the human potential, but we should at the same time say that he aimed to be practical.

Then why did Thomas Jefferson not remarry? That would have been a practical step for him. Family tradition alleges that he promised Patty on her deathbed that her girls would not have a stepmother. Had he done otherwise, he would have married a woman who brought wealth and could have rescued him from his later pecuniary embarrassments. But it seems entirely possible that Jefferson was a man increasingly fixed in his habits who found self-sufficiency preferable to having a partner whom he would feel obliged to consult. In his world, such a choice did not have to result in celibacy.

The highly symbolic letter to Charles Bellini in which Jefferson used the phrase “tranquil permanent felicity” was sent from France in September 1785, shortly after the third anniversary of Patty’s death. In it, Jefferson was eloquent in his praise of American society because, he believed, marriage was revered there. He contrasted what he was witnessing in Paris:

Conjugal love having no existence among [the French], domestic happiness ... is utterly unknown. In lieu of this are substituted pursuits which nourish and invigorate all our bad passions, and which offer only moments of extasy amidst days and months of restlessness and torment. Much, very much inferior this to the tranquil permanent felicity with which domestic society in America blesses most of it’s inhabitants.⁷⁶

Apparently, Jefferson found a means of enjoying a kind of “domestic happiness” without re-experiencing “conjugal love.” But he also does not deny knowing what “bad passions” feel like. The Betsey Walker incident, dating back to 1768, informs us that he knew lust and, at least on the one occasion, had propositioned the wife of a friend. That he initially concocted a story about an argument over money to explain to his inquiring daughters in the early 1790s why he had stopped being cordial toward Betsey’s husband shows once again that he was reticent to talk about his sex life.⁷⁷ But the sanctity of marriage was something he held dear, or so he repeatedly professed after his years of “unchequered happiness,” the words he chose in his 1821 Autobiography to describe his ten-year marriage.

Patty’s loss was more than he could bear. By all accounts, his commitment to her was real and heartfelt. Taking Sally as a sexual partner rather than looking for a second wife might have resolved, or at least tempered, his fear of loss; his emotional tie to the lover would now presumably be weaker, owing to her enslaved condition. One rationale for taking a concubine would be to have less invested emotionally in the survival of his partner and their children.⁷⁸

So, then, even if the bondwoman’s life was somehow made better by being Jefferson’s concubine, was her happiness really considered? There is nothing to dispute Jeff Randolph’s statement that Sally Hemings was dressed no better than the other house servants; this fact becomes even more interesting when we consider that Martha Randolph was generally responsible for requisitioning the servants’ clothing. Was appearance reality here?

To suggest, as some have, that Sally Hemings was a “liberator” of sorts seems doubtful. A more typical development is the kind reported by another former slave (not one of Jefferson’s), who recalled that in her teen years she successfully turned down her master’s sexual advances, out of a sense of self-respect, only to agree to a similar arrangement with another white man sometime later. It was, she explained, “less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.”⁷⁹ In other words, “arrangements” between the races, or between classes, in which powerful men sought to exert authority over vulnerable, unequal young women, involved a certain amount of coercion—even as affection grew. No amount of discretion or patient negotiation could change that. The relationship may have had compensatory elements, but it was not really liberating.

Except for the leering publicity that maverick journalist James T. Callender gave his private life, Thomas Jefferson, a man of privilege who lived in splendid isolation, apparently indulged his desire for physical intimacy without upsetting the social order. Though politically he opened himself to potential risk, from the perspective of philosophical medicine his actions did nothing to violate the principle of moderate, healthful living that he clearly sought to enjoy.

Securing the Sexual Frontier I: Jefferson’s Options

Securing the Sexual Frontier II: Jefferson the Greek

“the fortuitous concourse of breeders”

“proof, defence & a substantial corpus delecti”

Ellen’s Sally

What Lies Within?

Some Inferences