THIRTY-FOUR
By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it.
—JAMES CALLENDER, the Richmond Recorder, September 1802
THERE HAD BEEN a time, not so very long ago, that Jefferson believed he could, if not end, then transcend, partisanship. It was an ideal of the age: the concept of “party” was viewed with fear and suspicion. The great George Washington himself had warned against partisan spirit in his farewell address.
The warning did no good, and Jefferson’s hopes of enduring political unity were never to be realized. In early 1801, even before Jefferson declared that Americans were all Federalists and all Republicans in his inaugural address, Albert Gallatin reported the reality on the ground in the capital: “You may suppose that being thrown together in a few boarding houses, without any other society than ourselves, we are not likely to be either very moderate politicians or to think of anything but politics.” Federalist Simeon Baldwin shared the sentiment, writing, “The men of the different parties do not associate intimately.” Yet another observer said, “No tavern or boarding house contains two members of opposite sentiments.”
Jefferson did try. “Nothing shall be spared on my part to obliterate the traces of party and consolidate the nation, if it can be done without abandonment of principle,” he said in March 1801. Thirty-four months later, after the partisan wars of his first term, he struck more practical notes, accepting the world as it was. “The attempt at reconciliation was honorably pursued by us for a year or two and spurned by them,” he said.
As Jefferson well knew, in practice the best he could hope for was a truce between himself and his opponents, not a permanent peace. Political divisions were intrinsic; what mattered most was how a president managed those divisions.
Jefferson’s strategy was sound. Believing in the promise of democratic republicanism and in his own capacity for transformative leadership, he took a broad view: “There is nothing to which a nation is not equal where it pours all its energies and zeal into the hands of those to whom they confide the direction of their force.”
He proposed a covenant: Let us meet the political challenges of the country together and try to restrain the passions that led to the extremist, apocalyptic rhetoric of what Jefferson called the “gloomy days of terrorism” of the 1790s, and perhaps politics could become a means of progress, not simply a source of conflict.
The prevailing Federalist view was that such a covenant was lovely to talk about but impossible to bring into being. John Quincy Adams was right when he told his diary that political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. “The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense,” Adams wrote during Jefferson’s first term.
The Founders’ dream of a nation beyond partisanship was one that simply could not survive the very nature of a free politics in a culture of diverse interests.
Republican or Federalist, to anyone who bothered to pay attention, there was no mystery about Jefferson’s agenda in the capital. “Mr. Jefferson doesn’t at all hesitate to say that the previous administration conducted itself under anti-republican maxims,” the French envoy Louis-André Pichon reported home to Paris, and the new president was determined to correct such “inequalities and errors.”
Jefferson was relentless in pursuing and putting down threats to his vision of a republican nation. Whether they were Federalist judges and other officeholders—including the chief justice of the United States—or hostile newspapermen, Jefferson’s foes faced spirited challenges from the President’s House. By virtue of the Republican successes in the 1800 presidential and congressional elections, Jefferson had the strength to do largely as he wished. He had made his essential views known; candidates for the House and the Senate had made their support for him and for those views clear as well. A majority of the voting population wanted to move on from the Federalism of the 1790s, and Jefferson was ready to lead the way. The Federalists had a lot to say, but their words were no match for what the president had: the votes.
The new Judiciary Act of 1802 was a monument to Jefferson’s power. The 1801 act was a Federalist bid to protect the faction from popular reaction by giving lifetime tenure to the like-minded. The 1802 bill, written and passed by Jefferson’s Republicans, sought to break the Federalist hold on the judiciary. On one side stood Federalists arguing that the courts—including courts created only months before—were sacrosanct. On the other stood Jefferson and his followers asserting that no branch of government could rightly lie beyond the reach of reform.
The principles at stake were self-evident. So were the political realities. Though Jefferson proceeded with caution—there were no declarations of war on the judiciary—he did proceed. After Jefferson’s 1802 annual message, the Senate went to work on repeal “in pursuance of the recommendation” of the president. “The Judiciary bill has been crammed down our throats without a word or letter being suffered to be altered,” said Roger Griswold.
The repeal passed on Monday, March 8, 1802. The House vote reflected the Republican advantage in the lower chamber. In the Senate, the bill succeeded by a single vote, but it succeeded. It was an enormous victory for Jefferson, and the Federalists were horrified.
Jefferson’s hatred of his cousin John Marshall was cordial, but it was hatred nonetheless. (“The judge’s inveteracy is profound, and his mind of that gloomy malignity which will never let him forego the opportunity of satiating it on a victim,” Jefferson once wrote.) In February 1803, the chief justice issued the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case of Marbury v. Madison, a confrontation between one of John Adams’s midnight appointees, William Marbury, and the Jefferson administration. The decision, which held that Madison had been wrong to withhold a commission, went against the president, but Marshall wisely avoided a showdown while helping lay the foundations for the concept of judicial review.
U.S. judge John Pickering of New Hampshire, meanwhile, was the object of impeachment in the House in the winter of 1803, as was Supreme Court associate justice Samuel Chase. Pickering was unstable, a drinker who may have been insane; his impeachment and conviction were of less ultimate moment than the effort against Chase, who had given the Republicans an opening with a provocative charge to a grand jury in Baltimore and who had been openly hostile to Jefferson’s party before. “Where the law is uncertain, partial, or arbitrary, where justice is not impartially administered to all; where property is insecure, and the person is liable to insult and violence without redress by law,—the people are not free, whatever may be their form of government,” Chase said in May 1803. He attacked the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, telling the Baltimore jury, “Our republican Constitution will sink into a mobocracy,—the worst of all possible governments.”
Infuriated by Chase’s diatribe—one issued from the sanctuary of the bench—Jefferson wrote Maryland congressman Joseph H. Nicholson, who had recently brought charges against Judge Pickering. “Ought this seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution and on the proceedings of a State to go unpunished; and to whom so pointedly as yourself will the public look for the necessary measures?” In conclusion, Jefferson noted: “I ask these questions for your consideration; for myself, it is better that I should not interfere.”
Except, of course, that he just had interfered. It was a characteristic Jeffersonian tactic, instigating a course of action from afar. Ultimately the Senate convicted John Pickering and the House impeached Samuel Chase, who won an acquittal from the Senate on the Friday before Jefferson’s second inauguration in 1805. The failure to remove Chase from office has long been interpreted as a defeat for Jefferson, but the president’s point was made. Judges who, in John Randolph’s phrase, played the part of an “electioneering partisan” were not safe from censure of some kind. The Federalist judiciary was on notice.
Such successes drove Jefferson’s enemies mad. One correspondent wrote to the president of hopes “that your Excellency might be beheaded within one year.” An anonymous letter from New York told Jefferson that the writer—who signed himself “A Federalist Democrat”—had been asked “to go to Washington and then assassinate you.” Twelve days later came another letter from New York, this one signed “A—X,” saying: “You are in danger a dreadful plot is forming against you.… Julius Caesar was cautioned for the Ides of March—I caution you for the last of April.”
In victory, Jefferson moved carefully on the politically treacherous issue of federal appointments. The composition of the government was among the key questions to challenge the newly inaugurated president—and the newly inaugurated president’s hope to lead a less divided nation. How many Federalist officeholders should be removed and replaced with Republicans? Jefferson’s Republican allies were pushing for aggressive action. “An energetic tone towards the leaders of the royalist party will keep the republicans and new converts together and gain strength daily to your administration,” Monroe had written Jefferson eight days after the inaugural in 1801.
Jefferson replied that he hoped the fever of the late 1790s had broken and that the Federalist manipulation of the XYZ affair and other supposed threats to the nation had come to be seen as manufactured. “At length the poor arts of tub plots etc were repeated till the designs of the party became suspected.” The “tub plots” reference was from the English Civil War, when forged evidence of a 1679 conspiracy to keep James, the Catholic Duke of York, from the throne was found in a tub of meal. Jefferson’s evocation of the episode in the context of the 1790s shows that he continued to view history partly through the prism of the wars and conflicts of the seventeenth century—a time of conspiracy, intrigue, and perpetual tension between monarchists and republicans.
Believing the American people essentially sound and aware of the Federalist excesses, Jefferson favored a moderate tone (“We must be easy with them,” he said of the Federalists), but he did not fail to take decisive action.
Scholarly estimates put Jefferson’s removal rate quite high: He displaced about 46 percent of incumbent officeholders in 1801, the strong majority of whom were Federalists. Such a rate places Jefferson in the historical company of Andrew Jackson, whose removals three decades later shocked establishment sensibilities. Jefferson was especially hard on Adams’s last-minute decisions. One of Adams’s midnight appointments was that of Elizur Goodrich to the collectorship of the port at New Haven. The post had fallen open only in February 1801. Responding to Republican sentiment in Connecticut, Jefferson removed Goodrich and appointed Samuel Bishop, the mayor of New Haven, to his place.
A group of merchants in New Haven issued a remonstrance against Goodrich’s removal, prompting Jefferson to lay out his thinking on federal appointments. “Declarations by myself in favor of political tolerance, exhortations to harmony and affection in social intercourse, and to respect for the equal rights of the minority, have, on certain occasions, been quoted and misconstrued into assurances that the tenure of offices was to be undisturbed.” But, Jefferson went on, “Is it political intolerance to claim a proportionate share in the direction of the public affairs? Can they not harmonize in society unless they have everything in their own hands?”
He was pragmatic. He could see the whole. He understood that removals like the one in New Haven would produce political discord, but that was the nature of the enterprise.
As were scathing newspaper attacks. Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania, the governor who had been so forthright in his support for Jefferson in the 1800 election, felt that the partisan papers in his state were abusing their freedom of expression, and he was weighing whether to take legal action. “The infamous and seditious libels, published almost daily in our newspapers, are become intolerable,” McKean wrote Jefferson in February 1803. “If they cannot be altogether prevented … they may be greatly checked by a few prosecutions.”
Jefferson replied carefully but clearly. “On the subject of prosecutions, what I say must be entirely confidential, for you know the passion for torturing every sentiment and word which comes from me,” Jefferson wrote McKean on Saturday, February 19, 1803. “I have … long thought that a few prosecutions of the most eminent offenders would have a wholesome effect in restoring the integrity of the presses. Not a general prosecution, for that would look like persecution: but a selected one.”
Most newspapers, however, were out of reach, including James Callender’s. On Wednesday, September 1, 1802, in the Richmond Recorder, Callender had his revenge on Jefferson, publishing an account of the Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship.
It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the president himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies! …
By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighborhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story; and not a few who know it.…
Behold the favorite, the first born of republicanism! The pinnacle of all that is good and great! In the open consummation of an act which tends to subvert the policy, the happiness, and even the existence of this country!
’Tis supposed that, at the time when Mr. Jefferson wrote so smartly concerning negroes, when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race, he had no expectation that the chief magistrate of the United States was to be the ringleader in showing that his opinion was erroneous; or, that he should choose an African stock whereupon he was to engraft his own descendants.…
We give it to the world under the firmest belief that such a refutation never can be made. The AFRICAN VENUS is said to officiate, as housekeeper at Monticello. When Mr. Jefferson has read this article, he will find leisure to estimate how much has been lost or gained by so many unprovoked attacks upon J. T. CALLENDER.
Callender had many of his facts right, and he corrected those he missed. (He later noted, for instance, that Hemings had traveled with Polly, alone, and not with Jefferson and Patsy.) “The license that has been indulged against the President has exhausted its violence in revealing some very old so-called liaisons between him and one of his slaves,” Pichon reported to Paris.
Jefferson never directly responded to the charge. Historians have long taken an 1805 letter as an implicit denial. In that note, he said that the allegations about his courtship of the married Betsy Walker was the “only” allegation against him that was true. It is possible, though, that Jefferson was not addressing the Hemings allegations at all in that letter, which included a now-lost enclosure, presumably a clipping or copy of Federalist attacks on Jefferson’s character. Without the enclosure, we cannot know for certain that he was denying the Hemings story—only that the enclosure mentioned the Walker affair and some other alleged transgressions. In any event, the charges remained in wide circulation during his lifetime and afterward. “Callender and Sally will be remembered as long as Jefferson as blots on his character,” John Adams wrote privately. “The story of the latter is a natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.” Soon Callender was found drowned in three feet of water in the James River on a day when he had been observed wandering drunkenly through Richmond. The inquest discovered no evidence of foul play; it was a pathetic end to a tragic life.
In 1806 Thomas Moore, an Irish poet, published verses mentioning the rumors about Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
The weary statesman for repose hath fled
From halls of council to his negro’s shed,
Where blest he woos some black Aspasia’s grace,
And dreams of freedom in his slave’s embrace!
Patsy and a former Jefferson secretary, William A. Burwell, showed the “obnoxious passages” to Jefferson, who laughed them off, effectively ending a discussion before one could begin.
So far as we know, no one else in Jefferson’s family or official circle ever raised the Sally Hemings question with him except to denounce any discussion of it in the public press as reprehensible. For Jefferson, the code of silence on the issue of sex across the color line appears to have been total.
In December 1801, Jefferson had obliquely confided in Benjamin Rush about something else entirely: his physical well-being. “My health has always been so uniformly firm, that I have for some years dreaded nothing so much as … living too long,” Jefferson wrote. “I think however that a flaw has appeared which ensures me against that.”
He went into no detail, adding only that secrecy about any such question was essential. “I have said as much to no mortal breathing,” Jefferson added, “and my florid health is calculated to keep my friends as well as foes quiet as they should be.”
After Rush pressed his friend for specifics, Jefferson provided them. The complaint was diarrhea, a serious illness of the day. In his Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science, Dr. Robley Dunglison, who was to attend Jefferson at the time of his death a quarter century later, described diarrhea as a “disease characterized by frequent liquid … evacuations and generally owing to inflammation or irritation of the mucous membrane of the intestines.” It could be “acute or chronic,” and in some cases fatal “because like hectic fever it seems to obtain habitual possession of the constitution to operate upon it with scarcely any perceptible intermission, and, in general, to defy the most powerful remedies.” The affliction would trouble Jefferson for the rest of his life.
His family came to Washington for Christmas 1802. Patsy and Polly were together; Margaret Bayard Smith spent a good deal of time with them both. “Mrs. Eppes is beautiful, simplicity and timidity personified when in company, but when alone with you of communicative and winning manners,” Mrs. Smith wrote. “Mrs. R[andolph] is rather homely, a delicate likeness of her father, but still more interesting than Mrs. E. She is really one of the most lovely women I have ever met with, her countenance beaming with intelligence, benevolence and sensibility, and her conversation fulfills all her countenance promises. Her manners, so frank and affectionate, that you know her at once, and feel perfectly at your ease with her.”
Patsy, Mrs. Smith continued, “gave me an account of all her children, of the character of her husband and many family anecdotes. She has that rare but charming egotism which can interest the listener in all one’s concerns.”
It was a busy season. “I have only time to write a line to you My dearest husband, the incessant round of company we are in scarcely allowing time to dress to receive them,” Polly wrote her husband John Wayles Eppes. “I am at this moment writing whilst waiting for a gown to be smoothed, though the drawing room is full of ladies.”
The visitors from Virginia were struck by Jefferson’s lonely accommodations. “Adieu once more,” Polly wrote to Jefferson in January 1803. “How much I think of you at the hours which we have been accustomed to be with you alone, my dear Papa, and how much pain it gives me to think of the unsafe and solitary manner in which you sleep upstairs.” (Jefferson set about acquiring the proper furniture to provide fitting bedrooms for his large family on future visits.)
He loved it when everyone was there. A caller once observed the president sitting on the drawing room floor in the midst of grandchildren, “so eagerly and noisily engaged in a game of romps” that the visitor went unnoticed for a moment. “I will catch you in bed on Sunday or Monday morning,” Jefferson jovially wrote to a granddaughter on an occasion when he was en route to Washington.
From Monticello, Patsy wrote about her control over the house with a firmness that must have pleased her father. “I have wrought an entire reformation on the … household,” she told Jefferson. “Nothing comes in or goes out without my knowledge and I believe there is as little waste as possible. I visit the kitchen smoke house and fowls when the weather permits and according to your desire saw the meat cut out.”
There was still some hope of Jefferson’s having a small family with him in Washington: Both John Wayles Eppes and Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., were seeking congressional seats. If either or both won, they would come to live with Jefferson in the President’s House.
Despite all—the attacks from Callender, the inevitable toll of governing, the loneliness in the mansion—Jefferson liked being president. He was driven by a need to secure the Republic from all enemies, foreign and domestic.
He wanted America to be the way he thought it should be. Most leaders can only hope to shape their nation for a brief time. In the middle of 1803, a report from Paris would give Jefferson the power to transform his for all time.