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March 23, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
09:41
Did Jefferson Sleep with His Slave?
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Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance.
Everyone knows that Thomas Jefferson slept with his slave Sally Hemings, right?
Wrong. No one knows that.
There were rumors, and there's indirect evidence, but the case against Jefferson is weak.
The guy who first started the Sally Rumors was a Scotsman named James Callender, who came to America in 1793.
After Jefferson was elected president in 1800, Callender asked to be appointed postmaster of Richmond, Virginia.
Jefferson said no.
Callender asked again and threatened blackmail.
Jefferson told him to buzz off.
So in 1802, Callender wrote an article claiming that when Jefferson was ambassador to Britain in 1787, he took up with, quote, Dusky Sally, a, quote, Well,
Jefferson had a lot of political enemies, and they wrote scores of articles and at least ten poems about Sally.
Jefferson had written that blacks, quote,"secrete less by the kidneys and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor." Well, here's a poem that mentions this.
When pressed by loads of state affairs I seek to sport and dally, the sweetest solace of my cares is in the lap of Sally.
What though she by the glands secretes, must I stand shilly-shally?
Tucked up between a pair of sheets, there's no perfume like Sally.
In another poem, Jefferson turns into a black man.
And sullies the memory of his dead wife and produces a mixed-race brother for his white daughters.
And straight, by transformation strange, from white to black, his features change.
His jaw protrudes, his lip expands.
Puh! He secretes by all the glands.
His legs inflect, his stature shrinks, and from his skin all Congo stinks.
Behold him now by cupid sped, in darkness sneak to Sally's bed, with philosophic nose inquire how rank the sable race perspire, in foul pollution steep his life, insult the ashes of his wife,
all the paternal duties smother, give his white girls a yellow brother, mid loud hosannas of his knaves, from his own loins raise a herd of slaves.
Well, imagine writing this savage stuff about a sitting president.
It hurt Jefferson.
Callender may have been right to claim that he had done more harm to Jefferson's reputation in just five months than all his other critics had done in ten years.
The next year, though, Callender drowned in two or three feet of water in the James River.
Reportedly, he was too drunk to fish himself out.
A light-skinned black man claimed to be the Tom in Calendar's original accusation.
Thomas Woodson is supposed to have been conceived in Paris.
According to his descendants, he came back to live at Monticello until he was age 12, and then he left and took up the name of Woodson.
Madison Hemmings, who was undoubtedly Sally's son, also said that Jefferson was his father.
In 1872, this would be 46 years after Jefferson's death, he gave a long interview in which he made that claim.
Other indirect evidence is that Sally was reported to be light-skinned and pretty.
There was also a rumor that Sally's white father was also the father of Jefferson's wife Martha, in which case Sally would have been Jefferson's beloved wife's half-sister.
What about the famous DNA evidence?
First, those tests could show only whether someone in the Jefferson male line was the father.
Tests on descendants of Thomas Woodson showed that no Jefferson could have been the father.
And a positive result would have been very convincing, because if Woodson had been conceived in Paris, there was no other Jefferson besides Thomas who could possibly have been the father.
Now, the descendants of Madison, Madison Hemmings, the one who gave the interview, refused to permit DNA testing.
I wonder why.
The only test that came back positive was of Eston Hemmings.
That was Sally's last child.
Some Jefferson male was the father.
And now, that's it for the DNA evidence.
However, it was reported deceitfully.
The British magazine Nature Which broke the story in 1998, titled its article, Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child.
Eight weeks later, Nature published an apology, saying that there were more than half a dozen Jefferson men of reproductive age within striking distance who could have been the father.
Sorry. But by then, the myth had become fact.
So what's the story with Eston?
He would have been conceived late in Jefferson's second term.
The terrible calendar accusations had been circulating for more than six years.
How likely is it that Jefferson would take the risk of romping with Sally under those circumstances?
And he doesn't appear to have been a very highly sexed man.
And there are almost no accounts of him chasing women after his wife died, certainly not after middle age.
Jefferson would have been 64 years old when Esten was conceived, and his letters from that period are full of complaints about migraine headaches, arthritis, intestinal infections.
Furthermore, Monticello was swarming with children, grandchildren, servants, visitors, slaves, hired hands.
It would have been next to impossible to keep a slave mistress a secret.
And Jefferson's family and staff were unanimous in saying there was no such thing.
Jefferson's letters to his family at this time were full of moral instruction that would have been brazenly hypocritical if he had been fornicating with a slave.
Now the guy who probably knew the most about what went on at Monticello was the plantation overseer, Edmund Bacon.
He wrote, That the Sally Hemings business was a pack of lies.
He also wrote the name of someone else he caught repeatedly sneaking out of Sally's quarters early in the morning.
Unfortunately, the name has been rubbed out of the original, probably by the guilty party himself.
Okay, so who was Esten's baby daddy?
Who gave him that Jefferson DNA?
Well, Thomas had a younger brother named Randolph who lived 20 miles away and was often at Monticello.
There still exists a letter from the President inviting him to visit at exactly the time Esten would have been conceived.
Randolph was 51 years old and a widower and a completely different kind of person from the President.
A former Jefferson slave wrote, and I quote, Randolph sounds like he could have gone for a pretty mulatto.
He later remarried and had several children, so we know he was potent.
Also, the Esten family tradition had always been that a relative, not Thomas Jefferson, was the father.
Although when the DNA article came out, The descendants immediately changed their story, and now they finger Thomas as the father.
People who claim Monticello was a misogynist love nest point out that Jefferson never denied the Sally story.
Well, he didn't stoop to denials.
But there is a private letter that he wrote in 1805 in which he denied all the scurrilous stuff written about him, except for one thing.
He admitted that in his youth, He made a pass at a married woman.
Now, this is an implicit denial of the Hemmings business.
Finally, Sally Hemmings outlived Jefferson by seven years.
Not once is she known to have claimed that Thomas was her lover.
So, make up your own minds.
But if you don't believe me, maybe you'll believe the 13 prominent historians and academics called The Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemmings issue.
They wrote a 400-page book published in 2001 and re-issued in 2011 about the paternity claim.
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