Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993 TAG: 9304100206
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WITH CONTRADICTIONS, AN AMERICAN HERO COMES TO LIFE
To whole generations of Americans, Thomas Jefferson has been the essence of their country.A trifle haughty for mid- to late-20th century generations, perhaps.
Even a bit eccentric. Certainly not the macho, slightly lustful Thomas Jefferson that Ken Howard played in the movie version of "1776."
But generally above reproach and above all the writer of the Declaration of Independence, president of the United States and the Sage of Monticello.
When many of my generation think of Jefferson, the thought brings back the smell of the oil they used to put on the wooden floors of elementary schools, where we first heard of the great man.
We nodded in and out of sleep when the radiators overheated, and Jefferson, and the rest of those oddly dressed men in the picture of the signing of the Declaration, didn't do much to wake us up.
Jefferson now fascinates me, but Monticello bores me. It seems a cold place, in which some of Mr. Jefferson's inventions - the calendar clock, for example - seem, well, precious.
But Jefferson - born 250 years ago come Tuesday - has remained unassailable as a man of history; rather like Robert Edward Lee in the eyes of Southerners.
He was criticized in his own time, but he has been canonized since.
Then, last fall a symposium at the University of Virginia, Jefferson's "academical village," found people saying terrible things about the Sage of Monticello:
Jefferson was racist, which would not have been surprising for a slaveholding Virginian of his time.
Jefferson indulged freely in the forbidden act of miscegenation, which was certainly not a novelty among masters of the manor and plantation - the slave women having little to say in the practice.
Almost 20 years ago, the late Fawn Brodie, an accomplished and respected historian, wrote that she believes Jefferson had a 38-year affair with Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello, and that children born of the affair remained slaves.
The family long ago denied the stories. Jefferson remained silent, and most of Jefferson's biographers have rejected the Hemings story - using words like "tenuous."
But two centuries later, a conference produces a Virginia lawyer who says he is a great-grandson of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And the grandson said the relationship to Jefferson is not that much of a deal as far as his family is concerned.
Maybe Thomas Jefferson will never be dull again. Maybe such proceedings will flesh him out and not leave him "partly trapped in unchiseled marble," as Fawn Brodie saw him.
If this is a time for a modern debunking of Jefferson, he will not bear it alone.
Recently, Alan T. Nolan, an Indianapolis lawyer, wrote a short book that suggested Robert Edward Lee was something short of a Southern saint, and that he, too, was racist.
There is no suggestion of any sexual dabbling as far as Lee is concerned, but the sainthood is seriously assaulted. This, of course, is only one small book among others that carry on the legend unquestioned.
Almost as sobering is the allegation that Douglas Southall Freeman created a myth, not a man, in his epic writings about Lee. There was a time in Virginia when you could easily have raised enough money to build a huge statue of Freeman to join Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson on Richmond's Monument Avenue.
And what of John Adams - the old revolutionary who willed himself to live until the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and unknowingly joined Jefferson in death on July 4, 1826?
In last November's issue of Playboy, the centerfold claims direct lineage to John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams.
The Playmate of the Month, described as being of West Indian, Irish and Cherokee origins, is quoted as saying: "John had some girlfriends."
There is no mention of fiery Abigail Adams, who was as famous as Jefferson or either of the other Adamses in her time.
There have been rumors for years in Charlottesville and Albemarle County about Sally Hemings and Jefferson - the subject early on of a pamphleteer Jefferson had once defended.
In 1979, Barbara Chase-Ribaud wrote a novel titled "Sally Hemings" that had a teen-age Sally pregnant by Jefferson while she was serving the then-minister to France as a maid in his Paris mansion.
In the novel, Abigail Adams, who meets Sally and Jefferson's daughter, Polly, in London, is shocked that Sally is white.
In her book, Fawn Brodie doesn't snicker or take an intolerant view of what she says Sally and Jefferson were up to for years in Paris and Monticello:
"It was not the scandalous debauchery with an innocent, as the Federalists and later the abolitionists insisted, but a rather serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much happiness over a period lasting 38 years."
But, somewhat sadly, there have been snickers among some tourists at Monticello about a huge closet over Jefferson's famous alcove bed. Did Sally wait up there until the house was quiet?
Jefferson seemed haunted by sexual allusion. He was once accused of lecherous intentions toward the wife of a friend who asked Jefferson to look after her while he was away.
There was Maria Cosway, a married woman who attracted Jefferson seriously while he was in Paris. There is no suggestion of sexual contact between them, but Jefferson was warmed enough by the association to write his famous head-heart letter to her.
The man who composed the Declaration of Independence wrote of parting with Cosway:
"Having performed the last sad office of handing you into the carriage at the Pavillon de St. Denis, and seen the wheels get actually into motion, I turned on my heel and walked, more dead than alive, to the opposite door, where my own was waiting for me."
Those of us who smell floor oil when we think of Jefferson were never told such things. And he remained fleshless.
There also was no emphasis on what happened at Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, a fine old building still in use in an old city.
There, George Nicholas, an agent for Patrick Henry, by then Jefferson's enemy, persuaded the General Assembly of Virginia to look into Jefferson's conduct as Virginia's war governor.
The General Assembly was meeting in Staunton in the early summer of 1781 because it had left Eastern Virginia for safety, and stopped in Charlottesville, only to be chased over the mountain by the British cavalryman Bonastre Tarleton. Seven members had been captured in Charlottesville.
Jefferson himself - some said he tarried too long at breakfast - had to mount and ride wildly over Carters Mountain to escape the British.
The writer of the Declaration of Independence had, indeed, seriously damaged the old saying that the pen is mightier than the sword.
The war went badly in Virginia. Jefferson found that Virginia militiamen signed up long enough to get a gun and then faded away. A third of the men who panicked and ran at the Battle of Camden were Virginians.
It wasn't that easy, actually, to get a musket. The state, much bigger then, had the potential for 50,000 militiamen but only 4,000 muskets.
Worse, in the winter of 1781, the traitor Benedict Arnold brought the British up the James River, raiding and eventually capturing Richmond. When Arnold got to Richmond, he found only 200 men defending the city.
In the meantime, Jefferson rode around madly, exhausting horse after horse, looking for Baron Von Steuben, the man he had appointed to defend Richmond.
Jefferson's frantic horsemanship at the time was seen by his enemies as slapstick comedy and by his friends as a selfless effort to save the city by staying in the saddle for hours.
On April 24, 1781, the state government moved to Charlottesville, and Jefferson returned to his Little Mountain. Von Steuben wrote a report on wartime Virginia in which he said desertion in the militia went unpunished, laws were not enforced, and there had been "shameful evasions and impositions."
Then on June 2, the British came. Capt. Jack Jouett had heard at Cuckoo Tavern in Louisa County that Tarleton was coming.
He rode mercilessly through the night, with tree branches cutting his face, to Charlottesville with the warning. The assembly would reward Jouett with a sword and a pair of pistols. Virginia desperately needed a hero in those times, and Jouett obliged.
The Sage's mad ride over the mountain was interpreted quite differently. Fawn Brodie wrote that the ride "was eventually turned by Jefferson's enemies into a legend of military ineptness and cowardice."
Light Horse Harry Lee, the father of Robert Edward Lee, wrote later that the British were "chasing our governor from hill to hill and our legislature from town to town."
Jefferson sniffed that Lee's account was "an amusing historical novel."
Jefferson wrote that George Nicholas, who engineered the assembly investigation, "was like the minners [minnows] that go in and out the fundament of the whale."
When it is considered that the definition of "fundament" is either "anus" or "buttocks," this was not the noblest language Jefferson ever used.
In December of 1781, Jefferson appeared, as a delegate, before the General Assembly to defend himself. The assembly decided there was nothing to defend, but Jefferson insisted on a reading of the charges.
The assembly passed a resolution of thanks for his service as governor, and Jefferson resigned as a delegate.
There were hard times ahead for Jefferson, including the bitterness of national politics.
But his own state was the origin of most of Jefferson's troubles with his good name.
But, people who would debunk the Sage of Monticello find it hard to argue with one of the most enduring sentences in the English language:
"I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."