Division
As long as there’s been elections, there’s been divisions. The United States has a rich history of division, from well before the dramatic debates over the Declaration of Independence. But it was particularly virulent during the first seriously contested Presidential election in 1800. John Adams was President, and the Federalist candidate for re-election. Thomas Jefferson was Vice President, the candidate of the Democratic-Republican Party. The two parties were completely at odds over the future of the American Democracy, with both predicting dire consequences if the other won.
When the Democratic-Republicans won the Presidency by a tie-breaking vote of the House of Representatives, the US Constitution was tested. But President Adams accepted the results, and turned over the government to his rival, Jefferson. He left the new capital, Washington DC, the morning of the inauguration. That began a tradition of peaceful transition of power, a tradition that continued until January 6th of 2020.
The “Affair”
But the political division between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans continued. In 1802, a “poem” was published in Federalist newspapers in Philadelphia and Boston. The newspapers claimed in jest that it was authored by Jefferson himself, the “Sage of Monticello”. It ridiculed Jefferson’s long standing “affair” with an enslaved woman he owned, Sally Hemings. Today we would call it rape. That “affair” began after Jefferson’s wife died. Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife (they shared the same father), and fourteen years old when their “affair” began (Jefferson was forty-four).
The entire nation was well aware of Jefferson’s ongoing liaison with Hemings. It produced six children, who became the enslaved property of Jefferson. Monticello is the famous home Jefferson built with enslaved laborers on a mountaintop above Charlottesville, Virginia. The poem can be “sung” to another political tune, written originally to ridicule the Colonial troops in 1755, but later taken as a song of “honor” by Americans – Yankee Doodle.
The Poem
- Monticellian Sally
- Verse – Of all the damsels on the green, On mountain, or in valley, A lass so luscious ne’er was seen As Monticellian Sally.
- Refrain – Yankee doodle, who’s the noodle? What wife were half so handy? To breed a flock, of slaves for stock, A blackamoor’s the dandy.
- Verse – Search every town and city through, Search market, street and alley ; No dame at dusk shall meet your view, So yielding as my Sally.
- Repeat Refrain
Verse – When press’d by loads of state affairs, I seek to sport and dally, The sweetest solace of my cares Is in the lap of Sally. - Repeat Refrain
- Verse – Let Yankey parsons preach their worst–Let tory Witling’s rally! You men of morals! and be curst, You’d snap like sharks for Sally.
- Repeat Refrain
- Verse – She’s black you tell me–grant she be–Must colour always tally? Black is love’s proper hue for me– And white’s the hue for Sally.*
- Repeat Refrain
- Verse – What though she by the glands secretes ; Must I stand shill–I shall–I ? Tuck’d up between a pair of sheets There’s no perfume like Sally‡
- Repeat Refrain
- Verse – You call her slave–and pray were slaves, Made only for the galley ? Try for yourselves, ye witless knaves–* Take each to bed your Sally.
- New Refrain – Yankee doodle, who’s the noodle ? Wine’s vapid, tope me brandy– For still I find to breed my kind, A negro-wench the dandy !
Jefferson
Dirty politics didn’t begin with the 2016 election. And this essay isn’t an example of “Critical Race Theory”. Monticellian Sally is part of the “warts and all” history of the United States, a part that wasn’t taught in your history class in high school. But knowing about it now, draw your own conclusions about Jefferson, the conflicted man who wrote his own epitaph. It’s on his tombstone:
“The Author of the Declaration of Independence, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and the Father of the University of Virginia”.
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