A Tale of two Madisons

This is a tale of two Madisons, men of striking similarities and stark differences; contained in their lives is the complexity, criminality, and promise of the United States.

These two Madisons, likely, never knew each other, as the elder died when the younger was a teenager.

Scions of old colonial families, each could claim a signer of the Declaration of Independence as an ancestor. Despite that, their lives are of profound difference.

You see, dear reader, one of these Madisons was Madison Hemings, son

of the author of the Declaration of Independence, as well as a signer of it, while the other, Madison Grant, was a descendant of Robert Treat Paine of Massachusetts, who merely signed it. Madison Hemings, the second son of the enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, the plantation concubine and rape victim of her half-sister’s widower, Thomas Jefferson, had a very different life than his aforementioned namesake, despite being named after the same important founding father, James Madison. Madison Hemings lived a life enslaved by his father, until his father’s death resulted in his and his family’s freedom. Sadly, for the rest of the African-Americans enslaved by Thomas Jefferson, yet, likely, not related to him, freedom would not come. Instead, the rest of the enslaved Jefferson household was auctioned off to pay for Jefferson’s staggering debts, scattered throughout the country as “King Cotton” sunk its bitter roots deep into the fabric of American society. In contrast, Madison Grant lived a charmed life, as a scion of an “aristocratic” American family, which included early Puritan and Dutch settlers, a colonial governor, and multiple military officers. His own father was a Civil War veteran, decorated for heroism as a surgeon with the Union army. Grant attended Yale College, as descendants of Puritan “founders” were wont to do, before moving on to Law School at Columbia in New York as those members of the St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York were likewise wont to do. His life was one of utmost privilege, built upon the deep roots of the European colonizers of the Northeast. Hemings did not enjoy that privilege, despite being a scion of two aristocratic Virginia families, connected to the European colonizers on both sides of his family, as well. And therein lies the rub… Hemings was enslaved, the child of an enslaved mother, who herself had been the child of an enslaved mother, and the law passed enslaved status through the mother. He was born a legal slave, as his mother had been. Both his mother and grandmother had been raped by those “scions of aristocratic Virginia families,” because each had been “owned” by them, with no ability to give “consent.” Despite the strong streams of European blood in Hemings, he was still legally enslaved and legally “colored.” That slightest dilution of European blood by African blood was a precursor of the Jim Crow Era “one drop” laws that defined life for millions of Americans. These were the laws that Madison Grant supported, of course, because his claim to fame, beyond his advocacy of endangered animal species and the California redwoods, was his advocacy of the “endangered” “Nordic race.” You see, though Hemings’ father had openly mixed with African-European mixed women, Grant feared such mixing as a precursor of doom for American civilization, well part of it. In this fear, he seems to have had more in common with Hemings' father than Hemings, and yet their stories are inextricably bound.

Jefferson famously wrote in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” that slavery should end and African-Americans should leave because “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” Jefferson continued onwards to lay the basis for American scientific racism and denigrate African-Americans, several of whom were his own children, like Madison Hemings, named for his friend: Virginia planter, president and enslaver, James Madison.

Madison Grant shared Jefferson’s preoccupations with “scientific” ideas of race, but considered the so-called “Negro Problem” well handled by laws against inter-marriage and strict Jim Crow segregation. His fear was, ironically, other Europeans, but of a different sort. Whereas Jefferson saw the world as Black and white (and red), despite his children and his concubine being both Black AND white, Grant parsed the world more deeply. In his work The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History Grant saw an even greater division of humanity, and a fear of exactly the sort of people represented by Madison Hemings. With the publication of this book, Madison Grant, naturalist, conservationist, and advocate of America’s National Parks became a leading advocate of the American Eugenics movement.

Madison Grant invented a distinction of multiple white races, including the one he considered superior, the ancient Aryan race. These Aryans broke apart, leading to the rise of the so-called Nordic race, “and we know that all the blondness in the world is derived from this source.” (Grant, 1916, p.190) From Grant’s perspective, the contemporaneous influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Catholics and Jews, threatened to dilute and subsume this Nordic race in America, which would lead to their extinction, and as he had fought to preserve endangered animals and trees, he sought a eugenics solution to save the endangered "Nordics."

Grant’s ignorance of biology and genetics, similar to Hemings’ father’s ignorance of the same, led to wild conclusions based upon fantasies and prejudices, yet with devastating consequences. For more than 200 years after Hemings' father wrote out a list of speculations about the racial differences between Black and white, American scientists sought to prove the biological basis of difference, and Madison Grant, the intellectual descendant of such science sought to sort, categorize, and breed out what he considered to be “racially inferior” differences.

While Madison Hemings was living a life in Ohio, which disproved the nonsense his father wrote, American “race” anthropologists like Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz labored to justify enslavement of African-Americans, and systematic deportation and extermination of Native Americans.

These men’s work was barely questioned in Grant’s time, and he even refers to the “fact” that “Modern anthropology has demonstrated that racial lines are not only absolutely independent of both national and linguistic groupings, but that in many cases these racial lines cut through them.” (Grant, 1916, p. xv).

Hemings’ father, Jefferson, spoke fearfully of an entrenched American aristocracy, and sought to shed all such pretensions while president, though lording over a massive plantation with hundreds of enslaved laborers. Grant, some 100 years later embraced it, declaring of New York City that “there is a native American aristocracy resting upon layer after layer of immigrants of lower races.” (Grant, 1916, p. 5)

Whereas Hemings’ father, Jefferson, inspired the work that Grant took for, ahem, granted, Grant had his own fans. In the 1920s, an imprisoned German activist, wrote to Madison Grant after reading his book in prison. Adolf Hitler went on to lead Germany and attempt, through violent, eugenically-motivated mass murder, to recreate the Aryan nation of which Grant spoke.

After the horrors of the Holocaust, eugenics was largely discredited, but the forced sterilization laws it inspired stayed on the books until the 1970s, and the laws about mixed marriages, first passed in Hemings' Virginia in the 1600s, persisted until the 1960s.

As late as the mid 1990s, historians speaking at Jefferson’s plantation, Monticello, would deny that the Hemings family were Jefferson descendants, but DNA testing would prove them wrong. The science of genetics and DNA has proven a great deal wrong about what Grant stood for, and of what Jefferson disclaimed of his own children. This nightmarish strain of American racist thought, formulated by slavery, and spread through eugenics is a bitter weed in the American garden. Each time it seems gone it reappears to contaminate our discourse. These two men, Madison Hemings and Madison Grant, overlapped briefly in time, but significantly in the history of American and world racism.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Eugenics Archive