Thomas Jefferson (1743-1825, born and died in Virginia) has been subject to a lot of revision lately. I feel free to do some speculating. I know nothing about the life and parents who shaped him or his wife or his slave, Sally, who amounted to being a second wife. "Jefferson served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Previously, he had served as the second vice president of the United States from 1797 to 1801." “Mr. Jefferson displays a mild easy and obliging temper,” commented the duc de La Rochefoucald-Liancourt, “though he is somewhat cold and reserved. His conversation is the most agreeable kind.” (Wiki)
Jefferson married first a widow of two years of marriage who had a toddler son who died. She had six more pregnancies but her health was damaged and all but two succumbed very young. It is said that she asked Jefferson not to remarry. But he had a "second marriage" to a slave, half sister to his wife, and had more children with her. We have no record of any sexual relations to other slaves or to white women. It seems his first wife was quite wealthy. It's possible that his wife's money interfered with legal remarriage.
"In 1803, Jefferson began a controversial process of Indian tribe removal to the newly organized Louisiana Territory, and he signed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807. After retiring from public office, Jefferson founded the University of Virginia." (wiki) In short, he was an elitist, part of the formerly-English breakaway American oligarchy, who took a few shortcuts here and there. He was almost always in debt and spent a lot of time in France, taking his "second wife" along with him. France has always had quite a different view of both marriage and slavery. Jefferson was not very religious and printed a New Testament with all the miracles edited out: "The Jefferson Bible."
Jefferson negotiated the "purchase" of the Louisiana Purchase but did not consult, acknowledge, or compensate any of the indigenous people who had been settled there for millennia. He sent Lewis and Clark to survey the land and bring back samples of plants and animals. Clark was rather like Jefferson, a dependable man with a wildcard partner in Lewis, and a mongrel frontiersman crew, who had much French blood. Also, a young indigenous woman and her baby, his own slave, York, and a very big Newfoundland dog, Seaman. Feeling the need for the comfort of sex, all but Clark, Sacajawea, the baby and the dog came back with STD's. York survived and was eventually freed and provided with a wagon and team so he could make a living. The others all died in a few years, Lewis evidently from tertiary syphillis leading to suicide. He had never married or had children.
There is much to argue and speculate about with these people. Two major and ancient DNA streams come from Europe and Africa to overwhelm the people of America, along with the people who are vectors. Today we can even analyze the DNA of microbes and track their likely history, many of them starting in Africa as products of domesticating animals ten thousand years ago and afflicting the people of Europe before being carried to America. Some believe that STD's started among the indigenous people of America but certainly they had no immunity to the European microbes which deeply affected the repopulating of the continent after so many died. Being relocated to places they did not know broke their eco-harmony in deadly ways.
Those from layers of society with high entitlement, so much that they could invent a new country and argue about its design, buy and sell land across America, and then be the diplomats of the new country when dealing with France, are living in quite a different context than Sacajawea, captured and not-quite-enslaved as she led explorers back to her original home.
Jefferson, whose interests are abstract and sophisticated (math, architecture, fine wines, deism), goes into debt but keeps an auxiliary wife. William Clark has a protective fondness for three males: Lewis, York, and Sacajawea's boy whom he supported and encouraged lifelong. As well, he took as much care of Sacajawea as he could, and she both preserved the life of her baby (which Jefferson's wife could not do for her own babies in spite of the privileges and resources of her class) and guided the party.
Not far from here is a "population center" called "Meriwether" not far from the camp where a sub-group of the expedition including Lewis could see the edge of the drainage that was the boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. Beyond that was "Canada" dominated by the Hudson's Bay Company. There was a skirmish with Blackfeet boys and two of them were killed. The men left in a hurry and went home on the Missouri/Mississippi rivers. Water is a big player in the story of the West, but water has no DNA. Its code is written in gravity.
So human stories gather up identities from all these sequences and assign them to people, their sources, motives, customs and locations, their perfidies and betrayals, their wealth and limits. These historical humans are far more complicated and there are far more kinds of them than we think about. For recent decades people have been busy writing new histories or sub-histories, or simply fantasies about what might have been true or changes in point of view. What if Lewis and Clark were gay?
In the Sixties when Bob Scriver was a popular Western sculptor, he made two monumental sculptures of Lewis and Clark, including Sacajawea and her baby in the one at Fort Benton, and York and the Newfoundland named "Seaman" in the Great Falls one. He also made some small portraits.
When I was pulling away from the Unitarian Universalist ministry and spending one summer in a youth hostel in East Glacier, my first UU minister sought me out to see what I was doing. He was puzzled that I wasn't becoming something respected and important. As a compliment to me, he bought from Bob one of the small figures of Lewis and Clark. He was a historian who believed in the "Great Man theory."
Three decades later, both of us long out of the ministry (he retired, I bolted), he died and his widow wanted to give me "back" that small bronze, which I I have never seen except in photos. She had no consciousness of the change in the reputation of Lewis and Clark among indigenous people, due to the killings of Blackfeet teenagers at the Meriwether camp. She didn't realize that I'd been divorced from Scriver far earlier than his L and C monument phase or that I'd been a friend of Darrell Robes Kipp who wrote the libretto for the opera, "Summer Sun, Winter Moon" which mourns the deadly expedition. I refused the return of the bronze. She was from too different a context of codes to understand. Her code was way out of date. She didn't understand that cultural codes change all the time. And so do people. The story goes on and on, swerving and doubling back, merging and separating. I didn't bother to explain.
