ENTRY

Peter Carr (1770–1815)

SUMMARY

Peter Carr was a justice of the peace for Albemarle County, a representative to the House of Delegates (1801–1804, 1807–1808), an educator, and a founding trustee of Albemarle Academy, which later evolved into the University of Virginia. He was also the nephew of Thomas Jefferson and lived at Monticello as a young man. Carr is perhaps best known for the assertion, made by Thomas Jefferson Randolph after Carr’s death, that he or his brother Samuel Carr had fathered at least six children with Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s enslaved house servant, between 1795 and 1808. For this reason, Peter Carr was often accepted as the likely father of Hemings’s children until the publication of Annette Gordon-Reed’s monograph Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), which made a strong case for Jefferson’s paternity, and the 1998 DNA test that concluded that a Jefferson male, not Carr or his brother, had fathered Eston Hemings, the youngest son of Sally Hemings.

Thomas Jefferson

Carr was born on January 2, 1770, in Saint James Northam Parish, Goochland County, most likely at the Spring Forest plantation of his parents, Dabney Carr (1743–1773), a lawyer, and Martha Jefferson Carr, sister of Thomas Jefferson. Dabney Carr and Jefferson formed so close a friendship that after Carr’s death, Jefferson took full responsibility for the education of Peter Carr and the younger of his two brothers, Dabney Carr (1773–1837), later a judge of the Virginia Court of Appeals. During diplomatic service in France, Jefferson had to content himself with writing Peter Carr some much-quoted letters on education while entrusting his informal guardianship to James Madison. Carr attended Walker Maury’s academies in Orange and Williamsburg and studied from 1786 until about 1789 at the College of William and Mary and as a private student of George Wythe. About 1790 Carr began to study law at Spring Forest and Monticello under Jefferson’s direction. He was admitted to the bar in the summer of 1793 but practiced only briefly.

Peter Carr and Slavery

Late in 1794 Carr inherited some slaves and about 500 acres of land in Louisa County. He lived at Monticello until August 1796, when construction projects there caused him to move into Charlottesville. On June 6, 1797, Carr married Esther “Hetty” Smith Stevenson, a widow with one son and the sister of Robert Smith, who later served in Jefferson‘s cabinet, and Samuel Smith, a Maryland congressman. Of the Carrs’ four sons and four daughters, two sons and one daughter died in infancy. After 1798 Carr lived with his family at Carrsbrook, a 900-acre estate about five miles north of Charlottesville that the Carrs initially borrowed and then purchased from Wilson Cary Nicholas, Hetty Carr’s brother-in-law and later governor of Virginia. By the time of his death Carr also possessed 199 acres of adjoining land, at least fourteen slaves, and ten horses.

Carr was a passionate political supporter of Jefferson and the Republican Party, but his first effort to advance their interests failed. Under the pseudonym John Langhorne, he addressed a letter to George Washington on September 25, 1797, commiserating with him on alleged calumnies directed at the former president in his retirement. After Washington dispatched a predictably cautious reply, a local Federalist informed him of the subterfuge and charged that Carr had hoped to elicit an indiscreet response. The incident dealt a final blow to Washington’s already deteriorating relationship with Jefferson but otherwise achieved nothing.

Carr’s subsequent political career was more straightforward. After a failed attempt to win election to the House of Delegates in 1799, he supported Jefferson during the 1800 presidential campaign. Carr became a justice of the peace for Albemarle County on April 18, 1801, and about the same time he was elected to represent the county in the House of Delegates. He served three consecutive one-year terms, from 1801 to 1804, and won the same seat a final time for the 1807–1808 session. In all but his third term Carr sat on the Committee for Courts of Justice, and he also served on the Committee of Propositions and Grievances in his first term. He chaired the Committee of Privileges and Elections and served on two minor committees during the 1803–1804 session. Carr lost his bid for reelection in 1808 and was defeated again a year later when he ran for the state senate. A supporter in the latter campaign urged Carr to display less pride and more familiarity with the voters, attitudes that may help explain these failures.

Virtual Tour of the Academical Village at the University of Virginia

Carr collaborated in the great project of Jefferson’s retirement, the promotion of education. An accomplished student of English literature with an exceptionally melodious speaking voice, Carr in 1811 opened a successful but short-lived academy at Carrsbrook. In 1803 he had been named a founding trustee of the Albemarle Academy, an institution that existed only on paper until March 25, 1814, when he joined four other trustees in an attempt at its revival that included adding Jefferson to the governing board. On April 5, Carr was named president, in which capacity Jefferson wrote him a long and frequently cited letter on September 7, 1814, outlining his educational philosophy and urging the board to raise its sights and found a college. The Albemarle Academy Carr helped reinvigorate evolved into Central College and later into the University of Virginia.

The President

Despite his widely acknowledged gifts, Carr failed to realize Jefferson’s hopes for a distinguished legal or political career, at least in part because of the self-indulgence, corpulence, and “extreme indolence” of which he stood accused in an otherwise affectionate memoir by a much-younger cousin. Carr’s notoriety came long after his death with the assertion that between 1795 and 1808 he had fathered at least three sons and three daughters of Thomas Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings. In 1802 James Thomson Callender, a waspish Richmond journalist, publicly accused Jefferson of fathering the children. Circumstantial evidence seemed to corroborate the charge. Jefferson was at Monticello when each Hemings child was conceived, and there were no documented Hemings pregnancies during his long absences. Jefferson allowed two of her surviving children to escape from slavery and freed the other two in his will, even though he emancipated very few other slaves. Sally Hemings’s son Madison Hemings in the 1870 Ohio census and an 1873 newspaper article maintained that Jefferson was his father, an assertion supported by Israel Gillette Jefferson, another former Jefferson slave.

Edmund Bacon

Descendants of Jefferson’s white daughters, many of his admirers, and some historians sought to refute the allegation. In an 1862 memoir Jefferson’s former overseer Edmund Bacon denied Jefferson was the father of the Hemings children but failed to name another man. Secondhand accounts of two conversations, written in 1858 and 1868, reported that Jefferson’s grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph had fixed the blame on Peter Carr and his younger brother Samuel Carr. One version explicitly named Peter Carr as the father of Sally Hemings’s children, identified his brother as the father of offspring by another Jefferson slave, and described the Carrs shedding tears of remorse about the public furor over Jefferson’s supposed responsibility. In the other, the Carr brothers allegedly found their uncle’s predicament amusing, and in relating the story Randolph’s sister concluded that Samuel Carr was responsible. From the initial publication of the first of these accusations in 1951, most Jefferson scholars, despite the absence of any contemporary evidence naming the Carrs or placing them at Monticello at the critical times, accepted these later, obviously contradictory stories as exculpatory of Jefferson and speculated on whether Peter Carr or Samuel Carr, both of whom lived reasonably close to Monticello, was the father. Samuel Carr probably did form other interracial sexual liaisons, but he had been raised by relatives in Maryland and seems to have been much farther removed from Jefferson and the Monticello social circle as an adult. Peter Carr was therefore often accepted as the likely father of the Hemings children until the publication in 1997 of Annette Gordon-Reed’s monograph Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which made a strong case for Jefferson’s paternity. The following year a DNA analysis conclusively ruled out both Carrs, established Jefferson or a male-line relative as the father, and, in conjunction with the other evidence, suggested Jefferson himself was the most credible candidate.

A View of the President's House in the City of Washington After the Conflagration of the 24th August 1814

After a British army burned Washington in August 1814, Carr joined the contingent of militia guarding the approaches to Richmond. The British moved instead against Baltimore, and he returned home, but the rigors of service in a hastily constructed encampment undermined his already delicate health. Two weeks after complaining to Jefferson of rheumatism, ague, and fever, Peter Carr died at Carrsbrook on February 17, 1815. As he had requested in his will, he probably was buried near his parents and children in the family cemetery at Monticello, but no gravestone survives.

MAP
TIMELINE
January 2, 1770
Peter Carr is born in Saint James Northam Parish, Goochland County, most likely at the Spring Forest plantation of his parents, Dabney Carr, a lawyer, and Martha Jefferson Carr, sister of Thomas Jefferson.
1786—1789
Peter Carr studies at the College of William and Mary and as a private student of George Wythe.
ca. 1790
Peter Carr begins to study law at Spring Forest and Monticello under the direction of Thomas Jefferson.
1793
Peter Carr is admitted to the bar but practices only briefly.
1794
Peter Carr inherits some slaves and about 500 acres of land in Louisa County, but lives at Monticello until August 1796, when construction projects cause him to move into Charlottesville.
June 6, 1797
Peter Carr marries Esther "Hetty" Smith Stevenson, a widow with one son. They will have four sons and four daughters; two sons and one daughter die in infancy.
September 25, 1797
Peter Carr writes a letter to George Washington under the pseudonym John Langhorne. The letter, written with the goal of eliciting an indiscreet response from the former president, commiserates with Washington on alleged calumnies directed at him in his retirement.
1798
After this date, Peter Carr lives with his family at Carrsbrook, a 900-acre estate about five miles north of Charlottesville that the Carrs borrowed and then purchased from Wilson Cary Nicholas, Hetty Carr's brother-in-law.
1799
Peter Carr fails to win election to the House of Delegates.
April 18, 1801
Peter Carr becomes a justice of the peace for Albemarle County, and at about the same time is elected to represent the county in the House of Delegates. He serves three consecutive one-year terms in the House, from 1801 to 1804.
1803
Peter Carr is named a founding trustee of the Albemarle Academy, an institution that exists only on paper until March 25, 1814.
1807
Peter Carr wins a seat in the House of Delegates representing Albemarle County.
1811
Peter Carr opens a successful but short-lived academy at Carrsbrook, his 900-acre estate.
April 6, 1814
Peter Carr is named president of the Albemarle Academy.
August 1814
In the aftermath of the British army's destruction of Washington, D.C., militiamen, among them Peter Carr, guard the approaches to Richmond.
September 7, 1814
Thomas Jefferson writes a letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, outlining his own educational philosophy and encouraging Carr to apply it to the establishment of Albemarle Academy, which exists in name only and of which Carr is president.
February 17, 1815
Peter Carr dies at Carrsbrook. He is likely buried near his parents and children in the family cemetery at Monticello, but no gravestone survives.
October 24, 1858
In a letter to her husband, Joseph Coolidge, Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge denies the possibility that her grandfather, Thomas Jefferson, could have fathered children by the slave Sally Hemings. She also reports on speculation that Jefferson's nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr, may have been responsible.
June 1, 1868
Henry S. Randall writes to James Parton a letter recounting his conversation with Thomas Jefferson Randolph, grandson of Thomas Jefferson, in which Randolph asserts that Peter Carr, not Jefferson, was the father of Sally Hemings's children.
November 5, 1998
"Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child" is published in Nature magazine. It details the results of a genetic study by Dr. Eugene A. Foster concluding that "a Jefferson male"—although not necessarily Thomas Jefferson—had fathered Eston Hemings.
January 2000
An investigation by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which has owned and operated Monticello since 1923, releases the findings of an investigation, concluding that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of Sally Hemings's children.
FURTHER READING
  • Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
  • Looney, J. Jefferson. “Carr, Peter.” In the Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Vol. 3, edited by Sara B. Bearss, 29–31. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2006.
CITE THIS ENTRY
APA Citation:
Looney, J. & Dictionary of Virginia Biography. Peter Carr (1770–1815). (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/carr-peter-1770-1815.
MLA Citation:
Looney, J., and Dictionary of Virginia Biography. "Peter Carr (1770–1815)" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 27 Sep. 2023
Last updated: 2021, December 22
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