Thomas Gibbons (politician)

Thomas Gibbons (December 15, 1757 – May 16, 1826) was a planter, politician, lawyer, steamboat owner and the plaintiff in Gibbons vs. Ogden.

Early life
Gibbons was born at Mulberry Hill, his family's plantation outside of Savannah, Georgia, on December 15, 1757. He was the son of Joseph Gibbons and Hannah (née Martin) Gibbons. Between 1752 and 1762, his father acquired several thousand acres between the Ogeechee and Savannah Rivers where he operated a saw mill, grew rice, and owned over 100 slaves.

He was educated at home and in Charleston, South Carolina, where he read law. During the American Revolutionary War, Gibbons, who was just eighteen when it started, was a passive Loyalist.

Career
Following the Americans' victory over the British, Gibbons and other remaining Tories were convicted of treason and he was considered a prisoner of the Sheriff of Chatham County. His estate was confiscated and only after executive order was he permitted to remain at his mother's and allowed and to pass between there and Savannah. In January 1783, Gibbons petitioned the Assembly for citizenship, which was granted six months later under the stipulation that he could not vote, hold office for 14 years, or practice law. However, in only four years, he was granted full rights and privileges of citizenship.

Between 1791 and 1801, only four years after being granted full rights of citizenship, Gibbons served several terms as the Mayor of Savannah, Georgia, from 1791 to 1792, again in 1794 to 1795 and lastly from 1799 to 1801, as a Democratic-Republican. In addition to his service as mayor, he was also an alderman of the city. In 1801, he was appointed a federal judge.

As mayor, Gibbons was the head of the Savannah delegation who welcomed U.S. President George Washington to Savannah during Washington's "ceremonial tour of the South" in May 1791.

Move to New Jersey and letter to Senator Johnathan Dayton


In 1801, Gibbons moved north and purchased a summer house in Elizabethtown in New Jersey, where he purchased a large private dock facility a few years later. His neighbor was former United States Senator and New Jersey Governor Aaron Ogden.

In December 1802 Gibbons wrote a letter to Johnathan Dayton, who then served as U.S. Senator from New Jersey, which in part asserted that the sexual liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was a reality. The letter revealed the names of all of Hemings’ three children, who were alive at the time, and some other information, that newspaper accounts of the day did not reveal. Byron Woodson, A President in the Family, (Westport CT, Praeger, 2001), 32-3. The Jefferson/Hemings controversy began with a news article by James Callender, published in a Richmond newspaper on September 1, 1802. Ever since Fawn Brodie’s Jefferson biography was published in 1974, Jeffersonian historians such as John Chesler, Annette Gordon-Reed and Joshua Rothman have applied ad hominin castigation to Callender. Bad mouth the messenger, who in real life suffered an awful death in 1803. The common thread of both the Callender article and the Gibbons letter is that Jefferson and Hemings produced children together. Callender wrote three of four articles; he indicated that Hemings gave birth to more than one child, but named only Tom. Gibbons wrote, “That Jefferson lives in open defiance of all decant rule, with a Mulatto slave his property named Sally, is as correct as truth itself, and that his children, to wit, Tom, Beverly, and Hariot…” Gibbons did not get the names of Tom’s siblings from the newspapers, so his account is distinct. It is a separate source. Historians such as Gordon-Reed knew about the letter. Gordon-Reed complained about the harsh language that Gibbons used in describing Hemings, but danced around and avoided the substance of the Gibbons letter. (G-R, TJ and TJ, U. Press of VA, 1997, 171-2) She hid it from the readers of both of her Jefferson/Hemings books. In her first book Gordon-Reed wrote, “Jefferson scholars have never made a serious and objective attempt to get at the truth of this matter.” (She should have made Brodie the exception, but she did not. ) Gordon-Reed was acclaimed for that approach, but the approach was saturated with hypocrisy, as for one, Gordon-Reed hid much more evidence than any other ‘Jefferson scholar’ the Gibbons letter being only one of many instances. Tom’s presence in 1802 is corroborated; there are two sources reporting his presence, both over two hundred years old. Gordon-Reed and other historians claimed that the child died soon after birth. This comes from Hemings’ son Madison who gave a statement for a newspaper in 1873. The problem is that Madison was born in 1805. Tom was born in 1790 and left Monticello soon after Callender started the scandal in 1802. Madison could not be a witness; he was not alive, but Jefferson scholars do not understand that a witness has to be a living person; nor do they understand the concept of corroboration. Gordon-Reed was correct to criticize ‘Jefferson scholars’ but she failed to see herself as the worst offender and failed to exclude Fawn Brodie from the malaise. The Gibbons letter had no known impact during Jefferson’s Presidency and was not known to participants in the controversy until the 1990s. Jefferson historians dropped their denial of the sexual liaison very soon after a DNA report was professionally dumped into the media without the knowledge of the DNA testing organizer. “Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy,” http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/white_house/july-dec98/jefferson_11-2.html, accessed 7/7/2006. Byron Woodson was one of the DNA donors. He is a first-hand witness. Dr Foster, the testing organizer, promised the DNA donors that historians would be kept away from the DNA process. Historians (except Brodie) had never handled the history honestly; descendants of Sally Hemings had read Fawn Brodie’s biography of Jefferson. The testing and laboratory work may have been perfect, but the reporting was hijacked by historian Joseph Ellis and others. Dr. Foster was distraught when he learned that he had lost control. He failed to inform the DNA donors of the reported results before they were made public, as he had promised he would do. After Woodson learned that things had gone astray, Foster answered Woodson's pointed questions honestly and never failed to answer the telephone. Foster did not know Ellis. When Ellis and news outlets, like U. S. News and World Report were preparing a media dump, Foster thought the DNA results were still secret. Pulitzer Prize winner Ellis appeared as the star of a massive multi-media media dump, reporting the reputed DNA results Nov. 1st and 2nd 1998. Ellis appeared on PBS News Hour Nov. 2, 1998, announcing "...the scientific evidence that we have now generated." Again, DNA donors had been promised that historians would be kept away from the process, knowing of their untrustworthy track record. Ellis claimed that the Woodson Y-chromosome DNA did not match the Jefferson family DNA. Thomas Jefferson’s DNA was not used as his body was not exhumed. Foster sent a letter objecting the handling of the matter to Nature (magazine) and the Washington Post reported (L. Smith, 1/6/99) that Foster had issued a written objection. Foster told Woodson, "I don't know," when his project was breached, thus because he lost control, Foster did not know if the Nature article, which he had co-authored in prior months, reported the actual results or not. Soon afterwards Ellis became embroiled in a scandal, was suspended for a year from the college where he taught and admitted that he was a habitual liar. Historians at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Foundation), Annette Gordon-Reed and other historians embraced the results of a hijacked DNA report advanced by an admitted habitual liar (Ellis) without explaining how the Gibbons letter, the Callender articles, the Woodson family oral history and other sources could all independently advance the same story with that story being incorrect (i.e., incorrect according to the Foundation, etc.) Switching to another approach, the movie Sally Hemings was broadcast in the year 2000. Twenty million Americans simultaneously watched the movie on CBS. The producer acquired "the rights" to Brodie's book so as to "own the underlying material." (Tina Andrews, Sally Hemings, 55) CBS executives, the production company executives and the screenwriter are intelligent, accomplished people and they decided to take on Brodie's evidence rather than the DNA report. Why did they make that choice? Avoiding a 4,000-word answer -- because they are grown-ups. They decided to not join the historians, like Annette Gordon-Reed in throwing the historic record under the bus. The story changes too much, when Tom and Callender are ripped out of the story. They wanted the movie to make sense. Lastly, there was a track record of ill will between CBS and historians, as in prior decades historians had prevented the movie's production. --- Americans deserve a history that has integrity.

Gibbons enters the steamboat business
Gibbons formed a partnership with Ogden, to operate steamboats. In 1817 Gibbons acquired a steam ferry, the Stoudinger, built by Allaire Iron Works, as a Hudson River ferry business between Elizabethtown and New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1818, he acquired Bellona. Gibbons hired Cornelius Vanderbilt to captain the Bellona. Over the next few years, he also purchased Thistle, Swan, and Emerald. Vanderbilt biographer T.J. Stiles described Gibbons as "a staggeringly rich rice planter from Georgia." Gibbons turned out to be a mentor to Vanderbilt throughout his life.

In 1818, Gibbons broke his partnership with neighbor Aaron Ogden and started competing with him, just months before Gibbons hired Vanderbilt. Ogden had acquired rights to a steamboat monopoly in New York waters. The monopoly had been granted by the New York State Legislature to the politically influential patrician Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton, who had designed the steamboat. Both Livingston and Fulton had died by the time Vanderbilt started working for Gibbons. The monopoly was held by Livingston's heirs. They had granted a license to Ogden to run a ferry between New York and New Jersey. Gibbons launched his steamboat venture because of a personal dispute with Ogden, whom he hoped to drive into bankruptcy. To accomplish this, he undercut Ogden's prices. Ogden then secured an injunction against Gibbons on October 21, 1818. This prompted Gibbons to bring a legal action to overturn the monopoly. The landmark legal case, known as Gibbons vs. Ogden, was fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where Gibbons, represented by Daniel Webster and U.S. Attorney General William Wirt, eventually won in 1824.

In 1820, six years before his death, Gibbons had built, by William, what is today known as the Thomas Gibbons Range, in Savannah's Ellis Square. He had owned the lot since 1809.

Personal life
In 1780, Gibbons was married to Ann Miles Heyward (1757–1820). Together, they were the parents of many children, only three of which survived to adulthood:
 * Ann Heyward Gibbons (1790–1817), who married John Trumbull (1784–1859), son of Gov. Joseph Trumbull.
 * William Gibbons (1794–1852), who built the Gibbons Mansion in Madison, New Jersey, and married Abigail Louisa Taintor (1791–1844).
 * Thomas Heyward Gibbons (1795–1825), who married Mary Dayton, daughter of U.S. Senator and Speaker of the House Jonathan Dayton.

Gibbons died on May 16, 1826, in New York. He was "obese and diabetic from a life of rapacious eating and drinking."

Descendants
Through his daughter Ann, he was the grandfather of Thomas Gibbons Trumbull, John Heyward Trumbull, and Hannah Gibbons Trumbull (1813–1876), who married Ralph Henry Isham, and Sarah Backus Trumbull (1815–1903), who married Daniel Coit Ripley (1812–1893). However, due to Gibbon's falling out with his son-in-law, no child of John Trumbull was able to inherit any piece of Gibbon's estate or property as dictated in Gibbons' scathing will.

Through his son William, he was the grandfather of Sarah Taintor Gibbons (1829–1909), who was married to Ward McAllister (1827–1895); and William Heyward Gibbons (1831–1887), William's only son. William Heyward sold the family mansion, known as the Gibbons Mansion, to Daniel Drew in 1867 for $140,000. Drew donated the mansion and grounds to found Drew Theological Seminary (now known as Drew University), named in his honor.