Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

by Mark Andrew Holowchak

The invitation came from a group of Jefferson admirers who felt he had not received a “fair trial” on this issue and had formed the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society.

A year later, in April 2001, we issued a lengthy report concluding with but a single, very mild, dissent, that the story is probably false.

Eston's most likely conception date, and an oral history taken down from a Monticello blacksmith—published years later by the University of Virginia Press under the title Memoirs of a Monticello Slave—asserted that when brother Randolph visited Monticello, he would “come out among black people, play the fiddle, and dance half the night.” There is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson ever socialized with his slaves.

We found it noteworthy that the oral tradition passed down by generations of Eston Hemings's descendants was that he was not the

child of President Jefferson, but rather of an “uncle.” So Randolph is the only potential father who fits all of the evidence.

Cynthia Harris Burton. Her book is titled Jefferson Vindicated: Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Genealogical Search (2005).

But, more important, the charge was originated by a disreputable scandal-monger named James Thomson Callender, who declared that he was seeking “ten thousand fold vengeance” after his efforts to blackmail Jefferson into appointing him to public office had failed.

was a collection of almost-identical oral traditions passed down by descendants of former slave Thomas Woodson, who had settled in different parts of the country. Woodson had surfaced after Jefferson's death and claimed to have been the “Tom” conceived by Jefferson and Hemings in Paris upon whom Callender had premised his allegations.

his childhood friend Dabney Carr, who had been identified by Jefferson grandchildren as having admitted to fathering children by Sally Hemings),

Speculating that Jefferson “might” have felt this, and that Hemings

“could” have done that, she argues that such a relationship might have occurred.

Since virtually everything we know with any certainty about Sally Hemings of possible relevance to this issue could be written on a three-by-five-inch index card (which we demonstrated in the Scholars Commission report6), th...

The Gordon-Reed volume appeared at a time when it was popular among some historians to try to topple the great “dead white males” of American history.

Professor Gordon-Reed and her new book received virtually every award for which they might have been eligible, including the Pulitzer Prize in History, the National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal from the president of the United States, a half-million-dollar “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Harvard University appointed her to three professorships, including in law and history.

For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

else, this book is an exercise in courage. Even here at the University of Virginia, in the eyes of some, defending Thomas Jefferson is beyond the pale, and I have faced some negativity as a direct result of my participation in the Scholars Commission inquiry.

Truths necessary for our own character, must not be suppressed out of tenderness to its calumniators. –TJ TO PRESIDENT JAMES MADISON, MARCH 23, 1815

Using Monte-Carlo statistical analysis and a Bayesian argument, Fraser Neiman, a member of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation panel of experts, published a study to show that it was next to impossible that anyone other than Jefferson fathered each of Hemings's children.

Gordon-Reed published the award-winning The Hemingses of Monticello in 2008 and possibility morphed into fact. She not only considered the liaison factual, she also filled in many of the details of that liaison in an “artful” reconstruction of events that gave Sally Hemings the dignity that she deserved and brought down Jefferson from Mount Rushmore. Jefferson was given his comeuppance.

Gordon-Reed, who in 1997 complained of white male scholars “controlling the discourse,” now controls the discourse.

It is a scholarly unhealthy and frightening state of affairs.

In spite of the massive shift on the issue, the fact remains that the DNA evidence is inconclusive and does not show it likely that Jefferson was the father of Eston, or any, of Sally

and the revisionist tendency to treat history as a normative discipline,

Their reconstructions are not just descriptive, but also morally evaluative. For them, it is insufficient to say Jefferson acted in such and such manner at a particular time of his life. One must add normatively and that makes him a hypocrite, a misanthrope, and a villain.

Overall, scholars, who accuse Jefferson of having had a lengthy liaison with Hemings as well as having been racist—at the forefront is Gordon-Reed—have gained control of the historical discourse and have molded public opinion concerning Jefferson in spite of the fact that there are no rationally persuasive reasons for such accusations.

it is incumbent on accusers like Gordon-Reed and Burstein to show through incontrovertible evidence, not circumstantial evidence or hearsay, that Jefferson and Hemings had a liaison, before spinning yarns about the nature of their liaison.

Lacking such evidence, it is morally reprehensible for scholars to state that a liaison occurred or was even probable. To do so is to blur the line between fact and fantasy, to place monetary gain or literary prizes in writing ahead of integrity,

That leads to a deeper issue, ignored by critics of such authors: the immorality of a...

Conclusions cannot be decided in advance of disclosure of evidence for them. Evidence contrary to one's thesis cannot merely be ignored. Historical scholars have a duty to aim at truth, not sales of books, literary prizes, or even vengeance.

was a person who gave much of himself to his fellow human beings. Even staunch political rivals like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton recognized that. It is morally irresponsible for scholars to oppugn hastily Jefferson on gauzy, ambiguous evidence.

No scholar ought to be praised for irrationality.

In addition, she includes two overlooked published reports by the Monticello slaves Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson.

aright

is here that Brodie develops the Freudian/Eriksonian motivation for her thesis.

The conclusion, implicit (hence, the brackets around claim 4) in claim 3, is that Jefferson had to act on his libido. Otherwise, he would have drowned in it. That is a queer conclusion, given Brodie's psychoanalytic bent, for it ignores one alternative in keeping with the tenets of psychoanalysis: heightened sublimation.

peccadillo,

peccancy.

That one should express “overwhelming remorse” at an indiscretion that occurred some forty years earlier is pathological, in that it shows incapacity to come to terms with or, at least, escape one's past. It would be strange for a man, whose moral faculty has matured, to express overwhelming remorse some forty years later, especially in light of Jefferson's Stoic-like demeanor

According to the “testimony” of Madison Hemings, son of Jefferson's slave Sally Hemings, Martha's father John Wayles also took one of his slaves, Elizabeth Hemings, as concubine and had by her six children, one of whom was Sally Hemings.

have read through the epistolary exchange between Jefferson and Cosway, and I fail to see the “ineffable tenderness.” Jefferson never loses himself completely to his emotions

On the morning of December 8, 1787, the two were supposed to meet for breakfast before Cosway was to leave for Calais, with Jefferson accompanying her part of the way. Cosway left prior to the planned breakfast. She explains in a letter (December 10, 1787) that she was “confused and distracted.”

France turned his attention to his fourteen-year-old slave, Sally Hemings.

Brodie begins, “The evidence that the real rival was the comely little slave from Monticello, and that their affection began to bloom early in 1788, is complicated and subtle.”

relationship is an 1873 “interview” with Madison Hemings, son of Sally Hemings, by editor Samuel Wetmore in the Pike County Republican in Pee Pee,

But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine, and when he was called home she was enciente [sic; enceinte or “pregnant”] by him.

Dabney is right. How could the relationship have brought Sally, in Brodie's words, “much private happiness,” if Jefferson neglected their children? In such a scenario of neglect, Sally would have been miserable.

The lengthy delay gives good reason to believe that the story is a canard.

How, then, did Jefferson treat Madison's mother? Given the two's sexual intimacy on at least six occasions, it is strange that Madison gives no evidence of any public displays of intimacy, however subtle, between his parents.

One questions how intimate his knowledge of Jefferson was.

short, without some evidence of how Madison had come directly to know what he was reporting in his account (e.g., “I saw my mother and Thomas Jefferson kissing on such and such occasion”) the account is hearsay.