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

by Mark Andrew Holowchak

That is the same portrait that scholars who study his actions upon retirement get. He undertook the drudgery of writing letters because he believed in a duty to help his fellow men. “From sunrise to one or two o'clock, and often from dinner to dark,” he writes to John Adams (January 11, 1817), “I am drudging at the writing table. And all this to answer letters into which neither interest nor inclination on my part enters; and often from persons whose names I have never before heard. Yet, writing civilly, it is hard to refuse them civil answers. This is the burthen of my life, a very grievous one indeed.”