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

by Mark Andrew Holowchak

April 18, 1788, Brodie adds, Jefferson got a note from his daughter Martha, in which she requested permission to become a nun. Are the events coincidental?

Why would he wish her or anyone of his party to fall ill? Finally, that Patsy's request to enter the nunnery was designed to get her father's attention—perhaps even to anger him—is not unreasonable. That it is linked to recognition that her father was having an affair with Hemings is unsupported by evidence and, thus, bosh.

Madison Hemings reported, we recall, that the child “lived but a short time.”47 Yet according to the report of James Callender in 1802, the son, Tom, did not die as an infant, and as an adolescent the boy strikingly resembled Jefferson.

Patsy did not enter the nunnery, but she “rushed impetuously into marriage” and “the haste is suggestive.”

Jefferson was clearly gauche when verbally expressing himself in front of other men. He shied away from debate and public speeches. His presidential addresses were scarcely audible.

Nonetheless, certain factors would have made a relationship difficult, if not impossible. Jefferson's health and activities were issues at the time of the conception of Eston Hemings in 1807.

So debilitated was Jefferson that he was impotent, “within a reasonable degree of medical certainty.”

“Not until he was entering his eighty-third year did he gravely decline.”58 I think it safer to conclude the steady decline assumed by Hyland cannot be presumed,

Nonetheless, his work on ego-psychology and defense mechanisms might at least be heuristically profitable.

One of those mechanisms is sublimation—the mechanism for diverting psycho-sexual energy from its principal outlets (sexual exchanges, from highly casual to highly intimate, with other persons) and deploying it in constructive or socially accepted ways.

manifestation of an early expression of a lifelong tendency to sublimate sexual impulses. In Freudian parlance, Jefferson was dutiful, punctual, orderly, prolific, polymathic, and forward looking, because his libido was forced into the direction of productivity, not sexual activity. In modern parlance, he was an abundantly intelligent geek at the expense of his sexual activity.

He recorded meteorological data punctiliously at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m. for some fifty years.

I could go on, but that would be overkill.

So completely absorbed was he in learning and its advance that it is highly unlikely that he could have been a

Such efficient, productive persons are efficient and productive at expense of libidinal interests.

Finally, certain of Jefferson's letters betray a Platonic or Epicurean contempt for sexual licentiousness.

The gist of such letters is in keeping with Plato's link of “erotic love” with “anarchy” and “lawlessness”62 and Epicurus's notion that sexual love “never actually benefits anyone.”63 In sum, if Jefferson was highly sexual, his sexuality was massively sublimated.

“anal” (e.g., tidiness and orderliness), yet he also exhibited what ego-psychologists would dub great adjustment to reality. For instance, he did not press the issue of slavery when he believed it premature (see chapter 6). The country was too divided and his energies would best be spent otherwise.

Sally Hemings, a minor historical figure about whom nothing is certainly known,

Historian John C. Miller in The Wolf by the Ears writes that Brodie is “piling implausibility upon implausibility.”

into evaluating the past”69—what I call in chapter 2 the “fallacy of historical anachronism.”

twenty-five pages, the word mulatto appears eight times, whereas in his tour of southern France one year earlier, he uses the word once in forty-eight pages. She goes on to list each citation.

Brodie writes of Jefferson's famous “usufruct” letter to James Madison (September 6, 1789). In that letter, Jefferson argues that one generation of men has no right to bind the next—especially through public debts.

There is the tendency to go beyond the obvious and, in doing so, one can seldom, if ever, simply say that so-and-so is merely a good person for good reasons. Goodness, when psychoanalyzed, burns like butter on a sizzling skillet.

compulsively controlled man, Jefferson was convinced that miscegenation meant “degradation”: can readers believe that he would have conceived five children, one of them in the interval when he returned to Monticello for his daughter's funeral, not as a matter of exceptional passion but of continuing calculation, guiltlessly pursued?

Again, lack of reference to Harriet and Sally are given as proof of Jefferson's preoccupation of them in his thoughts.

The argument, to be forceful, needs an additional premise added—Jefferson had a thirty-eight-year relationship with Hemings. Adding that premise, however, is circular reasoning, as it proves the conclusion at which Brodie ultimately aims—the existence of a relationship.

Sally Hemings was a sprat to Jefferson—Brodie

clamant

Overall, Brodie's attempt to find psychological or psychosexual evidence in Jefferson's writings of an affair with Hemings through “omission” is ridiculously lame.

Hemings is fraught with sentences to which the modality of possibility is added.

Jeffersonian historian Julian Boyd, Brodie's biography consists of “her pyramiding of conjecture upon conjecture and then regarding the result as incontrovertibly proven facts, to be employed thereafter as the basis for still further piling on of inferences.”

She adds, “Since Jefferson mentioned three ‘runaways’ in his Farm Book, two of whom, Beverly and Harriet Hemings, were Sally Hemings's children, it seems likely that the fourth was Tom Hemings, and that he left Monticello at a relatively early age, probably [here a slightly stronger modality] shortly after the story of his mother's relationship with Jefferson broke into the press in 1802. Perhaps his mother chose not to discuss this son with anyone after his departure and made every effort to protect his identity in the white society by a mantle of silence.”

The cumulative effect of those possibility claims—a rhetorical tack used similarly and equally disingenuously by law professor Annette Gordon-Reed (the focus of chapter 2)—is to overwhelm readers with a dizzying array of possibilities,

By book's end, readers are swamped with possibilities, which titillate quixotic minds, but, taken together, amount to nothing to discerning readers i...

Jefferson was devastated and wrote, months later, to his friend John Page (June 25, 1804). “Others may lose of their abundance, but I, of my want, have lost even the half of all I had. My evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life.…But whatever is to be our destiny, wisdom, as well as duty, dictates that we should acquiesce in the will of Him whose it is to give and take away, and be contented in the enjoyment of those who are still permitted to be with us.”

Finally, there is the testimony of Edmund Bacon, overseer at Monticello. In his memoirs, he reported that speculation concerning one beautiful mulatto being Jefferson's daughter was false. “I have seen him come out of her mother's room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early.”

There are two alternatives, Wallach says. There is the white oral tradition and the black oral tradition.

First, he was never a friend of Jefferson. Jefferson was, early on, amicably disposed to Callender, when he recognized that Callender might be of some service to the republican cause. That amicable disposition soon ceased, as Jefferson quickly realized that Callender was not the sort of person who could be trusted by anyone for anything, as he was merely out to advance his own cause.

incredulous

Following psychohistorian Peter Loewenberg, she says both disciplines are “hermeneutic—they're sciences of meaning—not random. The patient makes a slip, or presents a dream, and together we explore its meaning. The same thing is true in history.”

Psychoanalysis is only said to be hermeneutic, a claim made famous by philosopher Paul Ricoeur, because attempts to substantiate psychoanalytic claims as genuinely causal have failed—that

that is, hermeneuticism is a way of conceding the efficacy of psychoanalysis as a clinical method without subjecting psychoanalytic claims to the rigors of the hypothetico-deductive method, according to which scientific generalizations are put to the test through predictive consequences that either confirm or disconfirm the generalization.116

Offering support to the oral and circumstantial evidence can only be taken to mean providing additional inductive evidence.

Given that, it has to agree with the oral and circumstantial evidence. If so, it does not bolster it in the least, for it was culled ad hoc.

Disowning his slave family was not an option.

Yet according to Madison Hemings's own account, Jefferson showed especial attention to his white daughters and white grandchildren, but almost completely ignored his “slave family.”

Jefferson's low profile concerning his slave family is fully and cleanly explained by use of Occam's razor: He did not have a slave family.

smaltos,

Again, there still exists in many Arabic countries an oral tradition concerning Alexander the Great being the son of the devil. Though he was plainly an unprincipled killer, I suspect fully that the oral tradition exaggerates apropos of his parentage.