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

by Mark Andrew Holowchak

There is another difficulty. The black oral tradition is not monolithic. Other families of Hemings's descendants have an oral tradition—and this was likely the predominant tradition until Brodie's book and its backlash—where an uncle of Jefferson is the father.

Moreover, there is a loud oral tradition among the Woodsons that Tom Wood...

missing Tom Hemings. That loud tradition was proven wrong by DNA testing in 1998. Tom Woodson was shown not to have b...

And I have known, not in…a scholarly way.…I know this relationship existed and while, I cannot prove

happen. A man who owns slaves is not far away from one who will sleep with his slave.

Drawing the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons might indicate, as Plato states in Meno,126 a certain god-given inspiration, but it betrays no knowledge and, thus, is worth about as much evidence to a serious scholar as is Boyd's unscholarly feeling.

She draws plentifully from the published testimony of Madison Hemings in 1873 to drive her reconstruction of the liaison and merely overpasses the numerous difficulties with that testimony.

The historical issue of the truth or untruth of an actual liaison takes second spot to the sociological issue of giving blacks a sense of legitimacy concerning the founding of the American nation.

Yet Gordon-Reed, trained in law, is not out to demonstrate that Jefferson and Sally Hemings did have a liaison in this book but to offer “a critique of the defense that has been mounted to counter the notion of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison.”

Gordon-Reed does offer some insight into the nature of “proof” by giving an analogy to shed light on how “proof” differs from “evidence.”

“Some scholars and commentators, who almost invariably approach the subject of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in a defensive posture,” she writes, “have demanded that every brick of evidence that the two might have had a relationship amount to its own individual wall of proof.”

What precisely the brick-wall analogy purports to show is unsettled. However, the analogy is mislead...

First, evidence and proof are qualitatively different: the former admits of degrees, ...

Deductive arguments are proofs. When the premises of a deductive argument are true, the conclusion must be true, because the conclusion neve...

arguments, in contrast, are assessed by evidence and admit of ...

Arguing historically for a liaison or its lack is merely a matter of evidence; ...

Thus, the existence of a liaison must be determined inductively by amount and relevancy of evidence garnered.

Moreover, all the relevant evidence must be considered and weighed. Evidence incompatible with one's claim cannot simply be ignored.

Gordon-Reed is clear about one thing: Her enterprise is one of showing that a liaison is possible—not that one occurred.

No one, I suspect, would be inclined to rule out the literal possibility of a liaison,

empirical, not a priori, and historians are in the empirical business.

First-rate historians, I suspect, are amply aware of that and, thus, no first-rate historian would go out on a limb and argue that some event is categorically impossible.

What precisely does it mean to say that some event is possible? When one adds the modality of possibility to a standard declarative sentence, one weakens the assertion tremendously. Consider two claims: (1) Jefferson had a liaison with Sally Hemings. (2) It is possible that Jefferson had a liaison with Sally Hemings.

Thus, possibility claims, in effect, are vacuous, as they make no demands on reality other than what is asserted must not be an impossible (i.e., logically impossible) state of affairs.

Because they assert little, in common parlance possibility claims are seldom very significant and seldom insightful.

Given Gordon-Reed's express agnosticism and the relative vacuity of her thesis, one must question the significance of the book and its contribution to the secondary literature.

She asks, “How is it possible to get at the nature of a relationship between a man and a woman like Jefferson and Hemings when neither party specifically writes or speaks to others about that relationship or their feelings?”10 She is unwilling to consider the obvious: Lack of verbal or written testimony is readily explicated by the nonexistence of a relationship.

that he frees her children upon the age of twenty-one. What children? Either Jefferson is planning to have several children with Hemings or the two are preparing for any contingencies of a long-term sexual relationship.

James Callender, who first mentioned the boy in 1802, wrote of Tom as being ten or twelve years old and being a sable resemblance to Jefferson. Jefferson makes no mention of the boy in his Farm Book, in which he lists all of Sally's children.

The first mention of any child by Sally in the book is in 1795, not 1789.

Madison Hemings, we recall, wrote that Tom Hemings d...

As historian and Virginia native Virginius Dabney has noted, the historians Winthrop Jordan, Garry Wills, Merrill Peterson, James Bear, and Douglass Adair have concluded that Tom Hemings, conveniently named, was merely “another figment of calumniatory James Callender's fertile imagination” in his quest to humiliate the president.14 That conclusion is plausible.

In The Hemingses of Monticello, never has one done so much from so little, it might be said.

she has gone on in her second book to give p, without the modality of possibility, a life of its own—Jefferson did have a liaison with Hemings.

Possibility has insidiously morphed into fact.

Again, Gordon-Reed writes of a letter from Jefferson's granddaughter Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge to her husband James Coolidge (October 24, 1858). Writes Ellen, “No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to public gaze.” Gordon-Reed in the manner of Brodie states, “What she wanted to assert, but could not do so explicitly, was, The woman everyone is talking about, Sally Hemings, was my grandfather's chambermaid, but she never went into his room

Thus, the probability that the sequence of events unfolded precisely in the manner Gordon-Reed suggests it had unfolded is almost zero.

In a review of The Hemingses of Monticello, prominent American historian Eric Foner lauds Gordon-Reed's admission that too little is known of James Hemings, Sally's brother, to speculate on why he, when freed by Jefferson after returning from France, took his own life.

Foner says, “Gordon-Reed is determined to prove that theirs was a consensual relationship based on love.”

She is not shy about letting her readers know that she is not merely an historian, but a black historian with an agenda to set the record straight on blacks as they have historically been portrayed.

Symbolically, it's tremendously important for people—as a way of inclusion. Nathan Huggins said that the Sally Hemings’ story was a way of establishing black people's birthright to America. If you look at the flip side of it, rejecting the story is a part of the rejection of black people's birthright and claims to America. So people invest a lot in the topic and the subject.

is social change, not historical accuracy.

Madison could readily have had a self-aggrandizing agenda. Psychological studies indicate that humans tend to remember selectively.

Madison Hemings was sixty-eight at the time of the newspaper story, and the account indeed contained several errors—for instance, Jefferson's dislike of farming.

how much to attribute to Madison Hemings and how much to attribute to the editor Samuel Wetmore, who had both personal and political motivations for an anti-Jefferson story.

addition, “there is no evidence of an oral tradition corroborating the assertions attributed to Madison Hemings which antedates the publication o...

uncle of Jefferson is the father, not Jefferson himself.

it that a black man, because he has been marginalized, is incapable of lying? Marginalization, if anything, is a good reason for lying.

It is an issue of rationally assessing data, and rational assessment is blind to skin color. Gordon-Reed's work could be deemed, I dare say, racist or, perhaps more fittingly, racistist—that is, racially driven in a nonhateful manner.

Online reviews of Gordon-Reed's book iterate the point that the themes of racism and of the evils of slavery oppress readers. Writes one: “I…felt manipulated while reading. I do not need to be reminded over and over again about how morally wrong, cruel and degrading slavery was—I