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July 4 - July 9, 2022
implausible, and racist. It is one thing to note and clear up inaccuracies in prior research, which perhaps has marginalized blacks. It is another to malign first-rank scholars, like Malone and Peterson, who have demonstrated their scholarly integrity over the years. One wonders why more critics have not taken her to task for hurling racial stones at others.
To a large extent, her sociological agenda is to show that Sally Hemings is an important historical figure, while cutting down Jefferson to size.
Perusal of the historical literature indicates that. By skillfully playing the race card—and references to race and racism fill a dizzying number of pages of her two books (and the works of most other Jefferson historians)—Gordon-Reed has accomplished what she has accused white historians of doing: controlling the allowable discourse. That is morally unconscionable: History is about rationality; and rationality, I repeat, is blind to skin color.
The fact that canards about a person have had an influence on history does not show that the person has.
Gordon-Reed here commits what I call the fallacy of historical anachronism. That occurs when one forms a judgment of a historical event or figure in an argument by using contemporary standards that were not in place during the epoch of that event or figure, or when one forms a judgment of a contemporary event or figure by recourse to the standards of the past that are no longer in place today.
role. It would be presumptuous for Gordon-Reed to assert that she, if she had been a white male Virginian who owned a large estate in Jefferson's day, would not have owned black slaves.
It is the exceptions among the Southern gentry that need to be explained.
etiological
For Gordon-Reed, they are not to be forgotten, because Jefferson's wife, according to the testimony of Madison Hemings, was Sally Hemings's half sister and because of Jefferson's lengthy liaison with Sally Hemings.
The conclusion is obvious. In praising the Hemingses—Sally especially—Gordon-Reed can at the same time indict Jefferson for opportunism, hypocrisy, and racism.
In an article called “Engaging Jefferson,” Gordon-Reed points out the tendency of whites who believe in a liaison to see it as rape and of blacks who believe in a liaison to see it as mutual affection.
catachrestic
Moreover, “always” is not enough; we are told “ever always.” Stripped of catachresis, we arrive at the following psychological insight: No person always (always) does any one [particular or general?] thing from complete internal consonance. That might be true—and I suspect it is, though philosophers like Aristotle, the Stoics, and Kant would disagree—but how aidful is it in showing the likelihood of forced sex?
but little about his sexual life—specifically nothing about his putative liaison with Sally Hemings—then that is best explicable by there not having been a liaison.
Most scholars agree there is a consensus among historians that Jefferson had an affair with Sally Hemings. Consensus I suspect is true.
Yet something has gone abundantly awry with Jeffersonian historical scholarship. Consensus on the Jefferson-Hemings liaison has been attained insidiously. Gordon-Reed has gained control of the discourse and has made the issue of paternity one that turns on race.
In effect, consensus has been reached by fear rather than by evidence.
sister. In Brodie's enthusiasm to illustrate her point, she misread language, invoked currently fashionable psychological explanations to overinterpret unconscious patterns in Jefferson's writings, and construed psychic dilemmas without regard to eighteenth-century norms.
they necessarily were fathered by Monticello's master.
Thus, he is committed to the proposition It seems highly unlikely that Jefferson necessarily fathered Hemings's children, and that is not the same claim as It is highly unlikely that Jefferson fathered Hemings's children.
Inclusion of the words seems and necessarily in the first claim are significant. Seems shows Burstein has no more than a lukewarm commitment to a high unlikelihood. Necessarily shows that Burstein is lukewarmly committed to there being no options other than Jefferson fathering Hemings's children.
urges. I offer abundant evidence [italics added] in the book that Jefferson could rationalize his behavior to himself on the basis of the medical authority of his age, which literally recommended for a widower like himself occasional sex with a young, healthy, fruitful, attractive female, in order to preserve his own mental and physical health.
Peter Carr on how to act when faced with a moral decision, he urged in language that must now be read with great poignancy, “Ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you.”
There are several difficulties. It is not clear that Jefferson's actions and writings are irreconcilable. That works on assumption of a huge gap between them—something I believe is manifestly false. I, for instance, believe that they are largely reconcilable, and I have attempted to do just that in my book Dutiful Correspondent.
He was, thus, committed to authenticity. So, the requirement to see beyond his moral language attends
In Jefferson's Secrets, Andrew Burstein continues scholarship along the lines of Brodie and Gordon-Reed that is designed to expose the man behind the words—Jefferson the hypocrite.
antipodean
Why now does Burstein think Jefferson continued his relationship with Hemings after publication of Callender's malicious claims in 1802?
to Thomas Jefferson Randolph's testimony that Peter Carr was the father of Hemings's children.
the Carrs only from the possibility of fathering Eston Hemings, not from fathering any of the other children of Sally Hemings.
Sally Hemings's mother, Betty, and her mother's sisters are known to have had multiple paramours of different races.
Foremost among that evidence is the testimony of Isaac Jefferson: “Old Master's brother, Mass Randall, was a might simple man: used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night; hadn't much more sense than Isaac.”
bloodline. It is not sufficient to say one's motivation for defending Jefferson is ad hoc. Many ad hoc moves are undertaken for good reasons and wind up with favorable results. One has merely to consider the discovery of the planet Neptune.
etiological simplicity.
Finally, in what sense is Jefferson as the father of all (or any) of Sally Hemings's children the simplest explanation? On assumption that all the children had one father, an assumption merely of scholarly convenience, it is the simplest explanation for historians insofar as it does not involve any historical digging, as it were.
First, the argument from consensus is bunkum, if it is an appeal to the general American public. If not, it is simply falsely stated, as there is no wholesale consensus among Jeffersonian scholars. The 2001 Scholars’ Commission Report, published in 2011 as The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (see addendum), is sufficient proof of that.
Finally, to fall back on the expertise of law professor Gordon-Reed, as the lion's share of historians today do, is ad hoc in a harmful way. Her work, as I have shown, is as chimerical and unconvincing as that of Brodie. It is also agenda-driven, not truth-driven.
and I add there is good reason to question her authority, as racial bias abounds in her work—is a fallacious appeal to authority.
William G. Hyland Jr. is a lawyer who has recently published on this issue and contends that the case for a liaison is “based on a pyramiding of inferences, wild speculation, conjecture, and witnesses whose credibility and memories have been severely impeached.”
Burstein examines Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia in an effort to show that Jefferson's view of black inferiority disallowed a genuine relationship of love between unequals.29 Jefferson believed, if only provisionally, that blacks were inferior to whites in both mind and body.
It is absurd to think that there was such a “treaty of Paris.” First, all of the Hemingses, prior to the trip to Paris, were given special treatment and Sally, even after her return to Virginia, was treated no better than other Hemingses.35 Jefferson's codicil (see Appendix C) indicates that his slaves Burwell Colbert, John Hemings (Sally's younger brother), and Joe Fosset were singled out for special favors more than Sally's sons, Madison and Eston.
“Imagine an immature slave girl probably insecure and possibly pregnant with her first child wanting to stay behind alone in France in the midst of a Revolution, rather than return to Virginia where her friends and family lived and where she knew she would receive good care.”
The relationship between antecedent and consequent in that conditional claim is bogus.
that, Jefferson was not a consequentialist, as many have incorrectly asserted,44 but was following the Stoic Panaetius as well as the empiricists such as Francis Hutcheson.
The account is thin, bereft of substance, and unfocused. Moreover, it does not much follow Lehmann's lead.
Yet Aristotle, perhaps the foremost authority on the subtleties of Greek culture in his day, says that women have a fully developed rational faculty, but not one that is manly (andreios)—that is, suitable for ruling or governing, hence the political inactivity of Athenian women.
Women had an especially important domestic role—household management (oikonomia) as it related to production of goods in a household. All things worn and eaten were produced at home. Thus, an Athenian woman, within the sphere of activity within the household, was like the foreman of a small factory.
Thus, following Aristotle, the nature and social role of women complemented that of men.
slave? Homoeroticism was seen by many Greeks in the Classical Era (500–336 BCE)—for example, the Athenian gentry of Plato's and Aristotle's day—as a more exalted form of sexual activity. In Phaedrus, for instance, Plato tells us that many Greek men went bankrupt in trying to win the affection of a handsome young man.52 The early speeches of Plato's Symposium are straightforward paeans to male homoeroticism.
As historian Karl Lehmann correctly notes, Jefferson avoided Aristotle, Plato, and other such philosophers because of his abhorrence of metaphysical dogmatism—that is, Jefferson was an empiricist, not a rationalist.
