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July 4 - July 9, 2022
Burstein's characterization of Epicureanism suggests that his grasp of it is dilettantish.
Epicurus's view of sex was hostile. Sexual desire he acknowledged to be natural, though it was unneeded and an impediment to a tranquil life.57 Thus, if Jefferson was taking Epicurus as a model for good living, “the Greek option” of “procreative sex with [an] attractive servant” would have been anathema—that is, counterproductive to ataraxia.
To argue from seven commonalities to the claim that their prescriptions were identical is untoward, even foolhardy, but Burstein does just that.
That Hemings was a possible outlet for Jefferson seems plain because she had children by a white father. Yet her accessibility does not mean Jefferson was interested. Even if he was seeking sexual outlet, a man of Jefferson's wealth and esteem would have had the interest of numerous available women, were there interest on his part. That he would have chosen a slave is doubtful.
Jefferson throughout his life was, like a Stoic, fully involved in the affairs of humans.
Yet radical claims need an abundance of evidence, for, if true, they mark a radical shift in the literature—a shift that blights the character of another human being. For better or worse, Jefferson is not just another human being. He is one of the few acknowledged American heroes.
He also avoided a duel with friend and neighbor John Walker over the presumed affair with his wife.
letter to James Madison (August 28, 1789): “I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively. He who says I will be a rogue when I act in company with a hundred others, but an honest man when I act alone, will be believed in the former assertion, but not in the latter.”
roseate,
add cosmology and epistemology to ethics here, because, for the ancients, virtue (aretē) or, for Epicurus, equanimity (ataraxia), could not be attained without a truthful approach to reality and without some sense of integration in the cosmos.
Jefferson's rigorous moral ideals make unlikely the possibility of an affair with a slave to slake his own sexual appetite.
Martha (April 7, 1787), for example: “Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.
sleep.” Thus, if it should turn out that Jefferson did carry out an in-chamber, thirty-eight-year relationship with Sally Hemings, then there would be nothing more to say than he was a liar (he expressly denied any wrongdoing other than making a pass at Betsy Walker in his 1805 letter to Robert Smith13), an uncaring father (he would have placed his libidinal outlet ahead of concern for his family), and a hypocrite (he would not have lived up to the ideals he embraced)—that is, Jefferson, by his own canons of morally upright activity, would be a moral reprobate.
Almost everything Jefferson wrote speaks of a sort of asexuality.
the following syllogism: No decent white person could be involved in an affair with a black slave. Jefferson was a decent white person. Therefore, Jefferson could not have been involved with a black slave.
Her misgivings notwithstanding, the syllogism is sound, if relativized to Jefferson's person, station, time, and place—namely, if the first premise is understood as No decent white person of Jefferson's day and given the mores of the South at that time could be involved in an affair with a black slave. Gordon-Reed's failure to relativize (i.e., her judging Jefferson from present standards instead of those standards of his time and place) is once again another instance of the fallacy of historical anachronism.
Jefferson believed each person had a moral duty to benefit his fellow man and work toward social betterment.
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
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Civility required an answer.
Gordon-Reed, however, largely ignores Jefferson's writings because to her they offer no clue to the person behind the pen. To rule out thousands of pieces of evidence apropos of a person's character by dismissing the possibility that those
Yet Gordon-Reed seems to have preference for what is possible instead of what is factual.
What tilts the balance in favor of Jefferson is that Madison and Eston Hemings were born after Callender's accusation, and Burstein finds it implausible that Jefferson would have been smug enough to continue a sexual relationship once it was publicly disclosed in 1802.
Jefferson kept this little piece of paper in the most private drawer in a secret compartment of the drawer beside his bed. And it was folded and unfolded countless times over the years and in it was a lock of his late wife's hair and a lock of the hair of one of their infant children who had died. And this was the real Thomas Jefferson, the man of sentiment who loved deeply, who felt deeply.
An analogy is aidful. Imagine a weakly constructed chain that one attempts to strengthen by adding to it ends two other weakly constructed chains. The new chain is nowise strengthened. By adding together his three weak arguments, Burstein has constructed just such a chain. Marveling at its length, he has nowise considered its capacity for work.
fallen from grace, as so many men have done so often, it is virtually inconceivable that this fastidious gentleman whose devotion to his dead wife's memory and to the happiness of his daughters and grandchildren bordered on the excessive could have carried on through a period of years a vulgar liaison which his own family could not have failed to detect. It would be as absurd as to charge this consistently temperate man with being, through a period, a secret drunkard.
Such a mixture of the races, such a ruthless exploitation of the master-slave relationship, revolted his whole being.
Jefferson took no interest in the upbringing of these children; he made no effort to educate them—Sally herself was apparently illiterate—but he did give them their freedom even though they were wholly unprepared for it. Such indifference to the welfare of his own children is incomprehensible in a man who, like Jefferson, took such joy in family life and who was so vitally concerned with education.
There are several problems. First, we cannot merely assume claim 1 is factual. It is not known that Sally Hemings was fathered by John Wayles.
Recall that he told his physician Vine Utley (March 21, 1819) that he seldom went to bed without first having read something morally uplifting. He expressed in several letters his opinion that Jesus Christ was a paragon of moral perfection, insofar as any human being could approximate moral perfection, and that motivated him to make his own version of the Bible by cutting out the influence of supernature in Christ's words and deeds.
He stated with great candor to General Henry Knox and the nation's first secretary of war (April 8, 1800) that he never deserted a friend due to differences of opinion in politics, religion, or physics, though numerous friends had deserted him for such differences.
Against Brodie, nowhere does he mention any influence of John Wayles, who likely had very little effect on the development of Jefferson's character.
“The leadership he sought was one of sympathy and love, not of command,” writes historian Henry Adams.
Even Madison Hemings's controversial account in the Pike County Republican in 1873 mentions Jefferson as “universally kind to all about him.”
Seventh, Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia strongly objected to the admixture of white and black blood.63 There is little to suggest a change of mind in his lifetime. Over twenty years later, he writes to politician and antislavery advocate Edward Coles (August 25, 1814), “The amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.”
A polymath such as he would have had little interest in the cheap, fleeting enjoyment that a liaison with Hemings or any other woman would have afforded him. Fondness for sensual attachment does not easily admit of routine and, because of that, it does not readily escape detection—especially over a thirty-eight-year span. It is not sufficient for scholars like Burstein to note Jefferson was
Scholars who wish to implicate Jefferson in a lengthy sexual relationship with Sally Hemings know plainly, even if they expressly deny it, that in accusing Jefferson of a liaison they are at once accusing Jefferson of insidiousness, hypocrisy, and dishonesty. Yet Jefferson's character—the testimony of others and his writings show—was very likely foursquare.
Attacking a person's character on insufficient evidence is not only illustrative of bad scholarship, but also of insidiousness, hypocrisy, and dishonesty—that is, the sort of moral depravity of which Jefferson today is commonly accused. Jefferson devoted much of his life to serving his fellow human beings in the capacities of statesman, inventor, farmer, scientist, patron of the sciences, benefactor, father, grandfather, friend, letter writer, and so forth. Those things we do know. There is no firm evidence to indicate that he did have a relationship with Sally Hemings. When evidence is
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My wife's sister, for instance, was astonished to hear from me that we do not know whether Jefferson had sex with Sally Hemings and that I thought it very unlikely. She was taught otherwise in high school. She learned from a text that stated the liaison as fact and from a teacher who regurgitated that “fact.” In my classes on philosophy, more of my students know Jefferson as the president who had a sexual affair with his slave than they know him as the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Something is horridly skewed.
others took the liberties of speculating, often wildly from scant evidence, and of ignoring the work of other historians whose theses were inconsistent with theirs.
The most popular books,
The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (TJMF) followed their lead in confirming their quick conclusions.
What is most disheartening is that Jeffersonian psychobiographical history and the science behind it are generally replete with normative judgments:
Just when did history and science become a normative and moralistic, not descriptive, discipline—namely, when did history and science become “Aesopian”?
indicates that either sound reasoning is not in vogue or
there is a witch hunt. Those two alternatives, as we shall see, need not be exclusive.
etiological
Yet what compelling biological evidence is there that Thomas Jefferson and not some other Jeffersonian fathered Eston? There is none. The biological evidence shows only that someone in Jefferson's bloodline was the father, not that that someone could only have been Thomas Jefferson or that that someone was more likely to be Thomas Jefferson than to be the offspring of any other person. In ruling out the Carrs in the paternity of Eston, one cannot simply implicate Jefferson.
For geneticists, a pathologist, a statistician, and a biochemist to declare that lack of historical evidence for the paternity of any other Jefferson in conjunction with the DNA findings makes Thomas Jefferson the most likely father of Eston Hemings is unconscionable. Yet that is precisely what they did in the published study.
This argument is compelling only if an additional premise, something like There is noncircumstantial evidence that Thomas Jefferson was intimate with Sally Hemings, is included. Otherwise, absence of evidence shows nothing.
According to Barger, Foster was aware that publication in Nature would mean quick fame, and quick fame was a larger enticement for Foster than being true to his promise to Bennett.
