Professor Gordon-Reed and “Transcription Errors”
The verdict among historians on “Tom and Sally” really began to shift with the 1997 publication of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, written by Annette Gordon-Reed, at the time an assistant professor at New York Law School (not to be confused with the more prestigious New York University School of Law). After acknowledging some of Professor Brodie’s shortcomings, Professor Gordon-Reed, an African-American, proceeded to draw from Brodie’s work in producing a far more believable account of how Thomas Jefferson could have had an affair with Sally Hemings.
As the final revisions are being made to my Individual Views in 2010, Professor Gordon-Reed has become perhaps the hottest property in the entire field of American history. Her latest book, The Hemingses of Monticello,11 has pretty much swept the field of literary recognition in categories where she was eligible:
On November 19, 2008, she won the National Book Award for non-fiction;
On April 9, 2009, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship;12
On April 20, 2009, she won the Pulitzer Prize for History;
On May 28, 2009, she won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, awarded annually for the “most important new book about America’s founding era”;13
On July 14, 2009, she was named Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of History by the State University of New Jersey;14
On July 18, 2009, she won the SHEAR Book Award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic;
On September 10, 2009, she received an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award;
On September 30, 2009, it was announced that she had won the 2009 Frederick Douglass Book Prize given by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University. The prize was awarded at a dinner in New York in February 2010.
On February 25, 2010, President Barack Obama honored Professor Gordon-Reed with the National Humanities Medal – America’s “highest medal for achievement” in her field.15
On April 30, 2010, Harvard Law School announced that she would join the Harvard faculty in July as a Professor of Law, Professor of History, and as the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcilffe Institute for Advanced Study;16 and
On September 28, 2010, she received a five-year, unrestricted $500,000 fellowship (widely known as a “genius grant”) from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.17
Indeed, her growing fame was such that the retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens led the head of the American Civil Liberties Union to recommend Professor Gordon-Reed as a possible replacement.18
Interestingly, although serious problems involving altered historical documents in her first book (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings) were made public in our 2001 report and have been identified elsewhere19 as well, the prestigious committees charged with evaluating her work have apparently not found them troubling. This is all the more curious, given the reaction in recent years to charges of apparently less serious misconduct by other scholars.
As will be discussed in greater length in the Postscript to this volume,20 when it was revealed in 2001 that Pulitzer Prize recipient Professor Joseph Ellis—at the time the preeminent scholar in the paternity-belief camp—had fabricated aspects of his own personal history (e.g., claiming to have served in combat in Vietnam when he spent his entire active duty service in the Army as a history professor at West Point), he was suspended for one year without pay, deprived indefinitely of his chaired professorship (it was restored in 2005), and permanently banned from teaching a popular seminar on the Vietnam War. Several prestigious lecture invitations were reportedly withdrawn as well.
Early the following year, historian Stephen Ambrose was widely criticized for what turned out to be multiple acts of apparent plagiarism,21 and additional charges of plagiarism led Pulitzer Prize recipient Professor Doris Kearns Goodwin to take a “leave of absence” from the PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer show and to resign from the Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University. Unsold copies of the book in question were withdrawn.22
In 2005, the University of Georgia Press revoked the 2004 Flannery O’Connor Award given to Professor Brad Vice when it was revealed he had drawn heavily upon and used passages without citation from a previously published short story by another author, and all remaining copies of his book were destroyed by his publisher.
Plagiarism, of course, is the use of another writer’s words without attribution—taking credit for another’s work. It is justly considered a serious offense, but it is not the worst possible misconduct by an historian. For it does not normally mislead the reader in a search for historical truth.
A far more serious offense was revealed in 2002, when an independent committee appointed by the Dean of Emory College to review accusations that Professor Michael A. Bellesiles had fabricated historical records in preparing his Bancroft Prize-winning volume, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, concluded his “unprofessional and misleading work” entered “the realm of falsification.”23 Professor Bellesiles resigned his faculty position, and the Trustees of Columbia University voted to rescind the Bancroft Prize and requested that the accompanying $4,000 award be returned.24
In sharp contrast, Professor Gordon-Reed has apparently paid no price for what appear to be equally if not more serious transgressions against accepted standards of professional behavior. Professor Bellesiles’ greatest offense appears to have been “making up” historical evidence, whereas Professor Gordon-Reed appears to have repeatedly and materially altered important but not at the time readily available historical documents to make her case that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings more credible. A few examples may illustrate the problem.
In Chapter Four we will discuss the already mentioned newspaper story that appeared in the Pike County Republican in 1873 and was presented as the statement of an elderly Madison Hemings—a son of Monticello slave Sally Hemings. When the Gordon-Reed volume was first published, copies of the original article were not easy to find (although a transcription had appeared as an appendix to Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History). I ultimately paid a researcher in the area to visit the Ohio Historical Society and make me a photocopy of the original article.
This newspaper article at first glance appears to be powerful evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered all of Sally Hemings’ children. But as will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four, it has some rather serious credibility problems. Several important factual statements attributed to Madison Hemings are plainly wrong—and to at least some extent they undermine the credibility of the article. Some were things that Madison Hemings clearly knew about, so the errors might suggest either that this was not really the account of Madison Hemings or that his memory had deteriorated in his old age (he was sixty-eight at the time) to the point that his entire statement might be suspect. For example, although it is well known that Madison’s grandmother was Betty Hemings—the daughter of a white English ship captain and an African slave woman—the 1873 newspaper article reports Madison as declaring: “My grandmother was a fullblooded African. … ”
When Professor Fawn Brodie recognized this obvious error, she quite appropriately corrected it in her transcription by inserting the word “[great-]” before “grandmother” in brackets to disclose that she had altered the original document. But that served to emphasize the rather obvious factual error in the story, in the process casting doubt about either the legitimacy of the entire story or Madison Hemings’ memory at the time—neither of which is helpful for the purpose of using the article as key evidence in this dispute. So Professor Gordon-Reed merely altered the original in her transcript (see Figure 1 on the next page) to read “My great-grandmother was a fullblooded African. … ” Credibility problem solved.25
One might like to be charitable and attribute such alterations to ignorance of fundamental rules of scholarly writing. But that is not ea
sy, as Professor Gordon-Reed was a member of the prestigious Harvard Law Review while a law student at Harvard. The standard reference on legal writing and citations is The Bluebook,26 which was originated decades ago at Harvard by the editors of that same journal. Every law school with which I am familiar makes certain that its students are fully versed in the requirements to identify alterations in documents, as in certain courtroom settings an intentional failure to do so could lead to disbarment or other serious disciplinary action.
Figure 1. Altering Historical Documents #1: Changing “Grandmother” to “Great-Grandmother”*
In the 1873 Pike County Republican article reprinted in Professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Sally Hemings’ son Madison is reported to have said that his “grandmother” was a “fullblooded African.” In reality, it is well established that Sally’s mother Betty Hemings was the child of a white English ship captain and an African slave woman. If this was in fact what Madison said, he presumably confused his grandmother with his great-grandmother, whom he also knew—perhaps suggesting that his memory was faulty at the age of sixty-eight or that these were not his words. The original is clear:
In her transcription, on page 245, Professor Gordon-Reed corrects the factual inaccuracy by simply inserting “great-” before “grandmother” without the use of brackets to disclose her alteration:
As a former member of the Harvard Law Review, Professor Gordon-Reed cannot credibly claim to be unaware of this important requirement of scholarly writing. By omitting the brackets, she has increased the credibility of her evidence. This is far from the worst of her alterations.
* * *
* Passages reproduced in facsimile in this volume have been electronically scanned from the originals or photographs of the original documents.
Like other major style manuals,27 The Bluebook is clear on the need to identify changes in original texts, and lawyers are trained to be meticulous in such matters. The Bluebook explains:
When a letter must be changed from upper to lower case, or vice versa, enclose it in brackets. Substituted words or letters and other inserted material should also be bracketed. …Significant mistakes in the original should be followed by “[sic]” and otherwise left as they appear in the original. …28
For those familiar with the Jefferson family, an arguably greater problem with the 1873 newspaper story attributed to Madison Hemings arises when Madison reportedly discusses his mother’s 1784 voyage to Europe with Jefferson’s youngest daughter Maria.29 The original article (see Figure 2 on the next page) states:
When Mr. Jefferson went to France Martha was a young woman grown, my mother was about her age, and Maria was just budding into womanhood.
The problem here is that Maria (born as “Mary” and also known as “Polly”) Jefferson was born on August 1, 1778. Thus, when Thomas Jefferson arrived in France in July 1784 with eleven-year-old eldest daughter Martha, Maria (who remained in Virginia with relatives) was but five years old—hardly likely to have been “budding into womanhood.”
How does Professor Gordon-Reed remedy this glaring factual inaccuracy in the story attributed to Madison Hemings? She merely deletes a few words—well, a dozen words—from the original and transcribes it as:
When Mr. Jefferson went to France Martha was just budding into womanhood.
Had she inserted an ellipsis ( …) between “Martha” and “was,” the resulting alteration would be technically correct but terribly misleading and dishonest. But that might have flagged for readers that Professor Gordon-Reed had left something out of the sentence. Whatever the explanation, as Figure 2 on the next page illustrates, Professor Gordon-Reed has materially altered historical evidence in such a manner as to make her document more credible. If intentional, that is a very serious violation of the rules of professional writing, and as a former member of the Harvard Law Review she cannot credibly pretend ignorance of the rules.
Sadly, this is hardly the only example of Professor Gordon-Reed’s apparent tampering with evidence to strengthen her case. She includes in the book a transcription of an obscure 1858 letter written by one of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters that clearly has been materially altered to totally change the clear intent of the original. In the very legible original, Ellen Randolph Coolidge wrote:
He [Thomas Jefferson] lived, whenever he was at Monticello, and entirely for the last seventeen years of his life, in the midst of these young people [eight grandchildren when Madison was born], surrounded by them, his intercourse with them of the freest and most affectionate kind. How comes it that his immoralities were never suspected by his own family—that his daughter and her children rejected with horror and contempt the charges brought against him. That my brother, then a young man certain to know all that was going on behind the scenes, positively declares his indignant disbelief in the imputations and solemnly affirms that he never saw or heard the smallest thing which could lead him to suspect that his grandfather’s life was other than perfectly pure.30
Figure 2. Altering Historical Documents #2: A Five-Year-Old Girl “Budding into Womanhood”
When Thomas Jefferson went to France in 1784, he was accompanied by his nearly twelve-year-old daughter Martha but left five-year-old Maria with relatives in Virginia. Sally Hemings was later chosen by those relatives to accompany Maria to Paris in 1787. In the 1873 Pike County Republican story (that is presented as the statement of Sally’s son Madison), a serious factual error asserts that Maria was “just budding into womanhood” at the age of five. Such errors do not enhance the credibility of the document.
In her transcription of this document, Professor Gordon-Reed eliminates the credibility problem by deleting a dozen words to make it appear (incorrectly) that Madison was describing the almost twelve-year-old Martha rather than five-year-old Maria:
In fairness, Madison was here discussing events that occurred years before his own birth. But that is the case with virtually all of the comments attributed to him in this article of relevance to this inquiry. By materially altering her “evidence,” Professor Gordon-Reed has misled her readers and violated a fundamental rule of ethical scholarship.
In Professor Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, however, the word “disbelief” in the final sentence above has been transcribed as “belief.” (See Figure 3 on the next page)31 While it only involves the omission of three letters, it obviously at minimum confuses the meaning of the sentence.
Even more troubling is a far more elaborate alteration to this important letter that occurs just a few lines later. The original clearly reads:
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 the public gaze.
Professor Gordon-Reed transcribes this sentence instead as:
No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze.
(See Figure 4 on page 37.)
Figure 3. Altering Historical Documents #3: Changing “Disbelief” to “Belief”
In a private addendum to an 1858 letter to her husband Joseph, Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge explained why the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings could not be true. She noted in the process the indignant “disbelief” of her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph (who was especially close to the President at Monticello) in the story:
Courtesy Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
However, in her transcription of this important letter (the original of which is kept safely secured with other valuable historical documents in a library at the University of Virginia), Professor Gordon-Reed transcribed the word “disbelief” as “belief.”
By deleting ten words and adding another (none attributable to merely having “skipped a line” or other carelessness), Professor Gordon-Reed has quite conveniently transformed a sentence that strongly undermine
s her premise into a grammatically coherent piece of evidence for her case.32 Without this alteration, including this letter in her book would make no sense—as it otherwise does not support her position. With the alteration, Ellen appears to be admitting that Sally could have visited Jefferson’s chambers when he was not “in the public gaze.”
Figure 4. Altering Historical Documents #4: Allowing Sally Hemings into Jefferson’s Chambers When He Was Present
In the same 1858 letter discussed in Figure 3, Ellen Coolidge clearly asserts that Sally Hemings was not allowed in Thomas Jefferson’s chambers when he was there:
Courtesy Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
By deleting ten words from the original and adding another, Professor Gordon-Reed’s transcription suggests instead that Sally was only allowed to be with Jefferson in his chambers “at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze.”
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 6