There is a reason that my Individual Views are the most extensive. When we began our inquiry, there were several existing summaries of what might be termed “the case against Thomas Jefferson.”55 Each of us began by carefully reading the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee’s Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (a ten-page report supplemented by forty-three pages of appendices, also referred to herein as the Monticello Report), and most of us also read at least substantial portions of Professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. In an effort both to identify the various major arguments in favor of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of one or more of Sally Hemings’ children and to identify arguments in Jefferson’s defense, with the encouragement of other members of the Scholars Commission I agreed to prepare a “working document” that would try to identify the arguments on both sides. In the end, this came down to identifying six major arguments in favor of Jefferson’s paternity, critiquing each of them, and then looking at “evidence” acknowledged by Jefferson’s critics which I felt they had dismissed too quickly and another series of relevant issues they had largely ignored. The plan was that others in the group would then identify points I had overlooked or omitted and provide their own critique of the arguments on both sides. When we gathered at a hotel near Dulles Airport for three days of lengthy discussions in December 2000, with the encouragement of others, I decided to use this “working document” as the basis of my own Individual Views—at which time I added this introduction and a new chapter about how little we actually know about Sally Hemings. My final Postscript was added years later to provide some additional thoughts and assess the initial impact of our efforts. Since 2001, I have also revised and made additions to these earlier chapters to reflect new thoughts or available information. So if my views read like the “counter-brief” to the arguments of revisionist scholars and the Monticello Report, that is because they were originally prepared to serve precisely that purpose.
I want to emphasize that, while several of my colleagues have agreed to add their names to this statement, and in preparing it I have benefited from the able counsel not only of many members of the Scholars Commission but also from a number of other individuals on both sides of the debate (some of whom are identified below), the words are mine and responsibility for the specific arguments and the accuracy of facts is mine alone. It is important to emphasize this point because I have continued to make additions and changes to the manuscript even after others had agreed to “sign on” or “concur” in my earlier draft; please do not assume that the scholars whose names appear alongside my own on the cover page to these Individual Views have even read every sentence of the final version.
Yet another caveat is in order. While one year may seem like a lot of time for such an inquiry, in fact most of us also have full-time jobs and we have had to do our work on this issue as an “extracurricular activity” in addition to the work for which we get paid. This document remains, in essence, a “working document” that I hope will assist others in understanding how I reached my own conclusions in this inquiry. It does not pretend to be the final word on the topic, and it leaves several issues unresolved. There is no doubt in my mind that careful research by scholars in the future will produce information relevant to this inquiry; however, in my judgment, the avenues that were not pursued further were unlikely to produce evidence that would have changed my basic conclusions.
To me, this is not as close a decision as it was for a few of my colleagues, and were I on a jury in this matter, I would have no difficulty finding Thomas Jefferson “not guilty.” That is certainly true were the advocates of his alleged paternity obligated to meet the legal standard of establishing his guilt by “clear and convincing evidence” or even by “a preponderance of the evidence”; but I would go so far as to say that my research in connection with this project has persuaded me that he is “innocent beyond reasonable doubt.” And perhaps I should add that, despite my long admiration for our third President, when first approached about this inquiry I had assumed—on the basis of press reports on both the DNA tests and the subsequent Monticello Report—that Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of Eston Hemings had been scientifically established.
The first nine chapters of my Individual Views will examine the arguments that have been raised to support the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings. Chapter Ten will then turn to a series of issues that I believe have been too quickly glossed over by Jefferson’s critics, such as the eyewitness testimony of Thomas Jefferson’s overseer that he often witnessed another man leaving Sally Hemings’ room early in the morning while he was arriving at Monticello for work.
Chapter Eleven will look at some of the “evidence” that has received little consideration—in part because much of it apparently does not exist. That is to say, had a Jefferson-Hemings romance gone on in Paris and at Monticello for decades as alleged, there ought to be some direct evidence to support it. Someone should have seen or heard something and left a record. Like the dog that did not bark in Sherlock Holmes’ short story, Silver Blaze, some of the strongest evidence in this case may be the fact that not one of the hundreds if not thousands of visitors who swarmed over Monticello while this relationship was supposedly going on left a shred of evidence of having observed any sign of the alleged affair. No one left a record of seeing a suggestive glance, a passing caress, or even the President and Sally Hemings walking or talking together. For seventy years56 after the scandal broke, neither Sally Hemings—who for nearly a decade after Thomas Jefferson’s death lived as a free white woman in Charlottesville—nor any of her children left any record of having asserted that her relationship with Thomas Jefferson went beyond that of master-slave. With but two exceptions that will be discussed in Chapter Four, none of the hundreds of slaves who lived at Monticello during this period left any record that they believed the story.
Then there is the issue of Thomas Jefferson’s extraordinary investment in his own reputation, and his obvious devotion to his young daughters. Was he reckless enough to entrust his cherished reputation to the discretion of a child whom Abigail Adams had just described as wanting more care than his eight-year-old daughter? As a widower and a popular figure in Parisian diplomatic and social circles, where he could have had his pick among numerous beautiful and talented women, would Thomas Jefferson have jeopardized his daughters’ respect by seeking passion in the arms of their young servant girl? These and other questions have in my view been given far too little consideration thus far in this debate.
Methodology, Admissible Evidence, and Burdens of Proof
Perhaps a few words should be said at this point about the methodology of this inquiry and such things as the quality of acceptable evidence and burdens of proof. When the passage of centuries prevents us from examining witnesses, reliable documentary evidence is scarce, and recorded statements attributed to various individuals are in conflict, what are we to believe? Our task is to “search for the truth,” but just where do we find that truth among the conflicting accounts and almost total lack of serious information about one of the alleged key participants?
Addressing the Jefferson-Hemings issues, the late historian Professor Douglass Adair—former editor of the William & Mary Quarterly, who was recently acknowledged by revisionist historian Professor Peter Onuf as “one of the most important early American historians of his generation”57—once observed: “The professional historian is taught to be extremely skeptical of any purported episode in a man’s career that completely contradicts the whole tenor of his life and that requires belief in a total reversal of character.”58 Many of the most prominent “new believers” in the story that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings have acknowledged that such behavior would have been totally out of character for him; and there is widespread agreement that journalist James Callender had neither credibility nor actual knowledge of events at Monticello. I continue to believe that the allegations
of a long-term “affair” must be established by credible evidence before we can conclude the story is more likely than not the truth. Idle speculation and “could-have-been” hypotheses, reinforced by triple-hearsay accounts from unknown sources, are not sufficient.
On the other hand, it has been suggested that it is well established throughout the United States that paternity cannot be established without “clear and convincing” proof based upon evidence that would be admissible in court. That is, indeed, the legal standard; but we are not engaged in a legal dispute designed to affect the property or liberty rights of individuals. One might argue that Thomas Jefferson’s reputation ought to be of sufficient interest to society that nothing short of legally sufficient proof should be permitted to tarnish it; but that ignores the realities of historical research. If we are in pursuit of the truth, we must be willing to consider not only “hearsay” evidence, but also second- and third-degree hearsay.
While not controlling, legal rules of evidence are also not irrelevant to our inquiry. There is a reason courts do not like to entertain hearsay accounts: experience over many centuries has confirmed that such statements tend to be less reliable and thus less probative of the truth than direct testimony of those who actually took part in a dispute or observed it first-hand. Each time a story is retold to a new person, additional risks of either intentional or inadvertent error enter the picture.
In Chapter Four, we will examine a classic evidentiary problem. A story is written by one man (an anti-Jefferson journalist), alleging to contain statements made by a second man (Sally Hemings’ son Madison) about the truth of factual matters that occurred before Madison’s birth and for which he provides no explanation or “source” for his reported beliefs. The issue is complicated further by the fact that Madison waited nearly half a century after receiving his freedom to tell his story, and thus his recollections may not have been fresh. When we realize that he held clear feelings of resentment toward one of the subjects of his account, and he stood to gain personally in terms of his status and prestige from his account, the document becomes even more problematic. And when we consider that his views were set to paper, without the use of quotation marks to capture his actual words, by a highly partisan journalist who had an anti-Jefferson “agenda” of his own, the document’s utility in our search for truth is yet further compromised.59
Yet another example of the problems of hearsay surfaces in Chapter Nine and involves a statement by a Vermont schoolteacher named Elijah Fletcher, who traveled through Charlottesville and, after meeting with local citizens, reported that the Sally Hemings story was a “sacred truth.” This, too, is among the “evidence” relied upon by various advocates of Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’ children. It begins as weak evidence—a prejudiced source reporting local gossip—and falls completely apart when one realizes the rest of the story. It turns out that Mr. Fletcher happened to have shared a stagecoach from Washington, D.C., to Charlottesville, with one of Thomas Jefferson’s most vocal local critics. With John Kelly as his “tour guide” in Charlottesville, it is not surprising that Elijah Fletcher was introduced to others with a low opinion of the President.
In these cases, we have found enough contextual evidence to realize that the testimony has been influenced by enough biased sources to leave it little probative value. But here we were fortunate; how do we assess similar statements where we have no knowledge of the background or context? It is a serious problem for the historian.
From a legal perspective, the burden of going forward with the evidence properly falls upon the party advocating a particular fact. This is one of the many alarming features of the way the Jefferson-Hemings issue has recently been handled. In a setting where virtually no information is known, the absence of knowledge is not “proof” of anything (other, perhaps, than of the fact that there is no reliable evidence). To argue that an alleged fact should be presumed to be true because there is no evidence that it did not occur is not sound scholarship. Without other evidence, we cannot fairly conclude that Mr. Jones is a murderer simply because there is no proof someone else committed the crime. Similarly, suggesting that Sally Hemings must have been monogamous60 because scholars did not accuse her of being otherwise (in a setting where there is little indication many scholars gave serious thought to the matter, or for that matter that evidence existed to permit an intelligent judgment on the issue) contributes nothing to the search for the truth. But this has been a common practice in the current debate.
One cannot prove with absolute certainty that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were not both secret agents of the British Government during the American Revolution. To be sure, they both played leading roles in the revolution against Great Britain; but one might argue that a good spy would want such “cover” to have access to all of the best secrets.61 As far as I can tell, neither Washington nor Jefferson ever “publicly denied” serving the British, and few if any of their leading biographers have addressed the issue. These facts are not evidence that either is guilty of the charge, and yet they are precisely the kind of “evidence” that is being offered by some to establish Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’ children.
Indeed, one of the many frustrating aspects of reading the books of Fawn Brodie, Annette Gordon-Reed, and some of the other advocates of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship is how they pretend to find evidence from the lack of any information. For example, Professor Gordon-Reed tells her readers “[t]here is no indication that Jefferson discouraged free movement on James’s part while in France.”62 From that, we are asked to accept, it follows that “It is likely that James would show Paris to his sister. … ”63 Of course, one could just as easily argue that there is no evidence that James, or anyone else, ever showed his sister around Paris, and from that pretend that we have “evidence” that she spent almost all of her time sitting in a room alone at the Abbaye.64 Both arguments are equally flawed. The point is not that James might not have taken his sister to see the big city, but that our almost complete lack of information about her stay in Paris does not constitute “evidence” that makes either interpretation “likely.”
This problem also infects the Research Report of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which in concluding that Thomas Jefferson likely fathered all of Sally’s children argued: “convincing evidence does not exist for the hypothesis that another male Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children.”65 Obviously, the same reasoning could be used to point the blame at any male Jefferson. As will be shown in this report, there is no “convincing evidence” of the paternity of any of Sally Hemings’ children. But it does not follow logically that our inability to pin responsibility on suspects B through X ipso facto makes suspect A guilty.
On another occasion, Professor Gordon-Reed seems to be arguing that the burden of proof in establishing paternity falls on counsel for the defense:
Because Jefferson defenders have not been able to remove him from the list of possible fathers of Sally Hemings’s children and because they have not presented a convincing case for another man’s paternity, they must rely on particular characterizations of Jefferson and Sally Hemings that render him incapable of such a response.66
Surely the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” survives. One can only imagine how frequently many wealthy male celebrities would be defending themselves in paternity suits if the standard of proof really were that an individual was guilty unless he could prove another man to be the father.
Since the results of the DNA tests were released, it has become common for historians to suggest that the “burden has shifted” to Jefferson’s defenders. Professors Lander and Ellis wrote in the essay accompanying the release of the DNA data in Nature that the new evidence had “sealed the case” against Jefferson vis-à-vis Eston’s paternity, and added: “The jury remains out with respect to Sally’s other children, but the burden of proof has clearly shifted.”67 Writing later in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, Pulitze
r-Prize recipient Gordon Wood added: “clearly the burden of proof has shifted: until otherwise disproved, Jefferson is now presumed to have fathered one or more of Sally Hemings’s children. …So accepting of the sexual relationship are most historians now that it will be difficult for any future scholarly cautionary notes to get heard.”68
As a practical matter this may well be true. But as a matter of science and logic, the DNA tests did no more than establish that Eston Hemings’ father was almost certainly a Jefferson. Once it is established that more than one Jefferson male was likely present at Monticello when Eston was conceived, the DNA tests create no presumptions between competing candidates for paternity. At that point, we must return to the study of history and the analysis of other potential evidence.
By what standard do we assess competing interpretative arguments from the available evidence? The fourteenth-century logician William of Occam is credited with the Latin maxim pluralitas non est ponenda sine necesitate, which roughly translates, “Entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied,” or more colloquially, “Don’t make more assumptions than are necessary to explain what is observed.” This is often also identified as the “principle of parsimony,” the “principle of simplicity,” or merely “Occam’s Razor,” and it is at the heart of most scientific inquiry.69
There are, without doubt, conspiracies and cover-ups in life. But there are also wrongful accusations. Professors Brodie and Gordon-Reed have shown that, with a bit of creativity and some flexibility in handling the facts, it is possible to make an argument that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings might have had a sexual relationship. That point is conceded. The issue before us is whether there is serious evidence suggesting that such a relationship was likely, and whether after evaluating all of the evidence there is a simpler explanation that is equally consistent with the known facts.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 8