The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

by Robert F Turner

  The lesson is obvious: today, as throughout American history since the inception of the story nearly 200 ago, many Americans for various reasons want passionately to believe that Thomas Jefferson fathered some or all of Sally Hemings’ children, whether or not the evidence supports the charge.

  Myth vs. History: Oral Tradition as Unreliable Evidence

  Traditionally, historians long have recognized the unreliability of oral tradition as evidence. Family “oral history” or “family tradition” particularly is unreliable, for many reasons, as Professor Turner points out in his report. These include the high probability of errors creeping into stories that are told and retold from one generation to the next, as well as the tendency “to embellish the family legacy to instill pride and confidence in the next generation.” The problem is not peculiar to American history or modern times: notables in ancient Rome frequently claimed descent from the gods—Julius Caesar, from the goddess Venus, for example—to make them even more patrician.

  Indeed, family oral traditions really ought not to be called “history” at all, for they are rather, quite literally, myth. That realization hit home with me last summer when I was attending a conference at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and visited the Museum of Archeology, which is famous for its collection of totem poles and other artifacts relating to Pacific Northwest Indians (or “First Peoples,” as they are called in Canada). Totem poles, of course, were used by the native peoples to memorialize their own myths. Here’s how the guidebook I purchased at the Museum explained their mythology24:

  There were two kinds of myths on the Northwest Coast—those which were known to and could be told by everyone and those which were the private property of particular families and could only be told by their members. Both kinds tell of a primordial age before the world became as it is now, a time when finite divisions between humans, animals, and spirits had not yet been created and beings could transform themselves from one form into another. …It was a time now lost but remembered. It was a world now gone, but one that people recreated in art and ritual. Through ceremonial and artistic re-enactment of their heritage, through dance, song, and ritual acting, people maintained continuity with their genesis. So, even though mythological time belonged to long ago, before mankind became separated and distinguished from animals and nature, the memory of it could be kept alive.

  The myths which everyone could tell concerned the change of that other world into this one. …The family myths, on the other hand, told of family origins, of ancestors who came down from the sky as birds or who married mythical animals and shining celestial beings; they told of the wanderings of the ancestors, their settlement in their present locations, and their acquisition of the privileges and powers which defined the greatness of the family line. Paramount among these were those rights whose representations the family could display on totem poles and ceremonial objects to broadcast their heritage to others.

  As noted below, the Monticello Committee report essentially takes the “family myths” of the Madison Hemings descendants and treats them as history. It would be like a historian today saying that a famous tribal leader among the Pacific Northwest First Peoples really was descended from a raven bird, because his family myth says so—it must be true because it’s a story people “continued to tell their children and grandchildren . . . , often at significant times in their lives”!25

  There are many reasons to doubt the reliability of the oral tradition handed down by Madison Hemings’ descendants. Significantly, there is no evidence of an oral tradition corroborating the assertions attributed to Madison Hemings which antedates the publication of the 1873 Pike County Republican story. Thus, rather than being an oral history handed down to her descendants by Sally Hemings herself—or by any contemporaries of hers with first-hand knowledge of happenings at Monticello, or even by Madison Hemings himself, who presumably had only second-hand knowledge of his paternity—the allegation of Jefferson’s paternity of Sally Hemings’ children appears to have originated with these 1873 newspaper stories. And, like the oral tradition handed down to Thomas Woodson’s descendants, it is quite likely that the Madison Hemings oral tradition ultimately owes its origin to the original 1802 Callender allegation.

  Yet, as discussed below, the Monticello Committee report treats the Madison Hemings story as key evidence linking Jefferson to Sally Hemings. Indeed, apart from the so-called “Monte Carlo” simulation (the problems of which are also discussed below), it is literally the only evidence cited by the Committee report in support of its conclusion that Jefferson likely fathered all the children of Sally Hemings—that is, the children other than Eston.

  Among other families of Hemings descendants, a quite different oral tradition—attributing the paternity of Sally Hemings’ children to an “uncle” of Jefferson’s—appears to have been handed down from generation to generation. The Monticello Report’s effort to discount that tradition, while accepting the Madison Hemings story, is quite unconvincing, as noted below.

  Broader Context of the Myth Today:

  The Assault on Standards

  The rise of three related phenomena in higher education generally—the “political correctness” movement, multiculturalism, and post-modernism—helps explain why the Jefferson-Hemings myth has become so readily accepted today, not only by the American general public but also by scholars who should know better.

  The term political correctness was coined in the early 1990s, in the midst of a controversy over perceived threats to academic freedom on America’s college and university campuses. Originally an approving phrase used by those on the Leninist left to denote someone who steadfastly toed the party line, “politically correct” or “P.C.” began to be used ironically by critics of the left—first by conservatives (such as Dinesh D’Souza, author of the best-selling book Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (1991)) and later by liberals and many old-school leftists—who sought to defend campus freedoms against “P.C.” censors. The debate encompasses many issues, among them official campus speech codes, designed to protect certain groups of students from “oppressive” or even merely “insensitive” racist or sexist speech, as well as new curriculums emphasizing race and ethnic distinctions.26

  Perhaps the most important attribute of the “politically correct” movement has been its emphasis on “race/class/gender-ism,” which pictures culture and language as giant hidden structures that permeate life and which assumes that American culture (or Western culture generally) has been dominated by the culture and language of European white males.27 In its opposition to this perceived hegemony, the P.C. movement overlaps with the other two modern movements in higher education, multiculturalism and postmodernism.

  Multiculturalism began as a well-intentioned movement to diversify education—and the teaching of history, in particular—by calling attention to the experiences of women, blacks, American Indians, immigrants, and members of other groups whose stories largely had been neglected in textbooks. What began as a movement on behalf of diversity and cultural pluralism, however, devolved into a “particularist” movement that, in its overreaction to perceived “Eurocentrism,” fostered even more extremely distorted views of American history, such as Afrocentrism.28 Particularists “have no interest in extending or revising American culture; indeed, they deny that a common culture exists. Particularists reject any accommodation among groups, any interactions that blur the distinct lines between them. The brand of history that they espouse is one in which everyone is either a descendant of victims or oppressors.”29

  When advocates of political correctness or extreme multiculturalism challenge the culture of rationalism and humanism, they also ally themselves with an even more pervasive movement among American intellectuals in recent decades, the so-called “post-modern” movement. Postmodernist theory attempts to “deconstruct,” or expose, the underlying subjectivity and indeterminacy of everything we assume we know. Among historians, postmodernism has meant
an assault on objectivity: a rejection of traditional standards for discovering facts, weighing evidence, and interpreting events. Traditional analytic and empirical methods are rejected in favor of history as mere “narrative.” As one theorist put it, “The past is not discovered or found; it is created or represented by the historian as text.” History, to the postmodernists, is no more factual or objective than any other discipline; “there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of construing its meaning over another,” for interpretation is inevitably “socially constructed.”30

  Postmodernists and radical multiculturalists frequently argue that white male culture has achieved domination over other cultures through values such as rationalism, humanism, universality, and literary merit—values which the multiculturalists claim are not objective but rather are tools for oppressing other people by persuading them of their own inferiority.31 These views lead to “disturbing distortions in scholarship and public discourse,” argue law professors Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry. (It should be noted that Professors Farber and Sherry are not conservatives; they are mainstream liberal law professors who are alarmed at the threats posed to law and legal scholarship by radical multiculturalist movements in the legal academy such as Critical Legal Studies, radical feminism, and Critical Race Theory.) “Because they reject objectivity as a norm, the radicals are content to rely on personal stories as a basis for formulating views of social problems. These stories are often atypical or distorted by self-interest, yet any criticism of the stories is inevitably seen as a personal attack on the storyteller,” they observe. Indeed, “because radical multiculturalists refuse to separate the speaker from the message, they can become sidetracked from discussing the merits of the message itself into bitter disputes about the speaker’s authenticity and her right to speak on behalf of an oppressed group. Criticisms of radical multiculturalism are seen as pandering to the power structure if they come from women or minorities, or as sexist and racist if they come from white men.”32 Thus, not only objectivity, but also civility—the basic prerequisite for genuine dialogue—has been jeopardized.

  In recent years, many American historians have become concerned at the degree to which radical multiculturalism and postmodernism have apparently dominated the nation’s two leading organizations of historians, the American History Association (AHA) and the Organization of American Historians (OAH). Many historians consequently have resigned their membership in one or both of these groups. A politically diverse coalition of historians, ranging in their political views from conservative and libertarian to left-liberal—all who share a concern for how radical multiculturalism and “identity politics” have been destroying the profession—even have formed a new organization to compete with the AHA and the OAH, called The Historical Society (THS).33

  Sadly, the historical profession today has lost much of the standards by which evidence can be objectively weighed and evaluated in the search for historical truth. History, in effect, has become politicized in America today, as illustrated by the widespread acceptance of the Jefferson-Hemings myth as historical fact.

  Taken together, political correctness, multiculturalism, and post-modernism have created an environment in the academic world today in which scholars feel pressured to accept the Jefferson-Hemings myth as historical truth. White male scholars in particular fear that by questioning the myth—by challenging the validity of the oral tradition “evidence” cited by some of the Hemings descendants—they will be called racially “insensitive,” if not racist. As discussed more fully below in my critique of Annette Gordon-Reed’s book, among many proponents of the Jefferson paternity claim there has emerged a truly disturbing McCarthyist-like inquisition that has cast its pall over Jefferson scholarship today. Questioning the validity of the claim has been equated with the denigration of African Americans and the denial of their rightful place in American history. In this climate of scholarly and public opinion, it requires great personal courage for scholars to question the Jefferson paternity thesis and to point out the dubious historical record on which it rests.

  The Flawed Case for the Jefferson-Hemings Story

  The two most significant briefs on behalf of the Jefferson-Hemings paternity claim that have appeared thus far in print are Annette Gordon-Reed’s book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,34 and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (TJMF) Ad Hoc Research Committee Report (referred to below as the Monticello Report), released in 2000.35 I refer to both these works as briefs on behalf of the paternity claim, for both share this essential weakness: rather than objectively weighing all the relevant evidence according to established standards of historical scholarship, they both are markedly one-sided, based on a highly selective reading of the evidence, presenting the case for Jefferson’s paternity as if it were accepted as an article of faith. And for both Professor Gordon-Reed and for the staff at Monticello, it apparently is.

  Annette Gordon-Reed’s Book

  Annette Gordon-Reed is a law professor, not trained as a historian; her book is a classic example of what historians call “lawyer’s history”—an advocacy brief which marshals the evidence in favor of a predetermined thesis rather than objectively weighs the evidence in the search for historical truth.

  In both the preface and conclusion to her book, Professor Gordon-Reed quite directly admits that her mission is to expose the “troubling”—i.e., racist—assumptions made by historians who have denied “the truth of a liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.” To sustain the denial, she argues, historians must “make Thomas Jefferson so high as to have been something more than human” and “make Sally Hemings so low as to have been something less than human.” Historians have engaged in “the systematic dismissal of the words of the black people who spoke on this matter—Madison Hemings, the son of Sally Hemings, and Israel Jefferson, a former slave who also resided at Monticello—as though their testimony was worth some fraction as that of whites.” Indeed, she regards Madison Hemings as “a metaphor for the condition of blacks in American society.” He was, she notes, “a black man who watched his three siblings voluntarily disappear into the white world” and yet who “chose to remain black and to speak for himself,” only to be “vilified and ridiculed in a vicious manner” and then be “forgotten.” To vindicate him, she wrote the book.36

  Throughout her book, Professor Gordon-Reed vilifies as racist—without ever directly using that term—virtually every historian who has ever written about Jefferson and Sally Hemings: these include established Jefferson scholars such as Merrill Peterson, Douglass Adair, Dumas Malone, and John Chester Miller, as well as younger scholars such as Andrew Burstein. Her treatment of Burstein is illustrative of her technique. In his 1995 book The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, Burstein briefly addressed Madison Hemings’ 1873 newspaper interview, noting that it was “possible that his claim was contrived—by his mother or himself—to provide an otherwise undistinguished biracial carpenter a measure of social respect.” Burstein added, “Would not his life have been made more charmed by being known as the son of Thomas Jefferson than the more obscure Peter or Samuel Carr?” Professor Gordon-Reed answers this rhetorical question with an emphatic “no,” in the process ridiculing Burstein’s choice of words, particularly his reference to a “charmed” life.37 Burstein has since reversed his position of skepticism and now argues that the DNA test results “have convincingly linked [Jefferson] to Sally Hemings sexually.”38

  In addition to rhetorical arguments designed to ridicule the white male historians who have written about the Jefferson-Hemings matter—suggesting not so subtly that their writings have been infused with racist assumptions—Professor Gordon-Reed also carefully selects the evidence and presents it in the light most favorable to her cause, exposing what she regards as “double standards” in historical scholarship. In the process, however, she breaks down most accepted standards for weighing evidence, particularly for we
ighing oral tradition evidence, creating a new double standard which gives preference to the oral tradition supporting the Jefferson paternity thesis. Legitimate doubts about the veracity of the 1873 newspaper “memoir” attributed to Hemings—doubts based not only on the many problems found in the account itself but also in its broader political context, as noted above—are swept aside, as Professor Gordon-Reed focuses on such matters as scholars’ questioning whether a word like enciente would have been used by a black man at that time period.39 Her aim, again, is to vindicate Madison Hemings and his story, “to present the strongest case to be made that the story might be true.”40

  More broadly, Professor Gordon-Reed’s agenda is to use the Jefferson-Hemings story as a metaphor for American race relations. In a letter to the editor published soon after the DNA test results went public, Professor Gordon-Reed admitted quite directly the “silver lining” she found in this controversy, what it shows about “the history of racism in America”: “If people had accepted this story, he would never have become an icon. All these historians did him a favor until we could get past our primitive racism. I don’t think he would have been on Mount Rushmore or on the nickel. The personification of America can’t live 38 years with a black woman.”41

  Because her mission was to rebut the case made by Jefferson scholars—virtually all of whom have accepted at face value the paternity allegations made against Peter and Samuel Carr by Jefferson’s grandchildren T.J. Randolph and Ellen Coolidge Randolph—Professor Gordon-Reed ignores entirely the possibility that Jefferson’s brother Randolph or one of Randolph Jefferson’s five sons could have fathered one or more of Sally Hemings’ children. Although she lists in her bibliography Bernard Mayo’s Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother Randolph (1942), she excludes Randolph and his sons from her genealogical table of “The Jeffersons and Randolphs (Relevant Connections Only),” as well as from the nearly 50 “Important Names” listed in Appendix A to her book. Nor is Randolph Jefferson or any of his children even referenced in her index.