The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

by Robert F Turner

  Although the Scholars Commission was not the first53 to point out the alterations54 in historical documents transcribed by Professor Gordon-Reed and included in her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the release of our report probably did bring them to the attention of a larger audience. When she was asked by the media about the “incorrect transcription of a key letter from one of Jefferson’s granddaughters,” Professor Gordon-Reed “acknowledged her mistake …but said it was a ‘non-issue,’ because she would have used the letter regardless.”55 (One has to wonder why, since when transcribed correctly the letter would be the only document in her appendices that clearly undermines the case she is advocating.)

  Troubled that there were no apparent consequences for what he viewed as a serious act of professional misconduct, TJHS President John Works wrote to the Dean and President of New York Law School and asked whether the school was looking into the matter. On July 16, Professor Gordon-Reed responded to this letter directly to Mr. Works. She denied intentionally altering the text of the Ellen Randolph Coolidge letter, declaring: “Any mistake that appears in my work is just that—a mistake.”56

  The following month, Mr. Works received a brief letter dated August 14, 2001, from New York Law School Dean Richard Matasar stating in its entirety:

  Dear Mr. Works:

  I know Professor Gordon-Reed very well. I find the tone of your letter extremely offensive. She has told you she mistakenly transcribed the letter and that she will correct the error in future editions of her book.

  As a scholar—and a careful one at that—I have made similar mistakes in my own work. I fully support Professor Gordon-Reed.

  Sincerely,

  Richard A. Matasar

  Dean and President

  This would make more sense if “the mistakes” had involved transcribing “that” as “the” or “1873” as “1973”—most prolific scholars do occasionally make such mistakes—but, in order to make the Coolidge letter useful to her case, Professor Gordon-Reed had to make nearly a dozen alterations to a single sentence. The “mistakes” do not appear random, but rather remarkably transformed the original sentence into a grammatically correct new sentence with a very different meaning. There was another little “mistake” in the same letter, involving transcribing “disbelief” as “belief”—resulting in an implication that Thomas Jefferson’s favorite grandson believed the allegations against the President. One might add that virtually all of the “mistakes” in her transcription of the 1873 story about Madison Hemings also appear to have corrected obvious inaccuracies in the original that might have decreased the document’s credibility. Thus, Professor Gordon-Reed dropped a dozen words in a sentence so that it falsely appeared that Madison Hemings described not five-year-old Maria but nearly twelve-year-old Martha as “just budding into womanhood”57 when Thomas Jefferson went to live in Paris. The original document was very legible, and the words deleted could not be explained on the basis of mistakenly skipping a line while transcribing. As with other alterations in her book, the deletion of a dozen words from the sentence removes a passage that if not altered would have raised doubts about the credibility of the document being transcribed.

  I must admit that I had never heard of Dean Matasar before I read Professor Gordon-Reed’s book and then read the letter he wrote to Mr. Works, and I have not to my knowledge read any of his scholarly writings. But I would be interested in seeing even one example of his published works that includes “similar mistakes” to altering even half-a-dozen words in a key sentence so as to reverse its original meaning. Excluding situations of obvious fraud, I do not believe I have ever encountered such “errors” before from any serious scholar, much less a former member of Harvard Law Review like Professor Gordon-Reed.

  Interestingly, Mr. Works had the same reaction and wrote back to Dean Matasar asking for an example of comparable “mistakes” in his own published writings. That was more than nine years ago. To the best of my knowledge, he has not yet received either the requested example (much less “examples”), or for that matter any other response to his letter.

  Although other historians in the interim have been sanctioned, had awards withdrawn, and in some cases lost their jobs for the lesser offense58 of plagiarism, Professor Gordon-Reed has apparently suffered no adverse consequences. Indeed, she has gone on to be named a tenured professor at Harvard Law School and to win the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize in history, the George Washington Prize, a $500,000 “genius” award from the McArthur Foundation, and numerous other distinguished literary prizes for her latest book.59

  After the DNA tests were made public, Professor Gordon-Reed issued a new edition of her 1997 book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, addressing the DNA findings in an “Author’s Note” before the Preface. She reasoned: “‘Passionless’ science has stepped in to help solve a controversy that history and politics—driven by human passion—would not allow to be resolved by normal means. Let me be clear. There is currently no reasonable basis for doubting Madison Hemings’s story about his life at Monticello.”60 Although she refers to “the Carr brothers story”61—not in the possessive, but rather the story told by Jefferson family members that Sally Hemings’ children were fathered by Peter and Samuel Carr (a story she inaccurately alleges has been destroyed by the DNA tests62)—and noted that “Jefferson’s relatives” had “named two of their relatives as the fathers,”63 she nevertheless asserts in this Note that “[t]he suggestions about multiple fathers—in a way that is very telling and depressing—comes from current-day commentators.”64

  Indeed, Professor Gordon-Reed seems to find no possible explanation but racism to explain why white historians had ever challenged Madison Hemings’ account:

  We should also ask whether stereotypes about black women have any useful role to play in considering this issue. The casual implication that Sally Hemings’s children may have been fathered by different men is not based upon anything we presently know about the social situation at Monticello. It is more likely a product of long-held beliefs about black women’s natural licentiousness and the looseness of the black family structure.65

  While noting that some progress was evident from the positive reviews of her book even before the DNA tests were announced, she laments: “very few reviewers grappled with the role that the doctrine of white supremacy played in all of this.”66 I can assure readers that the fear that anyone who disagreed with Professor Gordon-Reed might be attacked as a “racist” or “white supremacist” deterred several able Jefferson scholars who were approached about joining the Scholars Commission in 2000. Professor Merrill Peterson did not give a reason for his decision to decline the invitation to join our group, and now that he has passed on I want to be careful about speculating as to his motives. At the age of seventy-nine he certainly needed no excuse to avoid additional burdens on his time. But he had openly and proudly supported the Civil Rights movement in the South, had played a prominent leadership role in the struggle to integrate the University of Virginia, and, as well, had worked hard to recruit African-American professors and students.67 I know that he was deeply hurt by patently false suggestions that he was some sort of white supremacist for being skeptical about the story attributed to Madison Hemings, and I have good reason to believe that he was pleased with the conclusions of our group.68

  I have only encountered one instance where Professor Gordon-Reed specifically discussed the Scholars Commission (although there may well be many others). On September 24, 2008, she took part in an online discussion of her latest book sponsored by the Washington Post, from which the following exchange with an unidentified individual from Virginia is excerpted:

  VA: I have read most of the scholars commission report. It has convinced me that Jefferson did not father Sally’s children. What is your opinion of the report?

  Annette Gordon-Reed: I have problems with the Scholars Commission Report—by the way—anytime a group has to call itself a “Scholar’s [sic] Commission” you know so
mething is up. Sort of like an establishment calling itself a “Gentleman’s Club.” In any event, as I recall there was not one scholar of slavery in the group. It would be as if someone were claiming to be an expert on France in the 18th century, and they didn’t know how to speak or read French. That would not pass muster. The lives of French people would be taken too seriously for that. That some think it should pass muster when dealing with the lives of enslaved African Americans speaks volumes about blacks’ position in this country. The scholarship about slavery in America is really the crown jewel in American historiography. It is a subject worthy of study and mastery (if I may use that ironic term) and that anyone could purport to seriously talk about an issue involving slavery without having input from people who spend their lives studying the institution—and I mean multiple people—is beyond mysterious.69

  After more than nine years, I honestly don’t recall who coined the term “Scholars Commission.” I am pretty sure it was not me or another member of our group, and I suspect it was someone affiliated with the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society. But I don’t find the term offensive or inappropriate. Among the Merriam-Webster definitions for the term “commission” is “a group of persons directed to perform some duty. … ”70 While “directed” may be a bit strong—we were “requested” and all served as uncompensated volunteers—I think the title fairly accurately describes the group. While I don’t disagree that the study of American slavery is important, our task was not to do a broad study of interracial sex in Virginia during the era of Thomas Jefferson, but rather the far more specific mission of assessing whether charges that Jefferson fathered one or more children with Sally Hemings were true. There were a variety of allegations and arguments to be assessed, and it is not clear to me that having spent decades studying the behavior of other individuals on other plantations would have been of tremendous value in our more specific inquiry. Certainly, though, everyone on the Scholars Commission was very much aware that interracial sex on southern plantations in that era was not uncommon, and that it represented yet another dimension of the injustice of slavery.

  Lest I be misunderstood, my concerns about Professor Gordon-Reed’s scholarship go well beyond the apparent “evidence tampering” documented in Figures 1–4. Because racism is such an evil prejudice, I find highly offensive her false allegations that scholars like Merrill Peterson who reached conclusions that differed from her own were “racists” or “white supremacists.” It has been an effective tactic for intimidating some scholars who might otherwise have been tempted to challenge her, but it is as irresponsible as falsely accusing an innocent man of rape. She is obviously a very bright and knowledgeable person on these issues—too bright and knowledgeable to believe that Thomas Jefferson was “just a typical southern slave owner. … ”71 Her obvious talents and expertise make it difficult for me to dismiss as mere incompetence her exclusion of Randolph Jefferson and his family from her book (she included a book specifically about Randolph in her bibliography), or to ignore on similar grounds her clearly false assertions that the DNA tests disproved the Jefferson family’s oral traditions that the Carr brothers fathered children by Sally Hemings.

  Other than her rather snide “gentlemen’s club” remark and denying that the alterations in transcriptions in her first book were anything but “mistakes,” Professor Gordon-Reed does not appear to have addressed our report on the merits. When invited to debate the Jefferson-Hemings issue at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association—where she could have defended her past writings and pointed out any flaws in our research or conclusions—she declined. For the record, the offer to debate her is still open.

  Professor Joseph Ellis

  Professor Joseph Ellis, who had co-authored one of the original Nature stories on the DNA tests and was certainly the most distinguished champion of the Hemingses’ cause, received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2001 for his best-selling Founding Brothers. His shift in positions—from characterizing the possibility that Thomas Jefferson was sexually involved with Sally Hemings as being “remote” and based upon “flimsy and wholly circumstantial” evidence in his highly acclaimed 1996 biography, American Sphinx,72 to asserting the Hemingses’ case had been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt”73 by the DNA study—was difficult for me to reconcile with my conviction that he was an exceptionally able scholar and my assumption that he was an honorable man. His overstatement (and Nature’s) of the DNA evidence was so great that Dr. Eugene Foster, who organized and oversaw the DNA tests, found it necessary to publish letters in both Nature and The New York Times seeking to correct the record.74

  As noted in the Introduction to my Individual Views, during our inquiry I exchanged letters with Professor Ellis and found him to be most gracious and candid in his comments. I liked him. But in his letters to me—bracketed before and after by scholarly articles repeating the “beyond reasonable doubt” assessment75—he took the view that the DNA results had changed his view from it being somewhat more likely that the story was false to somewhat more likely that it was true. That was a perfectly reasonable position, but it hardly explained his much stronger assessment in the Nature story or in subsequent public statements. I could not escape the suspicion that either Professor Ellis was not the outstanding historian that his record suggested or he was not the honorable individual his letter to me strongly suggested. I was unwilling to believe that he would intentionally misrepresent the truth, and yet I could not reconcile his obviously false and exaggerated scholarship with my perception of his skills as a professional historian.

  Both Joseph Ellis and the leadership at Monticello were enigmas to me. Every indicator told me they were honorable and able people. Yet their revisionist scholarship on this issue was so terribly flawed that it made no sense to me. And between them, their influence in shifting public and professional thinking on the Sally Hemings issue had been extraordinary. Widely recognized as among the most outstanding members of his profession, when Joseph Ellis changed positions and announced the case was proven “beyond reasonable doubt,” there was little reason for other scholars, who had not taken the time to examine all of the evidence in detail, to question the Hemingses’ story. And when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation quickly conceded the point, and the public was told that DNA tests had “seal[ed] the case,”76 the debate indeed seemed over.

  Two months after the Scholars Commission report was made public, a highly respected journalist dropped a bombshell, disclosing on page one of the Boston Globe that Professor Ellis had a long history of telling untrue stories to students, colleagues, and the media about such things as having served in the Vietnam War, having been a civil rights and anti-war activist, and having scored the winning touchdown in his high school homecoming football game.77 Careful research had revealed that Ellis was at Yale earning two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. in history during the years he claimed to have been in Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader with the elite 101st Airborne Division and later on the personal staff of General William Westmoreland. His high school yearbook revealed that he played no sports (but may have been on the football field at halftime as a member of the band), and his Yale friends and advisers had no recollections of any summer spent with the civil rights movement in Mississippi or anti-war activism on campus.78

  Mount Holyoke President Joanne V. Creighton initially defended Professor Ellis, issuing a statement that said in part “We at the College do not know what public interest the Globe is trying to serve through a story of this nature.”79 But, as pressure grew, she acknowledged what Ellis had done was wrong and finally was forced on August 17 to suspend her college’s most distinguished faculty member for one year without pay.80 On the same day, Professor Ellis—who had initially simply issued a statement through the college saying he “would not discuss any of the issues”81 raised in the Globe article—released a statement through his lawyer saying in part: “By misrepresenting my military service to students in the course on the Vietnam War, I did s
omething both stupid and wrong. I apologize to the students, as well as to the faculty of this institution, for violating the implicit covenant of trust that must exist in the classroom.”82

  The Boston Globe revelations made it easy for some who were struggling to decide whether Professor Ellis was a poor historian or was simply willing to misrepresent the truth when it served his interests. It was already known that he had been actively involved in the campaign to prevent the impeachment of President Clinton at the time he wrote that the DNA tests had proven Thomas Jefferson was also guilty of sexual misconduct while in office. Indeed, Ellis made frequent reference to the similarities between Jefferson and Clinton in several of his articles and public statements at the time.83 But the conventional wisdom was that his misrepresentation of his own biography had not infected his professional scholarship. For example, his editor at Alfred A. Knopf asserted: “no one has questioned his scholarship in any of the books he has written.”84

  In retrospect, I guess it is not necessary for me to attempt to resolve the issue. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that Professor Ellis seriously misstated the facts about the DNA test results, and in so doing he misled large numbers of people both within the community of professional historians and among the general public. And, like Professor Gordon-Reed, since the Scholars Commission report was released he has turned down invitations to defend his position on the Jefferson-Hemings issue in public debate. Readers tempted to rely upon his assessments of this issue should keep these realities in mind as they seek to weigh the value of his contributions.

  Historian Henry Wiencek