She notes census taker William Weaver’s 1870 marginal notation next to Madison Hemings’ name that “This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson!” and declares that this is “primary information from an original source.” One wonders what on Earth she is talking about. Presumably, while Weaver was speaking with Madison Hemings to obtain his name, age, and other information necessary for the census, Madison declared that he was Thomas Jefferson’s child. Recording this hearsay adds little to the Pike County Republican story published three years later that made the same claim. The sole basis for both claims is Madison Hemings, who could not have known with certainty the facts involved because they occurred before his birth.
As noted in Chapter Four of my Individual Views, both Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed acknowledged that the polished prose of Wetmore’s 1873 article was likely that of the editor and not a former slave with minimum formal education. In contrast, Leary asserts that “the language is commensurate with Madison’s background and training,” reasoning: “He was undoubtedly brought up to enter the white world, as his brother and sister had done. His conversational model had been the discourse of an articulate orator and one of the most literate men this nation has produced.”105 In reality, Thomas Jefferson was not “an articulate orator”106 and Madison reportedly admitted to Wetmore that Jefferson had never shown him “partiality or fatherly affection” and that he had learned to read by “inducing the white children to teach me the letters.” One may speculate that perhaps Madison was “trained” to “enter the white world,” but given the facts we know it is unreasonable to allege that this assumption is “undoubtedly” true.
Ms. Leary asserts that “[l]arge portions of Madison’s statement represent primary data based on his own experience,” noting that he claimed to have been “measurably happy”—a statement that “was not hearsay; it was his own direct experience.”107 That’s true. But, more significantly, for our purposes, Madison’s unsourced allegations—assuming for the moment that Madison was indeed the source for Wetmore’s rhetoric—about what occurred in Paris before he was born or his own paternity and that of his older siblings is clearly hearsay, at best. It was not testimony based on “his own direct experience.”
Consider also this bit of fantasy from Leary’s article:
Sally’s part of the bargain, clearly, was her availability when he wanted her and her pledge to have no other sexual partner. This mutual agreement, scrupulously observed, is the only reasonable explanation for the subsequent behavior of both Jefferson and Hemings. He assisted the departure of Beverly and Harriet and provided for manumission of Madison and Eston, thereby freeing all her children.108
Again, this is not “genealogy” and it is not history. And Leary’s conclusions certainly are not “clear” based upon the evidence she offers. Thomas Jefferson already legally owned Sally Hemings. He did not need her “consent” to demand sex from her or control her sexual involvement with other men. Even if one assumed that Beverly was secretly allowed to withdraw from Monticello in 1822 (at the age of 23 or more likely 24), this was hardly scrupulous observance of an alleged promise to “free” him at the age of 21. And if the “only reasonable explanation” for freeing Madison and Eston in his will was that he was having sex with their mother, how do we explain the fact that all but two of Betty Hemings’ sons and grandsons known to be alive and in Jefferson’s possession in 1826 were also freed—most of them under considerably more favorable terms than those given Madison and Eston? Was Thomas Jefferson having sex with their mothers too?
There is more than a little irony in Ms. Leary’s suggestion that I attempted to “mislead” readers in making the observation (which she concedes is correct) that the DNA tests of descendants of Thomas Woodson provided no evidence on his maternity. Consider Ms. Leary’s own effort to discredit the 1858 letter from Ellen Randolph Coolidge by noting Ellen’s denial of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship was contained in a letter “intended to influence a publication.”109 What she fails to reveal is that, while the first part of the letter was indeed provided to assist with a publication, the portion discussing her brother Jefferson Randolph’s comment on the Carr brothers’ admission was prefaced with this language: “I have written thus far thinking you might chuse [sic] to communicate my letter to Mr. Bulfinch. Now I will tell you in confidence what Jefferson told me under the like condition.”110 We often do not know the full purpose for which historic letters were written. But in this case it appears clear that Ellen Coolidge did not intend to have her discussion of the Carr brothers’ admission disclosed to any third party. Ms. Leary does her subscribers a disservice by misrepresenting this fact.
Speaking of Ellen Randolph Coolidge, Ms. Leary’s attempts to defend Professor Gordon-Reed’s “inadvertent” alteration in Ellen’s October 24, 1858, letter to her brother in a footnote, asserting: “Gordon-Reed dropped a short part of this quotation from her transcription (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 259), probably inadvertently; but the omission is viewed with dark suspicion at the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society website. … ”111 As a factual matter, this statement is untrue. Professor Gordon-Reed did not merely “drop” a “short part of this quotation”—she altered nearly a dozen words by either deletion, insertion, or moving words around in the sentence to materially change its original meaning. And this “inadvertent” alteration just happened to be on the most critical sentence in the letter for our purposes.
This is important, because intentionally altering historical evidence to mislead readers is a far greater sin than merely plagiarizing another scholar’s work. Plagiarism merely converts the intellectual property of another, whereas doctoring an historical document that most readers cannot readily check intentionally misleads everyone who reads the book. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”112
Consider the evidence. In the original letter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge wrote—and I have here kept her lines as they appeared in the original hand-written letter (see Figure 4 on page 37) so readers can consider the possibility that Professor Gordon-Reed merely “skipped a line” in making her transcription:
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.113
Professor Gordon-Reed transcribed this as:
No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze.114
This is the most critical sentence in the altered letter, and it was transformed from a piece of evidence for the defense into an “admission against interest” by a defense witness confirming that Sally was allowed to go to Jefferson’s bedroom when no one was thought to be looking. The other key “error” in Professor Gordon-Reed’s transcription of this document involved replacing the word “disbelief” with the word “belief” in a sentence asserting that Ellen’s brother Thomas Jefferson Randolph had “positively declared his indignant disbelief in the imputations” that President Jefferson had fathered Sally Hemings’ children.115 Then we have the alterations to the Pike County Republican story attributed to Madison Hemings to consider.116 I will leave to the reader the task of deciding whether Ms. Leary was justified in her assumption that this first alteration of key evidence was “probably inadvertent.”
Consider also Leary’s treatment of the statement by Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon that Harriet Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson’s daughter but the child of a man whose name was omitted from the published version of Pierson’s account and replaced with _____. Bacon is quoted as explaining: “I know that. I have seen him [the man other than Thomas Jefferson whose name is replaced with _____] come out of her mother’s room many a morning, when I went up to Monticello very early.”117 Of this statement, Ms. Leary writes:
Harriet was conceived in August 1801, Madison in April 1804. Unless the teenaged Bacon w
as hanging around Monticello for reasons of his own “on many a morning …very early,” his account cannot relate to any of the conceptions prior to Eston’s.
Eston is proved to have been a Y-line Jefferson descendant. If there is any truth at all in Bacon’s account, the man he saw leaving the room of Harriet’s mother would have to be a Jefferson. Bacon’s “many a morning” phrase implies not only that he, Bacon, was a Monticello inhabitant but that the Jefferson male was also in residence—and the only Jefferson living at Monticello was Thomas.118
On the contrary, the statement that Bacon “went up to Monticello very early” on “many a morning” suggests not that he “was a Monticello inhabitant” at the time, but instead that he was going from his residence to Monticello very early in the morning—presumably on the way to work. Bacon later told the Reverend Hamilton W. Pierson “I went to live with him [Jefferson] the 27th of the December before he was inaugurated as President,”119 it seems clear from Jefferson’s records that Bacon lived at Monticello from at least 1806 to 1822, and he claimed that had he stayed until December 27, 1822, “I should have been with him [Jefferson] precisely twenty years,”120 or since 1802.
It is also clear that Bacon worked for Thomas Jefferson in various capacities prior to becoming overseer.121 And it would seem logical that his statement “I have seen him [an unidentified man other than Thomas Jefferson] come out of her [Harriet Hemings’] mother’s room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early”122 might well have occurred prior to Bacon’s going to live at Monticello. He presumably “went up to Monticello very early” during a period or periods when he was working for Mr. Jefferson but residing elsewhere—so he would have had to make the trip up the mountain “very early” in the morning. However, we cannot completely dismiss the possibility that as overseer he might have traveled off the mountain for any of a number of reasons and then returned “very early”—so these observations of another man leaving Sally Hemings’ room could have been made while he was overseer or many years earlier (or both).
While it is true that Eston’s father was almost certainly a Jefferson, he did not have to be “in residence” on a full-time basis as Ms. Leary contends, but merely present at Monticello on the mornings (and, presumably, through part of the previous night) that Bacon observed him. Jefferson did not keep a record of routine visits by brother Randolph or his family members (unless their visit pertained to some business matter that on that basis warranted an entry in his records), and if Randolph and his sons only made the twenty-mile trip twice a year and stayed only a week or two each visit it is perfectly possible that Bacon could have observed one of them leaving Sally’s room a half dozen times over a period of two or three years and thus made the statement to Pierson. Leary’s attempt to persuade her readers that Sally’s lover for some unexplained reason had to be a full-time resident at Monticello (versus an overnight visitor who came to Monticello from time to time over a period of time), and thus Bacon had to be talking about Thomas Jefferson, is obviously absurd. The clear content of Bacon’s statement was that Harriet Hemings was not Thomas Jefferson’s child because Bacon had frequently observed another man leaving Sally’s room early in the morning. It is obtuse to fill in the blank line with the name “Thomas Jefferson,” pretending that Bacon might have said, essentially, “I know Tom Jefferson was not Sally’s lover, because I often saw him slipping out of her room early in the morning.”
Ms. Leary also assures her readers that Thomas Jefferson Randolph and his sister Ellen Randolph Coolidge could not have been telling the truth when they separately described hearing President Jefferson snoring or singing in his bedroom at night or early in the morning. “[B]oth implied that they would have heard any midnight visits by Sally because their rooms were either above or beside their grandfather’s. There was no bedroom within sound of Jefferson’s bedchamber (unless he was a thunderous snorer) and there was no room above it.”123 One must wonder if Ms. Leary has ever been permitted to visit the upper floors of Monticello, which are generally closed to the public because the very narrow staircases are viewed by the fire marshal as a safety hazard. There is indeed a room above Jefferson’s chamber where one can readily hear the voices of tour guides below as they point out the unusual features of Jefferson’s bed.124 And in Jefferson’s day, before modern air conditioning—when windows were normally kept open during the hot summer months, it would presumably have been even easier for the grandchildren sleeping in the “Appendix” above his chamber to hear any unusual noises coming from his bed during the night.
Albemarle County genealogist Cynthia Burton has written nearly 200 pages (65,000 words) with hundreds of footnotes meticulously rebutting Ms. Leary’s article, and I have no interest in duplicating that effort here.125 I highly commend it for anyone who views the Leary article as a serious piece of scholarship.
Dr. Thomas Jones’ “Review Essay”
The Leary article actually made few references to the Scholars Commission report. But the special issue of the Quarterly also included an eleven-page “review essay” entitled, “The ‘Scholars Commission’ Report on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter: An Evaluation by Genealogical Proof Standards,” written by Professor Thomas W. Jones, which seems to constitute the Society’s primary attempt to challenge our report.
According to the Gallaudet University Web site,126 Thomas W. Jones holds a B.A. in “Mental Retardation,” an M.A. in “Education of the Multihandicapped and Deaf-Blind,” and a Ph.D. in “Early Childhood Special Education.” Although he apparently had no specific past interest in Thomas Jefferson, he clearly has had an active extra-curricular interest in genealogy and was serving as the Quarterly’s review editor at the time his review was published.
When I learned of the special issue I immediately ordered a copy, and when it arrived I looked eagerly to see what errors they had found in our report—knowing that errors could still be corrected prior to submitting the manuscript to the publisher. Candidly, I came away from reading Professor Jones’ “review” more than a little disappointed—as he did not engage a single one of the key substantive arguments of our report. Instead, he criticized us for not including a genealogist on the Commission and complained that we failed to clarify the “genealogical question” of “Who fathered Sally Hemings’s children.”127 Again and again, he tells his readers, “the scholars applied an inappropriate paradigm,”128 and “[i]gnoring the genealogical paradigm has caused the report to fall short of genealogical standards in crucial ways. It does not specify an appropriate objective.”129 Jones explains:
For genealogical research to be efficient and effective, it must begin with an appropriate objective. Typically, the objective is to identify the parent of a given ancestor. Such a goal frames the scope of the research, enabling the scholar to seek relevant sources; and it provides a context for evaluating the findings.
Although established “for the purpose of reexamining the entire issue” (p. 8), the Scholars Commission explicitly eschewed the essential genealogical objective, stating: “We were not tasked with the job of identifying the father(s) of Sally Hemings’ children, and that has not been a primary focus of our inquiry. Our mandate was to examine the case against Thomas Jefferson” (p. 31), a mission the panelists viewed as “trying to prove a negative” (p. 31).
This arbitrary limit on the Commission’s purpose guaranteed a failed effort. In narrowly focusing their inquiry, the panelists touched on—but ignored the significance of—subsidiary genealogical questions, where additional research might have helped to solve the problem they were considering. These include tracing the descendants of Beverly and Harriet Hemings. …130
Mea culpa. It is true that we did not spend a lot of time trying to establish who fathered Sally’s children, nor did we spend time speculating about whether John Wayles was Sally’s father. Both issues may be of great interest to genealogists, but our task was to examine the evidence pro and con about whether Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings
. While I personally did work closely with one genealogist and received helpful information from others, I did not—and do not—view this as primarily a matter of genealogy, which I understand to involve the tracing of generations of ancestors or descendants of a specific individual or family. Much of Jones’ critique sounds to me like a critique of a soccer game because the players failed to abide by the standard rules of rugby or American football. Professor Jones is interested in genealogy, and he apparently wishes we had spent our year doing genealogy instead of what we were commissioned to do.
To be sure, some of the factual questions we did address might be of interest to anyone trying to trace the genealogy of the Hemings or Woodson families and presumably the Jefferson family as well. But our primary inquiry was confined to examining a single alleged relationship: Did Thomas Jefferson father one or more children by Sally Hemings? And for that inquiry the tools of the historian were of primary concern to us. This is not to say that we might not have benefited from having a senior Professor of Genealogy on our panel; but, in all candor, nothing in Professor Jones’ review left me believing he would have contributed much of value to our efforts.
Jones does concede that the Scholars Commission consisted of “an impressive panel of distinguished academics,”131 and that “thirteen eminent scholars signed the final report.”132 But rather than challenging our conclusions on the merits, his review consists largely of procedural comments that often are misleading if not clearly false. He tells his readers, for example, that:
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 65