Although the Commission’s title and the credentials of its members imply that conventional standards of scholarship have been applied, the “Final Report” offers no source citations. …The Commission grants liberal reproduction rights for the “Final Report,” whose lack of documentation will prevent the public from testing its assertions; but it restricts dissemination or quoting from the documented portions of the report.”133
There are two things Jones does not mention to his readers. First, in our individual views we discuss every issue in great detail and include more than 1,400 footnotes citing our sources so that other scholars, as well as “the public,” may “test” our assertions. As should be apparent to anyone who has read this far in this volume, the implication that we refused to provide “source citations” and sought to compel readers simply to take our word for the facts is not even close to a fair or accurate statement. But, of course, most of Professor Jones’ readers will not have seen our full report.
The second terribly misleading aspect of this quotation is Jones’ suggestion that we sought to restrict “dissemination or quoting from the documented portions of the report.” For the record, as Jones well knew, we put the entire report on the Internet for anyone in the world to download, print, and read at their leisure. And we certainly did not attempt to prohibit anyone from “quoting from the documented portions of the report.” What Jones is really talking about is that we did make a distinction between the official Final Report, which summarized the majority and minority conclusions and is printed at the beginning this volume, and the more detailed and heavily documented “individual views” that followed. We allowed anyone to reprint the entire “Final Report” for any non-profit purpose without even bothering to ask permission. The entire volume is copyrighted, but to promote wider distribution of the summary Report (pages 3–21) we gave advance consent to reprint that part for any non-profit purpose without any need to seek permission. The explanation for this was that we intended to eventually publish the entire collection as a book—this book—for future reference in libraries and for scholars and interested members of the public, and we knew that few publishers would want to invest the resources involved in publishing a book if the entire product was already in the public domain and could be published at will by any competitor at any time.
It is the overwhelming practice for scholarly books to be copyrighted, and doing so does not in the least prevent fair use “quoting” for purposes of scholarly review or rebuttal. Professor Jones clearly understood this, as he included quotations from our individual views in his published review. But his language misled his readers into believing we had somehow tried to conceal our documented analysis from other scholars and the public and sought to prevent anyone from quoting us. Both implications are absolutely false. We strongly favor a public debate—it is our critics who have refused to debate.
Yet another absurdity in Professor Jones’ essay is his assertion that individual views are “disavowed.” This is premised upon a disclaimer I included explaining that I had made several changes to my own Individual Views after four other members of the Scholars Commission had agreed to add their names as generally concurring with those views. Thus, I wrote that they should not be held accountable for specific facts or arguments in my final chapters. However, rather than “disavowing” responsibility, I emphasized: “the words are mine and responsibility for the specific arguments and the accuracy of facts is mine alone.”134 The “disclaimer” is not intended to disavow responsibility, but to make it clear to the readers that if they find errors or believe a particular argument is fallacious they should blame any such problems on me individually and not on other scholars who agreed generally with my overall views but had not even seen all of the final changes in my lengthy statement. There is nothing even arguably evasive or improper in that statement—it was a clarification of precisely who is responsible for the words that I had written. As Harry Truman put it: “The buck stops here!”
Professor Jones complains: “the Commission appears to have conducted very little original investigation. It cites virtually none of the mainstays of quality genealogical research, such as deeds, court records, and tax rolls from which direct, indirect, and negative evidence can be gleaned.”135 Jones does not explain how he envisions “deeds, court records, and tax rolls” will disclose whether Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings. In the early nineteenth century the births of slave children were not recorded at the county courthouse, nor were slaves permitted to own real property or required to pay taxes. We did take note of the fact that an 1870 census taker in Ohio made a marginal notation that Madison Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s son, but there is no evidence he was doing more than recording hearsay from Madison. We did, of course, discuss Thomas Jefferson’s will at some length and make frequent use of his farm, garden, and memorandum books.
Professor Jones does not appear to have even read some of the sources he discusses. For example, he notes that we dismissed the probative value of the “Monte Carlo” study contained in an article in the William & Mary Quarterly, asserting that “‘the Monte Carlo study’ is a nickname that the Commission itself gave to the article in the course of its meeting.”136 This is absurd. The use of Monte Carlo simulations has been well established in science and other fields for a half-century.137 Indeed, Dr. Fraser Neiman described his methodology as a “Monte Carlo study”138 and used the term more than two dozen times in the article in question. It is difficult to understand how Professor Jones could have made such an error if he had bothered to even glance through the piece.
Like Ms. Leary, Professor Jones notes that the letter Ellen Randolph Coolidge sent her husband in 1858 was “a letter Ellen explicitly penned so her husband could convince a Boston writer that an interracial liaison was ‘morally impossible’ for her grandsire.”139 And, like Leary, he fails to point out that the specific reference to an admission by the Carr brothers of paternity for Sally’s children was contained not in the main body of the letter but in a separate attachment which she expressly prefaced by saying it was to be held in confidence by her husband. Obviously, there is always a possibility that an historical letter was penned to mislead future historians, and that is certainly a possibility in this instance. But it is dishonest to portray Ellen’s reference to the Carr brothers as having been explicitly provided for the purpose of convincing a third party of a fact when that part of the letter is instead prefaced by instructions that the information should not be disseminated further.
Professor Jones concludes his short essay by saying: “The Commission’s eminent scholars could have applied decades of genealogical scholarship in their approach to a genealogical question. Instead, their report—rather than clarifying the question ‘Who fathered Sally Hemings’s children’—contributes to the plague of confusion.”
After reading his “review” of our report, I concluded that the easiest way to deal with it would be to reprint it on our Web site (and as an annex to the book version of our report) and allow each reader to examine both documents and draw their own conclusions. This would be in keeping with Jefferson’s vision of the University of Virginia, where I have been employed for more than two decades:
This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.140
Given what I felt was the weakness of his case, I also thought it might be worthwhile to debate Professor Jones on our points of disagreement and raised both possibilities with him in an e-mail. His reply is instructive:
Dear Professor Turner:
Thank you for your interest in publishing on the Scholars Commission web site my NGSQ review essay on the “Scholars Commission Final Report.” As with any scholarly publication, I am happy for anyone to refer to it and to quote from it. If the review is to be re-published in the future, however, my feeling at this time is that I should do so mysel
f in a suitable context. …
You also referred to the position that I “seem to embrace,” asking whether I would “be willing to take on the role of advocating the position that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings in a public debate.” The answer is unequivocally negative.141
I am tempted to make a comment about “restrictive dissemination” policies; but, in retrospect, given the quality of his work, and his refusal to defend it in public debate, perhaps Professor Jones is wiser than I had originally assumed.
The William & Mary Quarterly Review
In October 2001 the William & Mary Quarterly published an eight-page review of three books142—not including the Scholars Commission report—that nevertheless included some references to our work. It was written by Alexander O. Boulton, an assistant professor at Villa Julie College in Maryland.
After discussing the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society’s The Jefferson-Hemings Myth and noting the subsequent report of the Scholars Commission, Professor Boulton writes: “Together, the two publications offer a strong corrective to the early enthusiasm over a new consensus.”143
There is very little substantive discussion of the Scholars Commission report in this review (appropriately so, since it was not included among the volumes being examined), but Professor Boulton makes several statements that probably nevertheless warrant comment. For example, he finds Edmund Bacon’s statement that Jefferson could not have been the father of Harriet II because he (Bacon) often saw another man leaving her room early in the morning “implausible”144 because, Boulton believes, Bacon was not at Monticello during the period about which he made the statement. That may, or may not, be true—we really do not know if Bacon was visiting or doing odd jobs at Monticello around the time Harriet II was conceived—but even if we assume his observations were made several years later, when we know with certainty that Bacon was the Monticello overseer, his statement is inherently among the least obviously biased145 and is the only clearly eye-witness account pertaining to the question of Sally’s monogamy. And it really does not matter whether Bacon’s observations took place about the time Harriet II was conceived or closer to Eston’s conception. For if the story is true, the account strongly suggests that Sally either was not sexually involved with Thomas Jefferson or else was not monogamous in such a relationship. If she was monogamous with a man other than Thomas Jefferson, then it follows the President was not the father of any of her children. If she was not monogamous, the foundation for much of the case against Jefferson—which is expressly premised upon a presumption of monogamy—crumbles.
Professor Boulton also repeats the argument that “Randolph Jefferson …had never seriously been considered as a possible partner of Sally Hemings until the DNA evidence indicated that a Jefferson was unquestionably the father of Eston.”146 That argument has already been addressed and shown to be false (although, in fairness, there is no reason Professor Boulton should have known that).147
Similarly, he asserts “all previous testimony has agreed that Sally Hemings was faithful to the one father of all her children.”148 Unless by this he means only the highly problematic statements attributed to Madison Hemings by Samuel Wetmore in 1873,149 and the clearly false claims of Israel Jefferson published by the same source,150 this also is inaccurate. At best, scholars have assumed this to be true without examining the issue in detail or making any serious finding on the issue. (If one assumes that Bacon’s statement about the paternity of Harriet II was based upon observations he made years later, then he may be counted among those at least assuming monogamy—but we really do not know with any certainty when his observations were made.) Historically, most serious Jefferson scholars seem to have dismissed the Callender allegations on the basis of what they knew about Callender and Jefferson, and then accepted the accounts attributed to Jeff Randolph that the Carr brothers fathered her children. But since those accounts indicated that two brothers were fathers to Sally’s children,151 one cannot reasonably conclude that they “agreed” only a single father was involved. And this doesn’t even consider the original Callender charge that Sally was a prostitute.
Again, we read “there was never a suggestion from any source close to Monticello that Sally was anything other than faithful to the father of her children (whoever he may have been).”152 First of all, it would be equally accurate to note that (save for the factual allegations attributed to Madison Hemings decades after Jefferson’s death, the truth of which he could not possibly have personally known because they occurred years before his birth) “there was never a suggestion from any source close to Monticello that Sally was not the ‘slut as common as the pavement,’ who had ‘fifteen, or thirty’ different lovers ‘of all colours,’” as James Callender alleged.153 I mention this not because I place the slightest credence in anything Callender wrote, but because so much of the paternity-belief scholarship is premised upon the assumption that Callender was, at root, an honest journalist who may have stretched the truth a bit at the edges.154
Furthermore, unless one is prepared to exclude the possibility that Sally bore children by Thomas Jefferson, there certainly was “a suggestion from any source close to Monticello that Sally was other than faithful to the father of her children,” as overseer Edmund Bacon—the senior employee at the plantation—very clearly asserted that he had frequently witnessed a man other than Thomas Jefferson leaving Sally’s room early in the morning. One simply cannot seriously contend that there is no “evidence” from the Monticello community that Sally Hemings was not “faithful” to the father of her children if one believes that Thomas Jefferson was that father.
Then we have Professor Boulton’s allegation that “[a]ll defenders and critics of Jefferson agree that Sally Hemings bore a child, perhaps named Tom, around 1790.”155 One wonders where he gets such an idea. There is no record of a child being born to Sally Hemings in 1790 in any of Jefferson’s records, and the only apparent sources for such an allegation were Callender’s 1802 assertion and the Woodson claim (both now apparently refuted by DNA testing) and the story attributed to Madison Hemings more than seven decades later. While one cannot say with certainty that no such child was born, credible evidence is slight and the point is certainly not accepted by “all defenders …of Thomas Jefferson.”
Professor Joyce Appleby
While the immediate press reaction to the issuance of our report in April 2001 was encouraging, the academic community response has been somewhat less so. Scholars have not criticized our report on the merits for the most part; they have simply continued to embrace the revisionist mythology. This is not the time to examine all of the many books on Jefferson that have been published since 2001, but a few examples may be useful.
In 2003, UCLA Professor Joyce Appleby—former president of both the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association—wrote a volume on Thomas Jefferson for the American Presidents Series being edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., for Times Books. At first I thought she had made a brief reference to the Scholars Commission, writing: “A dissenting group of scholars has challenged the idea that the DNA findings established Jefferson as the father of Eston Hemings.”156 But the sentence was mysteriously footnoted to a 1999 collection of essays (Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson) by scholars who accept or assume Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.157
The short Appleby volume is well written and in many ways more respectful of Jefferson than many other modern biographies. She identifies shortcomings in Jefferson’s writings and beliefs, but then adds: “If they appall us, they should also provoke our wonder than anyone born in the bosom of a misogynist, slave-holding aristocracy could have dreamed of a society of equals.”158 To me, that was among many things that were truly exceptional about Thomas Jefferson, and I commend Professor Appleby for acknowledging it at a time when it is not fashionable within the professional historical community to praise him.
Nevertheless, the Appleby volume includes numerous troubling factua
l errors. For example, she writes that some people in the past “suggested that the white father of Sally Hemings’s children was more likely one of Jefferson’s nephews, a possibility that has since been disproved.”159 In reality, the DNA tests said nothing about the paternity of any of Sally Hemings’ children except Eston (and Thomas Woodson if he was, in fact, Sally Hemings’ child). The Jefferson DNA for the tests came from descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s cousins, but Professor Appleby asserts it was “taken from a living descendant of Jefferson’s brother.”160 She adds that “there were eighteen Jefferson men in Virginia” at the time (in fact there were more than two dozen), and claims that “only Jefferson lived in close proximity to her”161 (ignoring Randolph and his five sons less than twenty miles away).
It is surprising that such a distinguished scholar would make so many careless errors, even referring at one point to Jefferson’s “apt …depiction of slave owners as having the wolf by the tail!”162 Surely she has in mind Jefferson’s famous April 22, 1820, letter to John Holmes, in which the former President describes the dilemma of slave-holders: “[W]e have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”163 (A copy of the original handwritten letter can be found on the Library of Congress Web site, and it is clear that Jefferson actually wrote “ear” rather than “ears”—but the point is not material to our discussion.164) One does not get the sense that Professor Appleby was “out to get” Jefferson or has in any way altered her facts to make him look bad—most of her errors are essentially benign (e.g., it is immaterial whether the DNA samples used by Dr. Foster were taken from descendants of Randolph Jefferson or other male members of the Jefferson family). Nevertheless, they are disturbingly careless, particularly given the ease with which these facts could have been checked.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 66