Christopher Hitchens
Another relatively short volume on Jefferson was published in 2005 as part of the Eminent Lives series by HarperCollins. Written by Christopher Hitchens, it devotes about six pages to Sally Hemings at the end of Chapter Three. As is now common, Hitchens assures his readers that, while in Paris, Jefferson “began an affair” with Sally that was to “produce many children. … ”165 Indeed, he confidently asserts that it began in 1788.166 Some of his reasoning is in the finest traditions of Fawn Brodie and Annette Gordon-Reed (whose 1997 book he describes as “brilliant” and “dispositive”167):
The first clue to the relationship may lie in the simple fact that Jefferson, having met Sally and received his daughter from her in good condition, did not send her home again (as he had planned to do with the original escort). He did not require an extra servant at the Hotel de Langeac, his well-appointed residence, where Sally’s brother James was already on the staff, being trained as a French chef. Possibly the latter consideration influenced him, in inviting Sally to stay on. But nor did he exactly need a governess, since both his daughters were destined for boarding school. Thus the beautiful Sally became a part of the ministerial household, with no specific duties.168
Given Abigail Adams’ description of a teenage Sally as requiring “more care” than eight-year-old Polly, and the fact that the “boarding school” had quarters for servants, it is hardly remarkable that Thomas Jefferson did not send Sally back to Monticello alone.169 There is no contemporary evidence that Sally lived with Thomas Jefferson and significant evidence that she lived instead across town with the daughters at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont. Why else would classmates from the Abbaye years later make reference to Sally in letters to Jefferson’s daughter Martha?170
Mr. Hitchens notes that “[m]ost historians until recently took the view that a sexual liaison was literally unthinkable” because of the “revulsion that it is simply assumed that Jefferson must have felt, either for any carnal knowledge of a slave or …any carnal knowledge of a black woman.”171 Jefferson’s belief that blacks were less attractive than whites was well-documented in his Notes on the State of Virginia written shortly before Sally came to Paris, as was his outrage over the sexual exploitation of slave women by their masters.172
At another point Hitchens informs his readers that it is “probable” that Sally Hemings was literate, even though there is no evidence to support that belief and her son is alleged to have claimed that he learned to read and write by persuading Jefferson’s grandchildren to teach him.173 Hitchens acknowledges that “[a]ll we have is the testimony of her son Madison Hemings that she had while in Paris exacted a promise from Jefferson to free any children she had with him as soon as they achieved adulthood. And the ‘only’ evidence for that promise is that he did indeed free them, all of them, and no other slaves, ever.”174
This is obviously not true. There is credible but not conclusive evidence that favored slaves Great George and his wife Ursula (both unrelated to the Hemings) were given their freedom in 1781,175 and it is clearly established that Sally’s brothers Robert and James were legally manumitted by Jefferson in 1794 and 1796, respectively. Further, only two of the five slaves given their freedom in Jefferson’s will were children of Sally Hemings.176
Then we find this language:
When they left for America, with Jefferson insisting that she [Sally] be berthed next to him on shipboard, it has been suggested by some historians that Sally was pregnant though the child, if there was a child, did not survive. But all her subsequent children, duly entered into the log of Jefferson’s “farm book” at Monticello, were born exactly nine months after one of his much-punctuated sojourns at the house. No other possible father was present at all such times, which would seem to take care of the disgusting and unwarranted suggestion, made by several eminent historians, that Sally Hemings might have been giving or even selling herself to any male member of the Jefferson family.177
One wonders where to start in responding to this. Thomas Jefferson did not insist that Sally Hemings be berthed next to him on the ship back to Virginia—he asked for a berth for a woman servant “convenient to that of my daughters. … ”178 Since Sally’s job was to be their maid, that request made considerable sense. But since Martha and Maria were also likely to be located near their father’s cabin, had Jefferson wanted to have passionate sex with Sally on the cruise home one might have expected him to ask instead that Sally’s room be located away from that of his daughters—ideally in a secluded part of the ship where he could find privacy. The sole source for the report that Sally may have been pregnant during the trip home is the very problematic 1873 Pike County Republican article discussed in Chapter 4. I have seen no historical work making reference to the possibility that Sally was pregnant when she returned to Monticello in 1789 that did not appear to be based, directly or indirectly, upon the problematic 1873 newspaper article.179
Whatever Hitchens means by “exactly,” he is wrong. As discussed in Chapter Five of my Individual Views, to take the example of Sally’s first son, Beverly, nine months before his birth would have been July 1, 1797. Jefferson’s records clearly establish that he did not arrive at Monticello for another ten days.180 That doesn’t mean he could not have fathered Beverly Hemings, but it does demonstrate the silliness—and factual inaccuracy—of using the word “exactly” in this context.
Nor can anyone say with full confidence that “[n]o other possible father was present at all such times” (as we simply don’t know the whereabouts of many of the theoretically possible fathers in this drama)—and, far more importantly, there is no reason to assume that there could have been but a single father. (Madison Hemings, after all, is said to have testified that Sally’s mother gave birth to children by no fewer than four different fathers.181) As for the “disgusting and unwarranted suggestion” allegedly “made by several eminent historians,” that “Sally Hemings might have been giving or even selling herself”—Mr. Hitchens seems ignorant of the fact that the “suggestion” that Sally Hemings was “a slut as common as the pavement,” who had “fifteen, or thirty” different lovers, was not a creation of “eminent historians” at all. It originated with James Thomson Callender—the author of the 1802 newspaper article that started the rumor that President Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings. I’m unaware of a single serious Jefferson scholar who has alleged that Sally was a prostitute. As far as I could tell, the common belief shared by everyone on the Scholars Commission was that Sally Hemings was most likely a totally innocent victim of Callender’s virulent racism.
Speaking of Callender, to Mr. Hitchens’ credit he observed that Callender was “a scandal-mongering journalistic hack” who had “become a propagandist for Federalism.” He added: “Callender was an alcoholic thug with a foul mind, obsessed with race and sex,” and “a contemptible bigot who had a political agenda.”182 He got that part right, unlike much of his discussion of the Hemings matter.
Like too many post-DNA writers, Hitchens asserts that “a detailed DNA analysis …showed an excellent match between blood drawn from Jefferson’s and Hemings’s descendants,” and concludes:
[T]his precise genetic compatibility entirely excludes Peter and Samuel Carr, Jefferson’s nephews, upon whom his white descendants, white society more generally, and “damage-control” historians like Douglass Adair had been willing to place such circumstantial blame or suspicion as might accrue. Circumstances, remarked Emerson, are often persuasive as evidence—“as when you find a trout in the milk.” But the evidence we now possess, which is to trout and milk what cream is to coffee, and something rather beyond that, leaves no space for any reasonable doubt.183
The only issue about which there can be little serious doubt is that Eston Hemings was fathered by one of the more than two dozen Jefferson men in Virginia in 1807. Only a single Hemings descendant was linked by DNA to a Jefferson father, and if—as long believed by his own descendants and Monticello experts—Thomas W
oodson was Sally Hemings’ child, the tests proved her “1790” child could not have been fathered by any Jefferson. As discussed in Chapter One of my Individual Views—and readily acknowledged by the scientists involved—the DNA tests said nothing about the paternity of Sally’s other children. The story passed down by Thomas Jefferson’s grandchildren that the Carr brothers had admitted fathering children by Sally Hemings is not at all incompatible with the 1998 DNA tests, which only addressed the paternity of Thomas Woodson and Sally’s youngest child Eston.
* * *
On balance, while the report of the Scholars Commission released nine years ago has certainly not ended the debate, criticism of the report on its merits has been rare and there seems to be a growing recognition that the case that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings is far from established fact. It is not insignificant, in my view, that during this period not one of the senior scholars who once championed the Hemings cause has been willing to engage us in public debate on the merits of the controversy.
The mandate of the Scholars Commission was not to examine Thomas Jefferson’s attitudes towards slavery, but merely to examine the issue of whether he fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings. Yet, even if one accepts the view that the Callender accusations were unfounded, it will be difficult for many to accept Jefferson as someone worthy of our respect and admiration unless we come to terms with the slavery issue. Why did he own human beings as slaves? Why didn’t he grant them their freedom? Why did he not at least free them in his will, as George Washington had done? These are critically important questions that I believe can readily be explained. Indeed, I am working on a short monograph designed for just that purpose. But the task of searching for the truth on this topic is made more difficult by some prevailing social and political trends in the academic community. Scholars who might otherwise wish to counter the new conventional wisdom realize that doing so could come at considerable professional risk.
Multiculturalism and Thought Reform in America
Much of the recent debate about the Jefferson-Hemings controversy has been perceived as having racial overtones. Professor Gordon-Reed and some other scholars have been quite open in their allegation that white historians who did not accept as gospel the 1873 Pike County Republican story attributed to Madison Hemings were fundamentally “white supremacists” and are unworthy of the respect of decent people. And since Jefferson himself owned slaves and—with the qualification that his tentative conclusions might easily be explained by the conditions of slavery in which they lived,184 and that he hoped his concerns would be proven wrong over time185—recorded some unfavorable observations about the intellectual capacity and work ethic of his slaves,186 the very idea of honoring or “memorializing” him is now offensive to many honorable people. Indeed, in recent years it has been suggested by some that Jefferson’s image ought to be removed from Mount Rushmore.187
As my colleague David Mayer has observed in his own Individual Views,188 the legacy of Thomas Jefferson has been caught up as well in a cultural war that is going on across the nation and around much of the world. This reality is readily conceded by many who have played an active role in promoting the story that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings. Discussing a 1993 conference of Jefferson scholars at the University of Virginia on the occasion of Jefferson’s 250th birthday, Professor Joseph Ellis writes: “the conference assumed the character of a public trial, with Jefferson cast in the role of defendant.” Ellis continues:
The chief argument for the prosecution came from Paul Finkelman, a historian then teaching at Virginia Tech, and the chief charge was hypocrisy. …Finkelman thought it was misguided—worse, it was positively sickening—to celebrate Jefferson as the father of freedom.
If Finkelman was the chief prosecutor, the star witness for the prosecution was Robert Cooley, a middle-aged black man who claimed to be a direct descendant of Jefferson and Sally Hemings [through their alleged first son, Thomas Woodson]. Cooley stood up in the audience during a question-and-answer session to offer himself as “living proof” that the story of Jefferson’s liaison with Sally Hemings was true. No matter what the scholarly experts had concluded, there were several generations of African-Americans living in Ohio and Illinois who knew they had Jefferson’s blood in their veins. …His version of history might not have had the hard evidence on its side, but it clearly had the political leverage. When he sat down, the applause from the audience rang throughout the auditorium. The Washington Post reporter covering the conference caught the mood: “Jefferson’s defenders are on the defensive. What tough times these are for icons.”189
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Professor Gordon Wood, of Brown University, told the 1993 conference that “It’s been coming for a long time. Public culture is demanding this change. …We should accept it and even celebrate it.”190
For many decades, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Chair of History at the University of Virginia was held first by the legendary Dumas Malone, whose six-volume biography of Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1975; and then by Merrill Peterson, who until his death in 2009 was widely regarded as the greatest living scholar of Jefferson’s life. After Peterson retired in 1989, the chair was filled by Peter Onuf, whom no one would call a great admirer of America’s third President. Onuf organized the 1993 conference. Professor Ellis writes:
Onuf suggested that Jefferson’s stock was definitely going down but that only a few historians were willing to follow Finkelman all the way and transform Jefferson from the ultimate American hero to the ultimate American villain. Scholars were not quite ready to raze the Jefferson Memorial or chip his face off Mount Rushmore. On the other hand, the mindless devotion to the mythical Jefferson that still dominated the popular culture clearly drove serious students of Jefferson to the edge of sanity. And the filio-pietistic tradition represented by Malone and Peterson was certainly dead in the scholarly world.191
Again summarizing Onuf, Professor Ellis writes:
[Jefferson was] a large and obvious target for those ideologically inspired historians and political pundits who went charging back into the American past in search of monstrous examples of racism, sexism and patriarchy to slay, then drag back into the present as trophies emblematic of how bad it was back then. And he was the perfect target for such raiding parties precisely because so many ordinary Americans had so much invested in him. He was a contested prize in the ongoing culture wars. If history was any kind of reliable guide, the more wild-eyed critics were unlikely to win the war, but the growing emphasis on Jefferson as a slave-owning white racist had the potential to erode his heroic reputation, as the critical judgment of scholars seeped into popular culture.192
Professor Ellis reports: “Onuf described the emerging scholarly portrait of Jefferson as ‘a monster of self-deception’. …For Onuf, the multiple personalities of Jefferson were looking less like different facets of a Renaissance man and more like the artful disguises of a confidence man.”193
According to Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn, Professor Onuf was present at a meeting of the Research Committee of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation during which a draft report was being considered. Dr. Wallenborn pointed to a particular assertion and remarked to the effect that they did not have reliable evidence to prove it was true. At this point Professor Onuf reportedly interjected: “We don’t need proof. We are historians. We write history the way we want to.”194
In an interview with filmmaker Ken Burns, Onuf explained: “Jefferson …was not a multiculturalist or somebody who celebrated diversity. He believed that diversity would give way in the face of enlightened discourse to a common enlightened understanding.”195 But with the Sally Hemings story, historians have been able to solve the dilemma that one of America’s most respected icons was not “politically correct” by the newest standards. Professor Gordon Wood writes:
[Jefferson] remains a touchstone, a measure of what we Ame
ricans are or where we are going. No figure in our history has embodied so much of our heritage and so many of our hopes. It is not surprising therefore that he should not have become a new symbol of our multicultural and multiracial society.196
To achieve the goals of “multiculturalism” and “diversity,” traditional rules of scholarship are clearly being “relaxed”197 and a commitment to seeking the truth is now in conflict with the goal of telling the people that which will make them most receptive to supposedly socially desirable outcomes. Professor Annette Gordon-Reed, whose Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings began the most recent debate on this issue, asserts that “Anything you don’t want to believe you don’t have to believe.”198
Writing in the Washington Post in early 2001, historian John Ferling observed that “the study of the stereotypical ‘dead white male’ has gone out of fashion in academe. … ”199 A 2002 New York Times article about a “radical course” by the operators of George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon to “reposition” the first President “for a new era” explained:
“When teachers and curriculum planners and textbook authors look at the founding fathers today, they see too many white males,” said David W. Saxe, a professor of education at Pennsylvania State University who studies American history textbooks. “George Washington is dissipating from the textbooks. He’s still mentioned, but you don’t spend a week in February talking about him, doing plays and reciting the farewell address. In the interest of being inclusive, material about women and minorities is taking the place of material about the founders of our country.”200
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 67