Sean Wilentz, the Dayton-Stockon Professor of History and Director of the American Studies Program at Princeton University, wrote in The New Republic:
What, exactly, is stoking the contemporary rage against Jefferson? An anachronistic political correctness, certainly, in which early twenty-first-century personal is the early nineteenth-century political; and an ideological disquietude about the greatest articulator of American democracy, the burden of whose principles might be lifted off certain shoulders if he could be shown to have been a mountebank. Jefferson embodies the Enlightenment, which infuriates both the religious right and the postmodernist left. Trashing Jefferson is also a sure path to attention and fame. Until now, partisans from across the American political spectrum sought to use Jefferson for their own purposes. Today it is fashionable on the left and on the right to debase Jefferson, and score contemporary political points, and pray for the best-seller lists. …
At the most recent meeting of the American Historical Association, for example, an audience of academics roared its approval when Joseph Ellis pronounced Jefferson ‘the deadest white male in American history’.201
If I react more negatively than some to these new trends in scholarship, it may be because for many years my academic focus was on Leninism and the Communist world.202 I was thus very familiar with campaigns to impose social consciousness in arts, science, and education. I recall reading (and writing) about artists being selected for distinction not on the basis of their virtue and artistic talent but on how well they portrayed the ruling Party’s political objectives. Ho Chi Minh once wrote: “Truth is what is beneficial to the Fatherland and to the people. What is detrimental to the interests of the Fatherland and people is not truth.” 203 (Of course, it was the Communist Party’s responsibility to determine what was “beneficial” to the “Fatherland” and the “people.”) During Stalin’s reign in the Soviet Union, artists and photographic technicians would be tasked with copying or altering paintings or photographs to remove individuals who had fallen out of favor with Stalin and/or insert images of newly favored Party members.204 Such behavior is not conducive to democratic governance, or a respect for historical truth.
When in 2000 I read stories about University of Wisconsin officials altering a photograph of students watching a football game to insert the image of an African-American student (who had never attended a football game at the school), so the photograph could be used on the cover of an undergraduate application document and reflect the “diversity” the officials wished to portray,205 it troubled me. I am all for having diverse student bodies and faculties at our colleges and universities and also for efforts to make minority students feel welcome and comfortable in this process. But when universities or other institutions conclude it is appropriate to alter photographs or other documents to deceive their prospective students into believing something that may not be true, where do we draw the line at other forms of dishonesty—and what message are we giving our students when such duplicity becomes known? If we teach our historians that it is acceptable to rewrite or invent history to promote a desirable social attitude, who is to be empowered to determine which social attitudes it is permissible to deceive our students and the public about? One does not have to be so naïve as to believe that all “facts” taught as history over the years accurately reflect reality in order to be troubled by a pedagogy that permits the intentional falsification of truth within our universities to promote some political end. Certainly such an approach undermines Jefferson’s belief that our universities should be premised upon “the illimitable freedom of the human mind,” that the goal of education is “to follow truth wherever it may lead,” and that error may be tolerated “so long as reason is left free to combat it.”206 In my view, the use of universities to deceive the people is incompatible with the concept of a free people associated in a democratic government dedicated to human freedom and decision by the will of the people.
Conclusion
The allegation that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings began as part of a blackmail threat by a disreputable journalist with no apparent first-hand knowledge of the facts. His case was premised upon the theory that while U.S. Minister to France Jefferson had begun a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings that produced a son named “Tom,” and the story gained some credibility when Thomas Woodson claimed after Jefferson’s death that he was in fact that child. But six DNA tests of descendants of three sons of Thomas Woodson have established that Thomas Woodson could not have been the son of any man carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome.
Most of Thomas Jefferson’s friends and many of his political enemies rejected the charge, in part because it was so out of character for Jefferson and in part because the author of the charge was well known for defaming popular political figures. Throughout most of the past two centuries, serious Jefferson scholars have either ignored the charge altogether or dismissed it as false. It received new life in 1974 with the publication of Fawn Brodie’s biography, but few scholars found her speculative arguments persuasive at the time.
The pendulum began to shift with the 1997 publication of Professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, which the following year was reinforced by misleading reports about DNA tests that showed Sally Hemings’ youngest son, Eston, was probably fathered by one of the more than two dozen Jefferson males in Virginia at the time of his conception. As discussed in my Individual Views, there are numerous inaccuracies in the Gordon-Reed volume, and there were at least six other Jefferson males who were likely at Monticello when Eston was conceived. For various reasons, all but one of them may have been a more likely candidate for Eston’s paternity than the elderly President. The most likely candidate is probably Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, who is documented by a slave memoir to have spent his nights at Monticello socializing and dancing with his brother’s slaves, is reported to have fathered children by other slaves, and is the only “suspect” who is consistent with the oral traditions passed down by Eston’s descendants prior to the mid-1970s. For generations the story was told that Eston was not the President’s child, but rather the child of a Jefferson “uncle”—and the President’s brother was widely known at Monticello as “Uncle Randolph” because of his relationship to Jefferson’s daughters.
It is my hope that our report will at minimum help to correct some of the mythology that has grown up around this issue in recent years. The ninety-two-percent margin by which the members of the Scholars Commission concluded that the allegation is probably false should at least give those otherwise inclined to accept the charge reason to pause, as should the fact that the leading scholars who embraced the argument that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings prior to the release of our report have been unwilling to defend that position in public debate.
Clearly, the legend of Sally Hemings has experienced major setbacks since the start of the new millennium. Professor Gordon-Reed’s account has suffered from the disclosure that key historical evidence she relied upon was altered to materially change its meaning. The dilemma we encountered in trying to reconcile Professor Joseph Ellis’ distinguished reputation as a scholar with his misstatement that the DNA tests had proven the case against President Jefferson “beyond a reasonable doubt”207 became a bit easier for some when, two months after our report was released, the Boston Globe disclosed that Professor Ellis had a long history of telling falsehoods to his students, colleagues, and others.
As someone who has long admired Professor Ellis, but at the same time is persuaded that his conclusions on the Sally Hemings issue are profoundly wrong, I take some satisfaction from a prediction he made in an article published in the William & Mary Quarterly in January 2000—perhaps the zenith of what I perceive to be the Sally Hemings myth. He wrote: “If the American past were a gambling casino, everyone who has bet against Jefferson has eventually lost. There is no reason to believe it will be different this time.”208
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nbsp; Footnotes
1. Our report was available for anyone in the world with Internet access to download and read for several years, first at www.mindspring.com/~tjshcommission and then, after demand for the report exceeded the permissible bandwidth of that site, at http://www.geocities.com/tjshcommission/. Not being knowledgeable about managing Web pages, I prevailed upon the late Eyler Coates, Jr., to establish this free account and maintain the site on our behalf. Unfortunately, I did not think to ask for the password to access the site prior to Eyler’s untimely passing in January 2002; so through 2002 and most of 2003 it existed without being maintained and then disappeared. Since the book version was expected to be published soon, when the second site stopped working I did not attempt to establish a third site.
2. Steven T. Corneliussen, Black and White in a New America, Dec. 24, 2001 at A16.
3. See, e.g., Robert F. Turner, State Responsibility and the War on Terror: The Legacy of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates, 4 CHICAGO J. INT’L L. 121 (2003); and Robert F. Turner, President Jefferson and the Barbary Pirates, in PIRACY AND MARITIME CRIME: HISTORICAL AND MODERN CASE STUDIES 157 (Bruce A. Elleman, Andrew Forbes & David Rosenberg, eds., 2010).
4. When it became clear that our report would be finished in early April, I proposed that we schedule our press conference the day before Jefferson’s birthday with the thought that it might increase press interest in our report and perhaps lead to some additional editorial coverage in connection with Jefferson’s birthday on Friday.
5. Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society President John Works, whom I first met just prior to our Washington press conference, was reported to have claimed that the President had been “duped” by those who scheduled the White House event. (See, e.g., The Wrong Jefferson?, WASH. POST, Apr. 15, 2001.) Given the reports that the event had been orchestrated on short notice and at the same time as our press conference, I initially found the circumstantial case troubling, but I was assured by the Chairman of the Board of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation that the White House had initiated the discussions and the Foundation had merely sought to be cooperative—which, given the reputation of the individuals involved, I am confident was a truthful statement. Whether individual employees at Monticello may have independently encouraged such contact is less clear.
6. See, e.g., William Branigin, Pruning Thomas Jefferson’s Family Tree: Historians’ Report Attacks Theory That 3rd President Fathered Slave’s Children, WASH. POST, April 13, 2001 (“The release of the 550-page report by a panel of 13 scholars from across the country came as President Bush hosted a gathering in honor of Jefferson’s birthday that a White House spokesman said included ‘both family members from [Jefferson’s] marriage with Martha Wayles Jefferson and his descendants from Sally Hemings.’”); Michael Killan, Panel Rebuts Jefferson-Hemings Theory, CHICAGO TRIB., Apr. 13, 2001 (“the report was issued as President Bush played host to Jefferson and Hemings family descendants for a White House celebration of Jefferson’s birthday”); Report Says Jefferson Didn’t Do It, DES MOINES REGISTER, Apr. 13, 2001 (“The 258th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson’s birth was marked Thursday with a visit to the White House by descendants of Sally Hemings, a Jefferson slave, and the revival of a 200-year-old debate over whether the third president fathered the children of his servant. A new study …contradicts previous theories. … ”); Jeffrey T. Kuhner, Bush Recognizes Black Jefferson Kin: Scholars Doubt Slave Child Story, WASH. TIMES, Apr. 13, 2001; Study Finds Jefferson Unlikely Slave Father, PLAIN DEALER, Apr. 13, 2001 (“As President Bush was welcoming a multiracial group of descendants of Thomas Jefferson to a White House ceremony yesterday commemorating the birthday, a panel of scholars released a 500-page report concluding that Jefferson probably did not father any children by his slave Sally Hemings.”).
7. The only exceptions that came to my attention at the time were the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. However, a few weeks later the Journal printed a lengthy op-ed I had written summarizing our conclusions. See Robert F. Turner, The Truth About Jefferson, WALL STREET JOURNAL, July 3, 2001.
8. See, e.g., A Happy Occasion for Jeffersonians, OMAHA WORLD-HERALD, Apr. 16, 2001 (“So the question is still open. Those of us who thought it had ended with the last report were guilty of judging prematurely.”); Jefferson and Hemings redux, WASH. TIMES, July 11, 2001; It Seems to Us . . . , BUFFALO NEWS, Apr. 14, 2001, at C10; and Robert L. Bartley, Thinking Things Over: Accountability for Anderson, Also the High-Minded, WALL STREET JOURNAL, Mar. 18, 2002.
9. See, e.g., Laura Peek, Jefferson Child Theory Disputed, TIMES (London), Apr. 14, 2001; Jefferson “did not father slave boy,” THE INDEPENDENT (London), Apr. 13, 2001.
10. Doubts About Jefferson and Hemings: The Debate Goes On, AMERICAN HERITAGE, March 2002.
11. See http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h665.html.
12. See Chapter One of my Individual Views.
13. Dr. Douglas Day, Director of the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, press release dated July 1, 2003, distributed by e-mail. In the press release, Dr. Day adds: “Wherever one falls in the on-going debate about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings, an objective reader must acknowledge that A President in the Family is masterfully written, and a thoroughly compelling story,. …The Woodson family’s history is inextricably entwined with that of the Jeffersons.” Id. In fact, the only evidence that “the Woodson family’s history is inextricably entwined with that of the Jeffersons” is Thomas Woodson’s allegation that he was the famous son of Sally Hemings named “Tom” and mentioned in the Callender allegations. He may or may not have been the child of Sally Hemings. While Byron Woodson’s book may well be “masterfully written, and a thoroughly compelling story,” one would expect an historian familiar with the facts to at least observe that overwhelming scientific tests have now established that the story is fiction.
14. See Chapter One of my Individual Views.
15. See, e.g., Patrick Rogers Glenn Garelik & Amanda Crawford, Out of the Past: All Tom’s Children—A President’s presumed affair with a slave gives new meaning to the term Jeffersonian, PEOPLE, Nov. 23, 1998. (“Now even such stalwart Jefferson defenders as the members of the Monticello Association, who trace their pedigrees back to Jefferson’s two daughters with Martha, seem to have backed down in the face of the DNA tests. …‘Who knows,’ says the group’s secretary, Gerald Morgan, 75, who had once discounted the President’s affair as a ‘moral impossibility.’ ‘It was probably [Thomas] Jefferson who was the father.’”)
16. See Chapter Three of my Individual Views.
17. Errors in the Monticello Report are discussed extensively in my Individual Views. The Coolidge transcript alterations are illustrated in Figures 3 and 4 on pages 36 and 37.
18. The individual in question did not withdraw over a difference with the group’s majority over substantive conclusions, but rather because he was heavily committed in trying to finish another book and felt that he needed many more months before he would be able to do justice to this issue. Without dissent, the rest of the group agreed to postpone our report for several months, but when at that time he reported that he still had not found time to begin his research and the rest of the group decided that further delays for the research he had in mind would be unlikely to produce new evidence that would alter anyone’s view, he elected to withdraw.
19. I have no way of knowing with certainty whether these reports were true, or not. There was ample evidence that Jefferson descendants were invited on short notice subsequent to the announcement of our press conference, and I was told that some invitees had been informed that the program had been suggested by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. My accounts were at least third-hand, so I cannot be certain of the details. But I am not inclined to question to words of the Chairman of the Board and President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, and thus am confident that any such suggestion was not approved by the Monticello board.
20. Turner e-mail to John Works, Dan Jordan, and James Truscott
, dated April 6, 2001, subject: DRAFT of Scholar’s [sic] Commission Report. The e-mail noted that there were several hundred pages of “individual views” that were still being finalized and would not be available until the press conference on April 12.
21. “With our Board meeting just ahead, I’ll not likely have a chance to review your report until much later. Thanks again for sharing a copy, and all the best. Dan.” Dan Jordan e-mail to Bob Turner dated April 10, 2001.
22. Dan Jordan e-mail to Bob Turner dated Tue, 17 April 2001.
23. Id., Thursday, 19 April 2001.
24. Kurt Samson, Slave Children Not Jefferson’s, UPI wire, Thursday, 12 April 2001.
25. Bob Dart, New Jefferson study rejects theories that he fathered children by his slave, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, Apr. 13, 2001.
26. Michael Killian, Panel rebuts Jefferson-Hemings theory, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, April 13, 2001.
27. Jeffrey T. Kuhner, Bush recognizes black Jefferson kin: Scholars doubt slave child story, WASH. TIMES, April 13, 2001.
28. An earlier draft of my own Individual Views had been provided in confidence to the chairman of the Monticello Association’s MAC at his request and it is certainly theoretically possible that this was shared with someone at Monticello prior to our press conference. But the final version of the full report was not even printed off of my computer until the day before our press conference, and as soon as photocopies were bound and placed in boxes at the copy center they were moved to my car, where they remained until a few minutes before our Washington press conference the next morning.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 68