The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

by Robert F Turner

  29. See Figures 3 and 4 on pages 36 and 37.

  30. See Chapter Six of my Individual Views.

  31. See Chapter Four of my Individual Views.

  32. See Chapter Nine of my Individual Views

  33. See Chapter Ten of my Individual Views.

  34. Thomas Sheehan, Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings: Two Hundred Years of Controversy 16 (1999).

  35. This letter is discussed in Chapter Nine of my Individual Views and reprinted as Figure 10 on page 187.

  36. Monticello Report, Appendix F at 2.

  37. The DNA tests exclude the possibility that Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings were fathered by the same man, so if both were in fact children of Sally Hemings she could not have been monogamous.

  38. See, e.g., http://www.woodson.org/reunion2003_news.asp.

  39. See Monticello Report, Appendix K at 2.

  40. See page 161 (emphasis added).

  41. See, e.g., the excerpts from Garry Wills’ 1974 review from the New York Review of Books, quoted in the Introduction to my Individual Views on page 175–76.

  42. Monticello Report at 5.

  43. I am genuinely fond of Dr. Daniel Jordan, who has graciously invited me to take part in a variety of special events at Monticello over the years, and for that reason I have agonized over whether I should even mention these concerns in this Postscript. But they are a part of the story, and—while I still have no idea how to explain them—to conceal them out of concern that they might offend a friend would be inconsistent with my commitment to pursue the truth.

  44. Jefferson to Van Hasselt, Aug. 27, 1797, reprinted in THE GARDEN BOOK 257 (Edwin Morris Betts, ed. 1974).

  45. See, e.g., this definition from Encyclopedia.com:

  MONTICELLO (constructed between 1769 and 1809) was designed and built by Thomas Jefferson to be his home, farm, and plantation. Construction progressed through two stages. …Altered throughout most of Jefferson’s life, the brick house embodies the ideals of the American Enlightenment, as well as the moral, aesthetic, political, and scientific motives of its designer.

  Available at http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3401802737.html.

  46. The account is of mixed quality. It acknowledges, for example, that “[t]here is no evidence in Jefferson’s records of any special privileges accorded to Sally Hemings that would distinguish her from other members of her family,” and that “in his records, Jefferson made no mention of Sally Hemings that would distinguish her from other members of the enslaved community at Monticello.” But it also alleges that the oral history of Eston Hemings’ descendants asserted that he was Thomas Jefferson’s son until the 1940s—a claim for which there appears to be no compelling evidence.

  47. This language was included at http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings-jefferson_contro.html as late as February 18, 2003, but within the next nine days was changed to the language below.

  48. http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings-jefferson_contro.html (last checked on August 24, 2009).

  49. Jeremy Borden, Fewer Tourists See Monticello: Visits at 28-Year Low, DAILY PROGRESS (Charlottesville, VA), Jan. 8, 2008.

  50. Id.

  51. Id.

  52. See the Introduction to my Individual Views at page 31.

  53. The late Eyler R. Coates first discovered the alteration in the Ellen Randolph Coolidge letter in 2000 and brought it to my attention by e-mail.

  54. See Introduction to my Individual Views, Figures 1-4, on pages 33, 35, 36, and 37.

  55. Sam Hodges, Scholars: No Proof Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Children, MOBILE REGISTER, Apr. 13, 2001.

  56. Gordon-Reed to Works, July 16, 2001, copy on file with author.

  57. See the Introduction to my Individual Views at page 35.

  58. Plagiarism is obviously dishonest and constitutes intellectual “theft,” but in the field of history it does not necessarily mislead the reader in the search for the truth. To alter historic documents that, at the time, were not readily available to readers in order to conceal obvious factual errors and make the original document appear more credible—or to present a credible witness as having said something she clearly did not say—undermines the search for the truth itself and thus is in my view a far more serious offense.

  59. See the Introduction to my Individual Views at p. 30.

  60. ANNETTE GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS xi (1998). The issue, in reality, is not so much Madison Hemings’ account of “his life at Monticello,” but rather his alleged account of events in Paris and elsewhere that occurred years before his own life began.

  61. Id. at x.

  62. Id. at xi. This ignores the reality that the DNA tests only addressed the paternity of Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings, and said nothing about whether one or both Carr brothers—or anyone else—fathered Sally Hemings’ older children.

  63. Id.

  64. Id. at xii. As noted in Chapter Three of my Individual Views, James Thomson Callender, the originator of the story of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship, alleged that Sally Hemings had as many as “thirty different lovers. … ”

  65. Id. As discussed in Chapter Two of my Individual Views, the statement attributed to Madison Hemings and relied upon so heavily by Professor Gordon-Reed alleged that Sally’s mother Betty Hemings had children by at least four different men.

  66. Id. at xiii. See also, id. at viii (“The treatment of the story well into modern times is evidence of the continuing grip that the doctrine of white supremacy has on American society.”)

  67. Bruce Weber, Merrill D. Peterson, Jefferson Scholar, Dies at 88, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 2, 2009 (“At Virginia, Mr. Peterson was known for his liberal views. Outspoken on the subject of integration, he had arrived on campus before blacks were recruited either for the student body or for the faculty. In March 1965, shortly after civil rights marchers in Selma, Ala., were attacked by the state and local police, he delivered a fervent and eloquent speech at the campus rotunda. ‘We are concerned with what is happening in Selma because what is happening there involves what is taught here—truth, honesty, justice, compassion, the rights and freedom of all men in a democratic society,’ Mr. Peterson said. ‘Today Selma is a vital link in the heritage of American liberty. No university in America or in the world has a clearer title to speak for that heritage in the present crisis than the University of Virginia. And it’s high time, long past time, we were heard from. Selma is a symbol, but as President Johnson told us the other night, it has become a turning point, like Lexington and Concord and Appomattox, of America’s unending search for freedom.’”

  68. I was told by a Monticello guide that on July 4, 2001, Dr. Peterson had posted on the bulletin board in the break room used by the guides a copy of a short summary of our work I had written for the Wall Street Journal. For the article in question, see Robert F. Turner, The Truth About Jefferson, WALL STREET JOURNAL, July 3, 2001, available online at http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/ ?id=95000747.

  69. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Root: Sally Hemings and Me, Wednesday, Sept. 24, 2008; 12:00 PM, available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2008/09/18/DI2008091

  802348.html.

  70. Merriam-Webster OnLine Dictionary, available at http://www.merriam-webster.com/

  dictionary/Commission.

  71. GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 148.

  72. JOSEPH J. ELLIS, AMERICAN SPHINX: THE CHARACTER OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 366 (Vintage ed. 1998).

  73. Joseph J. Ellis, Jefferson: Post-DNA, 57 WILLIAM & MARY QUARTERLY 126 (Jan. 2000).

  74. See Chapter One of my Individual Views.

  75. Id.

  76. Eric S. Lander & Joseph J. Ellis, DNA Analysis: Founding Father, NATURE, Nov. 5, 1998, vol. 395, issue 6706 at 13, reprinted in Monticello Report, Appendix A.

  77. Walter V. Robinson, Professor’s past in doubt: Discrepancies surface in claim of Vietnam duty, BOSTON GLOBE, June 18, 2001 at A1.

  78. Id. />
  79. Patrick Healy & Walter V. Robinson, Professor Apologizes for Fabrications, BOSTON GLOBE, June 19, 2001 at A1; Walter V. Robinson, Professor Faces Investigation at Mount Holyoke, BOSTON GLOBE, June 21, 2001 at B3. (“Creighton also retreated from her Monday criticism of the Globe for disclosing Ellis’s misrepresentations.”)

  80. Statement of President Joanne V. Creighton, August 17, 2001, available at http://www. mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/news/ellisdecision.shtml.

  81. Robinson, Professor’s past in doubt.

  82. “Further Statement of Joseph J. Ellis,” Aug. 17, 2001, available at http://www.mtholyoke. edu/offices/comm/news/ellisstatement.html.

  83. See Chapter One of my Individual Views.

  84. Josh Tyrangiel, A History of His Own Making: Author Joseph Ellis Invented a Vietnam tour of duty. But Why?, TIME online edition, June 24, 2001, available at http://www.time.com/ time/education/article/0,8599,165156,00.html.

  85. Henry Wiencek e-mail to Bob Turner, Sept. 11, 2007.

  86. In order to make certain that I was doing justice to his views and to the technical issues of science involved, at my request Mr. Corneliussen drafted much of this portion of my Postscript, which I have only lightly edited.

  87. See Chapter Two of my Individual Views, pages 91–93.

  88. Annette Gordon-Reed, Let’s Not Muddle Historical Fact, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH, Jan. 28, 2007, at E5.

  89. David R. Douglas, Rebuttal Muddled Scientific Fact, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH, Feb. 10, 2007, at A10.

  90. Gordon S. Wood, Slaves in the Family, N.Y. TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Dec. 14, 2003 at 10.

  91. R. B. BERNSTEIN, THOMAS JEFFERSON 196 (2003).

  92. Steven T. Corneliussen, Have Scientific Data Proved Hemings-Jefferson Link?, RICHMOND TIMES-DISPATCH, Jan. 14, 2007 at E1.

  93. Steven T. Corneliussen, “Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, and the Authority of Science: Whether or not Hemings and Jefferson had children together, misreported DNA and misused statistics have skewed the paternity debate, discrediting science itself,” May 6, 2008, available at http://www.tjscience.org/.

  94. Elizabeth Shown Mills, Editor’s Corner: The Past Is a Foreign Country, 89(3) NATIONAL GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY 163 (Sept. 2001).

  95. CYNTHIA H. BURTON, JEFFERSON VINDICATED (2005).

  96. Helen F. M. Leary, Sally Hemings’s Children: A Genealogical Analysis of the Evidence, 89 (3) NATIONAL GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY 165–66 (Sept. 2001).

  97. Fraser D. Neiman, Coincidence or Causal Connection: The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson’s Visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings’s Conceptions, 57 WILLIAM & MARY QUARTERLY 198 (Jan. 2000).

  98. Leary, Sally Hemings’s Children 174 n. 48.

  99. See page 216.

  100. Id. at 187. Ironically, later in her article Leary argues that “mother-to-daughter lifestyle transmission” is a common phenomenon, and that “girls raised in a particular environment tend to grow up accepting that familiar lifestyle as both the norm and their fate.” Id. at 197 and n.143. And since Madison allegedly told Wetmore that Betty Hemings had at least four different fathers for her children (see JAMES A. BEAR, JR., JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 26 n.1 (1967)), it makes even less sense for Leary to assume that Sally’s children all had but a single common father.

  101. Id. at 182.

  102. Id. at 189. Nor was the family claim that Sally’s children were fathered by a Carr nephew. Both accounts attributed indirectly to Thomas Jefferson Randolph report that he said two Carr nephews confessed in his presence to fathering children by Sally Hemings. See Chapter Ten of my Individual Views on pages 208–12. So much for the assertion that no one ever questioned Sally’s monogamy.

  103. Id. at 191.

  104. Id. at 185.

  105. Id. at 195.

  106. Jefferson was uncomfortable in the role of a public speaker and much preferred the pen to the spoken word. Indeed, as President he departed from the precedents set by Washington and Adams of making his annual report to Congress in person and elected instead to submit written reports.

  107. Leary, Sally Hemings’s Children at 196.

  108. Id. at 197.

  109. Id at 199.

  110. Id. (emphasis added.) See the introduction and Chapter Ten of my Individual Views for a more detailed discussion of this letter.

  111. Id. at 206 n.178.

  112. Jefferson to John Norvell, June 11, 1807, in 11 WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 225 (Mem. Ed. 1903).

  113. Monticello Report, Appendix E at 17.

  114. ANNETTE GORDON-REED, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS 259. Readers can examine excerpts of the original and transcription in Figure 4 on page 137.

  115. Id. at 258–59. See Figure 3 on page 36.

  116. See the Introduction to my Individual Views, Figures 1 and 2 on pages 33 and 35.

  117. Quoted in Leary, Sally Hemings’s Children at 203.

  118. Id. at 204.

  119. JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 39.

  120. Id. at 39–40.

  121. THOMAS JEFFERSON’S GARDEN BOOK 601 (Edwin Morris Betts, ed., 1999).

  122. JEFFERSON AT MONTICELLO 102.

  123. Id. at 205.

  124. See Chapter Eleven of my Individual Views on page 241.

  125. CYNTHIA H. BURTON, JEFFERSON VINDICATED (2005).

  126. http://academic.gallaudet.edu/cce/extonline.nsf/0/EF734C8CC4CF59738525672D000C 5BEA?Open Document.

  127. Thomas W. Jones, The “Scholars Commission” Report on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter: An Evaluation by Genealogical Proof Standards, NATIONAL GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY QUARTERLY 218 (Sept. 2001).

  128. Id. at 209.

  129. Id. at 210.

  130. Id. at 211.

  131. Id. at 208.

  132. Id.

  133. Id. at 209.

  134. The slightly edited disclaimer appears on page 44 of this volume (emphasis in original).

  135. Id. at 212–13.

  136. Id. at 213.

  137. A Google search of “Monte Carlo simulation” produced more than one million hits.

  138. Fraser D. Neiman, Coincidence or Causal Connection: The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson’s Visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings’s Conceptions, 57 WILLIAM & MARY QUARTERLY 198, 208 (Jan. 2000).

  139. Jones, The “Scholars Commission” Report at 218.

  140. Jefferson to William Roscoe, Dec. 27, 1820, in 15 WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 303 (Mem. Ed., 1904).

  141. E-mail from Tom Jones to Bob Turner, 2/20/02.

  142. The three books reviewed were Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. (ed.), The Jefferson-Hemings Myth; Byron W. Woodson, Sr., A President in the Family; and Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day.

  143. Alexander O. Boulton, The Monticello Mystery—Case Continued, 58(4) WILLIAM & MARY Q. 1039, 1040, Oct. 2001.

  144. Id. at 1041 n.8.

  145. Presumably the Jefferson and Hemings family members all had a “self-interest” in either portraying Jefferson as saintly or confirming the Hemings family claim to famous ancestry. Bacon clearly admired Jefferson, but he had no obvious benefit in misrepresenting the facts as he understood them. He was independently wealthy, living far away from Jefferson’s impoverished relatives, clearly unfriendly to the southern cause, and also clearly respected as a man of honor. Whether his story is true or false, objectively he appears to be among the most credible sources and the only actual “witness” to specific activity that was likely directly related to Sally’s sexual behavior pattern.

  146. Boulton, The Monticello Mystery 1042.

  147. See Chapter Ten of my Individual Views.

  148. Boulton, The Monticello Mystery 1042.

  149. See Chapter Four of my Individual Views.

  150. Id.

  151. See Chapter Ten of my Individual Views.

  152. Boulton, The Monticello Mystery 1046.

  153. See page 101.

  154. For example, in another article in the special issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly discussed above, Professor Joshua D
. Rothman writes: “Jefferson scholars have routinely dismissed Callender’s allegations out of hand, arguing that his motives and character made him and anything he wrote entirely unbelievable. Gordon-Reed points out that his personal repugnancy and malicious motivations—both valid reasons to view his articles with a skeptical eye—do not necessarily make him a liar or absolve historians of a responsibility to examine his claims. Indeed, Callender’s biographer notes that over the course of the man’s career he sometimes misinterpreted information, but there ‘is little, if any, evidence of his purposeful invention of stories or falsification of facts.’” Joshua D. Rothman, Can the “Character Defense” Survive?, 89(3) JEFFERSON-HEMINGS: A SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE NATIONAL GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY Q. 219, 221 (Sept. 2001). I would submit that there is not the slightest evidence to support Callender’s libelous attacks on Sally Hemings, a woman he had probably never even seen and about whom he seemed to know very little.

  155. Boulton, The Monticello Mystery 1044.

  156. JOYCE APPLEBY, THOMAS JEFFERSON 75 (2003).

  157. Id. at 162 n.2 (citing Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson [Peter Onuf and Jan Lewis, eds. 1999]).

  158. APPLEBY, THOMAS JEFFERSON 3.

  159. Id. at 74.

  160. Id. at 75.

  161. Id.

  162. Id. at 79.

  163. Jefferson to Holmes, Apr. 22, 1820, 15 WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 248, 249 (Mem. ed. 1903).

  164. A copy of the original page is available at http://memory.loc.gov/master/mss/mtj/mtj1/051/ 1200/1238.jpg.

  165. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, THOMAS JEFFERSON: AUTHOR OF AMERICA 59 (2005).

  166. Id. at 64.

  167. Id. at 62.

  168. Id. at 60.

  169. See page 74.

  170. James A. Bear, Jr., The Hemings Family of Monticello, VIRGINIA CAVALCADE, (Autumn 1979), 85. See also 16 PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON xxxi (1961).

  171. HITCHENS, THOMAS JEFFERSON 61.

  172. THOMAS JEFFERSON, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA Query XIV, reprinted in 2 THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 193–94 (Mem. ed. 1903).