http://www.americanthinker.com/
July 11, 2009
When, in the course of the Clinton presidency, it became necessary to normalize sexual misbehavior among presidents, the memory of Thomas Jefferson was soiled, with the compliance of academic and journalistic liberal elites.
Jefferson Memorial, Washington D.C.On July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson died at the age of eighty-three. For his tombstone, he listed the three accomplishments he desired most to be remembered: Author of the Declaration of Independence; Author of the Virginia Statutes for Religious Freedom; and Founder of the University of Virginia. Today, many Americans have no idea about his significant achievements but rather, when they hear Thomas Jefferson's name, their immediate response, "Isn't he the president who fathered slave children?"
The charge that Thomas Jefferson fathered a slave boy went back to the time of his presidency, and was given new life in Fawn Brodie's 1974 book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. She was proved wrong in the late 1990s by DNA testing on the descendants of both Jefferson family members and slaves which demonstrated that her candidate had no genetic link at all. Published in the British science journal Nature, the study did find an unanticipated connection to a different slave family, and the article's misleading title, "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child," caused an immediate sensation.
Nature was roundly criticized by other science journals because its headline over-stepped the actual results of the study which only proved that someone in the Jefferson line was connected with the descendants of the slave Sally Hemings. Not surprisingly, the mass media picked up on the Nature story's title and not the scientific criticism. Most recently, author Annette Gordon-Reed has won a series of prestigious book awards for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a work based on the decidedly skimpy evidence of a Jefferson liaison with the slave Sally Hemings and the rather contradictory oral history of Hemings' descendants.
The trump card for critics of Thomas Jefferson throughout all of this has been the poorly reported DNA "evidence" (despite the actual results of the study) analyzed here in my Washington Times article with Kathryn Moore [ http://theamericanpresident.us/images/Myth%20of%20Tom%20and%20Sally.pdf ]. The Nature article surfaced at the same time that a sitting president was having some very real problems with his sexual escapades in the Oval Office and, as Washington Post ombudsman E. R. Shipp conceded in the paper's somewhat belated "clarification" on the DNA findings, the Post's and other papers' reporters couldn't help "finding irresistible the possibility of a 200-year-old presidential sex scandal on a par with President Clinton's" and that they had failed to make clear what is fact and what is speculation in the controversy over the DNA testing which demonstrated only that "a" Jefferson fathered the fifth child of Sally Hemings -- not which Jefferson. Shipp also recounted how the study's principal author, Dr. [Eugene A.] Foster, "has tried to rein in these stories but to no avail."
Jefferson Monument, University of VirginiaThe Washington Post's retraction may as well have been printed in invisible ink, and the Wall Street Journal stated that "the backtracking comes a little late to change the hundreds of other headlines fingering Jefferson." Few people today know anything of the howl of distress that immediately arose from the authors of the DNA study on the very pages of Nature, or the confession-is-good-for-the-soul statements by Nature's spokesperson in Science magazine and elsewhere when Nature's editors owned up to their error.
As for Gordon-Reed, an attorney and law professor at New York Law School, she knows quite well what DNA evidence can and cannot prove, and I write about her lawerly dancing on the Jefferson DNA matter in "Annette Gordon-Reed and the Jefferson DNA Myth" on the History News Network this week. A particularly intriguing development is the release this month of William Hyland, Jr.'s In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal. Like Gordon-Reed, author Hyland is an attorney, but rather than holding teaching positions, he is a trial lawyer by trade who most recently wrote "A Civil Action: Sally Hemings v. Thomas Jefferson" in The American Journal of Trial Advocacy [Vol. 31, No. 1, 2007]. Readers may wish to check out the Hyland and Gordon-Reed books, and decide for themselves which of these dueling attorneys makes the better case.
19 Comments on "Slurring Thomas Jefferson"
As the author of In Defense of Thomas Jefferosn, this comment should be made concerning our greatest founding father: Thomas Jefferson was either the most prolific, hypocritical liar in American history or the victim of the most profane, 200-year-old defamation of character allegation in legal annals.
ReplyDeleteThere is no gauzy middle ground in this historical tableau.
The fevered debate about Jefferson and his alleged sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, changed radically in 1998Science exploded an historical bombshell, confirming that a male carrying Jefferson DNA had fathered Sally’s last child, Eston. The British science journal Nature's distortion of that news led to a worldwide misrepresentation that DNA had specifically proven Thomas Jefferson was the father. In fact, at least two dozen male Jeffersons could have fathered Eston. Historians understood this, but certain scholars marginalized evidence pointing toward any paternity candidate but Jefferson.
For the last ten years, in my view, Jefferson’s reputation has been unfairly eviscerated by a misrepresentation of the DNA results in the Jefferson-Hemings sexual controversy. The exhumation of discredited, prurient embellishments has not only deluded readers, but impoverished a fair debate. The “Sally” story is pure fiction, possibly politics, but certainly not historical fact or science. It reflects a recycled inaccuracy that has metastasized from book to book, over two hundred years.
In contrast to the blizzard of recent books spinning the controversy as a mini-series version of history, I found that layer upon layer of evidence points to a mosaic distinctly away from Jefferson with one inevitable conclusion: the historians have the wrong Jefferson--the DNA, as well as other historical evidence, matches perfectly to his younger brother, Randolph and his teen-age sons, as the true candidates for a sexual relationship with Sally. Quite simply, the most credible evidence exonerates Jefferson:
• the virulent rumor was first started by the unscrupulous, scandal-mongering journalist James Callender, who burned for political revenge against Jefferson. Callender was described as “an alcoholic thug with a foul mind, obsessed with race and sex,” who intended to defame Jefferson’s public career.
• the one eyewitness to this sexual allegation was Edmund Bacon, Jefferson’s overseer at Monticello, who saw another man (not Jefferson) leaving Sally’s room ‘many a morning.’
• Jefferson’s deteriorating health would have prevented any such sexual relationship. He was 64 at the time of the alleged affair and suffered debilitating migraine headaches which incapacitated him for weeks.
• Randolph Jefferson had a reputation for socializing with Jefferson's slaves and was expected at Monticello approximately nine months before the birth of Eston Hemings, the DNA match.
• The DNA match was to a male son. Randolph had six male sons. Thomas Jefferson had all female children, except for a nonviable infant, with his beloved wife, Martha.
• Unlike his brother, by taste and training Thomas Jefferson was raised as the perfect Virginia gentleman, a man of refinement and intellect. The personality of the man who figures in the Hemings soap opera would be preposterously out of character for him.
Thus, let a fair minded public decide where the truth lies, mindful of Jefferson’s own words:
When tempted to do anything in secret, ask yourself if you would do it in public; if you would not, be sure it is wrong.
WILLIAM G. HYLAND JR
AUTHOR, IN DEFENSE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON
Thank you very much for all of your efforts in this matter and thanks for commenting. Continued success and warmest regards.
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