by M. Andrew Holowchak
"In a new “manifesto” titled “Monticello Affirms Thomas Jefferson Fathered Children with Sally Hemings” (June, 2018), The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has declared that the official position of the foundation is that Thomas Jefferson fathered all six of Sally Hemings’s children. It is a perplexing statement, especially given that it is made not on account of any new evidence that has a bearing on Jefferson’s avowed paternity, and prior to this manifesto, they were content to espouse some degree of skepticism of paternity based on the available evidence. The manifesto merely rehashes its amassed “evidence” while paying lip service to certain maverick dissenters—“some who disagree.” With the opening of Sally Hemings’s room on June 16, they have taken it upon themselves to “remove the qualifiers.” They write now of a firm commitment to the relationship. There is little room for doubt.
As the Thomas Jefferson Foundation began
planning The Life of Sally Hemings, an exhibit that relies on the account left
by her son, Madison Hemings, it became apparent that it was time to reexamine
how to characterize Jefferson’s paternity. For nearly twenty years, the most
complete summary of evidence has remained the report authored by the Foundation
in January 2000. While there are some who disagree, the Foundation’s scholarly
advisors and the larger community of academic historians who specialize in
early American history have concurred for many years that the evidence is
sufficiently strong to state that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six
children with Sally Hemings. In the new exhibit exploring the life of Sally
Hemings, her choices, and her connection to Thomas Jefferson, as well as in
updates to our related online materials and print publications, the Foundation
will henceforth assert what the evidence indicates and eliminate qualifying
language related to the paternity of Eston Hemings as well as that related to
Sally Hemings’s three other surviving children, whose descendants were not part
of the 1998 DNA study. While it remains possible, though increasingly unlikely,
that a more comprehensive documentary and genetic assemblage of evidence could
emerge to support a different conclusion, no plausible alternative with the
same array of evidence has surfaced in two decades.
Some comments on this manifesto:
First, they state that the most complete
summary is their own report of January, 2000, and that smacks of self-service.
Since publication, that report has been challenged by a number of compelling
books: Bob Turner’s The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission (2001),
Cynthia Burton’s Jefferson Vindicated (2005), William
Hyland’s In Defense of Thomas Jefferson (2009), and my
own Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of ThomasJefferson and Sally Hemings (2013).While none of these books
proffers the sockdolager which shows that there was no relationship, all offer
compelling reason for doubt. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has dealt with the
arguments in those books by ignoring them. They can do that. They run the show
at Monticello. For instance, as author of 10 books on Jefferson, some 70
published essays, not one of my books on Jefferson—and I have written
critically on Jefferson’s views on religion, politics and political philosophy,
history, morality, education, progressivism, and cosmology, inter alia—is
for sale in the library at Monticello. Why? I wrote Framing a Legend,
which attacks the often-shoddy scholarship on behalf of the liaison and argues,
ultimately, for skepticism. Skepticism, it seems, is sufficient for censorship.
They run Monticello and they can give visitors their own account of Thomas
Jefferson by disallowing diversity of opinion.
Second, “there are some who disagree” is
massively understated. Many disagree. The issue is that if you disagree with
their official position on the liaison, if you disagree with what is now their
manifesto, you run the risk of being dubbed “racist,” which is the kiss of
death in liberal academic circles. I am a liberal, but I am interested in
truth, not politics. Consensus among scholars today is, thus, forced, because
of fear of being called racist. Truth has become irrelevant. Jefferson may have
had a relationship with Hemings. That is important to know. Yet we wish to know
that as a result of open debate on both sides of the issue and with a look
at all the available, relevant evidence. If such debate shows
anti-paternity is unlikely, then the anti-paternity adherents will have gained
by, as Socrates has said, “an exchange of error for truth.” Yet TJF disallows
open debate because they control the intellectual climate at Monticello. With
open debate, they run the risk of being shown to be pedantic, dogmatic, and
perhaps wrong. Thus, if Jefferson did have an affair with Hemings, we ought to
demand evidence of it. A scholarly pro-paternity wave of hands among members of
TJF, many of whom are unqualified to have a vote, ought not to convince anyone.
Third, Sally Hemings is an odd choice for
an exhibit, given that Jefferson says next to nothing of her in his memoranda
books and that no scholars know anything substantive of her life. Annette
Gordon-Reed has made a reputation of being an expert of Hemings’s life through
four chapters of the probable course of events in her stay in France in her
much ballyhooed book, The Hemingses of Monticello, but those
chapters are built on surmise, not evidence. The probability of her account
being accurate in all of its details is nil.
Finally, in their manifesto, they relist
10 reasons (click the link in the first sentence of this essay) to believe that
Jefferson fathered all of Hemings’s children. None of the reasons are new. Most
have been challenged; some have been refuted. The TJF is blind to those
challenges and refutations. Their policy again is to ignore evidence to the
contrary. Why? They have invested much too much over the years in the Hemings’
controversy, and now they cannot recant. Yet with the manifesto, they have
added something new: They are resorting to dogma, not debate.
With the exhibit of “The Life of Sally
Hemings,” TJF will have muddied its face. Monticello’s Gary
Sandling’s insisted when they were going about “reconstruction” of Hemings’s
room that “we’re not going to use this room to tell a story about DNA and the
paternity of her children.” Yet now we find that that is just what they are
doing. That is just what they had in mind all along.
Vivienne Kelly and I in “Monticello Claims toHave Found Sally Hemings’s Room: Is This True?” have argued that the
recent “discovery” of Sally Hemings’s room might be politically, not
veridically, motivated—that is, we at least challenged that notion that making
a room for Sally Hemings was being done for the sake of hammering home the
notion that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ six children. In our essay, we
noted that one of the results of the room over time would be to offer visual
proof of the nearly 40-year liaison. Having physical space at Monticello over
time would be taken as proof in the minds of visitors of a liaison.
What is bothersome about the TJF’s new
report is the political posturing of those in TJF. Sandling insisted that the
room’s discovery was not political. It was. The issue of Jefferson’s paternity
has been decided ex cathedra, without full discussion of all
relevant evidence, and by a select view of “authorities” on Jefferson who never
had doubts about Jefferson’s paternity in the first place. No one who dissented
was part of the decision-making. That is how it has been at Monticello for a
long time. That needs to change, because members of TJF are creating
Jefferson’s history, not reconstructing it. It is an insufferable situation.
The TJF is content with its removal of
qualifiers because they are content that the testimony of Sally Hemings’s son
Madison Hemings is trustworthy and correct. As I have shown (see HNN, Hemings’s testimony),
it is not. Its reliability is suspect from a number of points. We cannot merely
assume its veridicality.
The greatest danger with what the TJF is
doing is its complete insouciance concerning claims contrary to those they
embrace, even if those contrary claims are well supported. There is no other
way to put it, because there is insufficient evidence to decide the issue of
Jefferson’s paternity, and yet they have removed the qualifiers. In such a
case, we must be skeptical, not dogmatic. TJF disallows skepticism. They have
decided for us how we ought to think about Jefferson.
As John Stuart Mill showed in On
Liberty, the closest thing to a liberal’s bible, freedom of opinion and
critical discussion of matters unsettled by reason, are needed for truth.
Thomas Jefferson in Query XVII of his Notes on the State of
Virginia said the same thing. It is a paradox of Brobdingnagian
proportion that the people who now run Jefferson’s Monticello have such an
aversion to Jefferson’s priceless liberal values and such indifference to
truth."
Article from the History News Network (George Washington University):
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/169304
See also: Thomas Jefferson: A Defense of His Character and Thomas Jefferson and the Pursuit of Virtue
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