The Jefferson Lies (3 page)

xix

American Exceptionalism

Regrettably, the greatest casualty of the joint influence of Deconstructionism and Poststructuralism is American Exceptionalism—the belief that America is blessed and enjoys unprecedented stability, prosperity, and liberty as a result of the institutions and policies produced by unique ideas such as God-given inalienable rights, individualism, limited government, full republicanism, and an educated and virtuous citizenry.

Americans are blessed. America
is
an exceptional nation. That exceptionalism encompasses her great diversity of race, ethnicity, and religion, and it has benefited every American. But now, following several decades of Deconstruction and Poststructural indoctrination in education and politics, American Exceptionalism is no longer recognized, understood, or venerated. To the contrary, many American political officials now feel compelled to apologize to the world for America; they are conscious of our flaws but seem ignorantly oblivious to our matchless benefits and opportunities.

xx

The two-headed monster of Deconstructionism and Poststructuralism allows nothing respected to stand untainted—including Thomas Jefferson. Hence, Americans can readily point out what they have been told are his multitude of unpardonable sins but can list nearly none of his invaluable and timeless contributions that changed the face of America, and even the world.

Modernism

A third common attack device is
Modernism
, which examines historical events and persons as if they occurred and lived today rather than in the past. It severs history from its context and setting, misrepresenting historical beliefs and events.

For example, Modernists would look at what American Methodists believe today, recognize that they are among the most socially liberal of Christian denominations, and then declare that John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield were also socially liberal because they founded Methodism. Yet the Wesleys and Whitefield were characterized by numerous beliefs and practices that are anathema to most Methodist congregations today, including the overtly evangelical nature of the denomination at its founding, its outdoor camp meetings and revivals, and its tendency for demonstrative behavior that observers in that day described as emotionalism and fanaticism—behavior that would make many Methodists today extremely uncomfortable. In fact, it is highly unlikely that the Wesleys or Whitefield would ever be invited into the pulpits of modern Methodist churches. Modernists assume that everything is static—that as it is today, so it was then, but to accurately portray history, each group or individual must be measured not by today's modes of thinking, customs, and usage but rather by the context of their own times.

xxi

This is not to say that there is no absolute truth or that historical eras, movements, and individuals should not be judged by the immutable standards of right and wrong that transcend all generations—the standards that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers described in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, all must be judged by immutable objective standards, as “the laws of nature and of nature's God.” But just because those in previous generations often saw through a glass darkly does not mean they can be dismissed out of hand. Yet this is invariably what occurs when history is presented through the filter of Modernism. Too often today, Jefferson's life is wrongly judged and critiqued as if he were living now rather than two centuries ago—a practice that produces many flawed conclusions.

Minimalism

The fourth modern device used today is
Minimalism
, which is an unreasonable insistence on oversimplification—on reducing everything to monolithic causes and linear effects. Minimalism is easily recognizable in political campaign rhetoric: candidates take behemoth problems facing the nation—complicated difficulties that often have been decades in the making—and reduce them to one-line platitudes and campaign slogans. Minimalism is also apparent in the modern portrayal of history.

Our modern culture insists on easy answers, but the life of Jefferson does not accommodate that demand. He was an extremely complicated individual, not a man to be flippantly stereotyped or compartmentalized. In fact, he was probably much more complex than most other historic individuals from the same era. But many who write about him today try to conform him to a preshaped, preconceived, simplistic mold into which he does not fit. The image of Thomas Jefferson as presented by one modern writer will therefore often completely contradict the image presented by another, because each writer attempted to squeeze Jefferson into his or her own Minimalistic perception.

xxii

Minimalism is especially utilized by single-issue groups seeking to keep their issue at the forefront of public thinking—an especially difficult task in a culture already overloaded with single-issue organizations. Because such movements often lack widespread public support, they frequently attempt to bolster their standing by attaching someone of much broader public appeal to their narrow agenda, making that person appear to prove their objectives. Consequently, Minimalists portray Jefferson only as a racist, atheist, secularist, or whatever else they believe will help their agenda.

Academic Collectivism

The fifth and final device that undermines historical accuracy is
Academic Collectivism
, whereby writers and scholars quote each other and those from their peer group rather than consult original sources. This destructive and harmful tendency now dominates the modern academic world, with a heavy reliance on peer review as the almost exclusive standard for historical truth.

An excellent, if chilling example of this historical malpractice is evdent in a book called
The Godless Constitution
. In that work, Cornell professors Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore assert that the Founding Fathers were a group of atheists, agnostics, and deists who deliberately set out to create a secular government.
⁴⁷
This text has become a staple in many universities across the country; law reviews, courts, and other professors now cite this work as an authoritative source to “prove” the Founding Fathers' lack of religious belief.
⁴⁸
Strikingly, however, at the end of the book, where footnotes customarily appear, the professors candidly acknowledge that “we have dispensed with the usual scholarly apparatus of footnotes.”
⁴⁹

xxiii

What a startling admission by two so-called academics with PhDs! They make sweeping and forceful claims about a supposed lack of faith among the Founding Fathers, and their peers in academia herald this book as a great scholarly achievement. But there is not a single academic citation in the book to any original source or primary document. Not even a student at a community junior college would be permitted to submit a research paper with the same lack of primary source documentation, but somehow it is acceptable for professors at a noted academic institution to do so in a nationally published book.

This type of “peer review” is incestuous, with one scholar quoting another, each recirculating the other's views, but with none of them consulting sources or ideas outside his or her own academic gene pool. The presence of a PhD after one's name today somehow suggests academic infallibility—but this view must change if truth, accuracy, and objectivity are ever again to govern the presentation of history and historical figures. Primary source documents and historical evidence are the proper standard for historical truth, not professors' opinions.

In the following chapters, we will embark on a search for historical truth. We will attempt to reclaim many of the puzzle pieces of the image of Thomas Jefferson that have been discarded and lost in the twentieth century. Specifically, we will delve into seven contemporary claims about Jefferson's faith and morals, answering these questions:

• Did Thomas Jefferson really have a child (or children) by his young slave girl, Sally Hemings?

• Did Jefferson found a secular university as a reflection of his own allegedly secular lifestyle and beliefs?

• Did Jefferson write his own Bible, excluding the supernatural parts of Christianity with which he disagreed?

• Was Jefferson a racist who opposed civil rights and equality for black Americans?

• Did Jefferson, in his pursuit of separation of church and state, advocate secularizing the public square and the expulsion of faith and religious expressions from the public arena?

• Did Jefferson hate the clergy?

• Did Jefferson repudiate religion? Was he an atheist, deist, or secularist, or was he a Christian?

Let's examine Jefferson's own words and the eye-witness testimony of those who knew him best on each of these questions.

1

L
IE
#1
Thomas Jefferson Fathered Sally
Hemings' Children

I
n 1998 the journal
Science
released the results of a DNA inquiry into whether Jefferson had fathered any children through his slave Sally Hemings, specifically her first child, Thomas, or her fifth child, Eston.
¹
In conjunction with the announcement, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Professor Joseph Ellis wrote an accompanying article in the journal
Nature
declaring that the question was now settled—that DNA testing had conclusively proved that Thomas Jefferson had indeed fathered a Hemings child, thus scientifically affirming a two-centuries-old rumor.
²

That 1998 announcement concerning early American history was actually relevant to events occurring at the time, for it came at the commencement of President Bill Clinton's impeachment proceedings for lying under oath to a grand jury about his sexual activities with a young intern inside the Oval Office. News reports immediately pounced on the fortuitous DNA announcement, arguing that if a man as great as Thomas Jefferson had engaged in sexual trysts, then President Clinton should not face questions about his sexual misbehavior. After all, such conduct had not diminished the stature of Jefferson, they argued, so it should not be allowed to weaken that of Clinton.

Professor Ellis agreed, candidly admitting, “President William Jefferson Clinton also has a vested interest in this [DNA] revelation.”
³
Significantly, just weeks before Ellis' bombshell announcement about Jefferson, he had added his signature as a cosigner of an October 1998 ad in the
New York Times
opposing the impeachment of Clinton.
⁴
Henry Gee, a staff writer for
Nature
who also wrote a piece as part of the initial revelation, acknowledged that the DNA report provided much-needed cover for President Clinton:

2

The parallels between the story of Jefferson's sexual indiscretions and the travails of the current President are close. Thomas Jefferson came close to impeachment—but the scandal did not affect his popularity and he won the 1804 Presidential election by a landslide. And if President William Jefferson Clinton has cause to curse the invention of DNA fingerprinting, the latest report shows that it has a long reach indeed—back to the birth of the United States itself.
⁵

Dr. David Mayer, professor of law and history, was a member of an independent “Scholars Commission” later convened over the Jefferson-Hemings issue. He agreed that the timing of the DNA article had not been by accident:

Professor Ellis' accompanying article also noted, quite frankly, “Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton's sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role.” In television interviews following release of the article, Professor Ellis elaborated on this theme; and Clinton's apologists made part of their defense the notion that every President—even Jefferson—had his “sexual indiscretions.”
⁶

As far as Clinton defenders were concerned (especially his supporters in the media), the announcement of Jefferson's alleged moral failings was a gift from heaven. The entire nation was bombarded with the Jefferson paternity story for weeks; and the news of his moral failings was burned deeply into the consciousness of Americans. But many groups beyond Clinton supporters also welcomed the test results as useful to their particular agendas.

3

For example, the Jefferson-Hemings affair became the perfect platform for the feminist movement to discuss the nature of sexual relations. Many in that movement had already asserted that
any
type of sexual relations between a male and a female constituted rape,
⁷
but this development seemed especially to prove their point.
⁸
It was questioned whether any sex could be consensual if it was between individuals from different stations in life—such as Hemings and Jefferson. Many feminist writers, including Fawn Brodie, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Annette Gordon-Reed, had even authored books about the older Jefferson and the younger Hemings.
⁹

Another movement that benefited from the Jefferson-Hemings story included those who wished to keep open the racial wounds of previous generations. They pointed to Jefferson and his sexual exploitation of the slave Hemings as proof of how
all
African Americans were treated by
all
white Americans, not only in Jefferson's day, but also throughout much of the rest of American history.
¹⁰
The Jefferson announcement rekindled demands for restitutionary policies that would provide preferential treatment and elevation of status and opportunity as repayment for past wrongs committed.