The Jefferson Lies (5 page)

11

[T]he circumstantial case that Eston Hemings was fathered by the President's younger brother is many times stronger than the case against the President himself. Among the considerations which might point to Randolph are:

In
Memoirs
o
f a Monticello Slave
, former slave Isaac Jefferson asserts that when Randolph Jefferson visited Monticello, he “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night . . .” In contrast, we have not a single account of Thomas Jefferson spending his nights socializing with the slaves in such a manner. . . .

[W]e have Jefferson's letter inviting Randolph (and presumably his sons as well) to come to Monticello shortly before Sally became pregnant with Eston. It was common for such visits to last for weeks.

Pearl Graham, who did original research among the Hemings descendants in the 1940s and believed the story that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children, wrote in a 1958 letter to a leading Jefferson scholar at Princeton University that a granddaughter of one of Sally Hemings' children had told her that Randolph Jefferson “had colored children” of his own.

Until Fawn Brodie [recently] persuaded the descendants of Eston Hemings that President Jefferson was his father, their family oral history had passed down that Eston was fathered by “Thomas Jefferson's uncle.” That is not possible, as both of his paternal uncles died decades before Eston was conceived. But [according] to Martha Jefferson Randolph [Jefferson's oldest daughter], who was generally in charge of Monticello during Eston Hemings' entire memory there, her father's younger brother was “Uncle Randolph”—and he was referred to as such in family letters.

12

We don't know exactly when Randolph's first wife died, but we do know that he remarried—to a very controlling woman—shortly after Eston Hemings was born. About the same time, Thomas Jefferson retired from public office and spent the rest of his life at Monticello, where he could presumably have had access to Sally Hemings any night he wished. But Sally, although only in her mid-thirties, gave birth to no known children after Eston was born in 1808. Even the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation report acknowledges that Sally's childbearing years may have corresponded to the years in which Randolph Jefferson was a widower.
³⁹

Significantly, in its retraction even
Nature
ruefully conceded, “It is true that men of Randolph Jefferson's family could have fathered Sally Hemings' later children.”
⁴⁰
But this scholars' report was just as widely ignored by the media as had been both the DNA testing results that exonerated Jefferson and the retraction of its initial errant announcement. In fact, PBS's
Frontline
, A & E's
Biography
, the
Washington Post
, and others actually had in their possession reports that tended to exonerate Jefferson but deliberately omitted that information from their reporting.
⁴¹

Incidentally, Dr. Eugene Foster, who conducted the DNA testing, had been very clear about the limitations of his testing, but his findings were misrepresented by Joseph Ellis, historian and professor at Mt. Holyoke College. Ellis, who opposed what was happening to President Clinton at the time, had written the sensationalistic “announcement” for
Nature
, but his personal spin went well beyond Foster's scientific findings, making the story both inaccurate and unfactual. Perhaps this should not be surprising; four years later, in 2002, it was revealed that Ellis was also guilty of publicly lying to his classes on many occasions. (For example, he told students that he went to Vietnam as a platoon leader and paratrooper in the 101st Airborne and served on General Westmoreland's staff during the war; he did neither. He also said that he did active civil rights work in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement and was harassed by the state police for his efforts; again, neither was true. He claimed that he scored the winning touchdown in the last football game of his senior year in high school; it turns out he wasn't even on the team.
⁴²
) As one columnist properly queried, “How can you trust a historian who makes up history?”
⁴³

13

In hindsight, looking back over the complete fiasco, the
Wall Street Journal
correctly noted of the unreported retraction, “[T]he backtracking comes a little late to change the hundreds of other headlines fingering Jefferson.”
⁴⁴
The effect of the original news flood was toxic. One reporter who covered the story accurately noted, “[D]efective scholarship is difficult to recall.”
⁴⁵
The
Jewish World Review
therefore properly asked, “Was Jefferson libeled by DNA?”
⁴⁶
The evidence answers “Yes!”

In short, the DNA testing did not show Jefferson to be guilty of
any
sexual liaison with Hemings. The so-called smoking gun turned out to be a waterlogged pea shooter.

Category 2: The Evidence of Oral Tradition

The second source of Hemings' evidence used against Jefferson is oral tradition, but the DNA findings significantly weakened this source. The strongest evidence in this category had long been the two-century-old charge that Jefferson had fathered Thomas Woodson, but the DNA findings were conclusive that no Jefferson—not any of the twenty-six Jefferson males—had fathered Woodson. That original test was later repeated by Dr. Foster with the same results.
⁴⁷
Consequently, that oral tradition is now authoritatively disproved. (Incidentally, DNA testing has been conducted on descendants from two of Hemings' five children. As already noted, testing on the Thomas Woodson branch was negative for any Jefferson genes. The Eston Hemings branch showed some Jefferson genes, but it did not show from which of the twenty-six Jefferson males they came. The remaining three branches of Hemings' progeny have so far declined to participate in DNA testing.)

14

The other major oral tradition challenging Jefferson's sexual morality came from Sally Hemings' son Madison (the fourth Hemings child, born in 1805). In an article published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, Madison Hemings claimed that in France “my mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte [pregnant] by him” with Thomas Woodson.
⁴⁸
But the DNA testing disproved two of Madison's major claims: (1) there were no Jefferson genes in Sally's first child, Thomas; therefore, (2) Sally did not return home pregnant by Jefferson.

Several other of Madison's claims about Jefferson have also been shown to be erroneous—including his claim that Jefferson was not interested in agriculture.
⁴⁹
Yet modern authors such as Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law at New York University, believe that Jefferson was guilty of all that Madison charged him with; she dismisses outright all evidence to the contrary and even concocts evidence in her attempts to “prove” her claims.

For instance, in her book
Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
, she “reprinted” a letter written in 1858 by Ellen Randolph Coolidge (Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter) describing the rooms at Monticello. According to Reed, Coolidge had written:

His [Jefferson's] apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze.
⁵⁰

15

So, based on Reed's quotation of Jefferson's granddaughter, female domestics such as Hemings entered Jefferson's apartment only at hours when no one was watching.

Significantly, however, Coolidge's actual letter had said exactly the
opposite
:

His [Jefferson's] apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be
there; and none could have entered without being exposed to
the public gaze.
⁵¹
(emphasis added)

The emphasized portion above is what Gordon-Reed omitted, thus completely reversing its message. Significantly, the granddaughter had actually said that (1) no one could have entered without being seen and that (2)
no
female staff entered his room unless he was
not
there. But Reed, in order to bolster her own arguments against Jefferson, twisted and rewrote what Jefferson's granddaughter had actually said.

Sadly, when someone dismisses Madison Hemings' claims because of their many provable and obvious inaccuracies, writers such as Gordon-Reed cry “Racism!” and lament that black witnesses from history are automatically given less credence.
⁵²
Other writers such as Jan Lewis and Peter Onuf believe that those who do not accept the testimony of Madison Hemings carte blanche are simply racists.
⁵³

Such irrational refusals to consider the substantial evidence that contradicts Madison Hemings' claims indicates that personal predilections and political agendas have been placed above an honest search for the truth. Genuine scholars require verifiable documentation—something completely lacking in the case of Thomas Woodson's and Madison Hemings' oral testimonies. In fact, their oral testimonies are factually disprovable, which eliminates the second category of “evidence” used to “prove” Jefferson's paternity through Hemings.

16

Category 3: The Charges Published Two Centuries Ago

The earliest printed charges alleging Jefferson's paternity with Hemings appeared in newspaper articles written from 1801 to 1803 by James T. Callender (1758–1803).

Callender first rose to attention in 1792 in Scotland when he authored
The Political Progress of Great Britain
. That work, highly critical of the British government, led to his indictment for sedition. After being “oftimes called in court, he did not appear and was pronounced a fugitive and outlaw.”
⁵⁴
Facing prison, Callender and his family of young children fled to America for refuge in 1793, arriving with no means or prospect of support. American patriots, learning of Callender's plight, sympathetically embraced him as a man suffering British persecution. Many, including Thomas Jefferson, personally provided charitable contributions to help Callender and his children.

In 1796 Callender secured a job writing for a Republican (an Anti-Federalist, pro-Jefferson) newspaper in Philadelphia. Promising “a tornado as no government ever got before,”
⁵⁵
Callender resumed the defamatory writing style that had landed him in trouble in Great Britain, only this time it was against prominent Federalist Americans such as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington. By attacking the Federalists, Callender considered himself to be the mouthpiece for Jefferson's Republican Party and believed he was rendering it a valuable service.

The Northern states tended to be Federalist while the Southern ones tended to be Anti-Federalist (Republican). Callender was therefore in a northern state writing against Federalist statesmen highly regarded in that region. His writings not only raised great ire but were so defamatory as to invite litigation even in that land of free speech. So, fearing legal punishment, Callender fled from Philadelphia to Richmond in 1799.

Arriving there, he took a job with another Republican newspaper where he continued his attacks on the Federalists. Because of his vicious writings, Callender was convicted under the federal Sedition Law in 1800, fined $200 (about $3,000 today), and imprisoned for nine months. Still he did not relent. While in prison he authored two more attack pieces in the same style that had so frequently caused him difficulty. Callender proved to be a troublesome hothead with no sense of discretion.

17

During this time, Jefferson was serving as vice president under President John Adams. Callender wrote Jefferson twenty-nine letters, but Jefferson largely ignored him, replying only five times in a two-year period. Because of Jefferson's lack of response, Callender complained to James Madison that he “might as well have addressed a letter to Lot's wife.”
⁵⁶
Jefferson avoided Callender but continued occasional charitable gifts for the support of Callender's young children.

When Jefferson became president in 1801, he declared the Sedition Law to be unconstitutional and pardoned everyone who had been prosecuted under it (about two dozen individuals).
⁵⁷
Jefferson also ordered that the fines collected under that law be returned with interest. But the Federalist sheriff who had collected the $200 fine from Callender refused and even ignored direct orders from Secretary of State James Madison to refund the fine.

Callender, now free, was unaware of these difficulties with the sheriff and became infuriated against Jefferson, blaming him for not returning his $200. Secretary of State Madison reported to Virginia governor James Monroe, “Callender, I find, is under a strange error on the subject of his fine, and in a strange humor in consequence of it.”
⁵⁸

Callender became enraged at Jefferson. Believing that Jefferson's party owed him something for what he considered his long “service” on their behalf, he demanded a presidential appointment as the US postmaster for Richmond—an appointment that both President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison properly refused him.