Framing a Legend

Framing a Legend by M. Andrew Holowchak

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An “anti-racist” article condemning Thomas Jefferson as an undoubted and unquestionable pedophile rapist sparked an interest in me to dig into the vexed question of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It's hard to say what my mindset was before I read a few books on the issue. I probably thought that there was more evidence for the relationship than there was, mostly thanks to the confident tone of those who fall on the side of “Relationship? Yes.” What I learned was that the evidence for “the Relationship” is surprisingly weak - not non-existent, but nearly so.

Also, I was surprised to discover that Sally Hemings (“SH”) was white. The closest African or African-American that she could point to in her family was a grandmother on her mother's side, which made her 75% white. (In Nazi Germany, a Jew would have passed as German with that pedigree.) When Sally was given her liberty, she was subsequently listed as “free white” on local census rolls.

That is, parenthetically, a fascinating point. Race is defined as much by social status as ancestry. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves who were racially white. One wishes that someone would follow up on this from a social history perspective. (BTW - this is not the only place this fact appears. The mystery in Puddinghead Wilson by Mark Twain involves the mix-up of a slave child with a master's child. Apparently, this kind of thing was not something unbelievable.)

This book is written by a philosophy professor who takes the charge against Thomas Jefferson (“TJ”) very personally. Holowchak does a solid job of attacking the Relationship position. His personal investment is based on his respect for Jefferson as a thinker who was instrumental in founding the United States. At times, I found this zeal detracted from his arguments since much of his argument turns on an argument from character, namely, TJ did not have sex with SH because he was not the kind of man who would do that. Perhaps, but we have a history of people acting against type. People fall from grace. It's sad but true. So, perhaps because I don't share the same intimate relationship with TJ through a lifetime of study, I am more agnostic.

Holowchak defenestrates the Relationship Revisionists - Fawn Brody, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Andrew Burstein. Brody wrote in the 1970s from a Freudian perspective. Her thesis was properly derided as unsubstantiated at the time and largely was forgotten. Unfortunately, Annette Gordon-Reed is a black lawyer who managed to catch the wave of Wokeness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She was helped by the Dark Arts of woke propaganda, including mischaracterizing a DNA study in order to declare the debate over and accusing dissenters from the new orthodoxy of being racists.

A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area is redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ's records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ's younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, which is where her immaturity was commented upon by Mrs. Adams, but nothing is known from the Paris period. We know that SH had six children. This is essentially the sum total of everything that is known about SH.

There are four bits of evidence in support of The Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a “defeater,” sometimes several.

First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a “more sable” son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is the bias of Callender and the fact that there was no Heming's son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of being descended from TH, but a DNA analysis from his descendants showed that they were not related to the Family Jefferson. If we can't trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?

Second, SH's son Madison Hemings in 1873 told a reporter that he was the son of TJ. The problem here is that other Hemings had a family tradition of being descended from an “uncle” of TJ (although probably TJ's younger brother.) Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH's room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison's credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn't get the message, plus who was this other guy visiting mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory, which also happens when memory is involved.

Of course, he could have been right, but we don't know.

Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ's paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.

Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, so were his Jefferson-gene carrying relatives.

The bottom line is that we don't know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for The Relationship is more probable than not and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.

One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there is background evidence I would like to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don't know. Where was SH's room in relation to TJ's room? Don't know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don't know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem or was it ignored? Don't know.

These are all issues that I would like to know more about.

Nonetheless, at the present time and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that The Relationship might be something that actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation on the evidence we have.