| Episodes |
Day After Meditation (1): The Initial Scramble
Kristen Dalton
Dalton meditates on the impact of the DNA on the controversy after reading the two main compilations of scholarly responses: Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999) and the special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly March 2000.
[1] Whenever something happens that you thought could never in a million years happen, what do you do? You scramble. You desperately try to restore order and sanity in a world that just turned you upside down. Your heart drops into your stomach and you hyperventilate. You might sweat a little bit and your eyes might bug out. All in all, you look disheveled thanks to that brief, yet overwhelming moment of panic that has you second-guessing everything you worked on up until this point. This was common for many Jefferson scholars whose work was deemed inaccurate once the DNA evidence was published in 1998. Let's take a look at a Joseph Ellis, who, though very convincing, tried to play it cool.
[2] Ellis received the 1997 National Book Award for his American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. In it, Ellis outwardly denies the existence of a relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, for "after five years mulling over the huge cache of evidence that does exist on the thought and character of the historical Jefferson, I have concluded that the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote." He supports this bold claim, which appeared in the Appendix, with two pieces of circumstantial evidence.
[3] The first defense is that both Madison and Eston, the last two of Sally's children, were born after James Callender published the scandal in 1802. It is improbable, according to Ellis, that Jefferson would continue a relationship with Hemings once the secret had been revealed to the mass public. Secondly, Jefferson's biggest political rivals, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, had not continued the gossip that Callender exposed. As enemies, it is highly unlikely that neither figure would jump on the chance to squander Jefferson's public persona. Neither of them found the "dirt" worth spreading, therefore it must not have been true.
[4] A further piece of evidence that many historians believed in prior to the DNA was that it wasn't in Jefferson's character to have had a relationship with a slave woman: "He was, to be sure, capable of living with massive contradictions, but his psychological dexterity depended upon the manipulation of interior images and personae; he was not that adroit at the kind of overt deviousness required to sustain an allegedly thirty-eight-year affair in the very center of his domestic heaven." Ellis was not the only historian to use the character defense as proof of the impossibility that a relationship ever existed. "His most sensual statements were aimed at beautiful buildings rather than beautiful women," opined Ellis, "In sum, the alleged relationship with Sally Hemings, if it did exist, defied the dominant patterns of his persona." Most of what historians "know" about Jefferson's character could be found out in the countless letters he wrote, the numerous field books he kept, and the formal essays he published. He was ahead of his time with the scientific tools he invented, and his advanced forward-thinking was unlike any political figure during that era. But Ellis, and many other Jefferson scholars, did not ever consider that he would also be ahead of his time in terms of having a possibly loving relationship with a black woman. No, that thought never crossed their minds.
[5] The DNA evidence changed all of that on November 1, 1998, when Nature magazine published an article by Dr. Eugene Foster. The data found by the scientific study revealed that a male in the Jefferson lineage was the father of Eston Hemings. It also disproved the theory that the Carr brothers were responsible for Sally Heming's children and increased the probability that Thomas Jefferson himself was the likely candidate when taken in consideration with the other circumstantial evidence already provided. Popular public opinion quickly began to assume that Jefferson was the father of all of Sally's children. But what did this mean for Ellis and other historians who had spent years putting together theories that stated otherwise?
[6] Just two days after the DNA was published and turned the classic defenses of Jefferson on its head, historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote an op-ed column in the New York Times. Her article addressed the better question that the DNA left lingering: Why did historians go to extravagant lengths to deny this relationship? It's true; many Jefferson scholars like Ellis were relatively shocked to hear the news. Should they have been? Gordon-Reed offers a brief explanation for their unwillingness to believe in the relationship before the DNA provided probable evidence: "Make no mistake; the additional scientific information is important. But the truth is that historians need not have ceded the question to scientific investigators. A more disciplined, rigorous and less prejudiced application of historical method could have yielded the same results." Results that she had provided in her own 1997 Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Scandal. Not only does she call out the carelessness and prejudiced views of the Jefferson defenders, she goes one step further and proves that the relationship could be deemed probable even without the DNA evidence: her book.
[7] As for the way Jefferson historians approached the relationship, Gordon-Reed continues in her article that objectivity was a lost art. Furthermore, many Americans had trouble accepting that black-white sexual relations do occur, which "suggests that present-day observers think Jefferson's involvement with Hemings was a crime more heinous than the crime of his legal ownership of her." She continues that many historians were flawed in thinking that Madison Hemings's memoir was not worthy of evidence simply because he was black and a former slave. Meanwhile, the accounts recorded by the white Jefferson descendants were widely accepted and hardly criticized even though now the DNA evidence exposes their gaps in logic. "But time and again, historians exhibited the unfortunate human tendency to see only the things we want to see and to know only those things we want to know," she claims, "This tendency has served no good purpose in the struggle to come to terms with American history."
[8] It has become pretty clear pretty quickly that the DNA evidence not only reveals the question of what this means in terms of the relationship but also what this tells us about the historians who try to interpret that meaning and, perhaps more importantly, what reflection this has on modern-day American culture.
[9] For Ellis, it meant it was time to go back to his award-winning book to change a few things. By few, I mean the last four paragraphs in the Appendix section. That is the only thing he changed. Instead of providing a conclusive final stamp of denial, as he did in the first edition, he replaces it with four measly paragraphs that admit "no matter how plausible my interpretation, it turns out to have been dead wrong." He acknowledges the DNA evidence is valuable because "the match with Eston shifts the burden of proof toward the presumption that Jefferson was the father of each. The likelihood of a long-standing sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings can never be proven absolutely, but it is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt." However, he goes no further than this. Instead of scrapping his previous work, he keeps it as is even though admits he was wrong in the tiny print at the back of the book.
[10] Historian Clarence Walker points out the obvious flaws in Ellis's original argument. In his essay "Denial is Not a River in Egypt," Walker notes the difficulty white male historians have in accepting interracial sex relations. He references a paragraph from Ellis's work:
When scholarly defenders like Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson claimed that Jefferson was "not the kind of man" to engage in illicit sex with an attractive mulatto slave, they were right for reasons that went deeper than matters of male gallantry and aristocratic honor. Jefferson consummated his relations with women at a more rarefied level, where the palpable realities of physical intimacy were routinely sublimated to safer and sentimental regions. He made a point of insulating himself from direct exposure to the unmitigated meaning of both sex and slavery, a lifelong tendency that an enduring liaison with Sally Hemings would have violated in ways he found intolerable.
Walker understands that this line of thinking has since changed for Ellis but that it still "illustrates the power of denial in the historical profession and an anxiety about interracial sex in the general public." He goes on to suggest that this difficulty arises from one's own personal dealings with racial heritage and the possibility that it "may or may not include a dark-skinned ancestor."
[11] Ellis wasn't the only historian to be proven wrong, however, and for the ones that were, not many spoke about it. Winthrop Jordan was an exception. In "Hemings and Jefferson: Redux," Jordan admits that prior to the DNA evidence, he spent little to no time on the suspected relationship because it was common knowledge that it came from an unreliable source in James Callender: "Like most historians then, I may have felt at first that James Callender ought not be taken seriously, since he was clearly less than a role model of historical accuracy and, even more plainly, was out for himself and decidedly not a nice person. I ended up writing five pages on the question of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, which amounted to less than half of one percent of that book." That book was a biography that omitted the most talked about mystery of the American man and the slave woman. Was Jordan just careless? How was he to know that what Callender published nearly three centuries ago would turn out to be more and more true? "I thought arrogantly," he confesses, "that I had broader and more important things in mind."
[12] Maybe historians shouldn't find things to be selectively important. Jordan just might have realized what Joshua Rothman points out so eloquently about Callender in his research essay on "James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia." Rothman notes that most people living in the small communities in Virginia were heavily engaged in the gossip circles. Thomas Jefferson was in the Who's Who of the interracial sex world, and everybody knew it: "Especially regarding a story of this nature, the possibilities for exaggeration to become hyperbole as the Jefferson-Hemings story passed from person to person and then to Callender were enormous. That Callender got so much of the story right is a remarkable testimony to the extent and transmission of social knowledge about private interracial sexual affairs in Virginia communities." Furthermore, it restores a little more credibility back to the man who published the story as a personal vendetta.
[13] "James Callender was a lot of things, but he was not usually a liar," Rothman says, "When he ran the Jefferson-Hemings story in 1802, he believed it to be the most damaging information he had on the president, and he hoped it would ruin Jefferson's political career. He knew Jefferson's supporters would deny it, but he wanted to be certain they could not refute it, and he repeatedly dared them to do so. They never did. Significantly, it didn't make any difference. Callender's attacks were by and large true, yet they had almost no impact upon Jefferson's political fortunes."
[14] On November 9, 1998, nearly a week after Gordon-Reed's response, Ellis wrote an article in U.S. News and World Report that directly addressed what the newfound DNA meant: "In conjunction with the circumstantial evidence that already existed, it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with his mulatto slave. As one of those students of Jefferson who had previously questioned that possibility, I think it is important that this near certain conclusion be announced to what Jefferson called a ‘candid world.'"
[15] Ellis seemed neither disheartened nor panicked when discussing the evidence. Instead, he just seemed to be moving right along once he accepted it, which didn't take long at all. There was no looking back, for what was done through his previous research was done and now denied. Instead of refuting the scientific evidence, he went along with it and asked a number of new questions because of it. One of the most important questions he raised was "What difference does it make?" But even more than that was To Whom?
For the several hundred Hemings descendants who have maintained that their oral tradition was more reliable than the oral tradition of the white members of the Jefferson family and also more historically accurate than a substantial group of Jefferson scholars were prepared to acknowledge, this news is deliverance. It confirms the stories they have been passing along from generation to generation.
[16] The timing of the DNA could not have been more coincidental for President William Jefferson Clinton, who valued the evidence for his own reasons. Clinton's first-term inaugural parade was held at Monticello, and there was a special screening of the Ken Burns documentary at the White House. "I happened to be present at the reception afterward," Ellis tells, "when Clinton asked the assembled historical consultants: ‘Do you think the story of a sexual liaison with Sally Hemings is true?'" A disappointed look had come over his face when the historian responded in the negative, but "he was, we now know, at that very time involved in his own sexual liaison with Monica Lewinksy." The DNA had given Clinton hope, however, because "the dominant effect of this news will be to make Clinton's sins less aberrant and more palatable. If a vote against Clinton is also a vote against Jefferson, the prospects for impeachment become even more remote."
[17] As Clinton's personal character came in to question before the eyes of the public, Jefferson's personal character was also returning into view in the minds of historians. Walker points out "the historical Jefferson mattered hardly at all in the ensuing exchanges. Indeed, the meaning of the DNA evidence became a function of one's position on Clinton rather than Jefferson, on Monica Lewinksy rather than Sally Hemings." But both were American symbols -- one in the past and one in the present. It was now time for America to decide how they were going to place their judgments.
[18] We all know the story of Clinton, but Jefferson's still has an ellipsis. Again, Ellis does a great job of asking the questions that will lead us to new avenues of interpretation. "Will these new revelations about his sexual connection to Sally Hemings undermine this apparently bottomless affection? Will Jefferson be knocked off the elevated pedestal on which we have placed him? My best guess is that he will survive this trial even more successfully than Clinton survives his." I'm not sure how Ellis gets away with referring to the DNA evidence as a "trial," but, then again, he did get away with only changing the last four paragraphs in the Appendix of his book. Regardless, it is important now to think about Jefferson's legacy and how historians are going to re-examine it in the post-DNA era.
[19] On March 5 and 6, 1999, a conference was held at Monticello and the University of Virginia to discuss just that. Historians and Jefferson scholars, along with Dr. Eugene Foster, gathered just months after the release of the DNA. Later that year, a collection of essays resulted from this panel and was published in book form, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture. It was edited and compiled by Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, two of the featured historians responding to the increasing cries from the American public that Jefferson was a hypocrite.
[20] Annette Gordon-Reed responds in her article in that book, "The Memories of a Few Negroes," that it is hard to differentiate which part of the hypocrisy is so upsetting:
Was it that Jefferson did not practice what he preached or that he preached what he did not practice? If the DNA test had turned out differently, would Jefferson have been more admirable because it would have shown that he made negative comments about race-mixing and stuck to his guns? Would people have breathed a sigh of relief because Jefferson's stated aversion to blacks was thorough, complete . . . and consistent?
Though Jefferson's character had always been in question, the DNA evidence now erases any excuse of "moral impossibilities," as defended by his granddaughter.
[21] The inability for Americans to put a finger on the juxtaposition of Jefferson's thoughts and actions is precisely what has kept this story alive for so long. Werner Sollors notes this internal dynamic in "Presidents, Race, and Sex" as something that "made it controversial and particularly gossip-worthy in American memory, a dynamic created by the coexistence of racial slavery and democracy. Antislavery authors of the United States and abroad were drawn to a story that dramatized this paradox at the foundation of American democracy." He is a Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, our third president. He is a man who embodies ideas of the Enlightenment, who kept endless field books and journals, and who spread his knowledge in letters. As far as Jefferson's central role in creating the early government of our nation, the DNA evidence doesn't mean anything. It doesn't change the fact that he shaped American foreign policy or revised the entire Virginia legal code. These achievements, among others, are what he has always been known for. But they have also been the very things that make his relationship with Sally Hemings scandalous, and to many people, hard to explain.
