| Episodes |
Analyzing Adair
Mary O'Reilly
with comments by Casey Hollawell and Danielle Heymann
[1] In an issue as controversial as that of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings's purported love affair, evaluating the evidence with an unbiased eye is imperative to arriving at a reputable conclusion. While various scholars have struggled with this challenge over the years, few have failed to do so more so than Douglass Adair. Despite putting on an air of objectivity, Adair's evaluation of the scandal and attempt to determine the reality of the situation in his 1960 essay entitled "The Jefferson Scandals" is biased from the very beginning. Regardless of his attempt to seemingly weigh the evidence with due consideration, Adair manipulates the story in three distinct ways to bolster his own belief that the affair did not happen: by repeatedly framing Sally in such a way that makes the reader doubt both her credibility and her morality, by omitting the critical testimony of Israel Jefferson, and by treating the uncertain possibility of a relationship with between Hemings and Peter Carr as an empirical fact. In these three ways, Adair's allegedly impartial evaluation of the story quickly devolves into a motivated attempt to clear Thomas Jefferson's name.
Adair's Alleged Objectivity
[2] Despite the distinctly biased approach employed in his essay, Adair frequently attempts to present himself as a neutral and honorable researcher the reader should trust. In order to do this, Adair repeatedly acknowledges the plausibility of the affair and the fact that it could have conceivably happened. For instance, when evaluating the evidence in the Farm Book, Adair recognizes that "significantly, the name of the father of Sally Hemings's children is not reported. Unlike many of the entries in Jefferson's Farm Book, which reveal the wife and husband in a family, Sally and her four children are shown living at Monticello with no designated husband-father" (170). Rather than brush over this remarkable fact that serves as potential evidence of Jefferson's paternity, Adair makes note of the fact that the absence of any father's name is unusual and important. In doing this, he is seemingly taking into account all the details pertinent to the story--regardless of what they imply.
[3] Adair seems similarly open-minded about the story when he later recognizes the plausibility of Sally becoming pregnant while in France, writing, "although young, it was undoubtedly physically possible for Sally to have become pregnant while in Paris, just as it would have been physically possible for her to have borne a child ‘soon' after her ‘arrival' in Virginia" (175). In acknowledging this fact, Adair gives the reader the impression that he has no issue accepting the possibility of Jefferson impregnating Sally in Paris. Even after officially discounting the Hemings family's oral tradition in all of six sentences, Adair maintains the appearance of open-mindedness as he concedes that "the discovery of one major misstatement of fact in Sally's report about her relations with Jefferson certainly does not disprove the truth of other claims she made" (176). Despite the fact that he is simultaneously dismissing a critical element of the story, Adair still manages to present this fact in a way that makes him seem objectively open to any conclusion.
[4] Adair's seemingly most impartial statement comes when he addresses the possibility of fault on behalf of the Jeffersons. After evaluating Thomas Jefferson Randolph's testimony, Adair concedes that "if, as we have seen, Sally desired to dramatize her relation with her great and famous master and was tempted to falsify the record in order to elevate her status and her children's paternity by attributing it to Jefferson, we must recognize that Randolph had perhaps as powerful a motive to invent a story that would clear Jefferson's name" (178). By acknowledging the potential for deception and falsehood in the Jefferson story, Adair again appears to be playing the part of the neutral and trustworthy investigative researcher simply seeking to provide a conclusive answer to this historical debate. (see comment by Casey Hollawell)
Adair's Character Assassination of Sally
[5] In reality, however, Adair's approach to the story is anything but neutral. When carefully considering the nature in which Adair frames Sally throughout his essay, it becomes readily apparent that the language he employs presents Sally in a light that causes readers to distrust and even resent her. To begin, Adair almost instantaneously establishes a connection between the existence of the scandal and it being Sally's fault. Rather than assign it to Callender, to Madison Hemings, to the Jefferson grandchildren, or to the historians like himself who repeatedly revisited the scandal over the years, Adair holds Sally single-handedly responsible for the creation and proliferation of the scandal. By repeatedly associating her with the generation of the story, Adair fosters a sense of resentment in readers towards Sally. Exacerbating this biased presentation of Sally and the cultivation of resentment towards her is Adair's recurring reference to the alleged inaccuracy of "Sally's" story.
[6] This disparaging framing of Sally is made evident time and again throughout Adair's essay. The fact that Adair never even gives readers the chance to accept Sally's story is first made evident when, only two paragraphs in to analyzing Madison Hemings's testimony, Adair refers to the content of his memoirs as "Sally's report" and "Sally's falsification of fact" (175). This manipulative language not only unjustly shifts the statement from being Madison's to being Sally's but also forces readers to view Sally as a liar right from the get-go. Despite his claims to be objective, Adair is explicitly contemptuous of Sally from the very beginning. His manipulative phrasing only worsens as the essay progresses. When later comparing Sally to Martha Jefferson and Maria Cosway, Adair writes "Sally, however, asks us to believe," "Sally would have us believe," "Sally would ask us to believe," and "[Sally] would try to convince us" all in the span of a mere page (182). Despite the glaringly important and well-known fact that Sally had no known contact with the public regarding her relationship with Jefferson, Adair insists on telling his readers that she desperately sought--and still does seek--to convince us of her sexual liaison with him. Sally's alleged insistence is compounded with even more contempt from Adair as he then continues to stress her alleged outrageous inaccuracies, referring to the scandal as "Sally Hemings's pathetic story" (183), "the twisted story Sally told her children" (185), and "her fictitious account" (185).
[7] By presenting Sally in such a repeatedly snide and disparaging light, Adair willfully attempts to bolster his own argument by sowing seeds of disdain in the reader's mind towards Hemings. Rather than giving both the Hemings side of the story and the Jefferson side of the story the opportunity to be perceived as equally valid, Adair actively strives to have readers dismiss the Hemings's story before having even adequately analyzed it. In doing so, Adair gives priority to the Jefferson story and his own vested point of view and fails as the objective historian. (see comment by Danielle Heymann)
Adair's Conspicuous Omission of Israel Jefferson
[8] Adair further loses his credibility as a trustworthy and objective historian with his conspicuous omission of Israel Jefferson's memoirs. A critical primary source from the nineteenth century, this testimony by a Monticello slave confirms the existence of a sexual relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. Published in the Pike County Republic in December of 1873, Israel's memoir reads, "I also know that [Jefferson's] servant, Sally Hemmings, (mother to my old friend and former companion at Monticello, Madison Hemmings,) was employed as his chamber-maid, and that Mr. Jefferson was on the most intimate terms with her; that, in fact, she was his concubine." Such a direct validation of Madison Heming's testimony and the scandal at large surely would have negated much of Adair's conclusion. Given that Adair's approach to the scandal was largely dependent on the number of sources examined and how many agreed on the same points, Israel Jefferson's confirmation of the affair would have tipped the scale to, at the very least, the conclusion that no definitive answer could be drawn from the resources then available. By excluding this source, however, Adair leaves Madison Heming's testimony unverified--meaning, to him, that it was therefore inarguably inaccurate.
[9] After outlining the details of Madison Hemings's and Colonel Thomas Jefferson Randolph's individual stories and highlighting the obvious disparities between the two, Adair holds that "faced with irreconcilable disagreement between two prejudiced witnesses--Sally Hemings and Jefferson Randolph--about the paternity of the Hemings children, we can accept neither with confidence unless we find independent corroboration for one or the other statement from some third and independent contemporary witness." Repeatedly insistent on the need for and value of cross-checking the various primary sources against one another in order to best determine which was accurate, Adair conveniently finds such a source to verify the testimony of Randolph. Using Edmund Bacon's testimony that Sally did not have a relationship with Thomas Jefferson, Adair is satisfied to conclude that because the number of those discounting the relationship outweigh the number of those supporting it, the relationship officially did not happen.
[10] While such a method is by no means very empirical to begin with, Adair's conclusion is even less trustworthy in light of his conspicuous omission of Israel Jefferson's testimony. As a slave who was born and worked at Monticello, Israel Jefferson's experience was none too different from Isaac Jefferson's--whose, Adair writes, "opportunity for knowledge of Jefferson's daily routine at home was unexcelled" (171). Therefore, the likelihood that Adair discounted his testimony on the basis of a lack of repute or credibility is unlikely. The possibility that Adair was unaware of the source is even less likely, given the fact that it was published in the exact same newspaper the exact same year as Madison Hemings's own memoir.
[11] Ultimately, then, Adair's omission of such a source must be attributed to the harm it might do his essay. Given his heavy-handed emphasis on the need for cross-checking and corroborating sources, Israel Jefferson's testimony verifying Madison Hemings's memoirs would have left Adair with no conclusive statement to make regarding whether or not Sally and Jefferson truly had a relationship. Were he actually the objective and investigative historian, however, Adair would have taken all the pertinent and available resources into consideration nonetheless. Instead, Adair is blinded by his bias and knowingly leaves out applicable material in an effort to shape the story as he sees it--not as the evidence shows it.
Adair's Leaping Assumptions Surrounding Peter Carr
[12] While Adair's bias in approaching the story of Jefferson and Hemings has been made amply evident already, what is perhaps his most explicit breech of objectivity manifests itself in the assumptions he makes regarding the presence of Peter Carr. Based on the testimony of Thomas Jefferson Randolph's claim that the father of Sally's children was actually Peter Carr and Edmund Bacon's statement that the father of Sally's children was someone other than Jefferson, Adair takes what is an unverified statement by a prejudiced witness and regards it as fact.
[13] After making the one leaping assumption that Peter Carr is definitively the father of Sally's children, Adair's argument rapidly devolves into the creation of a series of increasingly baseless presumptions. Having begun to refer to Sally's possible relationship with Carr as an empirical fact, Adair claims that "almost all the evidence points to the notion that Sally's connection with Peter Carr was a genuine love match, exhibiting deep and lasting emotional involvements for both partners" (187), that "there is no hint from any member of the Monticello household or from the record of Jefferson's Farm Book that Sally Hemings was to the slightest degree promiscuous" (187), and that "apparently [Carr] won her heart once and for all, for there is no evidence of Sally Hemings's attachment ever to any other man" (187). What Adair fails to mention, however, is that there is no evidence, period. There is no evidence in the Farm Book indicating anything regarding Sally's love life beyond the fact that she procreated. Therefore, there is no evidence regarding her monogamy or her promiscuity because there is no evidence of who her lovers were in the first place. Furthermore, there is certainly no evidence that she ever had an attachment to Carr to begin with--much less a "genuine love match."
[14] Regardless of these facts, however, Adair continues to make increasingly presumptuous statements. After deciding that Peter and Sally had a long-lasting and loving relationship, Adair suggests that Peter struggled with the torment of choosing between her and his wife, Hetty Smith, all his life--that, "despite his affection for his wife, he found that for at least ten years after his marriage he could not divorce himself from Sally" (188). Adair then further elaborates that Sally, hurt and jealous, sought revenge, but that "her revenge was neither to refuse him her body nor to punish him by accepting others but, more subtly, to deny to her children--the children who were the continuing mark of their mutual affection--that Carr was their father" (188).
[15] Conveniently enough, this last leaping assumption lands nicely at the heart of the scandal and provides a conclusive answer to exactly just what transpired at Monticello. By taking the idea that Sally's relationship was actually with Peter Carr and running with it, Adair yet again manages to shape the story to fit the confines of how he wants the public to perceive it rather than approach the testimony of Randolph and Bacon like a neutral historian. Where Adair should have recognized that these statements were completely unverified personal testimonies, he instead regards them as validated facts--once more failing to live up to the objective historian he claims to be.
Conclusion
[16] Despite his claim to be an unbiased historian weighing all the relevant information in the scandal surrounding Jefferson and Hemings's relationship, this careful examination of his work proves that Adair is quite the opposite. When analyzing the nature in which Adair argues and the assumptions he draws, it becomes undeniably clear that he strives to arrive at a specific preconceived conclusion--rather than allow the evidence to speak for itself. By repeatedly holding Sally accountable for the story itself and dismissing its accuracy, Adair frames her in such a way that fosters dislike and distrust from the very beginning. In doing this, Adair slowly strips away credibility from the Hemings's oral tradition and bolsters his own preferred Jefferson's version of the story. By then also omitting the patently relevant testimony of Israel Jefferson and his verification of Madison Hemings's memoir, Adair further shapes the story by manipulating the evidence to leave the Hemings's story uncorroborated while actively seeking validation for Randolph's version. With his final acceptance as fact the idea that Peter Carr was undoubtedly the father of Sally Hemings's children, Adair's biased approach to the scandal becomes undeniably clear. While he may purport to be a reputable and objective historian, his efforts to frame the story in such a way that bolster Thomas Jefferson Randolph's testimony reveal his predetermined opinions beyond any doubt.
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Comments
Danielle Heymann
While it is evident that Adair presents Sally in "a repeatedly snide and disparaging light," as O'Reilly describes, Adair's perception of Sally does not make me dismiss the Hemings' story. In fact, the Hemings family seems even more interesting to me now because the Adair essay lacks an unbiased standpoint on them. O'Reilly states that the Hemings' side will be forgotten as readers quickly adopt Adair's biased opinions of Jefferson. However, most perceptive readers will be skeptical of Adair as a result of his spiteful descriptions of Sally and might not be so quick to join the Adair bandwagon. Readers who see that Sally is targeted may want to learn more about the real Sally Hemings. How did Sally truly act towards her superiors and family? What did Sally think of Peter Carr or Thomas Jefferson? It would be difficult to discover answers to these questions by reading Adair's essay. While O'Reilly is attentive that Adair has a biased perspective and "fails as the objective historian," I would not agree that readers would accept his opinions without some uncertainty. Adair's harsh description of her actually inclines me to believe that his malevolence hinders the validity of his arguments.
Casey Hollawell
Adair without a doubt employs all the above stated method to appear as unbiased as possible, but it seems he utilizes an additional tactic. Throughout the piece Adair perfectly places a series of rhetorical questions, and though they appear to prove Adair's impartiality, it seems he may have had an ulterior motive. Adair asks readers, "Can we trust Randolph's evidence, which is flatly contradicted by that given by Madison Hemings?" (178). Such a statement allows a reader to pause and really think. Surely if Adair himself is questioning Randolph, he must truly hold an unbiased stance. Not quite. After asking such, Adair continues to explain that surely we can trust Randolph because his story directly mirrors that of Edmund Bacon. If Adair truly wished to remain unbiased, would he not then have asked, "Can we trust Heming's evidence, which is flatly contradicted by that given by that of Randolph?" Should not both sides, both evidences be thoroughly examined before moving on to his next point? Adair continues to use his deceitful tool in inquiring, "Do we really dare decide Sally is completely untrustworthy . . . on this late and partial evidence of two unsympathetic white men?" (181). This is exactly what Adair "dares" to do. He wastes no time in proceeding to paint a picture of an untrustworthy whore, lying for her own gain. Adair asks this question to appear that he's giving Sally a fighting chance within the debate, but he does precisely the opposite in the paragraphs that proceed. Throughout the essay Adair attempts to trick readers into falling into his false trap of impartiality, but when examined closely the text drastically suggests otherwise.
