The Jefferson - Hemings Controversy

Episodes

Brodie, Fawn M. "Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2.1 (1971) : 155-71.: Written before the publication of her biography, this review of biographies by Jefferson Establishment scholars Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, who live "virtually in the shadow of Monticello" where Jefferson is a "local deity," suggests that they might be too close to their subject. They have been extremely protective of Jefferson's "intimate life," belittling or labeling libelous certain key documents: "There is what one may call psychological evidence which they often ignore or do not see," and the "unanimity with which [they] deny him even one richly intimate love affair after his wife's death suggests that something is at work here that has little to do with scholarship."
Brodie, Fawn M. "The Political Hero in America." Virginia Quarterly Review 46 (1970): 57-60.: Before the publication of her biography Brodie discusses the inconsistency between Jefferson's view of blacks and his desire for emancipation. She reflects on how the controversial and widely-debated allegation of a relationship between slave Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson might affect "the specific nature of his future image." Brodie touches on how whites and blacks, in light of Jefferson's "ambivalences," view the politician disparately, saying that "the blacks, who repudiate him as a hero, nevertheless believe that the historical Jefferson was a man of great physical vitality, which naturally includes sexual vitality. They believe his descendants dot the country from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. The whites, on the contrary, in insisting on his sexual purity, turn him into a monastic, ascetic, virtually passionless president."
Brodie, Fawn M. "Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren: A Study in Historical Silences." American Heritage 27.10 (October 1976): 28-33, 94-99.: Brodie reports that "since the publication of [her biography] . . . descendants of Madison, Eston, and Thomas have come forward with scrapbooks, family Bibles, private genealogies, and pictures that have been quietly preserved over the generations," and she reports what she knows about the descendants of each of the children.
Brodie, Fawn M. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: Norton, 1974.: Brodie's iconoclastic thesis is that Jefferson and Hemings had a loving relationship for thirty-eight years, a relationship that paralyzed his early actions to end slavery. Jefferson was the tragic victim of a society that would not accept miscegenation.
Brodie, Fawn M. "The Great Jefferson Taboo." American Heritage 23.4 (June 1972): 49-57, 97-100.: Two years before the publication of her full-length biography, Brodie conveniently capsules here her argument for a relationship, and a loving one, between Jefferson and Hemings.
Brodie, Fawn. Letter to Editor. Time 3 March 1975: 67.: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,912945-4,00.html; Brodie responds to a characterization of her biography by Virginius Dabney and Dumas Malone as "dirty graffiti" as "a slap at all black people" that shows that the Jefferson Establishment continues to deny "this most remarkable of our founding fathers a capacity for love. One wonders why."
Brodie, Fawn. Rebuttal. In Jerry Knudson. "Jefferson the Father of Slave Children? One View of the Book Reviewers." Journalism History 3 (summer 1976): 56-60.: Contains a response from Brodie filled with positive comments to rebut what she felt was the negativity of Knudson's sample.
Campbell, Colin. "Biographer Finds a Different Jefferson." New York Times 4 July 1984: C9.: Interview of the 92-year-old Dumas Malone, foremost member of the so-called Jefferson Establishment that resisted belief in Jefferson's involvement with Hemings. Malone now says that it was the idea "in the Brodie version" of an affair for "years on end" that he couldn't accept, but "it might have happened once or twice."
Dabney, Virginius. "Facts and the Founding Fathers." Speech delivered at the Charter Day Convocation, College of William and Mary, February 8, 1975. Representative American Speeches: 1974-1975. Ed. Walso W. Braden. New York: Wilson, 1975.: A speech given at the College of William and Mary on the Bicentennial of the American Revolution. Dabney condemns Brodie's biography as objectionable not "simply because it advances wholly unproved charges against Jefferson. It is even more objectionable because it seeks to show that the alleged fathering of a brood of mulatto children affected Jefferson's whole life thereafter, giving him a guilt complex." Dabney goes on to quote "the three greatest living authorities," Dumas Malone, Julian P. Boyd, and Merrill Peterson, on their unpublished views on Brodie's book. Each historian substantiates Dabney's argument, deeming Brodie's work invalid. He laments that "it is, however, dismaying that persons of presumed discrimination have accepted the slanders in these volumes."
Dabney, Virginius. Interview, July 31, 1975, conducted by Daniel Jordan and William H. Turpin for Documenting the American South. 77-79.: http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/A-0311-2/A-0311-2.html; Dabney talks about the circumstances surrounding his William and Mary speech.
Jones, John A. Editorial. [Waverly, Ohio] Watchman 18 March 1873. Reprinted Dumas Malone and Steven H. Hochman, "A Note on Evidence: The Personal History of Madison Hemings." Journal of Southern History 41.4 (1975): 523-28.: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1873rebuttal.html
Malone, Dumas, and Steven H. Hochman. "A Note on Evidence: The Personal History of Madison Hemings." Journal of Southern History 41.4 (1975): 523-28.: As another attack on the memoir of Madison Hemings accepted by Brodie, Malone and Hochman contextualize it with two other pieces designed to dilute its efficacy in the controversy: first, the introduction by editor S. F. Wetmore to the series in which the memoir appeared (with an analysis of his political motives), and, second, the nasty response to the memoir of Hemings by journalist John A. Jones. Their goal is to cast doubt on the authenticity and validity of Sally Hemings's story of what happened in Paris by suggesting Wetmore's political agenda and by providing contemporary assessment of Madison's reliability.
Malone, Dumas. "Jefferson's Private Life." New York Times 18 May 1974: 31.: Publishes the 1858 Ellen Randolph Coolidge letter naming Samuel Carr as the father of Sally's children to rebut Fawn Brodie's acceptance of the Madison Hemings version. Malone also published the letter in the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, but the shorter introduction here clearly shows his motive is to rebut Brodie.
Malone, Dumas. "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 84.1 (1974): 65-72.: The 1858 letter of Ellen Randolph Coolidge. First published as a result of the Brodie flap. Subsequent to the publication of Fawn Brodie's 1974 book accepting Madison Hemings's account of a relationship between Jefferson and his mother, Malone publishes this key 1858 letter of Jefferson granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge as a rebuttal, while providing his own introduction to it. Malone explains, "[Jefferson] well knew that slander, once raised, could never be wholly silenced, and he believed that the charges against him could be sufficiently answered by the tenor of his life. Mrs. Coolidge has specific suggestions [that is, Jefferson's nephew, Samuel Carr] about the paternity of Sally's children that cannot be dismissed lightly and her letter bears intimate witness to the tenor of her grandfather's private life." Thus, Malone deems the oral history of one family superior to the oral history of the other. Malone also published the Coolidge letter in the New York Times, but with a different introduction.
Miller, John Chester. The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. New York: Free Press, 1977.: Important because it is the first major book on this subject after Brodie's biography. It is a direct response to Brodie. Miller says Brodie's book "imposed" on him the need to write this book because she put a "gloss of verisimilitude" on the old "political canard" of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship. At least one reviewer points out how hostile Miller is to Brodie.
Rinaldi, Ann. Wolf by the Ears. New York: Scholastic, 1991.: A young person's biography of Harriet Hemings influenced by reading Brodie's biography. In her author's note, Rinaldi remembered that "Brodie's book and articles affected me deeply. I could not bear to think, as Brodie had written, that these children, who might have been the unacknowledged offspring of so great a man, had to wait to be freed by him, or, as in the case of Tom Hemings and his brother Beverly, had to run away."
Smith, Page. Jefferson: A Revealing Biography. New York: American Heritage Publishing Co, 1976.: "It will . . . be the assumption of this work that Sally Hemings did indeed become Jefferson's mistress, that the relationship ended in love if it did not begin in it, and that Sally Hemings was a notably self-reliant, independent woman who gave Jefferson all the love, attention, and tenderness that the most amiable of wives could give a husband."
Vidal, Gore. Burr: A Novel. New York: Random House, 1973.: Revisionist history, like Brodie's, views Jefferson from the perspective of one of his arch-enemies. Descriptions of Jefferson and Sally are not very flattering. Dabney pairs Vidal's novel with Brodie's history as two examples of the dirt done to Jefferson and the Founding Era around the time of the Bicentennial.
Williamson, Joel. New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States. 1980. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995. 44-48.: A section on the possible Jefferson-Hemings relationship in this "outline" history of miscegenation written primarily in 1977-1978 -- doubting that it occurred -- makes no mention of Brodie.