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1) The time has come, it seems, to erect a new tombstone for Thomas Jefferson. Before the Virginia statesman died he requested that his grave marker record him as "Author of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." But if we are to believe Fawn M. Brodie, that inscription should be replaced by one that reads: "Thomas Jefferson: Attempted Seducer of his Best Friend's Wife, Adulterer with Mrs. Richard Cosway, and Sire of Numerous Illegitimate Children by his Slave Sally."
David Herbert Donald 96
2) If we can take some of the unusual or unorthodox conclusions drawn by Ms. Brodie with due caution, we should accept this biography as an enlivening contribution to the vast Jefferson literature. I think the writer has made Jefferson's life as a human being, rather than his life as a statesman, far more interesting to thousands of us than it has ever been before.
Murat Williams
3) Fawn Brodie's book is not listed as fiction, and it is clearly based upon long and intensive study. Jefferson's name appears in the title, but the excuse for the book, and really the central character is one of Jefferson's slavesâ€"Sally Hemings, a nearly white half sister of Jefferson's late wife, by whom Jefferson allegedly had several children. The book then is not about Jefferson's political career, his services to his state and country, his contributions to education, to agriculture, to architecture, or even to political thought, though much can be found about these and others of his amazing range of accomplishments. It is about his secret love life.
Benjamin F. Wright 157
4) Jefferson biographers have been preoccupied with the kinds of food Jefferson ate, the books he read, the kind of music he enjoyed, and how he liked to spend his recreational time. Nonetheless, at least two reviewers of An Intimate History minimized the significance of even the possibility that Jefferson had a thirty-eight year long relationship with Hemings. Winthrop Jordan was "persuaded that it does not much matter." Similarly, Edward Weeks criticized Brodie for "driving her thesis so dramatically" and then asks rhetorically, "Does it really matter?" Once again, the selectivity with which the Jefferson Establishment viewed Jefferson's life is stunning.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 290
5) In my opinion, Brodie's writings lack evidentiary support. I think that she is an incredibly gifted writer and as a romantic myself, I found I was occasionally swayed by her arguments until I realized that she uses almost no historical facts to support her ideas. I think Samantha and Elizabeth were extremely insightful when they referred to Brodie as using the "character card in reverse." At this phase in our research, I think that we have enough evidence to support both sides so why do we listen to a woman whose only proof is her emotional feelings about the subject? Mary made an excellent point when she discussed how Brodie "did her research backwards." When you are writing about a controversial topic such as this one, I believe Brodie's work does not cut it. She needs to actually persuade her audience not just attempt to pull at their emotional heartstrings to win their support. Brodie also tries to make us look at Jefferson's other flings to support the idea that he and Hemings really did have a romantic relationship. In my opinion, I do not believe that Jefferson's relationships with Maria Cosway, Betsey Walker, or Martha Wayles help her case. These women all proved, in some historians' opinion, that Jefferson could not have possibly loved a black woman when he loved great women such as these. They use historical facts and reason which makes their arguments remain in my mind when I read articles such as Brodie's.
Caroline Nype, Lehigh University
6) She [Fawn Brodie] first visited Charlottesville in March 1969 when she had the opportunity to interact with some members of the so-called "Jefferson Establishment," including Dumas Malone and James A. Bear. Initially Brodie's relationship with these individuals appeared cordial. Malone, at the time the foremost Jefferson scholar, expressed "great pleasure" at having the opportunity to talk to Brodie and urged her to "keep in touch."
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 436
7) In fairness, it should be said that occasionally Brodie is on target; she puts Jefferson's agrarian philosophy in proper perspective, and she is accurate in her description of Jefferson's thinking about Great Britain and France. Finally, Brodie's writing is sometimes superb.
Clifford Egan 135
8) [Brodie] sets out to relate the canonized public Jefferson to the passionate, guilt-ridden private man whose sensual adventures have been glossed over by generations of sanctifying historians.
Michael Demarest
9) In any event, the book [Fawn Brodie's] is necessarily a fuller history of Jefferson's career than it is of his relationship to Sally Hemings. But, in fact, it is the most suggestive account we have of whatever there is to know about this slave, who belonged to Thomas Jefferson in all senses of the word.
Alfred Kazin
10) I truly appreciated Brodie's alternative character defense, to me it almost seemed like a common sense defense and is refreshing almost. The prior defenses we have seen, while supported by evidence, are sometimes not supported by logic. The character defense turns Jefferson into a saint, an unrealistic quality for any man, even a president. Brodie's reliance on the romance of the relationship, while slightly fantastical draws on the acknowledgment of the basic human need for love.
Sarah Freeman, Lehigh University
11) While we have reached a point, thanks to technology and science, where the evidence can no longer be ignored, I would suggest that in a cultural sense we are still abiding by Thomas Jefferson's rule. We are forgetting Sally Hemings' life, her efforts to free her children, and dismissing with silence the woman behind the president. She has been reduced to a slave woman who was in love with her master, a master who happened to be the third president of the United States. Despite the fact that even the assumption of love between a master and a slave woman has profoundly disturbing implications about the institution of slavery, the nature of the categories involved, and the power dynamics we have tried to assign to it, the public focus has mostly been given to the white male figure in the scenario.
Emily Honey
12) She [Fawn Brodie] has managed to write a long and complex study of Jefferson without displaying any acquaintance with eighteenth-century plantation conditions, political thought, literary conventions, or scientific categories -- all of which greatly concerned Jefferson. She constantly finds double meanings in colonial language, basing her argument on the present usage of key words. She often mistakes the first meaning of a word before assigning it an improbable second meaning and an impossible third one.
Garry Wills
13) At once hero and fool, the third president of the United States emerges as both framer and victim of his own times. . . . it seems clear that his relationship with Sally Hemings was closer in nature to a love affair than the casual debauchery of slave by master. She was, after all, his sister-in-law.
Carlyle Douglas 61, 64
14) This tendency causes Brodie to overlook the linkages between many of Jefferson's actions as President and his character and worldview, both of which had been pretty well formed long before he is said to have entered into the relationship with Sally Hemings. Instead, Brodie devotes much attention to the issues of Jefferson's presidency that centered around personalities (such as the rift with Adams, the Burr conspiracy, and rumors of miscegenation). Issues that continue to fascinate students of the presidency (such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Embargo, and Marbury vs. Madison) are crammed into the fewest number of pages as possible.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 340
15) I wonder if Brodie thinks Jefferson and Hemings shared a candle-lit dinner in celebration of Valentine's Day. Her evidence is just as shaky as the holiday itself. Though it is refreshing to have someone acknowledge this relationship without its immediate dismissal, the grounds on which it stands seem more like wishful thinking than concrete evidence. She takes a look at Jefferson's past relationships with all the women he couldn't have, who were in some way forbidden. She also looks at the basic ambiguity of Jefferson's life, which made it possible for him to approach slavery and his relationship with Sally in the same manner. He was so elusive and mysterious, that he was consistently inconsistent with his beliefs and actions. And that makes sense, sure. . . . She also mentions that All the Cool Kids Were Doing It, as in, many Presidents had scandalous affairs and nowhere near perfect marriages, but they weren't protected by biographers in the same way because I suppose they weren't as heroic. I see this playing out much like Valentine's Day: you want to believe so badly that it's a real holiday, but it's not: it's all made up by our grand fantasies of what we wish it to be.
Kristen Dalton, Lehigh University
16) The virtue of this book is that it offers the most extensive extant psychological portrait of Jefferson; a major fault is that, in following Jefferson in his separation of head and heart, the book comes off flat and one-dimensional. Brodie's data, with few exceptions, are not new, only newly interpreted, which is exactly the right method in this sort of work.
Bruce Mazlish 1090
17) The urge to rock the pedestals under our national heroes is a healthy symptom, one supposes, of our rowdy American manners, and scholars are not immune to it. As a rule, however, this mild scholarly vandalism tells us more about the scholars than the heroes they attack. Thomas Jefferson has teetered at their hands for 200 years without ever being in the least danger of a fall. These three books, each in its own way, suggest why Jefferson's reputation remains secure. When one is dealing with a President who was not only the founder of one major party but the patron saint of the other, not only architect, naturalist, and gardener, but philologist and bird fancier (he kept a pet mockingbird in the presidential office), a bit of chipping around the edges of the alabaster isn't likely to be noticed. Indeed these new books, where critical of Mr. Jefferson, invite reflection on the biographers -- the reviewers reviewed, as it were.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. 542
18) Easily among the most compelling biographies yet to appear in the literature of American lives, Brodie's Jefferson is bound to stir up controversy for years to come, not only over her interpretation of Jefferson's character but also over her methodology. While acknowledging Jefferson's rationality and his passion for order and discipline, Brodie questions the interpretations of Jefferson, presented most recently by Merrill D. Peterson and Dumas Malone, as a person who for the most part held his sexual and emotional drives in check. Her case is a good one.
Lois W. Banner 1390
19) Part of the book's success was due to Norton's promotional efforts. In late April the publisher sent Brodie on a publicity trip to New York City and Washington, D.C., where she was interviewed by both the print and the electronic media. Feature articles appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Post. In New York City Brodie received national exposure through an interview on NBC's Today show. In Washington, Brodie's biography quickly became a topic of comment in elite social-literary circles. It was the focus on conversation at a birthday dinner party given for Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy. And a number of prominent Washingtonians, including David Brinkley and Art Buchwald, were all reportedly deeply engrossed in the biography.
Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie 215-17
20) "Does a man's sexuality atrophy at thirty-nine, especially if he has already demonstrated that he was capable of a very great passion?" (Brodie 28.) As I read over this section I couldn't help but feel that Brodie was finally vocalizing a view that others were too scared to admit to. If anyone stops and thinks about it, it seems very logical and possibly and maybe even likely that a 40-year-old male widow would struggle with a sense of loyalty to his dead wife and a sexuality that is unfulfilled. Jefferson is only human, and it is so brave of Brodie to point out something which was probably on the tip of everyone else's tongue or in the back of people's minds for quite some time.
Kimbrilee Weber, Lehigh University
21) Brodie's book has been enormously successful. It was on the N.Y. Times' general best seller list for 14 weeks after its release on April 8, 1974. And the Book-of-the-Month club offered the book to its million and a quarter members as a special spring selection that year. This new biography of Jefferson -- although Brodie does not call it that -- first coasted along on praise in about half of the reviews appearing in newspapers and magazines. Then it received condemnation in a number of scholarly journals. Thus, it offers a good opportunity to see what standards are used today in the popular press in reviewing new history books.
Jerry Knudson 56
22) When I read reviews of Mrs. Brodie's book last spring and noted its wide circulation and wider appeal, I had a sense that justice was being done on a large scale -- not necessarily in the case of Jefferson, but rather in the case of all those Americans who are the sons and daughters of miscegenation. I felt that a veil was being lifted and that a barrier was being removed. . . . All around us we in Virginia see the living evidence of miscegenation, but what kind of pretense are we guilty of to treat it as unmentionable? . . . I look on this as a kind of gratuitous insult that belongs to 19th Century mental outlook of Southerners, but has no part in our world.
Murat Williams, qtd. in Jerry Knudson 60
23) It will, in any event, 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. Jefferson reputedly had promised Martha on her deathbed not to marry again. There is no indication that he was ever tempted.
Page Smith 210
24) [John Chester] Miller argues at length that the Hemings story falls short in two major respects: Jefferson consciously avoided sexual relationships outside marriage (as evidenced by his careful pose with women during his tenure as minister to France) and in fact held a personal repugnance toward miscegenation. His antislavery thought was directed to a great extent by his belief in innate racial inferiority. For him the essential condition of emancipation included the removal of blacks from white society.
Eugene H. Berwanger 438-39
25) By appealing not only to his audience at William and Mary College with what I hope was perceived as a feign attempt to curry favor, Dabney makes a desperate effort to guilt his audience into disregarding the words of Brodie and instead being blindly gracious to our forefathers. Certainly we can be gracious to their contributions, but to do so at the price of turning a blind eye to their scandals would be a disservice to the very foundation of a nation they were creating. To relinquish accountability in repayment for only their memorable deeds is not what this nation was founded upon; rather, that is more indicative of the unjust hierarchy that our forefathers were escaping from in forming this nation.
Brian Cohen, Lehigh University
26) Finally, the whole work suffers a little because the author at one point becomes too preoccupied with combatting the thesis of Fawn Brodie and others that Jefferson fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings. [John Chester] Miller concludes, rather dogmatically, that Jefferson's "character" simply would not have permitted such a deed. Like many another recent American historian, Miller seemingly subscribes to the (I think) fallacious premise that the whole Thomas Jefferson either inviolably stands as larger than life or meanly falls into the dust, depending upon the resolution of this historiographical debate.
Robert. P. Hay 177
27) All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Mrs. Brodie is not trying to debunk Jefferson, whom she greatly admires. Instead, she appears to be a disciple of the late A. C. Kinsey and believes that a man ought to be judged by the fullness and frequency of his sex life.
David Herbert Donald 96
28) Consider the genetic actualities and you may agree with me that the indignation of our senior historians may be of fading importance. In the newer world into which we are emerging, the equality of men, of which Jefferson dreamed, is more and more likely. In twenty years we have made great strides. A new path is open to another generation and on that new path, whether we like it or not, Mrs. Brodie's book is a landmark.
Murat Williams
29) Jefferson biographers unwilling to believe that Jefferson would have "exploited" Hemings by having sex with her have also precluded the possibility that Jefferson may have felt affection towards Sally. The implication here is that the great statesman, the face on the nickel, could not have lowered himself enough to choose a slave for a companion. Brodie, however, ascribes humanity to both Jefferson and Hemings equally. In another much maligned passage of An Intimate History, Brodie claimed that the two had a mutual affection for each other, which was "long a private, and inoffensive secret."
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 289
30) I've always hated reading a critical review of a movie after I go see because it seems it always forces me to find flaws with the film that I would have been happily unaware of prior to the review. This is kind of how I felt in reading Brodie's "Taboo" article and following it with a handful of critical backlashes. While at first I found there to be little wrong with Brodie's argument, reading the ensuing responses has made me a little more dubious of the validity of what she wrote. While I agree with the basic argument that Jefferson and Hemings did have an affair, I don't know that Brodie's "academic" approach to proving it was all that impressive.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
31) Brodie's New Orleans presentation sparked intense controversy. Merrill Peterson, in his role as a commentator, "blasted the speech," according to Brodie. She dismissed his remarks as not just an "attack" but also "intemperate and all rhetoric." On the other hand, Winthrop Jordan, the other commentator at the session, in the words of Brodie, "liked" the presentation, finding the "documentation impressive." As for the audience, she believed it was "deeply divided: one saw it in the applause, and also in the questions" asked.
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 442-43
32) To Brodie's factual errors, contradictions, and cavalier use of evidence must be added another sin -- the injection of contemporary issues into evaluating the past. This is most glaring with the racial question. "It was in his private life," Brodie tells us, "that Jefferson defined the relationship between blacks and whites in America, acting out in the most specific sense the psychosexual dilemma of the whole nation." This is a major, indeed breathtaking generalization inaccurate not only because one person does not define a complex problem, but also because Brodie never proves Jefferson's involvement with black or white women.
Clifford Egan 134
33) In any event, the book [Fawn Brodie's] is necessarily a fuller history of Jefferson's career than it is of his relationship to Sally Hemings. But, in fact, it is the most suggestive account we have of whatever there is to know about this slave, who belonged to Thomas Jefferson in all senses of the word.
Alfred Kazin
34) Nell Painter says: "American history is full of symbols that do their work without a basis in life. . . . Like other invented greats, Truth is consumed as a signifier and beloved for what we need her to have said. . . . Americans consume Sojourner Truth as the embodiment of a meaning necessary for their own cultural formations." Sally Hemings is another one of these American symbols, a creation of a culture that needs her to perform specific functions. I suggest that Hemings is being used to propagate the idea that America has finally gotten over its fear of miscegenation in breaking the silence about Thomas Jefferson. At the same time, she is being relegated to the background in favor of Jefferson. Her story is being silenced even as it is coming to light, and that silence helps reinforce racial lines.
Emily Honey
35) It kind of feels to me as though Brodie basically did her research backwards -- she firmly decided on the idea that Jefferson fell intensely in love with Sally in France before she actually had any substantial evidence to back it up. It then seems like she went looking for information that she could manipulate to match her story -- information that, on its own, bore little "evidence" of their relationship. It also seems as though she then ignored what information didn't support her argument. Instead of aspiring to write a chapter on Jefferson's relationship with Hemings that was as informative and accurate as possible, it instead feels as though she wrote one that was intended to simply be as convincing as possible.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
36) That last sentence is typical of Ms. Brodie's hit-and-run method -- to ask a rhetorical question, and then proceed on the assumption that it has been settled in her favor, making the first surmise a basis for second and third ones, in a towering rickety structure of unsupported conjecture.
Garry Wills
37) Throughout the book, a fundamental tension exists between what Brodie regards as her subject's "inner life" and "intimate history." She shows herself to be sensitive to the difference between the two in the foreword and even attempts in the opening chapter to see "intimate history" as the result of his "inner life." With the introduction of the Hemings speculations, however, the causal connection comes to a grinding halt. Thus Jefferson's behavior and policy pronouncements after 1787 are seen as a product of his "intimate history" alone rather than of forces which shaped it.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 340
38) She [Fawn Brodie] firmly accepts the reality of a relation which is, for many historians, still speculation, and she does not sufficiently weigh the psychological evidence on the other side of the question.
Bruce Mazlish 1090
39) Her "intimate history" digs hard for Jeffersonian quirks sufficient to fit Jefferson into their eccentric company. Her aim, it seems, is to turn biographical orthodoxy on its head in the most approved psychoanalytic manner: what others, including the magisterial Professor Malone, have dismissed as the canards of partisan or personal spite, or relegated to the realm of airy speculation, she solemnly tries to establish as fact. What they document, and interpret with reference to accepted theories of human conduct, she grudgingly admits only as the overt manifestation of "unconscious" urgings and motives -- although, like all such subterranean promptings, they are necessarily less apparent to the man himself than to a historian blessed with the insight of a Freud or Erikson.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. 542
40) What I find especially interesting about Will's review is that he actually doesn't deny the existence of a relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. He just disapproves of the way Brodie substantiates her argument and her assumption that their relationship was one of great splendor and romance. I think at the end of the day I agree more with Wills than I do with Brodie -- there may be evidence to suggest that they had a relationship, but even that is not certain. No one should be arguing with such ferocity, then, about the nature of their relationship. There is truly no evidence to effectively prove how romantic their interactions were or weren't, and any biographer should refrain from trying to pass their relationship off as empirically romantic -- or unromantic.
Mary O'Reilly, Lehigh University
41) Faced with the scarcity of direct sources on Jefferson's personal life -- a scarcity that has left previous scholars loath to plumb the depths of his character -- Brodie has turned to an intensive psychological analysis of the body of Jefferson's writings, whether personal or public. The technique is highly speculative, although the speculation is often brilliant. But it rests on two shaky assumptions: first, that there is a real psychological dimension, not only to private letters but also to public documents; and second, that the pre-Freudian eighteenth-century man had roughly the same psychological make-up as the twentieth-century man, and that modern psychological techniques can consistently be used to analyze him. Moreover, the unrelenting rigor of Brodie's psychologizing leads her to many questionable speculations.
Lois W. Banner 1390
42) Fawn's deep affection for -- even infatuation with -- Jefferson had only grown during the course of her research and writing. She found, by her own report, that in her nighttime dreams, she and Jefferson became "man and wife." She related to her subject on even a deeper level: "If I had been [born] a man," she told her son Bruce, "I would have been a man like [Jefferson]."
Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie 215-17
43) How did Brodie's book fare with the reviewers in the spring and summer of 1974 when it first came out? In a sample of 22 reviews (11 newspapers and 11 magazines other than scholarly journals) it was found that only five historians were assigned to review the book. Did they tend to accept Brodie's evidence on the paternity matter? One did, four did not. Of other reviewers, nine did, eight did not. Why the difference?
Jerry Knudson 57
44) Finally, for a man bitterly opposed to slavery, the taking of a slave woman as a mistress was both a kind of expiation for his guilt and a self-crucifying act. In so doing, Jefferson placed the issue of race at the center of his life: at the point of sex and the siring of children. If Maria Cosway had stimulated his sexual desires without perhaps always fulfilling them and thus stirred him into new life, these desires moved readily and almost inevitably toward this exciting new female presence in the household.
Page Smith 210
45) [Brodie] states that Jefferson was a victim of society that would condemn such a relationship. While I do not believe in this fantasy alternative, that an almost forty year-old Jefferson and a fourteen year-old girl were capable of finding love, to be fathomable, it does bring to light another option. Call me pessimistic, but I think Brodie's notion is nothing more than a hopeful conclusion to what may have been an extremely oppressive situation.
Alexandra Neumann, Lehigh University
46) As harsh and exaggerated as the criticisms over her methods were, the most revealing criticism Brodie received was from historians who claimed she underestimated or misunderstood Jefferson's "character." Prior to Brodie, most Jefferson biographers tended not only to shy away from but were prone to vehemently renounce any intimation that Thomas Jefferson remained sexually active after his beloved wife Martha's death in 1782. Family legend had it that Jefferson promised Martha, on her deathbed, that he would never marry again. Most biographers concluded that Jefferson would not have violated even the spirit of that promise by becoming intimate with another woman. Brodie hoped to counteract this traditional characterization of Jefferson as "essentially passionless, monastic, and ascetic" following Martha's death.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 285-86
47) Both [Dumas Malone and Merrill D. Peterson], she [Fawn Brodie] observed, teach at the University of Virginia, "virtually in the shadow of Monticello," where "Jefferson is so much a ‘presence' . . . and so omnipresent a local deity, that one cannot help wondering if this in itself does not exercise a subtle direction upon anyone who chooses to write about him. . . . Despite their declared bewilderment over the mysteries of the inner man, Jefferson biographers" such as Malone and Peterson have "been extremely protective of his inner life, or rather of his intimate life, which is not quite the same thing."
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 443-44
48) When Brodie strays away from her speculations about Jefferson and the heart (the bulk of the book) and into Jefferson the public man, the result is sheer disaster as error follows error. She is only one day off on the Chesapeake-Leopard affair (June 22, 1807, not June 23) but thirteen months off on the embargo (December 22, 1807, not November 1806). The maritime restrictions of the Napoleonic era baffle her.
Clifford Egan 133-34
49) Professor Brodie has the grace to describe Jefferson not as a hypocrite but as a self-defeating Virginian who wanted to do better than he did but did not always know what he wanted.
Alfred Kazin
50) This first turning point reveals that this controversy goes much deeper than simply whether or not Jefferson and Hemings were in a relationship that produced children. It seems to have now become a much deeper struggle between those who are willing to see things differently than they had before and those who are too stubborn to let go of past opinions and embrace the reality of what this relationship might have been.
Samantha Christal, Lehigh University
51) The current treatment of Sally Hemings as a historical figure bears out Gordon-Reed's assertion. While the vision of Thomas Jefferson is adapted to allow for human emotions, contradictions, failings, and double standards, the portrait of Sally Hemings is still left blurry and indistinct because historians and our society generally have difficulty dealing with the complicated nature of a relationship between a slave woman and her master, what that relationship might mean for her children, and the implications this has about the nature of racism in contemporary culture. Bringing forth this woman out of history in all her real life would entail a complete reassessment of the "dusky" areas between blacks and whites, and a realization of how closely intertwined the races actually are. To allow Sally Hemings agency and personhood in the pages of history and literature would begin to break down both racial binaries and familial bloodlines in a way that would completely rewrite the framework of American social relations. We need to follow Rinaldi into those "dusky" areas of Sally's life, and into the dusky areas of slave families, miscegenation, and continued racism and segregation in order to understand our current cultural problems, and bring them to light on the page. We need to create "scraps of paper" not only for Sally, but also for all of the other women, men, and children who have been written out of history.
Emily Honey
52) Ms. Brodie argues that Jefferson had, by 1788, fallen in love with the fifteen year old quadroon slave, Sally Hemings, who accompanied his daughter to meet him in France. She offers as "evidence" of his "special preoccupation" with Sally the "singular" fact that he used the word "mulatto" eight times in twenty-five pages of his travel account that spring. But all these references are to the color of the soil, and the OED gives that use of the word as peculiarly American and eighteenth-century.
Garry Wills
53) Brodie's interpretation fails to take into account the transformations that had taken place in the southern economy in the years between 1776 and 1826 as well as Jefferson's connection of his role as a politician and elder statesman, and the similar vacillations of many of his contemporaries.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 340
54) Brodie's analysis of the psychological situation is simply not convincing -- which is not to say that her conclusion may not be right -- though she then takes as bedrock what is still the shifting sands of speculation.
Bruce Mazlish 1090
55) Danielle Steele's predecessor? I anticipated that Brodie would have a legitimate argument, and maybe she builds one later in her book, but I was disappointed that she essentially just wants to believe Hemings and Jefferson loved each other and that's it. I did, however, find it interesting that the way in which she used the character card was in support of a completely different viewpoint than we've seen up to this point, saying that he wasn't a bad guy for having an affair with Hemings. That Jefferson, in fact, was a loving man, who fell in love with a "forbidden" woman. It seems a little too romance-novel, almost like the "lurid romance novel" Adair mentions in his essay we previously read.
Samantha Feinberg, Lehigh University
56) Brodie is convinced that Jefferson was a sly, lusty lady's man who after the early death of his wife (in 1782) scandalized his young daughters by carrying on an affair in Paris with the English artist Maria Cosway, and in Paris and at Monticello with a lovely mulatto slave girl, Sally Hemings, breeding several "yellow" children by the latter. These alleged amours, for which the evidence is slight and circumstantial, form the centerpiece -- the prurient centerpiece, one is forced to say -- of a not unaffectionate portrait. Its larger theme is that Jefferson, the cerebral philosophe, was really a sensual creature governed, if not indeed enslaved, by carnal passions: a secret Don Juan of the Enlightenment. That these passions drew him into scandalous assignations with slave women is, so Dr. Brodie ventures, a strong clue to the waning of his youthful enthusiasm for emancipation, which in later years dwindled into weak ambivalence.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. 542
57) Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History is undoubtedly Fawn Brodie's best-known biography. Certainly it was her most popular, appearing on the New York Times best seller list for thirteen weeks. Going through five printings during the first year of publication in 1974, it ultimately sold a total of 80,000 copies in hardback. Issued as a Bantam paperback a year later, the book sold 270,000 additional copies from 1975 to 1979 and netted its author some $350,000 in royalties. More important, Thomas Jefferson affirmed Brodie's status as a preeminent American biographer.
Newell G. Bringhurst, Fawn McKay Brodie 185
58) So Sally Hemings was in one sense the perfect mate. She belonged to Jefferson in two ways: she was his lover and his property. She was intelligent, handsome, perhaps beautiful, full of spirit and fire, undoubtedly "ardent" -- a rewarding companion in bed -- and above all unthreatening. If their relationship was, by the nature of it, ambiguous, she was not. Psychologists tell us there is a bondage complex in many men which involves a heightened sexual pleasure that is the consequence of masculine dominance expressed in the binding or confining of the sexual partner. Certainly the apparently almost universal indulgence of white masters with black slave women must have been related to this "bondage," which in turn is related to fantasies of rape; every relation of a white man with a black woman had this covert quality of rape, of taking something forbidden. Jefferson himself was unlikely to have been unaffected by it to some degree. What was secretive in Jefferson's nature must have responded to this most secret of relationships.
Page Smith 210-11
59) It was always Brodie's contention that she did not launch the biographical project in order to "prove" the Hemings affair but instead discovered evidence for the affair, which she was unable to ignore, in the process of her research.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 285
60) Whatever else she had done, Brodie had burnt her bridges to the "Jefferson Establishment."
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 444
61) Apart from speculation, conjecture, and guesswork, the author points out that the master of Monticello was home nine months before each of Sally's babies was conceived. This is hardly a bombshell; Ebony Magazine noted this fact years ago. In any case, being present hardly proves Jefferson's paternity.
Clifford Egan 133
62) The author [Fawn Brodie] sees Jefferson's psychological as well as economic predicament as a slaveholder. There were slaves, not just his own children, who if freed would have had to leave the state and disappear from his life.
Alfred Kazin
63) Well, does the psychic revelation derive, not from repetition of the word ["mulatto"] but from its choice in the first place? After all, though it was a use common in agrarian contexts, Jefferson could have chosen another word. Did he choose this one (instead of yellowish brown, which it seems to stand for) because he had just fallen in love with Sally? Unfortunately for Ms. Brodie's thesis, he had used "mulatto" in exactly the same way during his tour of southern France, the spring before Sally arrived in Paris. This category already existed in his mind. Ms. Brodie tries to solve this difficulty by stressing, once again, the repetition.
Garry Wills
64) I do not feel that Brodie's in-depth psychological speculations and symbolic interpretations come any closer to the truth than the blanket denials of a possible Jefferson-Hemings connection on the part of scholars she refers to as the "Jefferson Establishment."
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 339-40
65) One of Jefferson's major divisions was over the bucolic versus civilized life, a division echoed in the pulls of domestic versus public and American versus European existence. Brodie is good on some of this, but she does not explain sufficiently what the "seductive power of politics" was for her subject. Nor does she shed light on how Jefferson could compulsively make pregnant his beloved wife, for whose sake he retired from public life for six years, knowing that each childbirth threatened her life and finally took it.
Bruce Mazlish 1091
66) Professor Brodie's attempt to make much of coincidence and ingenious guesswork on the subject of "black Sally" is of a piece with the pervasive psychoanalytic mode of the book. She finds vast meaning, for instance, in Jefferson's failure to use the word "chastity" very often in his writings: in his frequent use of the word "mulatto" to describe certain European soil colors; and in the hasty marriage of his elder daughter Martha on their return from France. Of all these strained speculations, the prize most surely be given to her suggestion that when Jefferson decided to remodel Monticello after his sojourn in France, "the possibility can be suggested that since buildings often symbolize in dreams the body of a woman. Jefferson . . . may have been unconsciously defining and redefining his ideal woman . . ." It can be suggested also that Jefferson, who tinkered with his house and grounds constantly for some 40 years, wanted to incorporate the new architectural ideas he had garnered in Europe.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. 543
67) Understandably, the "mulatto" landscape passage has been the most disparaged part of the book. However, as Annette Gordon-Reed points out, "critics of Brodie have picked the weakest of her arguments to criticize . . . thus concealing the far stronger evidence that Brodie presented." Indeed, hostile reviewers who focused on the mulatto passage or on Brodie's reading of Jefferson's fixation with the Van der Werff painting were frequently unwilling to give any credence to her more concrete evidence or to recognize that she hoped to utilize the techniques of the psychobiography to substantiate more conventional forms of historical evidence.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 284
68) In addition, Brodie gave copies of the manuscript "to several" of her "psychoanalyst friends" in the Los Angeles area, incorporating "extra revisions in the light of their suggestions." At Brockway's [Norton president] suggestion she also met in late February with the eminent psychobiographer Erik Erikson, who was himself currently at work on a short volume on Thomas Jefferson. She had an "absolutely marvelous" five-hour meeting with Erikson who was willing to read her manuscript and "make suggestions" for improvement.
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 446
69) The trip home [from Paris] raises another issue. Sally was very pregnant; if we accept the testimony of Madison Hemings, the baby was born soon after the return to America. As close as the quarters were aboard the ship (and we have Brodie's analysis of that), we are asked to believe that Jefferson more or less flaunted his youthful concubine in front of his daughters.
Clifford Egan 133
70) Fawn M. Brodie, professor of history of the University of California, Los Angeles, is a scholar whose book is subtitled "An Intimate History." It is a fascinating and responsible book, except for a few rhetorical exclamations over what Jefferson-on-the-couch really meant to say here and there in his letters. My only complaint against Professor Brodie is that she is better on Jefferson's sensitivity than on the compulsions of his philosophy, which I believe to be as intimate to this obsessed thinker as his need of love.
Alfred Kazin
71) It should be clear, by now, what fuels the tremendous industry this author [Fawn Brodie] poured into her work -- her obsession with all the things she can find or invent about Jefferson's sex life. Since that life does not seem a very extensive or active one, Ms. Brodie has to use whatever hints she can contrive. In particular, she reads practically the whole Jeffersonian corpus as a secret code referring to what is presented as the longest, most stable, most satisfying love in Jefferson's life -- that with Sally Hemings.
Garry Wills
72) To back up her assertion that Jefferson's involvement with Hemings was an "affair of the heart" and not one of exploitation, Brodie provides no documentation whatsoever, although such an assumption is a crucial link in her thesis. Even if one grants that the double meanings she finds in Jefferson's journal and letters represent admissions of the liaison, they could just as readily suggest a relationship involving less commitment than the one she believes took place.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 339
73) One must then conclude that Brodie's is a serious and often convincing account of Jefferson, psychologically viewed; only in terms of one's higher expectations for the author and the subject is the book a disappointment.
Bruce Mazlish 1091
74) Professor Malone, indeed, has had the courage of his conviction that Thomas Jefferson was a great man and President whose standing is self-evident. And that, I suspect, will be the judgment of others in other times.
Edwin M. Yoder Jr. 545
75) On the whole, Professor Brodie's study would have been a more useful contribution to a growing field of research had she been more skeptical about the ability of clinical insight to compensate for the lack of evidence and more cautious about applying Eriksonian analyses to situations that are not analogous to those which they were meant to be applied.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 340
76) There is no scrap of evidence for this passion [Jefferson had for Sally], except perhaps the fact that he retained Sally at Monticello after stories about her had been widely circulated. Still, what was he supposed to do? Kill her? Freeing or selling her would make her more likely to talk, or to be tricked into talking. It was safer to keep her nearby. She was apparently pleasing, and obviously discreet. There was less risk in continuing to enjoy her services than in experimenting around with others. She was like a healthy and obliging prostitute, who could be suitably rewarded but would make no importunate demands. Her lot was improved, not harmed, by the liaison.
Garry Wills
77) But since we know so little, my complaint against Professor Brodie as a biographer is that she does not keep in focus Jefferson's "inconsistency" on the subject of slavery and blacks. The contradictions of Jefferson's life and thought are not exactly what Dr. Johnson laughed at: "How is it that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves
Alfred Kazin
78) Looking at Thomas Jefferson two years after its publication, what is striking is that professional reviews were so gentle; the book suffers from serious flaws, defects noted by remarkably few reviewers.
Clifford Egan 130
79) If Fawn Brodie were alive today, she would appreciate the irony of her book's good sales at Monticello, the more so because her biography was banned from the book store there immediately after its publication.
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 454
80) Ironically enough, when the Jefferson Establishment tries to explain an historical agent's actions in terms of something as subject to interpretation as "character," they are borrowing from the psychohistorian's bag of tricks, and they begin to sound just a bit like Fawn Brodie, although without the virtue of her belief that "the truth [is] more important than the defense of the white race."
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 293
81) Brodie did what she could to insure an enthusiastic response to her book insofar as potential reviewers were concerned. She frankly told Brockway [Norton president]: "The three reviewers I most dread are Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd."
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 450
82) The DNA findings seem to indicate that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings' children. As a result, the Hemings-Jefferson relationship has been elevated from an unsubstantiated rumor to almost certainty in the minds of a large portion of the historical profession. However, twenty-six years ago Brodie established a strong case for a Jefferson-Hemings relationship without virtue of this kind of scientific evidence. What else did Brodie see in the historical record, which other historians did not?
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 277
83) Other biographers unite in describing the Jefferson-Cosway episode as a flirtation, and they concur that Jefferson preferred the company of mature and accomplished women -- Abigail Adams, Martha Skelton, and Maria. Brodie has the very immature and unaccomplished Sally becoming Jefferson's mistress at the age of fifteen. Furthermore, she asks her readers to believe that Sally negotiated freedom for her children at age 21 before consenting to leave France. It seems incredible that the sophisticated 46 year old Jefferson would bargain with an immature sixteen year old slave.
Clifford Egan 132-33
84) Ms. Brodie is confident that Jefferson shared her own obsession with Sally, and all his later references to slavery, Negroes, manumission, or miscegenation are read as direct or indirect expressions of his feeling for her. Guilt, torment, and conflict are interlineated through all his writings to make his soul quiver in tune with la Brodie's. Yet there is no scrap of evidence for this passion, except perhaps the fact that he retained Sally at Monticello after stories about her had been widely circulated.
Garry Wills
85) It should be pointed out that all the incriminating evidence Brodie draws upon was known to scholars long before the appearance of her book.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 339
86) According to Brodie, "in any President's life the silences can reverberate as loudly as the speeches." Accordingly, Brodie did not gauge Jefferson's public silence on the Hemings issue or the lack of a "paper trail" corroborating the oral testimonies as Jefferson's denial of the affair. Instead, she saw in these silences evidence of a pragmatic man determined to free his slave children and continue loving Sally. Brodie's Jefferson thought he could best accomplish this by keeping a low profile, rather than by publicly disowning his slave family.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 282
87) Contributing to the book's [Fawn Brodie's] popularity was the subject matter: the alleged "intimate" relations of one of the nation's most famous Presidents. The turbulence within American society during the 1960s and early 1970s had brought issues of race, sex, and gender into full, open discussion. . . . Then, too, there was the voguish popular interest in studies applying Freudian and Jungian psychological techniques to history -- in this case, to the biography of a man who was a particularly timely subject with the approach of America's bicentennial.
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 451-52
88) Brodie's tale strains the imagination. She asks the reader to believe that Jefferson's sexuality slumbered before he met Maria Cosway; if his sex drive was as strong as she says it was, the question arises, why was he not involved in liaisons before meeting Maria? Brodie offers no proof whatsoever to substantiate her speculation about the Jefferson-Cosway affair.
Clifford Egan 132
89) Ms. Brodie had earlier written that this consideration may have freed Jefferson from his own strictures on miscegenation; but now she thinks it added to his burden of remorse over the inability to recognize and educate his only sons. Both considerations are gratuitous. What concerned Jefferson as a result of miscegenation was the degrading of the citizenry's stock; and his bastards by Sally were like those that could have been born from any white prostitute -- not legitimate, not heirs, not property holders, not citizens he let those children who could "pass" run away, and did not seek to find them. The rest he freed in his will. The arrangement was convenient to him, and imposed no new burdens on his slaves.
Garry Wills
90) Professor Brodie is to be commended for her willingness to explore regions other Jefferson biographers have been reluctant to enter. Nevertheless, her book suffers from several flaws which prevent it from taking its place beside the classic works in the field of psychobiography as well as the standard historical analyses of Jefferson. These flaws include the disproportionate amount of space devoted to Jefferson's supposed liaison with slave Sally Hemings, the absence of new and reliable evidence on this topic, and the lack of attention paid to forces other than personality that could account for Jefferson's behavior.
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 339
91) Interestingly, Annette Gordon-Reed observes that Jefferson scholars have used both memoirs to flesh out "details of life at Monticello" while rejecting the "basic claim of paternity . . . almost without exception." White historians have instead typically chosen to accept an alternate oral history from the "white" side of the family (descendants of T.J. and Martha) about the paternity of Sally Hemings' offspring. Jefferson grandchildren, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Randolph Coolidge, blamed their uncles for the parentage of the fair-skinned slaves at Monticello.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 280
92) Reactions to the book [Fawn Brodie's] by the three most prominent members of the so-called "Jefferson establishment"â€"Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Julian Boyd -- did not appear in formal book reviews, but each manifested strong negative feelings in other ways.
Newell G. Bringhurst, "Making" 453
93) Probably the major reason Thomas Jefferson made the best seller lists was Brodie's claim that Sally Hemings was Jefferson's mistress from 1788-1826. A public titillated with stories of the intimacies of recent political leaders presumably was ready to learn that even the author of the Declaration of Independence was human.
Clifford Egan 132
94) One need not be unsympathetic to personality and politics research -- one may even be aware of the growing attempt to increase the rigor of political psychology -- to have grave reservations about this book [Brodie's].
Alvin Stephen Felzenberg 339
95) Her biography [Fawn Brodie's] of Jefferson is far from flawless, but it is immune from the racism that unconsciously infiltrated the interpretations of many Jefferson scholars who could not believe that the builder of Monticello and founder of the University of Virginia could have stooped so low as to have had sexual relations with, or perhaps worse, romantic attachments to a black woman.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach 278
96) On balance, however, Thomas Jefferson fails as biography and history. Notwithstanding Brodie's explanation in the forward, Jefferson and "the life of the heart" have to be understood in light of Jefferson the public man. Since affairs of the heart overwhelm the public man, Brodie's book is too unbalanced to be an acceptable biography. As history, Brodie's work fails because of her carelessness with sources; conventional scholars expect more than page after page of speculation in lieu of solidly documented material.
Clifford Egan 135
97) I'm afraid that Professor Brodie, despite her admirable qualities, is the worst thing to happen to Jefferson since James Callender.
Garry Wills
98) The pieces of historical evidence seized upon by Fawn Brodie in her Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History to indicate a passionate relationship between Jefferson and Sally in Paris fail the test of objective analysis. . . . The evidence indicates that any Paris romance between Jefferson and Sally Hemings belongs in a work of fiction, not of history.
Noble Cunningham 115-16
99) Madison Hemings bequeathed a narrative that changed American history when he stated bluntly, in an 1873 newspaper interview, that Thomas Jefferson was "my father." When his recollections came to wide attention in 1974 thanks to Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, they collided with the modern imperative to find redemption almost everywhere we look.
Henry Wiencek 219
100) In an extraordinary cultural transformation, the memoir that Merrill Peterson had disparaged in the 1960s as "the Negroes' pathetic wish for a little pride" has been refashioned into a comforting myth of a secret cross-racial romance. Brodie washed Jefferson clean of any stain when she wrote, "If the story of the Sally Hemings liaison be true, as I believe it is, it represents not scandalous debauchery . . . but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting thirty-eight years."
Henry Wiencek 219
