| Episodes |
Virginius Dabney and the Preservation of Honor
Raphael Khallouqi
"These best-selling volumes, purporting to be based on sound scholarship, tend strongly to degrade some of the very men whom we, in the Bicentennial, are seeking to honor."
[1] Incited by Gore Vidal's Burr and Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, the highly respected journalist and historian of his day Virginius Dabney takes a defensive stance in his address at the 1975 Charter Day Convocation at the College of William and Mary. On the two hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution, his ceremonial speech, armed with an arsenal of counter-criticisms and an argumentative tone, seeks to preserve the sainthood of two of our nation's Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Drawing upon the considerable leverage of scholarly distinction on the subject, Dabney aims to portray Brodie's claim that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had the relationship that the infamous James T. Callender accused them of as that of a misinformed outsider with no business meddling in the affairs of real Jeffersonian authorities. His relentless defense of the venerable Jefferson does not stop there, however, as he attempts to characterize Brodie as perpetually incorrect, bringing to the forefront some of her undeniably erroneous evidence, damaging her credibility. With respect to Burr, Dabney identifies the motivations and intentions of Vidal's main source of information, Aaron Burr, as being biased and skewed, ultimately devaluing the claims themselves.
[2] "Dabney brings high ethos to his argument, using authority as his chief supporting material," notes Waldo W. Braden. Calling on the opinions of three noteworthy Jefferson historians -- Julian P. Boyd, Dumas Malone, and Merrill Peterson -- all of whom share his opposing viewpoint to Brodie, Dabney asserts that their insights hold far more merit than hers. The Brodie book's unsubstantiated charge that Thomas Jefferson lived his whole life with a guilt complex after purportedly fathering mulatto children is challenged on the grounds that no other scholar of Jeffersonian distinction has picked up evidence of this tragedy. With such an exorbitant amount of intellectual power dedicated to the study of our nation's third president, it is unlikely to the infinitesimal power that this far-from-trivial aspect of his life would pass unnoticed.
[3] Dabney concedes, however, that Jefferson was "no plaster saint," referring to the fact that he attempted to seduce the wife of his friend John Walker, and, furthermore, he claims that no modern biographer has tried to make him out as one. Scholarship abounds with awareness of Jefferson's flaws. But, that said, in the Hemings matter, the three most respected Jefferson scholars all agree that Mrs. Brodie's book is "based on half-truths, unwarranted assumptions and grievous misinterpretation of the known facts." As Dumas Malone put it, "This determined woman runs far beyond the evidence and carries psychological speculation to the point of absurdity. The resulting mishmash of fact and fiction, surmise and conjecture is not history as I understand the term." Dabney goes on to devalue Brodie's qualifications on the topic by stating that Malone, Boyd, and Peterson have all devoted the majority of their professional careers to the study of Jefferson, contrary to her, whose others biographies were in entirely unrelated fields.
[4] Painting a picture of Fawn Brodie as a charlatan plagued by ignorance and incompetence, Dabney strikes down her historically inaccurate statements, proving her work to be mistake-riddled and borderline fraudulent. For example, she relies heavily on the testimonies of two aged blacks published in the Pike County, Ohio, Republican in 1873 for her work. Dabney shines light on her failure to take into account the fact that one of the aged men professed to have personal recollections of events that occurred before he was born.
[5] Delving deeper into the root of the controversy, Dabney contests the very notion that Jefferson fathered the children of Sally Hemings, an assumption without which Brodie has no foundation for her work whatsoever. Once again calling on the real authorities of the subject, Dabney quotes a statement from Douglass Adair to "prove" that Jefferson was innocent of Callender's infamous libelous charges. He goes on to state that scholars have studied the available materials and concluded that Peter Carr, one of Jefferson's nephews, was the father of the mulatto children in question. Presenting further evidence of Jefferson's innocence, Dabney recalls the statement of Edmund Bacon, overseer at Monticello, who claimed he knew who the father of Sally Heming's children was, and it was not Thomas Jefferson. Never naming the father, he said "I have seen him come out of her [Sally's] room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early."
[6] To put the finishing touches on his argument, Dabney addresses the question of why Jefferson never publicly denied fathering the children. He argues that with his father-in-law having irrefutably sired Sally Hemings and five additional children, and his nephews producing many other mulattos, Jefferson was understandably unwilling to enter into public controversy concerning this matter. Without the root of a scandal, sensationalists such as Brodie have their works rendered baseless and meritless.
[7] For the latter part of his speech, Dabney shifts his crosshairs to another book "that was not written by a professor of history, but by a novelist who makes pretensions to historical knowledge." This description is a powerful accusation against Gore Vidal, author of Burr, about which Dabney took serious offense too as it defames both Jefferson and George Washington.
[8] In order to defend the Founding Fathers at the "alma mater of a nation" on the Bicentennial against this disparaging work, Dabney provides a juxtaposition between the integrity of Aaron Burr, on whose words the story is largely based, and the moral virtue of Jefferson and Washington. And he stays true to his theme of deferring to the judgment of prominent historians deemed to have more credibility in their words than Vidal as a way of presenting accurate historical descriptions of the figures in question.
[9] Burr is described as "not the most admirable character in American history, [and] who, it should be noted, hated both Washington and Jefferson." Embedded in this description is the issue of Burr's intentions and motives. His first biographer, who knew him for forty years, claimed that "his prejudices against General Washington were immovable." Vidal's book, in which Burr is "constantly sneering at Washington, without any explanation by the author of the reasons for this bitterness," conveniently leaves out the fact that Washington caught him reading confidential documents, creating an animosity between the two that resulted in the slanders. On this basis Dabney is able to successfully devalue what the reader of the novel is told, that it is a portrait drawn from Washington's "own words and the observations of his contemporaries."
[10] Perhaps less startling are Burr's censures, exploited by Vidal, on Jefferson, who strived for the indictment of Burr in a trial for treason. Jefferson's role in the trial provides the basis on which Burr terms his enemy "a hypocrite" and "the most deceitful man he ever knew." What it does not justify, however, is his reference to "perhaps the most brilliantly versatile man America has produced" as an "intellectual dabbler" who "never did any one thing particularly well." Vidal skillfully manipulates this situation into a work of defamation, giving full repute to Burr's undoubtedly partial words.
[11] In reality, argues Dabney with the help of esteemed contemporaries Douglas S. Freeman, James T. Flexner, Dumas Malone, and John Richard Green, who "at a conservative estimate, devoted ten times as many hours to this enterprise as Gore Vidal," and whose works have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, General Washington, "the indispensable man," was "greater than any of us believe he was" and the noblest figure ever to stand in the forefront of a nation's life. Dabney states that after mature reflection he has concluded that the opinions of the scholarly elite outweigh those of Gore Vidal.
[12] By successfully overruling the claims of both Gore Vidal and Fawn Brodie with conclusions made by the highest ranking scholars in the field, Virginius Dabney devalues the works that aim to portray our nation's idols in a negative light. He identifies potential motives and lapses of reasoning behind the subject matter of the two books and discredits their authors, all while defending the integrity of our Founding Fathers at the nation's second oldest institution of higher education and, moreover, Jefferson's alma mater.
