For 25 years, The Thomas Jefferson (Memorial) Foundation has been pushing the story of Jefferson’s involvement of Sally Hemings. In 2000, after conclusion of their analysis of the 1998 DNA study concerning Jefferson’s avowed paternity of Hemings’ children, their story was that it was very likely that Jefferson fathered all of Hemings’ children, but in 2018, the qualifiers were removed: Jefferson was said factually to be the father of all of Hemings’ children. The biological (1998 DNA study), statistical (Fraser Neiman’s Bayesian argument), and historical evidence (Madison Hemings’ 1873 testimony and the work of Gordon-Reed) all converged ineluctably to that conclusion.
Yet scrutiny of such ineluctable evidence to anyone with an iota of rationality shows no ineluctability. The biological evidence for Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’ last child, Eston, for whom there is a chromosomal match (indicating only that Thomas Jefferson, his brother Randolph, Randolph’s sons, or any other male-line Jefferson was the father), is unavailing. Moreover, Neiman’s statistical argument is bogus, and it misleads. Finally, the historical evidence is weak. What is more, one cannot merely take three different sorts of evidence for some claim, each probatively insignificant, and add them up to make a strong argument. If that were the case, then any claim whatsoever could be shown to be true, and the argument pro “Jefferson was the fourth president” could be justified as readily as “Jefferson was the third president.”
Nonetheless, Monticello continues to preach that Jefferson’s paternity is a fact. Numerous thousands of people each year visit Monticello, hear their spin on Jefferson, leave convinced of Jefferson’s involvement with Hemings, and repeat that spin to others. Scholars who visit their webpage—an excellent resource except for their account of Hemings—are barraged by Monticello’s account of the life of Hemings—told at the expense of Jefferson’s integrity and patterned after Gordon-Reed’s highly imaginative speculations in three published and award-winning books—and merely repeat what they read without critically investigating the issue on their own: e.g., Gordon-Wood. Known descendants of Sally Hemings are told that they are scions of Thomas Jefferson.
The enormity of what Monticello has been doing and continues to do is unpardonable! That enormity—begun with Dan Jordan, taken to its greatest heights under Leslie Greene-Bowman (who brokered the factual nature of Jefferson’s paternity and was quietly removed from the presidency in January), and continued today by Jane Kaminsky—has endured for 25 years. The damage will take decades to repair, if ever we return again to valuing veridicality in historiography.
I have written on this topic abundantly, and here I wish not to iterate my arguments. It takes a book-length manuscript to expose them, and I wrote such a book—Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in 2013—which has done little to influence the scholarly landscape.
Why?
Scholars merely approach the issue emotionally, not rationally.
Moreover, many rhetorically ask: Why would the people at Monticello, those who occupy the mansion of Jefferson, lie about such things?
On assumption that historians will again adopt an evidential and rational approach to history in the near future—fingers crossed!—the years from 1999 to whenever the blight at Monticello formally ends will be a sort of Dark Age at Monticello.
One thing is clear. The best anyone can say about Jefferson’s paternity is that it is not impossible. Yet “It is not impossible that…” says little, and much too little to establish Jefferson’s paternity as a fact. Facts are not established by arguments, but they are verified simply by appeal to sensory data: I know that “It is snowing outside” is true by looking outside and seeing falling snow. It is not impossible that Jefferson, following Fawn Brodie, lusted after his oldest daughter Martha, though there is no evidence of that.
Why then does Monticello persist in pushing Jefferson’s paternity, when the most we can say is that we do not know?
To answer that question, I ask another: Why was the outrageous and transparently false 1619 Thesis received so sympathetically when it is complete nonsense, garbage?
Monticello, I have argued, has been and continues to be in the business of writing its own history, fictive but curative (in their sense of “curative”), to help us solve America’s many social problems: race, principle among them. That story includes making Sally Hemings to be one of the key early figures of early American history, when she was very likely an insignificant figure. Moreover, there is large money to be made by politicizing race. See for instance my critique of the 1619 Thesis.
In sum, Monticello is in the business of lying!
How has Monticello got away for so long with lying?
The answer involves propaganda, and fear.
Soviet Communism, paying lip service to establishing a dictatorship of the masses to free eventually the masses from the horrors of Western free-market capitalism—established instead a bureaucratically cumbersome totalitarian government where the Soviet Vozhd (the Big Boss, Stalin) ran the show, as it were. Anyone posing a problem for Stalin was exiled, or eliminated. Stalin famously noted that it is no crime if many innocent persons are killed to ensure the death of the guilty person. He put to death thousands of loyal Soviets (especially those who remembered the importance of Lenin and especially Trotsky in the Russian Revolution) during his Great (Political) Purge late in the 1930s. Stalin had a unique notion of “guilt.”
Propaganda works.
Vladimir Putin knows that. One has merely to control all aspects of the Russian media—no easy task—and convince Russians that what they read or hear elsewhere is designed to destroy Russia’s great oligarchical system. The folks at Monticello too have such control of the American media that they allow no open discussion of Jefferson’s avowed paternity. They push Sally Hemings at Monticello and on their website and they have historically changed the landscapes at the Smith Center, at UVA, and at UVA Press, where Pete Onuf, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy are editors of “Jeffersonian America.” They thus control Jefferson’s life and legacy by controlling the press!
Fear works.
Vladimir Putin knows that. All who openly object to his way of running Russia find themselves accidentally poisoned (Alexei Navalny, Dec. 2024) or a victim of accidental defenestration (falling from a window; Grigory Kochenov, Dec. 2022). So, from fear, Russians accept the constant deceptions from their Vozhd. It is a price to be paid for “security” from the outside world, ever aiming to overthrown the Russian government. Monticello and its people and partners also use fear, though not as extremely. Annette Gordon-Reed has done much in her publications, talks, and interviews to push the view that scholars prior to her first book would never consider Jefferson as a possible father of any of Hemings’ children because they were white males, and, of course, racists. She has so artfully played the “race-card” that few scholars challenge anything that she says lest they be dubbed racist.
Finally, the “good folks” at Monticello—and I say that tongue-in-cheek—have the bread, the Benjamins, the Kapusta, the money. With big money, there comes big power. They can control the discourse on Jefferson by controlling the people at and around Monticello (UVA included) and push their myth about the gentility and intelligence of Sally Hemings, whose sway on Jefferson might have influenced all his important decisions after her arrival at Paris in 1786. Yet in reality, Hemings was in all probability an illiterate household servant, but one who could, from the little we know of her, turn a few heads with her looks.
All collective organizations, irrespective of the initial intent or purpose of their creation or foundation, inexorably and inevitably devolve into mere self-serving and sell-perpetuating bureaucracies. While the TJMF may have started as a memorial to the man through the maintenance and preservation of his home, no trace of that function remains a part of its present reality. The current entities actions can be readily and accurately explained in the way they serve the existing interests of its administrators and employees by their adoption and promotion of 21st century American societies errors and prejudices, and their pandering concurrence with these have become their reliable ‘meal ticket’.
You weaken your argument to the point that I refuse to regard it by using Western propaganda with which you build up a false President Putin for your comparison. Eliminate that, an one can take your argument seriously. If fact, your view of President Putin is as flawed as that of “the good folks of Monticello.”
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