“Travelling through a desert, a man saw a woman, standing alone and with her eyes fixed to the ground.
“‘Who are you,’ asked he.
“‘I am Truth,’ she replied.
“‘Why have you left the city and retreated to the desert?’
“‘Times have changed. In days bygone, few people lied. Yet now, all people lie.’
“Human life [Aesop sums] is a vile and wretched thing, when falsehood is valued above truth.” ~Aesop, City of Lies
For over two decades, there has been no forward movement on the subject of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’, his avowed concubinage, because there has been no need of it. Gordon-Reed, who is regarded as the world’s foremost authority on the “relationship,” is typically cited as an unquestioned authority by biographers who are unwilling to study in her words “the totality of the circumstances.” I offer two illustrations, though numerous could be offered. Erik Neil writes in the introduction of the compilation, Thomas Jefferson: Architect, “The work of Annette Gordon-Reed and others on the Hemings family was transformational.” Has Neil, an architectural historian, ever read anything by Gordon-Reed or by other Hemings-family historians? Given that he is an architectural historian, that seems doubtful. In John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Gordon Wood states, “DNA results showing that the Hemings children were fathered by someone in Jefferson’s male line, together with the powerful arguments of historian Annette Gordon-Reed, give ample reason to conclude that Jefferson indeed took Sally Hemings as a concubine and fathered six of her children.” Just what are those “powerful arguments”? Wood never says. There are no powerful arguments.
It is obvious that Neil and Wood have never independently studied the issue. That is scholarly slothfulness. One expects better from a scholar of the rank of Gordon Wood.
Wood, I suspect, would reply: “I have more significant things to worry about than Jefferson and Sally Hemings. I really don’t care if there was or wasn’t an affair!” The point of that possible objection is that historical inquiry has a cost. To study the matter of Jefferson’s avowed concubinage with Hemings is to make a decision that that topic is worth a historian’s time—in philosopher Bernard Williams’ words, that that topic is an “investigative investment.” When someone makes such an investment, he typically puts aside other things with which he is involved, so that he can study the topic.
Nonetheless, if Wood’s somewhat cavalier references to the DNA study and to the “powerful arguments” of Gordon-Reed are sufficient to settle the issue for him, then he can be accused of scholarly slothfulness.
When Jeffersonian scholars spend the lion’s share of their intellectual time writing about Jefferson’s racism and duplicity, serious scholars who weigh in on the issue need to take the cognitive time to study Jefferson on slavery and race, and they need to investigate the distinct possibility of non-involvement with Hemings. It is not enough merely to fall back on the sophistry both on the webpage of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and on the writings of Gordon-Reed. It may be asking much of a scholar the rank of Wood to study thoroughly the issue of concubinage, but until he does so, he has no business to state that there is “ample reason” to conclude that Jefferson fathered Hemings’ six known children.
The late and great American historian, Forest McDonald (University of Alabama), who did study the issue, wrote of my book Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in which I tackle the issue of concerning Jefferson’s paternity. He writes, “A superb work that demonstrates its argument beyond question and, along the way, should mortify defends of the Jefferson-Hemings thesis for the slipshod and even dishonest work.” Lloyd Gardner (history, Rutgers University) states: “The first clear-headed assessment of what has become an accepted truth. Professional historians will now have to take account of Holowchak’s effective analysis of the weak evidence for the supposed liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It is not a matter of preserving Jefferson’s reputation that drives this inquiry, but a plea for the proper use of evidence that extends far beyond the borders of Jeffersonian literature.” Both reviews are on the back flap of my book.
Yet it might be objected that McDonald and Gardner, both elite historians, are Rankean neo-Positivists—that is dinosaurs, from a historiographical past, who inflexibly insist that history is fact-based and that conclusions are to be forged in pursuance of all the available relevant evidence, not merely from an attractive sampling. What is the rage today is revisionism, discretionary postmodernism, and Progressive relativism, each today under the cloak of Wokeism—the more bitter, the better—where each person’s canons of proper historiography are as sound as any other’s. Yet I too am one of those dinosaurs that still obstinately cling to the belief that history is about veridicality, not whim. TRUTH MATTERS!
In philosophical circles, appeal to Gordon-Reed is appeal to an authority. An argument from authority is an appeal to a recognized expert on some issue as evidence for some claim without additional support. We are bombarded by such arguments each day through media, when, for instance, celebrities endorse certain products—e.g., a profession tiddly winks player endorses a type of insurance and enjoins us to bundle our home and auto insurance—and most are woefully unpersuasive. As such, philosophers of logic have come to recognize that any argument based solely on authority is cogent—that is, rationally persuasive insofar as there is more reason accept than to reject the conclusion of an argument—when and only when, as I note in my book Critical Reasoning & Philosophy, the following conditions are met:
- The authority must be an expert in the area about which he speaks;
- There must be general agreement among all experts in that field; and
- The authority must be in agreement with the majority of the other experts.
In the case of Gordon-Reed and Jefferson’s paternity, however, all three conditions are met. And so, what is the gripe?
There is a fly in the ointment.
Historians, as well as the staff at Monticello, are wont to note scholarly consensus on Jefferson’s paternity (condition 2). That I willingly conceded.
The question is this: How have historians, a most discretionary group concerning what counts as relevant and rational evidence, arrived at scholarly consensus?
What goes unnoticed is that that consensus is generally based on uncritical appeal to Gordon-Reed as the sole arbiter of the issue of paternity. In other words, that general agreement has not occurred through independent investigation of all relevant available evidence—to do that would lead to skepticism, not dogmatism—by scholars. So, condition 2 needs qualification. General agreement by scholars cannot occur merely through sycophantic agreement with one acknowledged expert.
The Scientific Revolution, the harbinger of the Enlightenment, occurred as a violent intellectual reaction to authority: that of Aristotle and the Church. The authority of Aristotle for over two millennia on biological, political, metaphysical, and cosmological matters had drowned out all other voices. Though he had one of the largest minds in human history, he was wrong: His teleology was wrong; his physics was wrong; his cosmology was wrong; his psychology was wrong. And so, the Scientific Revolution was motivated by distrust of authority—consider here Francis Bacon’s four idols and the motivation behind Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning Two Chief World Systems—and a commitment to observation and experimentation to decide hypotheses, not appeal to some authority.
That has not occurred vis-à-vis the problem of Jefferson’s paternity. Annette Gordon-Reed has claimed that Jefferson fathered all of Sally Hemings’ children, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation agreed, and there has been no looking back thereafter. Anyone who disagrees with Gordon-Reed, a black lawyer, is racist.
Is Gordon-Reed such an infallible scholar that her word ought to preferred to the moil of scholarly digging?
Scrutiny of her reconstruction of the liaison of Jefferson and Hemings in her 2008 book, The Hemingses of Monticello, shows plainly that that reconstruction follows a literal interpretation of Madison Hemings’ testimony in the Pike County Republican in 1873—67 years after the death of Thomas Jefferson. In that “testimony,” Hemings claims that Jefferson was his father and the father of all of his siblings. There is no persuasive historical evidence other than this testimony, and Hemings speaks of events that occurred prior to his birth in 1805. His testimony, thus, is hearsay—that is, probatively unavailing and inadmissible in court. Gordon-Reed, astonishingly, gets around the worthlessness of the testimony by asserting merely that the testimony is so critical in determining the issue of paternity that it must be taken as eyewitness testimony! She writes in 1997: “Madison Hemings’s memoirs must stand or fall on the basis of his credibility alone. To that end, it must be said that these memoirs are properly described as items of direct evidence that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were involved in a relationship.” By her decree, worthless testimony has become worthful! What is more incredible is that no one, other than me, has seen fit to challenge that nonsensical claim. Nonsense is the vogue in today’s Jeffersonian scholarship, woke to its core.
By day’s end, there is next to zero probability that Gordon-Reed’s account of Jefferson’s life in her 2008 book is accurate: a reconstruction based solely on surmise. The reason is that there almost certainly was no affair!
I shock no one in asserting that there is ineliminably a certain amount of surmise in any historical reconstruction of events. To weave a narrative is to engage in some measure of surmise. Yet historical reconstruction is about evidence. When evidence is wanting, or ambiguous, it is a scholar’s responsibility to note that a reconstruction must be taken cum grano salis (with a grain of salt). Scholarly surmise must be introduced as surmise, not as fact.
The issue of Jefferson’s avowed paternity matters because evidence matters. Evidence is supposed to drive history. Yet Gordon-Reed, I have shown in several publications, is indifferent to evidence. She has asserted that fiction is as helpful as are facts in understanding Thomas Jefferson. Monticello, which has historically followed the lead of Gordon-Reed, agrees. The world follows blindly….
Even if Hemmings was Jefferson’s concubine, so what? Are we supposed to be scandalized by it in this present era? These lefties are applying Victorian standards to this alleged relationship as if modern Americans give a hoot about interracial relations and marriages. Not working. As if Northern slave owners didn’t have slave concubines? I understand that the left’s ultimate goal is to diminish Jefferson, all while making scads of money off of him. Typical. At Monticello they reconstructed slave cabins and as I understand it, the point is to make people gasp at the difference between a slave’s circumstances and the mansion right next to it. Typical white Southerners did not live in digs anything close to Jefferson’s mansion. If the current era ‘caring people’ were interested in history they would show photos of the typical Dog-Trot house and first person accounts of white Southerners’ true living conditions from the same era, instead of exploiting Sally Hemmings and the other slaves of the time for the left’s personal economic gain now. Our white ancestors lived very much on par with Jefferson’s slaves – dirt floors, log walls and all. If they showed that, then the white guilt wouldn’t take hold with the Yankees I guess. I don’t know. Speaking personally, as they like to say these days, “Sorry, NOT sorry.’ None of this ‘info’ diminishes Jefferson’s intellect and achievements, it only highlights how small people are now trying to benefit off of his greatness.
PS: Tom and Sally’s ‘affair’ is very tame compared to what the modern left pushes at us on a daily basis. Comparatively it seems rather sweet and romantic when one thinks about LGBTQ etc. that we are bombarded with daily.
It does matter, for TJ on one occasion implicitly denied any affair with SH. Thus, he could be called “liar” if it should be shown that there was an affair. what is despicable is that there is paucity of evidence for an affair and Monticello and the pro-paternity people monetized handsomely on asserting it as fact! Is that what historians ought to do???
You misunderstood my point. I was referencing the average reader of Gordon-Reed’s book and average visitor of Monticello. They, in my experience, say ‘So what?’. I completely agree that accurate history is important, and historians should deal in facts. Additionally, I was pointing out that G-R and the other lefty ‘historians’ are defeating themselves in their attempts to diminish Jefferson because they have so coarsened our society and culture that people don’t care about their lies about Jefferson and Hemmings because as I said, comparatively the idea of Jefferson and Hemings seems romantic to the vile things the left presents us with. People slough off the propaganda. When I visited Monticello that’s what the majority of visitors did. The eye rolls, sighs, and head shakes were too numerous to count. They came to see the mansion, learn as much actual/factual history as possible and ignore the BA spewed by the Monticello staff.
I believe “In Defense Of Thomas Jefferson” by William G. Hyland JR, G-R said the importance of the Jefferson/Hemmings study is not that it is factually correct, but that it helps to understand how black slaves built America…
This can easily be interpreted as an admonition that truth does not matter. It actually reflects perfectly her psycho-analysis
It is also interesting to see the relationships of all the faces involved in the Jefferson/Hemmings myth. They all despise Jefferson. They all congregated into the institutions of Jefferson and “marched through them”. They sabotaged them. The mentioned book has a chapter called “The Charlottesville Connection” that explains the network of the saboteurs (socialists).
I concur with Mr. Holowchak, truth matters. And with regard to history, it is the only thing that matters. Those who try to substitute wishes, preferences and desires for facts in the attempt to elucidate the reality of what occurred in the past are just engaging in obfuscation through deception. That isn’t history but propaganda.
I refer all to Robert F. Turner (editor) “The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy”, 2001, which will put a great deal of this to rest. To preface, immense amounts of documentation on Jefferson and all aspects of his life exist and have been studied in depth for tens of decades, by very serious scholars. Mr. Holowchak is more correct than he may know; Mr. Turner’s long introduction, primarily pp. 33-39, details very precisely that Gordon-Reed made “errors” in transcribing key primary source documents, all of which had the effect of supporting her ‘thesis’ that Thomas Jefferson himself, not another Jefferson, had a long term relationship with Sally Hemings – even though only one individual, Eston, has been positively identified as having Jefferson DNA. When I read her book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings”, 1997, my reaction was “conjecture and wishful thinking”; Mr. Turner has verified that not only was her book’s ‘basis in fact’ lacking, but that it also has the added element of intentional deceit. He carefully describes her “misuse’ of a letter from Ellen Randolph Jefferson, Jefferson’s granddaughter, discussing the subject. It’s disturbing that the entire country will listen to a soundbite designed to denigrate an American President and, by implication, undermine our foundations, without a thought that it might not be true. It might also be true, but that can’t be said because neither has been proven. Gordon-Reed did her best to entrench Thomas + Sally as truth, misusing primary sources in that effort, which make her far less than ‘an established expert on Thomas Jefferson”. And, there is a complete failure to recognize how racist it is to make it important because Sally Hemings was African American. Had Jefferson dallied with a neighbor’s white wife, society of the day would have been scandalized, but today it would just be an interesting aside.
Bob’s book is excellent and ought to be read by all.
I also recommend my books Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 2013, and Did Thomas Jefferson Really Father Sally Hemings’ Black Children? A Scholarly Analysis of the Historical and Genetic Evidence, 2021.
Why has not G-R been held accountable for distorting evidence to contour to her thesis? Such things used to be grounds for dismissal at an institution.
“Mr. Holowchak is more correct than he may know”? I have written much more on this blot, and from an analytic perspective, on TJ’s character than anyone. I was trained in the #2 philosophy department in the nation….
Thank you for comments!
Frankly, true or false, the matter at least to me is irrelevant. I still haven’t gotten over Jefferson’s “introduction” of a French revolutionary into the new State Department, hiding his presence as a “translator” for the Secretary of State. Jefferson spoke and wrote French so his use of this “change agent” had nothing to do with his duties as a representative of the United States and a (supposed) friend of George Washington. This “agent” of Revolutionary France called for Washington’s execution by guillotine and actually was able to rouse crowds of “revolutionaries” against the man doing his best to successfully create the nation we eventually had for however short a time. Interestingly enough, when the Revolution turned on this agent, he begged (of all men!) Washington to allow him to remain in America where he would be safe ~ and George, decent man that he was, did!
We know what the man did to Washington when we learn that Martha would not allow him to visit Mount Vernon after Washington’s death. If we’re going to hold truth up as the measure of all good (and it is!), then Mr. Jefferson has much to answer for in his treatment of a man who believed him a friend and never wanted all power Americans continually invested in him.
I would like to hear what Jefferson get to Washington. I’ve seen nothing in Washington’s writings that Washington’s wife intensely dislike Jefferson, is clear. That means little to me. What matters a lot to me, and will be the topic of an upcoming book that is in the making, is that John Adams, who was always a political rival of Jefferson, intensely loved Jefferson.
Who are you speaking of? Edmond-Charles Genêt?
I am a huge Jefferson fan, almost obsessed with him. I have over 40 Jefferson books in my library, including Malone’s 6 volume, 40 years-in-the-making Jefferson biography.
There are 3 groups of people on the Hemings story. Those who believe it happened, those who doubt it happened, and those who absolutely believe it did not happened. Count me in the “did not happen” group.
Ironically, it was Gordon-Reed’s book that started me on my Jefferson journey.
Mixed race descendants of my ancestors in Mr. Jefferson’s neighborhood were not all that uncommon. My great grand uncle, Richard Channing Moore Page, Major Artillery, Morris’ Battalion, Jackson’s Corps, Lee’s Army, had no children with the Connecticut lady he married after the War. But he had at least one child with a Black childhood friend after the War, this child who my grandfather was able to see walking along the side of the lane leading to his ancestral home, Castle Hill, in 1952. He stopped the car, got out and embraced this “elderly black man” as my mother related – and cried, for only the first time my mother had ever seen him cry. Because this gentleman was the last surviving member of his mother and father’s generation – and his cousin. But he never spoke a word of it. I pieced it together, but I will never, ever know for sure. Keeping appropriately mum about these things actually gave them life, as strange as it sounds. It worked, and very well indeed. RCM Page Jr went on to fly in WWI and was decorated, and until recently had an airport in Fort Meyer’s FL named after him.
Worked fine.
I thank all of you for your comments. Note that Abbeville will soon publish my book, Sally Hemings, Race, & Woke Historiography: The Abbeville Primer to Woke Thomas Jefferson. Dr. Don can tell you when it will appear for purchase….