By Charles E. Greenawalt II, Ph.D., Senior Fellow

Introduction

Since 1981, I have been a political science professor, an employee of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, or a member of the mass media. Throughout my youth and during the beginning of my career, the legacy of Thomas Jefferson shined brilliantly and was unquestioned. Jefferson looks over the Black Hills of South Dakota along with Presidents Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. His position on Mount Rushmore confirms his place in the American trinity of Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson. While Washington is the essential person who carved our nation from the British Empire; Lincoln saved the Union; and Jefferson was the foremost herald of freedom and enlightenment.

The primary author of the Declaration of Independence has a legacy of service and accomplishment rarely seen in world history. Along with writing the Declaration, Jefferson served as president, vice-president, secretary of state, and Governor of Virginia among many elected and appointed public positions. Finally, as he had inscribed on his  gravestone at Monticello, he authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and founded the University of Virginia.

Jefferson’s accomplishments, however, do not stop there. Other notable achievements include doubling the size of the United States by acquiring the Louisiana Purchase;  establishing the United States Military Academy; sending the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore and map the Purchase; dispatching three additional Western expeditions to follow-up on the findings of Lewis and Clark; and working with Congress, Jefferson played a vital role in the re-establishment of the Library of Congress. When British forces burnt the Library in 1814, Jefferson agreed to sell it his personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. Hence, the main building of the Library of Congress was named “The Thomas Jefferson Building.”

Finally, Jefferson abolished America’s participation in the international slave trade. Indeed, he called upon Congress to criminalize it on the first day it was possible. The Act prohibiting the importation of slaves to the United States was signed by Jefferson on 2 March 1807, and it took effect on 1 January 1808. This was the first date permitted by the Constitution. At the state level, Jefferson had drafted a bill in 1778 that would have forbidden the importation of slaves to Virginia.

One of the best summaries of Jefferson’s legacy and reputation, however, is the memorable proclamation made by President John F. Kennedy to a group of Nobel Prize winners dining with him at the White House:

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. Someone once said that Jefferson could  calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, break a horse, and dance the minuet. 1

While in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the mid-to-late 1970s, I changed my aspirations from a career in the U. S. Foreign Service to a career of teaching in the Academy. My graduate school professors made me realize that I could have a greater impact on the world by teaching generations of students as opposed to stamping visas in Chad for about half a career before meaningful work assignments would be allocated. The deciding factor for me, however, was the increasing political correctness I saw in the Academy along with a leftward shift in the political ideology of American political scientists. William Appleman Williams and his Tragedy of American Diplomacy were being celebrated at this time until Penn State professor, Robert James Maddox, wrote the 1973 book, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War. Maddox showed his readers how Williams selected fragments of the conversations among the Allied World War II leaders at Yalta, Tehran, and Potsdam and how he pieced them together in ways that helped to support his arguments that the Cold War was primarily America’s fault, rather than the Soviet Union’s fault. For 14 years, scholars used and cited Williams’ fraudulent scholarship without knowing his methods. Maddox’s scholarship, however, along with the collapse of the Soviet Union diverted the direction of scholarship in American foreign policy.

Today, however, we see that Thomas Jefferson’s legacy has encountered similar circumstances. Unfortunately, today the admiration of Jefferson has dimmed, and most young Americans will concede the accomplishments enumerated above, but they will assert that he was a racist, a bigot, and a slaveholder. A slaveholder that slept with his own 14 year-old slave, Sally Hemings, and impregnated her either five or six times.

James Thomson Callender

On 1 September 1802, the Richmond, Virginia Recorder ran an essay charging that President Thomas Jefferson had fathered several children by his slave, Sally Hemings. The author of the article was a journalist, James T. Callender, who had to flee Scotland for alleged sedition against the Crown. He stood charged with authoring or co-authoring a political pamphlet, Political Progress of Britain. He was pursued across England and his native Scotland before coming to America. Callender’s ten years in the United States was marked by similar political writing. His style was outrageous and flamboyant—a reporter that William Randolph Hearst would have loved to hire. Indeed, his writing is best compared to modern day supermarket tabloids. Scandal not only sells today, but it elevated sales of newspapers two centuries ago as well. Truth was not needed; only colorful writing delivered with great force.

Michael Durey described Callender’s writing style: “This combination of vituperative misanthropy and extreme political values would be a dangerous brew in an environment where political warfare was at a high pitch.” 2 In the course of his ten years in America, Callender managed to slander all five of our first five presidents. Callender boasted that he had thrown John Adams out of the presidency, though few believed him. His attacks on Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party in the Congressional elections of 1802 only increased the number of seats that they held in the Congress.

After Callender had arrived in America in 1793 with his family of young children, a number of American patriots came to his aid, including Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson extended financial aid to Callender on multiple occasions. After securing a job with a Democratic-Republican newspaper in Philadelphia in 1796, he attacked Federalists of the day with zeal. Considering himself the mouthpiece of Jefferson’s Party, he hounded Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and even, George Washington. In his new role, he promised to deliver upon the Federalists “a tornado as no government ever got before.” 3

As Jefferson became more familiar with Callender, he resisted his attempts to forge a friendship, and he discouraged him from moving to Charlottesville. These rebuffs against him, combined with Jefferson’s refusal to hire him as Postmaster of Richmond, Virginia after being elected President. By this time, Callender was cloaking his demands for the Postmaster job in threats against Jefferson. Additionally, Callender had determined that he wanted to marry one of Richmond’s young ladies, and after his rejection for the Postmaster job, she rejected his offer of marriage since he would need a job of the same ilk as Postmaster in order to support a family and a new spouse. He blamed the failed love affair upon Jefferson’s refusal to give him the job.

Callender had never visited Monticello, and he never spoke with Sally Hemings. He conceded that his charges were based on conversations with individuals from Albemarle County who noticed the presence of light-skinned mulatto slaves on Jefferson’s “Little Mountain.” The Federalist press picked up Callender’s story, and they repeated it various times in the years to come. Nevertheless, many Federalist leaders dismissed the story as false since they remembered the reporting style and tactics of Callender that had been used against their leadership until his move to Richmond. Federalist writer David Humphreys of Philadelphia’s newspaper, the Aurora, declared that his writings had shown that the story about Sally was false, 4 and another Federalist, General Henry Lee, wrote that “there is no foundation whatsoever for that story.” 5

In light of his setbacks and his bouts of alcoholism, Callender was found drowned in the James River in July 1803 after an extended drinking binge during which no issues of the Recorder were published. Meriwether Jones argued that Callender’s drowning in a state of intoxication was a deliberate suicide. 6

Callender, nonetheless, left his mark on American history. Historian James Truslow Adams writes, “Almost every scandalous story about Jefferson which is still whispered or believed can be traced to the lies in Callender’s book.” 7 Merrill Peterson, professor of history at the University of Virginia, believed the same observation. 8 The Pulitzer Prize winning historian, Dumas Malone, described Callender as “one of the most notorious scandalmongers and character assassins in American history.” 9

Pike County Republican

In 1870, a son of Sally Hemings, Madison Hemings, told a Census taker in Ross County, Ohio that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson. A few years later in 1873 a series of articles under the title of “Life Among the Lowly” was published by one of the Census takers, Samuel Wetmore who had become a newspaper publisher. Wetmore wrote about the plight of many of the African-American families that he had interviewed during the Census. His featured essay, however, was based on his interview with Madison Hemings, and it was published in March 1873 in the Pike County Republican. Through this work the Sally story resurfaced in America. Madison related a series of complicated and confusing “facts” that he described “as it came down to me.” 10

There was certainly no negative intent in Madison’s relating the story of his youth, as he knew it. Madison’s family story, as he knew it, was comprised of fragments of family stories and family history, mixed up and not connected properly. Nonetheless, this newspaper story became the basis of the 1974 book, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, by Fawn Brodie. The book told a tale of psychological interpretation based upon select letters of Jefferson. While the book received poor reviews from historians for its odd psychological ruminations, its charges of “deceit” and “hypocrisy” of a Founding Father made It a bestseller.

Fawn Brodie

In 1974, Brodie’s Intimate History was on the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks and sold 80,000 copies in hardcover and 270,000 in paperback. Her psychosexual analysis concluded that the third president’s affair with Sally was “a serious passion that brought both parties much private happiness over a period lasting 38 years.” 11 In fact, Brodie had experimented with psychological models previously. In 1943, she authored a biography of Joseph Smith that led to her excommunication from the Mormon Church. This book was followed by another study of the man who was labeled the “Scourge of the South,” Thaddeus Stevens. She also turned to what she considered another rich source of psychological material, Richard Nixon, in another book that would appear after her work with Jefferson.

In the late 1960s, she placed her attention on Thomas Jefferson. At this time, she suggested that if Jefferson did have a slave family with Sally Hemings that it would not be a tragic flaw in Jefferson, but a sign of psychic health. 12 Brodie chafed under what she called “the Jefferson establishment.” This establishment would have been comprised of Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Virginius Dabney. In a 1971 essay, “Jefferson Biographers and the Psychology of Canonization,” she suggested that this Jefferson establishment had succumbed to the impulse to sanctify without even realizing it. Brodie complained that Jefferson biographers had focused mostly on his public life and left his private life unexplored. She claimed to see psychological evidence that no one else had seen thus far. In fact, she called for the need for speculation and exploration, perhaps even Freudian analysis. 13

In the aftermath of the publication of Brodie’s book, Malone and other Jefferson scholars feared a lowering of scholarly standards. They believed that revisionists like Brodie valued ideology above accuracy. 14 Brodie announced, “This is a book about Jefferson and the heart.” It portrays not only his intimate life, but also his inner life. 15

On the other hand, Dumas Malone believed that the trouble with using psychoanalysis with figures of the past is that there are almost no materials to work with. In fact, Malone considered Brodie’s evidence inconclusive, its methodology questionable, and its thesis implausible. Dabney observed that “facts establishing Jefferson’s paternity of the children were nowhere to be found in Brodie’s vulnerable thesis.” 16 In May 1974, Malone wrote for The New York Times an op-ed column entitled, “Jefferson’s Private Life.” In this essay, he made public a letter written by Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge. In the letter, Coolidge stated that Jefferson could not have conducted a relationship with Hemings without raising suspicions since the family was so closely quartered at Monticello. She suggested that Sally’s children could have been fathered by the Irish workmen stationed at Monticello or by his nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr. 17 Malone found the Hemings legend so abhorrent that he devoted an entire appendix, titled “The Miscegenation Legend,” to his fourth volume of his Jefferson biography.

A final review of Brodie’s text came from Garry Wills, professor of history at Northwestern University, who had written several books on Jefferson himself. His critique of Brodie’s book read, “Two vast things, each wondrous in itself, combine to make this book a prodigy,” Wills argued. “The author’s industry—and her ignorance.” 18

Annette Gordon-Reed

In 2008, another book was published on the Jefferson-Hemings question from Annette Gordon-Reed. She published, The Hemings of Monticello: An American Family. This book won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, but provided little new information about Sally. Just like Brodie, Gordon-Reed assumes that Jefferson had a four decade long affair with Sally as well as fathering all of her children. This book finally led to the formation of “The Scholars Commission on The Jefferson-Hemings Matter” in 2010.

The Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter

In order to bring a sharper eye to this question and study it properly, a 13 member, blue-ribbon commission was formed of prominent historians and scientists (Black, white, male, and female). They included the following: Lance Banning, James Ceaser, Robert Ferrell, Charles Kesler, Harvey Mansfield, Alf Mapp, Jr., David Mayer, Forrest McDonald, Paul Rahe, Thomas Traut, Robert Turner, Walter Williams, and Jean Yarbrough.

They evaluated all of the evidence in the controversy, including the DNA samples from Jefferson’s and Heming’s descendants, including Field Jefferson, his uncle. The Commission stated that “Our conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that is almost certainly false.” 19 The historian Forrest McDonald said that “Jefferson was simply not guilty of the charge. New evidence indicates that Jefferson’s brother, Randolph, who was unmarried in his early fifties and known for socializing with the Monticello slaves, was a probable sexual partner for Sally and/or other slave women at Monticello. Randolph was easily influenced by others, and an old militia list revealed connections among Randolph and white men with black mistresses—in two cases those mistresses were Hemings women. Hence, the Commission felt that Randolph Jefferson and the Carr brothers were more likely to be Sally’s sexual partner.

Indeed, Malone noted that Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, made a categorical statement in the past. Requesting the discretion of biographer Henry S. Randall, Randolph said that no one at Monticello expected his grandfather of ever conducting an affair with any one of the slave women there. However, Randolph did say that Sally was the mistress of Peter Carr, one of Jefferson’s favorite nephews, who he treated like a son. Continuing, Randolph said that Sally’s sister, Betsy was the mistress of Samuel Carr, Peter’s brother.

The Commission regretted the public confusion about the 1998 DNA testing that has misled so many people. Malone’s final observation on this matter might have been: “Every true scholar must abhor any manipulations of facts and exploitations of sex or sensation in order to gain popularity and make money. If he enters the marketplace, he should be as scrupulous as a judge.” 20

What is the legacy of Jefferson? Excellence in life and statecraft, as well as in art and intellect. A lofty goal to pursue for Americans and for our nation.

Dr. Charles Greenawalt is Senior Fellow of The Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy.

ENDNOTES

1 David Barton, The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson (Dallas, TX: Thomas Nelson Press, 2012), pp. xii-xiii.

2 Michael Durey, With the Hammer of Truth—James Callender and America’s Early National Heros (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 51. Jones, Meriwether: Richmond Examiner, July 27, 1803.

3 Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Barbara B. Oberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 30: 583. 4 Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, “Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.”

5 Ibid.

6 Jones

7 James Truslow Adams, The Living Jefferson (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1936), p. 315.

8 Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), p. 15.

9 Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President, First Term: 1801-1805 (Charlottesville, VA:  University of Virginia Press), 4: 212.

10 Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty (Charlottesville, VA: Jefferson Editions, 2001), p. 20.

11 Thomas Fleming, Intimate Lives of the Founding Fathers (New York: Smithsonian Books, 2009), p. 411.

12 William G. Hyland, Jr., Long Journey With Mr. Jefferson: The Life of Dumas Malone (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2013), p. 151.

13 Fawn M. Brodie, “Jefferson Biographers & the Psychology of Canonization,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2, No. 1 (Summer 1971), pp. 155-171.

14 Hyland, p. 157.

15 Ibid.

16 Virginius Dabney, Across The Years: Memories of a Virginian (New York: Doubleday Press, 1978), p. 329.

17 Hyland, p. 155.

18 Hyland, p. 160.

19 Hyland, p. 222.

20 Hyland, p. 162