The essay, "Postmodernism and the Jefferson-Hemings Myth," by David Mayer, was printed in Navigator, the monthly newsletter of the Objectivist Center, in May 2001, and is posted on the Objectivist Center's website.

In this essay, Dr. Mayer finds that Jefferson's alleged relationship with Sally Hemings has tended to overshadow Jefferson's true significance, and that the belief in those allegations is "a symptom of a recent, disturbing trend in the history profession." The story of the relationship has been used by a number of partisans to advance their own agendas without regard to historical truth or "to objective, well-recognized standards of good historical scholarship." Chiefly responsible for this are three related phenomena: the "political correctness" movement, multiculturalism, and post-modernism. Dr. Mayer details how these overlapping movements have undermined rationality and humanism, and made an assault on objectivity and traditional standards of scholarly investigation, rendering history a matter of socially constructed interpretations. Personal stories become the basis for formulating views on social problems, and those who question the resulting myths are called racially insensitive, if not racists. As a result, the historical profession has lost many of the standards by which evidence is objectively evaluated, and ironically has itself become the vehicle of the kinds of politicized presuppositions that political correctness, multiculturalism, and post-modernism were intended to correct. (Click here for the essay.)

Dr. Mayer particularly identifies Annette Gordon-Reed's book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, as having "helped unleash an inquisition that casts a pall over contemporary Jefferson scholarship." The following selections are from his article in the Scholars Commission Report:

The two most significant briefs on behalf of the Jefferson-Hemings paternity claim that have appeared thus far in print are Annette Gordon-Reed's book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (TJMF) Ad Hoc Research Committee Report (referred to below as the Monticello Report), released in 2000 and available on the Monticello website (www.monticello.org). I refer to both these works as briefs on behalf of the paternity claim, for both share this essential weakness: rather than objectively weighing all the relevant evidence according to established standards of historical scholarship, they both are markedly one-sided, based on a highly selective reading of the evidence, presenting the case for Jefferson's paternity as if it were accepted as an article of faith. And for both Professor Gordon-Reed and for the staff at Monticello, it apparently is.

Annette Gordon-Reed's Book

Annette Gordon-Reed is a law professor, not trained as a historian; her book is a classic example of what historians call "lawyer's history" -- an advocacy brief which marshals the evidence in favor of a predetermined thesis rather than objectively weighs the evidence in the search for historical truth.

In both the preface and conclusion to her book, Professor Gordon-Reed quite directly admits that her mission is to expose the "troubling" -- i.e., racist -- assumptions made by historians who have denied "the truth of a liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings." To sustain the denial, she argues, historians must "make Thomas Jefferson so high as to have been something more than human" and "make Sally Hemings so low as to have been something less than human." Historians have engaged in "the systematic dismissal of the words of the black people who spoke on this matter -- Madison Hemings, the son of Sally Hemings, and Israel Jefferson, a former slave who also resided at Monticello -- as though their testimony was worth some fraction as that of whites." Indeed, she regards Madison Hemings as "a metaphor for the condition of blacks in American society." He was, she notes, "a black man who watched his three siblings voluntarily disappear into the white world" and yet who "chose to remain black and to speak for himself," only to be "vilified and ridiculed in a vicious manner" and then be "forgotten." To vindicate him, she wrote the book. (Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, pp. xiv, 234-35.)

Throughout her book, Professor Gordon-Reed vilifies as racist -- without ever directly using that term -- virtually every historian who has ever written about Jefferson and Sally Hemings: these include established Jefferson scholars such as Merrill Peterson, Douglass Adair, Dumas Malone, and John Chester Miller, as well as younger scholars such as Andrew Burstein. Her treatment of Burstein is illustrative of her technique. In his 1995 book The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist, Burstein briefly addressed Madison Hemings' 1873 newspaper interview, noting that it was "possible that his claim was contrived -- by his mother or himself -- to provide an otherwise undistinguished biracial carpenter a measure of social respect." Burstein added, "Would not his life have been made more charmed by being known as the son of Thomas Jefferson than the more obscure Peter or Samuel Carr?" Professor Gordon-Reed answers this rhetorical question with an emphatic "no," in the process ridiculing Burstein's choice of words, particularly his reference to a "charmed" life. (Jefferson and Hemings: American Controversy, p. 18.) Burstein has since reversed his position of skepticism and now argues that the DNA test results "have convincingly linked [Jefferson] to Sally Hemings sexually." (Andrew Burstein, "Jefferson's Rationalizations," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 57:183 (Jan. 2000).)

In addition to rhetorical arguments designed to ridicule the white male historians who have written about the Jefferson-Hemings matter -- suggesting not so subtly that their writings have been infused with racist assumptions -- Professor Gordon-Reed also carefully selects the evidence and presents it in the light most favorable to her cause, exposing what she regards as "double standards" in historical scholarship. In the process, however, she breaks down most accepted standards for weighing evidence, particularly for weighing oral tradition evidence, creating a new double standard which gives preference to the oral tradition supporting the Jefferson paternity thesis. Legitimate doubts about the veracity of the 1873 newspaper "memoir" attributed to Hemings -- doubts based not only on the many problems found in the account itself but also in its broader political context -- are swept aside, as Professor Gordon-Reed focuses on such matters as scholars' questioning whether a word like enciente would have been used by a black man at that time period. (Jefferson and Hemings: American Controversy, p. 20.) Her aim, again, is to vindicate Madison Hemings and his story, "to present the strongest case to be made that the story might be true." (Ibid., p. 210.)

More broadly, Professor Gordon-Reed's agenda is to use the Jefferson-Hemings story as a metaphor for American race relations. In a letter to the editor published soon after the DNA test results went public, Professor Gordon-Reed admitted quite directly the "silver lining" she found in this controversy, what it shows about "the history of racism in America": "If people had accepted this story, he would never have become an icon. All these historians did him a favor until we could get past our primitive racism. I don't think he would have been on Mount Rushmore or on the nickel. The personification of America can't live 38 years with a black woman." ("The All-Too-Human Jefferson," Letter to the editor, Wall Street Journal, November 24, 1998.)

Because her mission was to rebut the case made by Jefferson scholars -- virtually all of whom have accepted on face value the paternity allegations made against Peter and Samuel Carr by Jefferson's grandchildren T.J. Randolph and Ellen Coolidge Randolph -- Professor Gordon-Reed ignores entirely the possibility that Jefferson's brother Randolph or one of Randolph Jefferson's five sons could have fathered one or more of Sally Hemings' children. Although she lists in her bibliography Bernard Mayo's Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother Randolph (1942), she excludes Randolph and his sons from her genealogical table of "The Jeffersons and Randolphs (Relevant Connections Only)," as well as from the nearly 50 "Important Names" listed in Appendix A to her book. Nor are Randolph Jefferson or any of his children even referenced in her index.

The flawed scholarship of the book is further epitomized by a significant transcription error which appears in Appendix E, the text of Ellen Randolph Coolidge's 1858 letter to Joseph Coolidge. In relevant part, the original letter as found in the Coolidge Letterbook, University of Virginia Library -- in clear handwriting -- states the following about Jefferson's rooms at Monticello:

His apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.

As printed in the appendix to Professor Gordon-Reed's book, however, the passage reads:

His apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze.

(Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, p. 259.) Even if we give Professor Gordon-Reed the benefit of the doubt and assume that omission of the crucial words -- which obviously changes significantly the meaning of the sentence -- was not a deliberate distortion of the evidence but rather an innocent transcription mistake, so critical an error casts doubt on the reliability of her work.

The TJMF (Monticello) Committee Report

Following release of the DNA study in the fall of 1998, Daniel P. Jordan, the president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (TJMF) -- the institution that owns and operates Jefferson's home Monticello -- appointed a nine-person in-house research committee which was charged, in Jordan's words, to "review, comprehensively and critically, all the evidence, scientific and otherwise," including Dr. Foster's DNA study, "relating to the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings." The Committee was chaired by Dianne Swann-Wright, Director of Special Programs at Monticello (including its Getting Word Oral History Project described below), and its members -- described in its report as "including four Ph.D.'s and one medical doctor" -- were all Monticello staff members. Although the Committee consulted with members of two other Monticello committees -- the Advisory Committee for the International Center for Jefferson Studies and the Advisory Committee on African-American Interpretation -- it is worth emphasizing that no scholar independent of Monticello had any input in the report.

Although the Committee had concluded its work by spring 1999, its report was not released until January 27, 2000. (See "Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings," Thomas Jefferson Foundation, January 2000.) The report was immediately posted on the Internet, and Dan Jordan noted that within a week the Monticello website received nearly 60,000 "hits" a day, with some 3000 different individuals downloading the report. Two weeks later, after the television airing of the CBS miniseries Sally Hemings: An American Scandal, Jordan noted that the hits "maxed out" Monticello's system, with as many as 900,000 in one day. Although he dismissed the CBS miniseries as "ridiculous as history," "a soap opera," and "strictly Hollywood," Jordan acknowledged that "it certainly did encourage an interest in the story." He added, "Anything that encourages and raises the consciousness of the American people about history and race is a good thing." (Dan Jordan, interviewed in Shannon Lanier and Jane Feldman, Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family, New York: Random House, 2000, p. 113.)

What was not mentioned in the TJMF's press conference and not acknowledged on its website until about three months later, on March 23, 2000, was that one of the members of the Monticello Committee -- White McKenzie (Ken) Wallenborn, M.D. (the "medical doctor" identified in the committee's description) -- had dissented stridently from the Committee's report. Noting several areas of disagreement with the majority's report, Dr. Wallenborn in his minority report (dated April 12, 1999) concluded that "[t]here is historical evidence of more or less equal statu[r]e on both sides of this issue that prevent a definitive answer as to Thomas Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings' son Eston Hemings or for that matter the other four of her children." He urged the TJMF to continue to regard the paternity question as an open one. In an essay published subsequent to the release of his minority report, Dr. Wallenborn has charged that the Monticello Committee -- and particularly its chair, Dianne Swann-Wright, and Lucia (Cinder) Stanton (Shannon Senior Research Historian at Monticello), whom he identified as the principal author of the Committee's final report -- "had already reached their conclusions" at the start of their deliberations. According to Dr. Wallenborn's account, the Committee followed "the same tactic" that Professor Annette Gordon-Reed employed in her book, of ignoring or dismissing as problematic "most of the evidence that would exonerate Mr. Jefferson." (White McKenzie Wallenborn, "A Committee Insider's Viewpoint," in The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty, Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. ed., Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001, special advance ed., pp. 57-58.) Equally troubling is Dr. Wallenborn's statement that Dianne Swann-Wright failed to share his dissenting report with other members of the committee. Indeed, he notes that it was not shared with the interpretive staff at Monticello nor with the TJMF Board of Trustees until he began circulating it after the January 26, 2000 press conference. (Ibid., p. 64.)

Dr. Wallenborn's criticisms of the Monticello Committee appear to be well-founded. Upon close reading, its final report is far from being the "scholarly, meticulous, and thorough" analysis Dan Jordan claims it is. Its general conclusion, that Thomas Jefferson fathered one, if not all, of Sally Hemings' children, fails to be adequately supported by the evidence gathered by the Committee and summarized in its findings.

Indeed, a fundamental problem with the Committee report is the apparent absence of any methodology for evaluating or weighing evidence. When the report concludes, specifically, that the "currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he was most likely the father of all six of Sally Hemings children," it offers no standard by which the conclusory terms high probability or most likely can be objectively measured. Generally speaking, the Committee report seems to rest this conclusion on just a few pieces of evidence -- the results of Dr. Foster's DNA tests, Madison Hemings' 1873 "memoir," and the "Monte Carlo" statistical study conducted by Committee member Fraser Nieman -- plus one critical, but unsupported, assumption: that all of Sally Hemings' children were fathered by just one man. This single-father postulate rests on the flimsiest of evidence: the naming of the Hemings siblings' children after one another, which supposedly demonstrates the "closeness" of the family (and thus, it is assumed, Sally Hemings' monogamy), and the claim of an absence of evidence that Sally Hemings was not monogamous (a false claim in light of the Edmund Bacon evidence, which the Committee discounts, as noted below). The only documentary evidence which the Committee can cite in support of its conclusion that Jefferson "most likely" fathered Sally Hemings' children other than Eston is the Madison Hemings 1873 interview. (Appendix H, Sally Hemings and Her Children: Information from Documentary Sources, pp. 8, 10, 12.)

Another fundamental flaw in the Committee's report is the problem of bias and conflict of interest. Since 1993 the TJMF has been conducting an oral history research project called "Getting Word," to locate the descendants of Monticello's African-American community and to record and preserve their stories and histories. The project has interviewed over 100 people, including 22 descendants of Madison Hemings and four descendants of Eston Hemings. The very fact that Monticello staff members have been involved in this project makes it difficult for an in-house research committee to objectively evaluate oral history evidence. The problems of bias in favor of oral history evidence generally -- and selective bias in favor of those particular families interviewed through the Getting Word project -- were compounded by the fact that the chair of the ad hoc research committee was Dianne Swann-Wright, director of Special Programs at Monticello, who had been employed to work on the project since its inception (and her arrival at Monticello) in 1993. Given the intimate involvement of Dr. Swann-Wright and other Committee members with the people interviewed for the Getting Word project, it is not surprising that the Committee report heavily relies on the 1873 Madison Hemings story and the oral tradition among his descendants as the key evidence in support of the Jefferson paternity thesis.

As has been noted, oral tradition evidence has a general problem of unreliability. The Committee report is flawed not only because it relies heavily on oral tradition evidence, but that it relies on it selectively , taking seriously only that oral tradition that fits with the story of Jefferson's paternity. The bias is evident in the report, where it infers from the seriousness of the Madison Hemings' descendants' "history" that it is true and therefore ought to be treated on par with documentary and other evidence. "In a climate of disbelief and hostility," the report notes, "they continued to tell their children and grandchildren of their descent from Thomas Jefferson, often at significant times in their lives. . . . " (Appendix G, Oral History in the Hemings Family.) On the same page of the report, however, the Committee notes that the oral history of the Eston Hemings descendants claimed descent from Jefferson's "uncle" -- an oral tradition which apparently was taken just as seriously by this line of the family, until publication of Fawn Brodie's Intimate History prompted family members to change the story -- but the Committee dismisses the earlier tradition among Eston Hemings' descendants as "altered to protect their passing into the white world." (Ibid. ) The change of the Eston Hemings family oral tradition following publication of the Brodie book is acknowledged by family members. "We're just learning -- from some of our cousins -- stories we weren't able to hear," one family member said. (See Julia Westerinen, interview in Lanier and Feldman, Jefferson's Children, p. 56.)

Significantly, the Committee report also concluded that Thomas Woodson was not the son of Thomas Jefferson, and indeed that there was no documentary evidence linking him even to Monticello and Sally Hemings. (Appendix K, Assessment of Thomas C. Woodson's Connection to Sally Hemings.) The significance of this is twofold. First, it acknowledges the falsity of a core allegation of both the original 1802 Callender story and the 1873 story attributed to Madison Hemings: the notion that Jefferson's sexual relationship with Sally Hemings began in France, and that she bore him a son soon after their return to the United States. As the Committee report finds, there is no evidence of any child being born to Sally Hemings prior to 1795. Second, the findings regarding Thomas Woodson starkly reveal the inherent unreliability of oral tradition as evidence. The Woodson descendants just as fervently believed that their ancestor was the son of Thomas Jefferson, and the Committee found that "the longstanding oral history warrants inclusion of information" about Woodson despite the absence of documentation to connect him to Sally Hemings and Monticello, let alone to Thomas Jefferson. (Appendix H, Sally Hemings and Her Children, p. 6.)

There is one other oral tradition, of course, which was summarily rejected by the Committee. Beginning with the direct testimony of Jefferson's grandchildren, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Randolph Coolidge, the oral tradition in the family descended from Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph has identified one of the Carr brothers, Peter or Samuel (Jefferson's nephews by his sister Martha) as the father of Sally Hemings' children. Although that tradition apparently too was taken just as seriously as the tradition of Hemings descendants -- and although it is arguably far more reliable, for it was based on the testimony of eyewitnesses to the events in question -- the report essentially dismisses Carr paternity by pointing to the DNA test results on Eston Hemings' descendant and assuming that Sally Hemings' children were all fathered by the same man.

The Committee's bias is evident also in the double standard it employs in weighing evidence. For example, the published account of Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon, which identified another, unnamed man as the father of Harriet Hemings, is dismissed as having "problems of chronology," noting that Bacon was not employed at Monticello until five years after Harriet's birth (Review of Documentary Sources, p. 4). But this ignores the real possibility that Bacon resided at Monticello as early as 1800 and also assumes that Bacon was describing an event he witnessed prior to Harriet's birth when indeed he might have concluded that the man he saw some years later was the father of her children. However, immediately following this curt dismissal of Bacon's account, the Committee report states that Israel Jefferson's 1873 interview "corroborated Madison Hemings's claim of Jefferson paternity" -- even though Israel Jefferson's account, besides the many problems which it presents, also has a real "chronology problem" of its own: Israel was only eight years old at the time of the birth of Sally Hemings' youngest child, Eston! (Ibid., p. 4.)

Important pieces of evidence that question the Jefferson paternity thesis are either ignored or blithely dismissed by the Committee's report. For example, Jefferson's own denial of the Callender allegations, in an 1805 letter written to a member of his administration, is dismissed as "ambiguous" (Review of the Documentary Evidence, p. 2) -- an assessment that fails to take into account its clear historical context. The account of former household slave Isaac Jefferson, who mentioned and described Sally Hemings in his memoir, is omitted from the Committee report, even though the fact that Isaac did not so much as hint that there was any special relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings is powerful evidence questioning the paternity thesis. (Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, Isaac Jefferson as interviewed by Charles W. Campbell in 1847, printed in James A. Bear, ed., Jefferson at Monticello, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967.)

Other problems, though relatively minor, in the Committee's report reveal that it was far less meticulously written as one would expect it to be. For example, although the report does include a facsimile of the 1858 Ellen Randolph Coolidge letter, it follows it with the flawed transcription as found in Appendix E of Professor Gordon-Reed's book. The draft of Committee member Fraser Nieman's article, "Coincidence or Causal Connection? The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson's Visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings's Conceptions" -- which was going to print in The William and Mary Quarterly in January 2000, just as the Committee report was released -- contains a typographical error which distorts the DNA study in a significant way. The molecular geneticists tested "male-line descendants of Thomas Jefferson" (emphasis added), the article states, when of course it was not Thomas but Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's paternal uncle, whose descendants were tested.

The article by Mr. Nieman, who is director of archeology at Monticello, has far more serious problems than this embarrassing typographical error. As the Scholars Commission report notes, none of us were impressed by this so-called "Monte Carlo" statistical study. The Monte Carlo approach estimates the probability of a given outcome by comparing it to a very large number of random outcomes generated by a simulation model. Nieman's study rested on two unsupported postulates: that there could only be a single father for all of Sally Hemings' children, and that rival candidates to Thomas Jefferson would have had to arrive and depart on the exact same days he did. Here, the assumption of random behavior makes little sense, because the visits to Monticello of the other candidates for paternity -- Jefferson's friends and relatives (including his brother Randolph, Randolph Jefferson's sons, and the Carr brothers) -- were not random occurrences; they certainly would have been far more likely to occur after Jefferson's return to Monticello from extended absences in Washington or elsewhere. The final impression one gets of the Nieman study is of a simulation whose parameters were deliberately set to "get" Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings' children. (Ken Wallenborn reports that when Nieman presented his study to the Committee, he stated: "I've got him!" Wallenborn, "A Committee Insider's Viewpoint," in The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty, p. 53.)

As Dr. Wallenborn has noted, Neiman's statistical study "cries out for valid comparative studies of the other Jefferson males who might have fathered Eston, and in the absence of these comparisons, the results are inconclusive." (Ibid., p. 51.) As the Scholars Commission report notes, the circumstantial case that Eston Hemings was fathered by Randolph Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's younger brother, is "many times stronger" than the case against Jefferson himself. Significantly, even the Monticello Committee report notes documentary evidence that Randolph Jefferson visited Monticello in August 1807, a probable conception time for Eston Hemings (this evidence consisting of a letter from Jefferson to his brother, inviting him to visit Monticello while Randolph's twin sister, Anna Marks, was then visiting) -- but the Committee rejects this evidence because no corroborating evidence has been found to indicate that Randolph did in fact visit at this time. (Appendix J, Summary of research on the possible paternity of other Jeffersons.) The Committee report also notes that Randolph Jefferson's sons Thomas, in 1800, and Robert Lewis, in 1807, "may well have been at Monticello during the conception periods of Harriet and Eston Hemings." (Part V, Assessment of Possible Paternity of Other Jeffersons.)

One final, critical assumption made both in the Nieman study and in the Monticello Committee report as a whole is the assumption that Sally Hemings was continuously present at Monticello. As the Scholars Commission concludes, however, that assumption may be problematic. Sadly, we simply do not know enough about Sally Hemings -- even her duties at Monticello -- to conclude that she would have remained at Monticello rather than travel to, say, Poplar Forest, at some of the probable times of her conceptions. The question is particularly important given biographer Henry Randall's intriguing reference to "well known circumstances" that prove Martha Jefferson Randolph's denial of the charge that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children. As documented by Randall, Jefferson's daughter "directed her sons' attention to the fact that Mr. Jefferson and Sally Hemings could not have met -- were far distant from each other -- for fifteen months prior to the birth" of the child who supposedly most resembled Jefferson. Almost everyone has assumed that Mrs. Randolph was referring to Jefferson's absence from Monticello at that time, but she may very well have been referring to Sally Hemings'. (Letter from Henry S. Randall to James Parton, June 1, 1868, in Flower, James Parton, pp. 237-38.) This intriguing possibility is yet another matter that cries out for additional research.

From the Individual Views of David N. Mayer, in the Report of the Scholars Commission
for the Jefferson-Hemings Matter, April 12, 2001. Used by permission.

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