-Caveat Lector-
Subject: JEFFERSON SEX MYTH DEBUNKED
Saturday, March 13, 1999,
COMMENT page B7
Clintonites have long telegraphed their intention of smearing America's
early presidents in the hope of making the current one appear less
despicable
THE JEFFERSON MYTH, DEBUNKED
Egon Richard Tausch
The Spectator
Last year, Nature magazine exposed Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third
president of the United States, as having had an affair with his slave
Sally Hemings and having fathered at least one child by her. This
received a great deal of press attention, coming as it did just before
mid-term elections that were expected to determine a modern philandering
president's fate. At the same time, Joe Ellis, the author of the
article,
signed a full-page newspaper advertisement against the impeachment of
Bill Clinton. Ellis calls the reappearance of the alleged Jefferson
scandal "impeccable timing," being far too modest about his role in it.
The affair with the slave was also the theme of the film, Jefferson in
Paris.
Clintonites have long telegraphed their intention of smearing America's
early presidents in the hope of making the current one appear less
despicable. But Ellis' charge is untrue, and the best efforts of his
geneticist collaborators are useless window-dressing. Since the American
mainstream media have taken the headline of the genetics article as
gospel truth and have ignored disclaimers and flaws throughout, the
allegation against Jefferson must be rebutted. Historical truth and
competent science are more important than the "legacy" of Bill Clinton.
It is not an exaggeration to say that semi-educated Americans have, as a
result of the media barrage (and the obscurity of the original article),
now decided that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child through
his
slave, "surely as heinous an act as sex-games with an intern." The
accusation fooled even the Conservative columnists Joseph Sobran and
William F. Buckley Jr. Since the Clintonites have continually argued
that their troubles stem only from "lying about sex," the rest of us
must waste valuable time on an otherwise trivial historical subject.
Fortunately, Ellis's article to the contrary, no previous president,
including Thomas Jefferson, can hold a candle (or a cigar) to the sexual
corruption of the current occupant of the White House.
_____________________________________________
NO OTHER PRESIDENT CAN HOLD A CANDLE OR A
CIGAR TO THE CORRUPTION OF THE CURRENT ONE
_____________________________________________
The "study" published in Nature consisted of a little over a page of
genetic speculation and an editorial by Ellis, also a little over a
page,
of Clinton apologetics masquerading as history. Every competent history
student or teacher knows the allegations concerning Jefferson and Sally
Hemings. Yet one Clintonite was given time on National Public Radio to
announce that, until Ellis' piece, "white historians" had engaged in a
vast conspiracy to obliterate any suspicion of the affair. If such a
plot
existed, it was spectacularly unsuccessful, as the original accusation
was widely published in newspapers in 1802 (at the beginning of
Jefferson's first term as president), regularly reprinted (and regularly
rebutted), dwelt on at length in every biography of Jefferson since the
first one during his lifetime, and repeated throughout the rest of the
19th and 20th centuries, in high-school textbooks, a best-selling
bodice-ripper, screen presentations, and, finally, two full-length
history books devoted exclusively to the alleged scandal, both of which
were widely reviewed. Even tour guides at Monticello mention the
scandal,
though dismissively.
In Jefferson's time, guests at Monticello were fully aware that almost
all the family's house servants, adult and child, were "quadroons"
and"octaroons" (not "mulattos," as is commonly said). Being only
one-fourth, one-eighth or, in some cases, one-sixteenth of African
descent, most of them could, in the phrase of the day, "pass for white."
Yet none of Jefferson's numerous and highly influential visitors ever
accused him, privately or publicly, of sexual misconduct, nor was there
any scandal until the fateful year of 1802, when the notorious James T.
Callender came along. He was a Scot who, facing trial for sedition in
London in the 1790s, fled to America. He became a writer for the
Philadelphia Gazette, the house organ of the (original) Republican
party,
the faction founded by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was delighted with
Callender's vicious, if unfounded, attacks on luminaries of the rival
Federalist party. Callender called Washington a "scandalous hypocrite"
who "authorized the robbery and ruin of his own army" in the Revolution,
and John Adams "a British spy." He also slandered Madison. But none of
the mud ever seemed to stick. Callender's first modest success was when
he accused Alexander Hamilton of embezzling funds from the Treasury
while
serving as its secretary. Hamilton proved that the money was his own,
but
it had been handled mysteriously for the purpose of paying off a
blackmailer who had threatened to expose a love affair between Hamilton
and the blackmailer's wife. This discovery confirmed Callender in his
career of dynamite fishing-tossing out a fabricated slander in the hope
that some unrelated piece of muck would float to the surface.
Callender was indicted, tried and convicted under the (unconstitutional)
Sedition Act of 1798 for slandering President Adams. When Jefferson
became president in 1801, true to his principled opposition to Adams's
monarchical pretensions, he promptly pardoned all who had been
convicted,
including Callender, and released them from jail. But the federal
government was slow in returning the fines which Callender and the other
convicts had paid. Although Jefferson himself finally paid a portion of
Callender's fine, the latter brooded over his maltreatment and was
determined to be rewarded with the Richmond postmastership, which paid
$1,500 a year, for his services to the Republican party.
When President Jefferson refused to appoint him or to respond to his
letters, Callender threatened to release information damaging to
Jefferson. The president refused to pay what he called "hush money"
writing to Gov. James Monroe of Virginia that Callender "knows nothing
of me which I am not willing to declare before the world." Callender
then obtained employment on the Recorder, the house organ of the (now
opposition) Federalist party, and began assaulting President Jefferson
savagely.
Callender soon heard of the mixed-race servants at Monticello and
promptly announced that the long-widowed Jefferson had a "Congo harem."
He had also heard the name "Sally Hemings" and began to write of "dusky
Sally," "black Sal," "the black wench and her mulatto litter," and the
"mahogany coloured charmer." (He had obviously never seen the very
light-skinned Hemings.) The Federalist press gleefully repeated the
charge. The eminent historian James Truslow Adams, in The Living
Jefferson, concluded that every mention of the Sally Hemings scandal
could be traced back to Callender's articles. Nevertheless, the slander
grew until it included the accusation that Jefferson had sold his own
"black" children into prostitution in New Orleans. It then subsided
because of the complete absence of truth. By the 1820s, the entire
scandal, though heard by all, was believed by one, and it took the rise
of the Abolitionist movement and William Lloyd Garrison's publication of
the poem Jefferson's Daughter to revive the slander. A few other
Abolitionists made their own efforts at defamation, but since these
merely served to alienate them from their countrymen, north and south,
they soon gave up.
___________________________________________
ANY LITTLE OLD LADY CAN MAKE A DOG'S BREAKFAST OF
AN AGENDA DRIVE GENETIC STUDY
____________________________________________
Now we must examine the supposedly impartial science of the Nature
article's geneticists. With a public still dazzled by the trappings of
science, supporting an historical editorial with "scientific
discoveries"
involving terms and concepts unintelligible to even the best-educated of
non-specialists readers is a formula for success.
The science consists of DNA analysis. When the public is being subjected
to babble about genetic codes as the basis for everything from
scientific
evidence at famous criminal trials, to the pseudoscience behind the
movie
Jurassic Park, to Monica's dress, few can be expected to read beyond the
title, Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child. But readers who take the
trouble will find that the geneticist authors did not come to such a
categorical conclusion.
There was, however, one piece of apparent evidence, the only grounds for
suspicion which honest historians have ever entertained. This was a fact
which had been noted by some of those who had visited Jefferson in
Monticello: the Jefferson and the Hemings families resembled one
another.
So indeed they did, as would have been expected, for they were related,
as Thomas Jefferson himself knew. Sally Hemings was the daughter of the
Englishman John Wayles and the bright mulatto Elizabeth Hemings (herself
the daughter of an English sea-captain) whom Wayles took as his
permanent
concubine in 1761, after the death of his first wife. This same John
Wayles was Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law. Wayles, through his first
wife, Martha Eppes, had a daughter, Martha, later Mrs Thomas Jefferson.
She and Sally Hemings were half-sisters. In fact, all five of Sally's
siblings (the Hemings family) bore the same kinship to Martha. Through
his wife, Thomas Jefferson inherited the light-skinned Hemingses as
slaves. That is why the Hemings children bore a resemblance to his
children. He gave the Hemings family preferential treatment because
they were his wife's kin, not because they were his children.
Any little old lady living in genteel poverty in Charlottesville,
surrounded by her stacks of genealogical charts, can make a dog's
breakfast of an agenda-driven genetic study. The Nature article is not
even genetics; it is necromancy. Perhaps I am being too harsh on Joe
Ellis's geneticists. After their "findings" were disputed by other
geneticists, Dr. Eugene Foster, the lead author of the Nature article,
told the Washington Times that the media "went too far" with their
interpretation. He is now distancing himself from Ellis's article in the
same magazine, and even from his own article's title. But the historical
damage is done. The attention-span of the media and the public has been
exceeded. Jefferson's legacy will always be overshadowed by this new
sexual myth, invented to make his modern namesake look less morally
corrupt. Ellis insists that he was only out to show that past
presidents,
like the current one, were flesh-and-blood humans." I consider myself a
flesh-and-blood human, but I sincerely hope Joe Ellis never sets out to
prove me one.
Based on a longer article to appear in the American monthly Chronicles.
The author is an attorney in San Antonio, Tex.
The Spectator
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