NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/soc/history/10420

Text File | 1992-12-29 | 3.9 KB | 78 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Brian Douglass)
Subject: Re: jefferson question
Organization: Anasazi Inc Phx Az USA
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 03:18:56 GMT
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Selected excerpts from Douglas Wilson's article on Jefferson in the
November 1992 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

"...College teachers are often dismayed to discover that many if not most
of their students now regard this [liaison with Sally Hemings] as an
accepted fact.  But this is not all.  In the prevailing ethos of the sexual
revolution, Jefferson's supposed liaison is widely received with equanimity
and seems to earn him nothing more reproachful than a knowing smile."

"...In effect, something that before the 1960s would have been universally
considered a shameful blot on Jefferson's character has become almost an
asset."

"...Although the charge that Jefferson had fathered several children by one
of his slaves was first made public in his lifetime, by vindictive
journalist and office-seeker, James Callender...was not credited by
Jefferson scholars or the public at large.  But that began to change in
1974, when Fawn M. Brodie published a widely read book on Jefferson in
which she attempted to establish truth of Callender's charge as a prime
biographical fact."

"...She insisted that her object was... 'not scandalous debauchery with an
innocent slave victim but rather a serious passion that brought Jefferson
and the slave woman much private happiness over a period lasting
thirty-eight years."

"...Compelling as this picture has proved to the American public, most
Jefferson scholars and historians have remained unpersuaded.  It is true
that Jefferson was extremely protective of his personal life and went to
considerable lengths to keep it private, but it does not follow, as Brodie
would have us believe, that he must therefore have had something to
hide...  It is difficult for knowledgeable authorities to reconcile a
liaison with Hemings with much else that is know about him.  Jefferson
implicitly denied the charge, and such evidence as exists about the
paternity of Heming's children points not to Jefferson but to his nephews.
It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative, but the real problem with
Brodie's interpretation is that it doesn't fit Jefferson.  If he did take
advantage of Hemings and father her children over a period of twenty
years, he was acting completely out of character and violating his own
standars of honor and decency.  For a man who took questions of morality
and honor very seriously, such a hypocritical liaison would have been a
constant source of shame and guilt.  For his close-knit family, who
worshipped him and lived too near to him to have been ignorant of such an
arrangement, it would have been a moral tragedy of no small dimensions."

"But haunted as he was by other troubles and difficulties, there is no sign
of this sort of shame or guilt in Jefferson's life.  That is why Brodie
must present Jefferson and Hemings as a happy couple and their supposed
life together as giving satisfaction and lasting pleasure.  And whereas
there are grounds for suspecting a liaison, such as the terms of
Jefferson's will and the testimony of Hemings son Madison, there are no
grounds whatever for believing in what Brodie called the "private
happiness" enjoyed by Jefferson and Hemings.  That is pure speculation.
Because Brodie's thesis deals in such unwarranted assumptions, the great
Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone regarded it as 'without historical
foundation.'"

Douglas Wilson  is the George A. Lawrence Professor of English at Knox
College Illinois.