NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/soc/history/10428

Text File | 1992-12-29 | 4.9 KB | 98 lines

Newsgroups: soc.history
Path: sparky!uunet!noc.near.net!news.cs.brandeis.edu!binah.cc.brandeis.edu!RATH
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: jefferson question
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News System)
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Organization: Brandeis University
References: <[e-mail]>,<[e-mail]>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 18:02:43 GMT
Lines: 85

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Brian Douglass) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Corbett Ray Rowell) writes:
>>
>>    Please email [e-mail]
>>    Sorry about spelling errors, modem is acting up.
>>
>
>Selected excerpts from Douglas Wilson's article on Jefferson in the
>November 1992 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

I found tyhe order in which you presented this as possibly misleading.
The substantive disagreement most scholars are talking about is with
Brodie's assertion that the liason was long-term and happy, not with whether
or not it happened.  By shifting the focus over to Brodie instead of
Jefferson and bashing a marginal argument decisively, the author of the excerpts
seems to discredit by association the whole argument.  TJ's relations w/
Sally Hemings, and whether or not they produced a child, are still discussedby scholars, and even
"college teachers"--who might  nonetheless be dismayed by Brodie's wor.

>
>"...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."
:
:
major portion of argument against Brodie's book moved below
:
:
>". . .  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.

8< 8< 8< 8< the rest of the article is below. 8< *

>
>"...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.