Filksinger wrote:
‘Scholarly’ is not an adjective that springs to my mind to describe a report that frequently brands dissenting historians as ‘revisionist.’
The liberal sprinkling of ‘revisionist’ is rhetorical grandstanding that is at odds with supposedly unbiased and objective consideration of the evidence.
‘Revisionism’ lumps those subscribe to the Jefferson-Hemmings affair with Holocaust deniers and other unsavory and ahistorical folks. ‘Revisionist’ implies that there was a settled historical consenus that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of Sally Hemmings’s children, which it manifestly is not.
If anyone is engaging in revisionism it’s the authors of the report, not those who disagree with it.
The simple fact is this: prior to the release of the genetic tests, no historian attempting to confound the Jefferson-Hemmings hypothesis nominated Randolph Jefferson or his sons as the father of Sally Hemmings children. After the release of the genetic tests, Randolph Jefferson and/or his sons suddenly became the prime suspects. No new historical evidence was introduced that had not already existed for decades that supports this hypothesis. The former prime suspects, Samuel and/or Peter Carr, were instantly discarded. The evidence once said to indict the Carrs was tailored to fit Randolph Jefferson and sons. Revisionism? Pot-kettle-black.
There are many flaws I could point to the Scholar’s Commission report but I’ll pick on only a couple.
First off, the report engages in guilt by association by using the thoroughly sleazy and discreditable James Callender to undermine the claims of Madison Hemings. The report claims that Madison Heming’s account drew from James Callender’s original denunciations. The sole evidence presented for this charge is a misspelling of ‘Callender’ in the James Wetmore’s account of Madison Heming’s story. The report then leaps to the conclusion that:
This is quite a stunning leap of logic.
As the reports admits, Madison Hemings orally recounted his story to Wetmore. Why Hemings should be blamed for a misspelling by Wetmore is baffling. And why the misspelling should be interpreted as evidence that Hemings was familiar with Callender’s slanders even more baffling. Why the misspelling should be interpreted as evidence that Hemings seized on Callender’s gossip to manufacture a belief that Thomas Jefferson was his father is beyond belief. It’s evidence that the authors of the report are quite unprepared to engage in fair and impartial hearing of the evidence both for and against.
It’s worth comparing Madison Hemings’s account and James Callender’s charges.
James Callender charged Thomas Jefferson with fathering a mulatto boy, ‘Yellow Tom,’ other children by a slave ‘Dusky Sally.’ Callender claimed that ‘Yellow Tom’ pretended to be the President and cut other capers at Monticello. In a society where miscegenation was a social taboo - even if frequently violated - Callender’s charges were a heaping salvo of mud. Callender makes no claim for the age of ‘Yellow Tom’ nor does he make any claim to the circumstances of Yellow Tom’s conception or birth.
Madison Hemings’s account reduced to its substance is this: Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson became lovers while in Paris. When Jefferson desired to return from his embassy to France, Sally Hemmings balked. Jefferson induced Hemmings to return to the United States and slavery by promising to free all her children by age 21. When Jefferson and Hemmings returned from France she was pregnant but the child only survived a year or two after birth. Later Sally Hemmings bore to Jefferson four children, Beverly, Harriet, Eston and Madison, that survived to adulthood and Jefferson upheld his end of the bargain by freeing them all by the time they were 21.
It’s difficult to see how Callender’s slanders could be taken as inspiration for Madison’s account. Yet the report attempts to conflate the two accounts. The report pretends that the ‘Yellow Tom’/Tom Woodson equation somehow undermines Madison Hemings’s account despite admitting that there is nothing to connect Tom Woodson to Jefferson, Monticello or the Hemmings.
Andrew Warinner