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HISTORIOGRAPHIC REVISIONISM | PAGE 1, 2
Historians make judgments based on fragmentary evidence; missteps are an occupational hazard. Yet when Ellis shifted from hard-line skeptic (1997) to interpreter of fresh evidence that definitively proved his old views wrong, he didn't skip a beat. In Nature, he wrote: "With impeccable timing, Jefferson appears to remind us of a truth that should be self-evident. Our heroes -- and especially Presidents -- are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans." What happened to the godlike man who sublimated temptations of the flesh to sober appreciation of Doric columns? In the Nov. 9 U. S. News essay, Ellis suddenly depicts the scholarly world in a different light. "Within the scholarly world," he wrote, "the acceptance of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison had been gaining ground over recent years." Here the scholarly backpedaling seems a bit disingenuous. But forget the self-contradiction for a moment. This time, Ellis was correct the first time around. For years, historians had been disparaging anyone who dared to suggest that Jefferson and Hemings may have had a sexual relationship. A trip to the local library produced the following gems. In "The Jefferson Image in the American Mind" (1960), Merrill D. Patterson, among the first to confront the issue squarely, attributed the Jefferson-Hemings story to "the Negroes' pathetic wish for a little pride, and their subtle ways of confounding the white folks." Nice. Dumas Malone, an indefatigable biographer who devoted his professional life to Jefferson, pointedly wrote that he would have much preferred to ignore the whole sordid Hemings question if other historians (i.e., Patterson), had not had the bad taste to air it. In "Jefferson the President: The First Term" (1970), he sniffed that the charges "are distinctly out of character," and that adjudging them to be true "would be as absurd as to charge this consistently temperate man with being, through a long period, a secret drunkard." Can these sentiments be dismissed as the dated ravings of the old guard? Hardly. In 1991, one Alf J. Mapp Jr., in "Thomas Jefferson: Passionate Pilgrim," called the charges "Federalist fancy." (The Federalists, of course, were Jefferson's sworn political enemies.) In 1993, Willard Sterne Randall, in "Thomas Jefferson: A Life" (a book read and praised by President Clinton), said the tale "must be put down as mere gossip about a great man published in the absence of journalistic standards, much less historical ones." All this could inspire depression about the state of historiography, were there not a hero to the story, a woman who has gotten some due, but not nearly enough: Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor at New York Law School. Her 1997 book "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," while respectfully reviewed, was vastly overshadowed by Ellis'. Like an avenging torts professor straight out of "The Paper Chase," she laid bare -- in tight, unsentimental prose -- the shoddy logic and hidebound assumptions of the Jefferson "mafia," long before the Y-chromosome did. Her main point was: Circumstantial evidence is all we have. If you're going to dismiss the testimony of Madison Hemings (a black man) on the grounds that it is mere oral history, shouldn't you do the same for the self-serving memories of Jefferson's white grandchildren, who pinned the paternity on a family outcast, Peter Carr? To put it bluntly, Gordon-Reed wrote, the game is rigged when black and white testimony conflict. The white oral history was not just embraced, it was ferociously defended -- despite the fact that here were mulatto children running around who looked like Jefferson! "The underlying theme of most historians' denials," she wrote, "is that the whole story is too impossible to believe." Jefferson, after all, was almost too good for this earth. Hemings was barely human. Scholars "shamelessly employ every stereotype of black people and distortion of life in the Old South to support their opinion," she concluded. I called up Gordon-Reed to see if she was enjoying her vindication. (Ellis did not return two telephone messages left at his office.) The answer, of course, is yes. But she's not entirely happy that the media has focused so extensively on the discovery itself, and not on historians' past handling of the matter -- which, after all, was the main point of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings." Moreover, she added, Ellis' role as born-again spokesman "drove home the point of my book, which is that where Jefferson is concerned, the automatic person to talk to is the white guy." "What is the basis for trusting his position on this topic, when he has been exactly wrong?" she said. "The obvious response is that he won a National Book Award. But the book was on the character of Thomas Jefferson, and he didn't figure out that he had a mistress and had six children. That's a rather large omission in an exploration of the man's character." There is one small sore point in the two scholars' personal relationship. Before Ellis had finished his manuscript, Gordon-Reed sent him a copy of hers. They had an amiable intellectual exchange, and he intimated that she had convinced him that the odds were roughly 50-50 that an affair had taken place. When "American Sphinx" came out, however, Ellis reverted to the position the relationship was a "remote possibility." "He pretty much gave me the back of his hand," Gordon-Reed said. Maybe only someone from outside the historians' guild could identify the double standards that have governed discourse on this topic for so long. Another outsider, Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish intellectual and diplomat who has lately chipped away at Jefferson's status as poster boy for liberal democracy, went on record a couple of years ago to say he believed the affair happened. "I think the Jefferson of the biographers -- for whom such behavior would be unthinkable -- is a fictional construct." That statement now seems remarkably prescient. Historians scoffed when an earlier champion of the Jefferson-Hemings story, UCLA historian Fawn Brodie, pointed out in the '70s that Jefferson often used the French word for "mulatto" to describe the color of French soil during his visits there. Racial mixing was much on his mind, she concluded. Maybe that interpretation was drivel. But is it any more so than Joseph Ellis' psycho-biographic musings that Jefferson displaced his sexual urges onto neoclassical half-domes and arches? "It is my belief," Gordon-Reed wrote in "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings," "that those who are considered Jefferson scholars have never made a serious and objective attempt to get at the truth of this matter." On the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" this month, Ellis made the opposite point. Before the new evidence emerged, he said, "Honest people could honestly disagree." Now that the historical question has been resolved, it's the
historiographical one that nags. Not: Was Jefferson chaste? But: Were the
historians who were investigating the issue honest and objective in their
searchings? And, if the consensus is that they were not, will they confront
their failings? Or will they insist there was never a problem and in the same breath confirm that they have solved it?
Chris Shea is a freelance writer and a former editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The mystery of Monticello He's been exalted as the demigod of liberty and denounced as a racist reactionary. Who was the real Thomas Jefferson?
Past imperfect Thomas Jefferson, the Atlantic and the mything of the past.
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