JEFFERSON NOTES Jefferson Notes is a publication of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society Richard Dixon Editor jeffersonnotes@verizon.net Winter 2015 No. 15
LIBRARY DONATION
W
hen Thomas Jefferson was vice president, he promised Benjamin Rush a “letter on Christianity.” It was not until 1803, when Jefferson read a short treatise by Joseph Priestley, Socrates and Jesus Compared, that Jefferson was motivated to sketch out his syllabus, which he sent to Rush. He called it “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus, Compared with Those of Others" It was, Jefferson wrote, “the result of a life of inquiry & reflection and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions.” Throughout his lifetime, Jefferson supported many Christian churches, both with donations and personal attendance. By his presidency, he was having private doubts whether the message of Jesus had been corrupted by his followers. Even so, he admired the “system of morals taught by Jesus as “the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man.” Although a serious student of the Bible and one who turned to it for personal comfort and a source of advice, it was Jefferson’s reluctance to view the Bible as inerrant, or that Jesus was divine, that later drew the opposition of Orthodox Christians. Cont’d on page 2
I
n 2014, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society offered to donate free of charge to various school and public libraries The Jefferson- Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission. This program is made possible through the John and Catherine Coolidge Lastavica Literary Fund. Chaired by Professor Robert F. Turner, of the University of Virginia, thirteen distinguished scholars, independent and unpaid, spent a year studying all the available evidence relating to whether Jefferson could have been the father of a child by Sally Hemings. This unique scholarship is the most authoritative examination of this controversial claim. Their conclusion was the “unanimous view that the allegation is by no means proven; and we find it regrettable that public confusion about the 1998 DNA testing and other evidence has misled many people into believing that the issue is closed.” A short biography on Cont’d on page 5 each of the
There is no Jefferson Bible Cont’d from page 1
It was Jefferson’s hope that Priestley would take his syllabus and develop a new presentation of the Christian gospel. It is doubtful this would have occurred because Priestley believed that the bible was inspired. When Priestley died shortly after, the task was left to Jefferson. He deleted from the text of the New Testament the storyline of Jesus’ life, leaving a digest of Jesus words, He referred to this project as “too hastily done..the work of 2 or 3 nights only.” Jefferson titled this work “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth… Being an Abridgment of the New Testament for the Use of the Indians.” Jefferson was concerned with the missionary work to convert the Indians, but it was never published or distributed to the Indians. It became a personal reference and he referred to it as an “operation for my own use.” Jefferson went no further with the project, but he had not forgotten it as a task to be done. In Jefferson on First Committee to Design the Great Seal
I
n addition to his role on the committee for the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the Second Continental Congress also appointed Thomas Jefferson to a committee with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin to design the Great Seal of the United States. Within about 6 weeks, they submitted their suggestions which were rejected. It would take several more committees and six years before the final version of the seal was adopted. Adam suggested a theme that featured Hercules, and Franklin suggested the biblical scene of Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea. Jefferson proposed on the reverse side of Franklin’s suggestion the figures of Hengist and Horsa. According to legend, after the Romans left England, these two brothers brought their Saxon warriors to England to help the Britons subdue the Picts and the Scots. From this time until the Norman conquest, the Germanic tribes of Angles and Saxons migrated to England. Jefferson believed that the foundation of law in the United States came from this period and not from the legal systems instituted after the Norman conquest.
1813, perhaps reminded by the death of Benjamin Rush, he sent the syllabus to John Adams. Adams encouraged him to finish the project but Jefferson did not return to it until 1819. Jefferson’s original manuscript has been lost, but that project has been re-created by Mark Beliles. When he finally brought himself to the task, he apparently put aside “The Philosophy of Jesus.” Proceeding anew, he cut and pasted extracts from four translations of the gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English, leaving out the historical Jesus, until he had a narrative mainly of his moral teachings. Jefferson called it the “Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” The actual completion date is assumed to be 1820. This work was never published or distributed by Jefferson. Even his family did not know of its existence until after his death. It became public in 1895 when it was obtained by the Smithsonian. It was later referred to as “The Jefferson Bible.” Jefferson did not intend this effort to be a new “bible,” but to capture the moral philosophy of Jesus in his own words.
Jefferson argued in A Summary View of the Rights of British America, that the British American legal system was grounded in Saxon Law, not the feudalism established by the Normans. Under Saxon law, the settlers of the American continent were subjects of the crown by consent only, and the king did not hold title to the land. Jefferson apparently never deviated from this belief, although Merrill Peterson would refer to it as a “Saxon myth,” The committee’s suggestions were tabled and the final version of the great seal was not adopted until 1782, with the bald Eagle holding the olive branch of peace in the right-hand, but thirteen arrows of war in the left. Hercules, Moses, Hengist and Horsa did not make it on the seal, but the motto "E Pluribus Unum"; the date MDCCLXXVI; and Providence's eye within a triangle did survive from the Jefferson committee.
Jefferson Notes page 2
THE JEFFERSON IMAGE UNCONNECTED DOTS: MADISON HEMINGS AND THE TREATY LEGEND What was the treaty legend? rratic scholarship has now filtered down to a sticky note. Students at William and Mary, Thomas Jefferson’s alma mater, and at the University of Missouri, place the notes on his statue, labeling him “racist” and “rapist.” The latter charge stems from a general sense in the academic community that Jefferson started a sexual relationship in Paris with Sally Hemings, a 15-year-old slave girl. This rumor has hovered over Jefferson’s legacy since it was first raised in 1802 in the Richmond Register by the muckraker James Callender. It gained little traction through the years, because no direct evidence has ever been produced. In spite of the paucity of evidence, those who believe in this long affair between Jefferson and Hemings argue that sufficient proof could be found in the “memoirs” of Madison Hemings. What were the Madison Hemings memoirs Madison Hemings was born in 1805, the third of the four children of Sally Hemings who reached adulthood. In 1873, about 40 years after he left Monticello, he gave an interview printed in the Pike County (Ohio) Republican edition of March 13, 1873, in which he claimed that Jefferson was his father and the father of his three living siblings, and one who had died. The report was written by S.F. Wetmore in the first person, as though Wetmore had transcribed the words of Hemings. Even if one wanted to believe that Wetmore had not intruded his own thoughts into the report, the Paris years and the paternity of his siblings would not be knowledge known to Hemings, but would be hearsay. Hemings offers nothing in his observations that might support his claims. He does not describe any interaction with Jefferson, or with his siblings, that might suggest a parental relationship. Similarly, he does not provide any details of the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings that would be suggestive of a relationship between his mother and Jefferson, or that they were somehow connected as parents of the four children. He does not state any source or basis for these childhood memories.
The Madison Hemings interview by Wetmore is the source of the “treaty legend.” This account is central to those who believe that Jefferson fathered Hemings’ children. According to Madison Hemings, when Jefferson prepared to leave France, he intended to bring Sally Hemings back with him to Virginia, “but she demurred.” To induce her, Jefferson promised her “extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years.” This “treaty” took place 15 years before Hemings birth, but he does not reveal the source of this information. There is no record that anyone other than Hemings knew of this unusual arrangement with his mother, or that she ever told anyone, including him. Even given the benefit of hindsight, Hemings does not relate any of the “extraordinary privileges” that his mother received. In fact, all accounts indicate she was treated the same as the other house slaves. Madison describes her as “well used,” but there is no indication that her daily condition, material possessions, or duties at Monticello, involved any “extraordinary privileges.” The few references to her over the next thirty years do not suggest she was anything but a maid at Monticello. She was left at Monticello during the eight years Jefferson was president, and although he freed her two younger sons, he did not free her. What was the basis for the “treaty”? It was in Paris, according to Madison Hemings, that his mother became pregnant. She wanted to stay in Paris, because she would be “free.” She succumbed to Jefferson’s entreaties merely because he promised to free her future children. There is no other evidence to support this account, revealed almost half a century after Jefferson’s death. According to Madison Hemings, after his mother returned to Monticello, she gave birth to a baby who “lived but a short time.” On the trip home, Sally was in a cabin convenient to Jefferson’s two daughters. Both daughters later defended Cont’d on page 4
Jefferson Notes page 3
Unconnected Dots Cont’d from page 3
What about the Monticello report?
their father against the rumors raised by the Callender allegations. It is not possible that this pregnancy could have gone unnoticed. There is no mention of this baby in Jefferson’s Monticello records. Among Jefferson’s family, the slaves of Monticello, and the countless visitors, no one left a comment that Sally Hemings returned to Monticello pregnant. It also went unrecorded in Paris that Jefferson was in a relationship with Hemings, either by his French acquaintances or by British officials. Jefferson, as the United States minister to France, was wellknown in French society. He would also have been a subject for observation by intelligence agents of France and England, but no record of suspicion was ever made. The truth of the treaty legend is critical Those who argue for Jefferson’s paternity of the Hemings’ children believe that the “treaty” is not legend, in spite of the fact that it is hearsay and unsupported by any other evidence (some cite Israel Jefferson, but he was a young child at the time and who admits that he did not “positively know”). Without the Paris baby, there is no “treaty,” and there is no promise to free the future children of Sally Hemings. This lack of evidence is consistent only with one historical conclusion, that there was no Paris baby and there was no treaty. Was Tom Woodson the Paris baby? Those who have eschewed the need for corroboration of the Madison Hemings’ interview simply gnore his claim that the Paris baby died. They rely instead on the Callender claim that Sally Hemings lived at Monticello with Jefferson’s son. Callender’s sources are unknown and this claim is not supported by other evidence. The descendants of a Tom Woodson comprise a large and accomplished family who have long promoted that their origin was from the union of Jefferson and Hemings. There is no proof that a son was born to Sally Hemings about 1790 and was living at Monticello at the time of Callender’s articles in 1802. In 1998, DNA testing established that if Tom Woodson was indeed the son of Sally Hemings, his father would not have been Thomas Jefferson. Of course, Tom Woodson does not appear anywhere in the Monticello records, nor is he mentioned by any contemporaneous witness. Other than Madison Hemings say-so, there was no Paris baby.
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (previously, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation), which owns Monticello, stated in 1989 that, “The evidence for a liaison remains entirely circumstantial, and receives no support from other contemporary records." After the DNA results were released, an in-house committee gathered those “records” in a spiralbinder. This January 2000 Report concluded that “the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” Suppressed at the time by Monticello, but later released was a minority report which concluded that “The DNA studies certainly enhance the possibility but ...do not prove Thomas Jefferson's paternity.“ So, the process followed by the Monticello committee was to weigh the existing circumstantial evidence, which did not prove paternity, with the DNA test, which did not specify Jefferson as the father of any of Sally Hemings’ children, and conclude that these two bodies of “evidence,” each deficient alone, miraculously became proof of paternity when combined. Is the Madison Hemings interview evidence?
There is no standard for measuring proof that would make any of the claims in the interview with Madison Hemings creditable. His claims that his mother was pregnant by Jefferson when she returned from France, that Jefferson agreed to free her children if she returned, and that he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children is a story related decades after these events. Of the thousands of persons who passed through Monticello during the 35 years that Sally Hemings lived there, which included visitors, Jefferson family, and slaves, no one made these claims, including Sally Hemings herself. Is the interview central to the paternity story? Without Madison Hemings, there is no paternity story. An example may be found in the account for Sally Hemings in the on-line Encyclopedia Virginia. The writer accepts and relates Hemings’ statements as though they were proven facts. If all of these unproven allegations by Hemings were stricken from the article, what would be left would reveal that there is no support for the paternity claim. Jefferson is being judged by sticky note scholarship.
Jefferson Notes page 4
Thomas Jefferson: The Man Behind the Myths Now on Vimeo In the past few decades, historians have obscured the true character and thought of Thomas Jefferson. On April 11, 2015, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society presented a forum at the University of Virginia's Jefferson Scholars Foundation to address the current misconceptions and misunderstandings concerning the historical Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was a man of profound dimensionality. Some of the pursuits of his unusual mind include politics, philosophy, architecture, meteorology, agriculture, paleontology, religion, and biology. Nonetheless, he is generally known to the public today only as the writer of the Declaration of Independence and an owner of slaves. Go to TJheritage.org and click on the submenu Events & Videos, and then click on Thomas Jefferson: The Man Behind the Myths to review the biography of the speakers and the thesis of their presentations. Then, access the videos from the TJHS webpage by clicking on the Vimeo icon. You also access the video presentations on the TJHS Vimeo page at https://vimeo.com/user23533511 Mark Beliles DOUBTING THOMAS? THE DISTORTED RELIGIOUS LEGACY OF THOMAS JEFFERSON J. David Gowdy THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE PURSUIT OF VIRTUE Richard Guy Wilson THOMAS JEFFERSON ARCHITECT: MYTH AND REALITY M. Andrew Holowchak AN 'HONEST HEART' V. A 'KNOWING HEAD': THE MYTH OF THE PREEMINENCE OF RATIONALITY IN JEFFERSON'S CONCEPTIONS OF MAN AND SOCIETY Brian Steele THOMAS JEFFERSON'S EMBODIED MIND: BODILY DECAY, A MATERIAL GOD, AND HUMAN IMMORTALITY James Thompson THOMAS JEFFERSON TODAY AND THOMAS JEFFERSON TOMORROW
Videos from the two prior conferences are also available: “The Character and Legacy of Thomas Jefferson and its Meaning for Americans Today,” and, “Cracking the Fable: The Truth Behind Jefferson and Hemings.” The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society is now on Facebook. You can find our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/ tjheritage.org, or go to the TJHS webpage at TJheritage.org and click on the Facebook icon. If you have any questions on our Facebook content, please contact our Facebook editor Vivienne Kelley at viva.kelley@me.com
LIBRARY DONATION Cont’d from page 1
scholars who served on the commission may be found at http://tjheritage.org/scholars.html Librarians who are interested in receiving the book may email The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society at Jeffersonnnotes@verizon.net, or Vivienne Kelley at viva.kelley@me.com. Provide library address and contact information. The book will be provided by TJHS at no cost including shipping.
Jefferson Notes page 5
THOMAS JEFFERSON HERITAGE SOCIETY 12106 Beaver Creek Road Clifton, Virginia 20124
PRSRT STD US POSTAGE
PAID MERRIFIELD VA NO. 206
RETURN SERVICE REQUESTED
We welcome your support for the work of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society Please make donations to TJHS and forward to Box 4482, Charlottesville, VA 22905 Little Mountain $ 25.00 Rotunda 100.00 Memorial 250.00 All contributors will receive a copy of The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty. Rotunda and Memorial contributors will also receive Jefferson Vindicated.
BOOK NOTES IN DEFENSE OF JEFFERSON By William D. Hyland Jr JEFFERSON VINDICATED By Cynthia H. Burton FRAMING A LEGEND By M. Andrew Holowchak Available now from Amazon.com
Inalienable or unalienable?
W
hen Thomas Jefferson submitted his draft to the committee assigned the task of drafting a declaration of independence, he used the phrase that “all men” were “endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights.” However, when the declaration was first read to the public on July 4, 1776, “inalienable rights” had become “unalienable,” and this remains the official version. It is possible John Adams made the change since he used “unalienable” in his rough draft. “Unalienable” seems to be an anglicized version of the French and Latin roots. Although “inalienable” seems to be the more common usage today, the “unalienable” version is generally used when discussing the rights inherent in the Declaration of Independence. On the Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC quoting the Declaration’s preamble, “inalienable” is used. Although there are arguments that the distinction is based on political philosophy, it is generally accepted that the words are interchangeable and indistinguishable in meaning.
Visit the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society at www.TJHeritage.org for other articles on Thomas Jefferson Jefferson Notes page 6