Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings by M. Andrew Holowchak

Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings Reviews

• 
  Mark Skousen

  Here's my review of "Framing a Legend," by Rutgers Prof. M. Andrew Holowchak (Prometheus Books, 2013), who makes every effort to debunk the growing evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered the children of his slave Sally Hemings. I read the book with an open mind, because I would like to be on his side on this issue, but after reading his book and comparing his rebuttal with the main points made by a whole host of historians (see
  http://www.monticello.org/site/planta...), I tend to side with the new thesis that Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children.
  
  The DNA evidence only proves that a Jefferson family member was involved. It does not prove that it was Thomas Jefferson. However, consider these other facts:
  
  *Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello at the likely conception times of Sally Hemings's six known children. There are no records suggesting that she was elsewhere at these times, or records of any births at times that would exclude Jefferson paternity.
  
  *There are no indications in contemporary accounts by people familiar with Monticello that Sally Hemings's children had different fathers.
  Sally Hemings's children were light-skinned, and three of them (daughter Harriet and sons Beverly and Eston) lived as members of white society as adults.
  
  *According to contemporary accounts, some of Sally Hemings's children strongly resembled Thomas Jefferson.
  
  Thus, the circumstantial evidence appears overwhelming. Besides, it's hard to believe that Jefferson would remain celibate for decades, especially being a young man when his wife died. The liaison makes sense especially if Sally Hemings was Martha's half sister. Prof. Holowchak's argument that Jefferson was "anal" and sexually awkward doesn't mean he didn't suffer from those "hard to govern" passions that Ben Franklin talked about.
  
  It's it amazing that after nearly 200 years, scientific and historical sleuths can uncover so much detail about a secret that Jefferson thought he was taking to his grave.
  
  Best wishes, AEIOU,
  
  Mark Skousen
  
  http://www.mskousen.com
• 
  Lois

  White fragility writes a book.
  
  The author is so mad he's unreasonable.
  TJ was a horrible, evil human being.
  He knew slavery was wrong and that Black people were human beings and still he participated.
  Worse than that, he's the father of slave breeding in the US.
  The idea can be traced back solely to him.
  He enacts laws to make the enslaved folks he holds in captivity worth more.
  He held his own children in slavery and forced them to pay for their freedom with 7 years labor.
  He's a monster and a sick fuck.
  
  The idea that this is what has tarnished his image versus his own deplorable behavior is laugh out loud ridiculos.
  Most of this nonsense, bullshit thinking is tied up in the idea that the OG Colonizas, the Founding Turds, were somehow given this land by the white folks xtian gawd.
  Only they weren't given anything, they stole it, committed genocide to take it and enslaved others to turn a profit from their stolen goods.
  Even if he hadn't raped Sally Hemings, his own sister in law, when she was a child he'd still be a giant turd blighting the history of white people;
  but he did, so lets stop pretending *this* is the act that tarnishes his legacy.
  
• 
  Peter Bradley

  Framing a Legend by M. Andrew Holowchak
  
  Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote -
  https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
  
  An "anti-racist" article condemning Thomas Jefferson as an undoubted and unquestionable pedophile rapist sparked an interest in me to dig into the vexed question of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It's hard to say what my mindset was before I read a few books on the issue. I probably thought that there was more evidence for the relationship than there was, mostly thanks to the confident tone of those who fall on the side of "Relationship? Yes." What I learned was that the evidence for "the Relationship" is surprisingly weak - not non-existent, but nearly so.
  
  Also, I was surprised to discover that Sally Hemings ("SH") was white. The closest African or African-American that she could point to in her family was a grandmother on her mother's side, which made her 75% white. (In Nazi Germany, a Jew would have passed as German with that pedigree.) When Sally was given her liberty, she was subsequently listed as "free white" on local census rolls.
  
  That is, parenthetically, a fascinating point. Race is defined as much by social status as ancestry. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves who were racially white. One wishes that someone would follow up on this from a social history perspective. (BTW - this is not the only place this fact appears. The mystery in Puddinghead Wilson by Mark Twain involves the mix-up of a slave child with a master's child. Apparently, this kind of thing was not something unbelievable.)
  
  This book is written by a philosophy professor who takes the charge against Thomas Jefferson ("TJ") very personally. Holowchak does a solid job of attacking the Relationship position. His personal investment is based on his respect for Jefferson as a thinker who was instrumental in founding the United States. At times, I found this zeal detracted from his arguments since much of his argument turns on an argument from character, namely, TJ did not have sex with SH because he was not the kind of man who would do that. Perhaps, but we have a history of people acting against type. People fall from grace. It's sad but true. So, perhaps because I don't share the same intimate relationship with TJ through a lifetime of study, I am more agnostic.
  
  Holowchak defenestrates the Relationship Revisionists - Fawn Brody, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Andrew Burstein. Brody wrote in the 1970s from a Freudian perspective. Her thesis was properly derided as unsubstantiated at the time and largely was forgotten. Unfortunately, Annette Gordon-Reed is a black lawyer who managed to catch the wave of Wokeness in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She was helped by the Dark Arts of woke propaganda, including mischaracterizing a DNA study in order to declare the debate over and accusing dissenters from the new orthodoxy of being racists.
  
  A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area is redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ's records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ's younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, which is where her immaturity was commented upon by Mrs. Adams, but nothing is known from the Paris period. We know that SH had six children. This is essentially the sum total of everything that is known about SH.
  
  There are four bits of evidence in support of The Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a "defeater," sometimes several.
  
  First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a "more sable" son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is the bias of Callender and the fact that there was no Heming's son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of being descended from TH, but a DNA analysis from his descendants showed that they were not related to the Family Jefferson. If we can't trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?
  
  Second, SH's son Madison Hemings in 1873 told a reporter that he was the son of TJ. The problem here is that other Hemings had a family tradition of being descended from an "uncle" of TJ (although probably TJ's younger brother.) Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH's room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison's credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn't get the message, plus who was this other guy visiting mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory, which also happens when memory is involved.
  
  Of course, he could have been right, but we don't know.
  
  Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ's paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.
  
  Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, so were his Jefferson-gene carrying relatives.
  
  The bottom line is that we don't know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for The Relationship is more probable than not and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.
  
  One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there is background evidence I would like to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don't know. Where was SH's room in relation to TJ's room? Don't know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don't know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem or was it ignored? Don't know.
  
  These are all issues that I would like to know more about.
  
  Nonetheless, at the present time and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that The Relationship might be something that actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation on the evidence we have.
• 
  Micah

  This book is a mess, and the case it makes is fundamentally flawed and meaningless. The point is to say that maybe Thomas Jefferson didn't have any kids with Sally Hemmings, and somehow that makes him more moral or something? The vehemence with which the book is written is like that of someone trying to clear their name of a crime. They violently attack the works of other historians with triades that make the disagreements seem way more personal than academic.
  I'm well versed in historical contrarian takedowns, but I usually like there to be a point. The Aaron Burr book from 2007 does a much better job of this by being straightforward and concise. This book reads like a dude got super mad one day and just needed to go off. It doesn't feel well put together, and his argument gets more complicated than what he's arguing against, and not in a good way.
  But what's really most important is that whether he fathered her children or not is kind of immaterial to the fact that he did own her and many other human beings. He owned people. He's not magically better by not fathering children with her. She was his property, and everything from that point on is disgusting. It's just to a matter of degrees, and this book's entire purpose is to sort of erase the atrocities of slavery by winning a meaningless point.
• 
  Kathy

  Framing a Legend, one of the silliest things I’ve read, is a book-length diatribe castigating those writers (specifically three of them) who support the theory that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children. Using complicated mathematics, probability statistics and obscure multisyllabic terms, he consistently overstates his case, making anything after the first three chapters shrill, boring, and repetitious.
  
  I don’t subscribe unconditionally to the Jefferson-Hemings affair, in spite of its romantically satisfying appeal; but Holowchak’s limp exposé makes me want to.
  
• 
  Doug

  Professor Holowchak does a better job than the Gordon-Reed camp at examining the data objectively. He admits that the alleged liaison could have occurred, that it is impossible to be sure and that his opinion is that it probably did not. He does rip those historians who cherry pick evidence to support their desired outcome. I think some should not be allowed to call themselves historians as their analysis is so flimsy and easily shown to be flawed.
  
  Having read about a dozen books on this subject, by authors on both sides of the argument, I think the "No, they didn't" camp has done a much better job of letting the evidence lead them to a conclusion. The "Yes, they did" camp has failed to be persuasive, relying on circumstantial evidence and pointing to the absence of evidence as proof of a cover-up.
  
  The best book on this topic, the most thorough and objective,
  In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal. The worst are the two written by law professor,
  Annette Gordon-Reed; they are neither thorough, nor objective.
• 
  Eric

  Do you, like me, have that family member, or neighbor, or co-worker that likes to talk politics, and maybe you agree with their point of view, but they say it such an angry, bitter, unpleasant manner that you instinctively want to disagree with them?
  
  That was my reaction after reading this book. I tend to agree with the author that the Jefferson-Hemmings affair likely never happened, but the prose is so snarky and rude and condescending that I couldn't wait to get this over with and rinse the nasty aftertaste from my mouth. The author is so petty that at one point he even takes issue with an analogy used by one his targets, and then spends way too many words explaining why.
  
  If you must read a defense of Jefferson, this is a viable option, but be prepared to endure some tough reading.
• 
  Tim

  This book is so miserable and just flat out scholastically unsound that a review wouldn’t even describe its dreadfulness.
• 
  Jo Butler

  Rumors that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved black woman, began in 1802 and continued throughout Jefferson’s life. That premise has become widely accepted by scholars and by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
  
  Framing a Legend, a 2013 analysis by Dr. M. Andrew Holowchak, mounts a thought-provoking defense of Jefferson. His most convincing point is that a DNA study was done on descendants of only one of Sally Hemings’ children. It indicates that a close relative of Jefferson as Eston’s father, but does not prove that Jefferson was the father of Eston, or of any of Sally’s other, untested descendants. However, Dr. Holowchak spends a lot of time proving that Jefferson couldn't have possibly been the father of ALL of Sally Hemings' children, and implies that since Jefferson isn't proven to be the sire of them all, he wasn't the father of any.
  
  Dr. Holowchak analyzes fact and innuendo, and Jefferson researchers will find Framing a Legend useful. What marred the book for me was Holowchak’s overt disdain for the work of pro-paternity writers, which he describes as “mawkish” and “ridiculously lame.” He protests Jefferson’s innocence so fervently that I wonder if bias might have crept into his psychoanalysis of Jefferson’s writings – the same charge Holowchak makes against other researchers. A more balanced treatment would have been more convincing.