I have been opining about Thomas Jefferson here fairly regularly, so a conservative friend sent me links to a debate among historians intent on debunking “lies” about the great man. I was struck by the conclusory claim that the DNA link between several slave children and Thomas Jefferson was retracted shortly after it was published in 1998. It certainly wasn’t retracted by the author of a book on the DNA evidence I saw speak at the New York County Lawyers Association some time after I became a lawyer in 2000.
The author David Barton is paraphrased on Pat Robertson’s website:
In Jefferson’s defense, David addresses some of the biggest myths about Jefferson’s reputation:
- Lie: He fathered a child/children by his young slave girl, Sally Hemings.
Truth: In 1998, the journal Science released the results of a DNA inquiry as to whether Jefferson fathered any children through his slave Sally Hemings. Eight weeks after the blockbuster DNA story was issued, it was quietly retracted, without fanfare. The news exonerating Jefferson did not make the same splash in the headlines. The announcement came at the beginning of President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings for lying under oath to a grand jury about his sexual activities with a young intern in the Oval Office. They argued Thomas Jefferson had engaged in sexual tysts so therefore President Clinton should not face questions about his sexual misbehavior.
http://www.cbn.com/700club/guests/bios/David_Barton_070412.aspx
It would have been very easy to put a hyperlink on that website pointing to a source to argue the author’s point to a skeptic like me. I was pretty well convinced by a variety of sources– outside of the DNA test– that Madison Hemings, Eston Hemings and one or two others were the offspring of a decades-long affair between Jefferson and his departed wife’s half-sister (they had the same father), the slave Sally Hemings. So was at least one distinguished French guest of Jefferson’s who marveled at the likeness between the young red haired slave pouring his wine and his host at Monticello. Then there’s the fact that Sally’s four light skinned children were the only slaves Jefferson ever freed, among hundreds. Sally was freed after her master’s death by her new master, who was also her niece.
I know of no “retraction” of the DNA evidence, which, as I recall, linked the children to either Jefferson or a close male relative of his. The case for the relative being the father of several children over decades is weak. The case for Jefferson being the father very strong, the beautiful 15 year-old Sally and her brother were with the widower Thomas Jefferson in Paris and each of the slave children was born exactly nine months after Jefferson’s periodic stays at Monticello.
(break,
damn it, WordPress….)
Other flags went up while reading the short rebuttal of this “lie”. I found the citation of Clinton’s blow job denials in the context of when the DNA link was made and supposedly retracted to be pretty ridiculous, one of those telltale signs that the author has an ax to grind. I don’t particularly care what Jefferson thought about the bible, or Christianity– or whether Clinton stuck an unlit cigar in his love struck intern’s vagina, for that matter.
It’s like arguing about whether increased greenhouse gases, gases largely the result of human activity, have anything to do with global warming– if you believe the earth is warming at an alarming rate as virtually all climate scientists tell us. If you can find scientists who tell you definitively that there’s no connection with human activity, no warming, that it’s all some kind of left-wing conspiracy against free enterprise, well, I guess that’s good enough. Arguing about history is even more futile than arguing about science– in science at least there are experiments that can be done and data that can be produced to show a theory more or less likely.
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