Monticello Mythology

In Defense of Thomas Jefferson

The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal
by William G. Hyland Jr.
Thomas Dunne/St Martin’s, 320 pp., $26.95

Since the hack journalist and thwarted office-seeker James Callender first published his scurrilities, the Jefferson/Hemings controversy has had a run of nearly two centuries. And the longer it continues, the more it carries the marks of a kulturkampf: a culture war.

We’re dealing here, after all, with the world-historical figure of Thomas Jefferson, prince of the Enlightenment, apostle of government by consent and religious tolerance, as well as with the discordant ghost of human slavery. Few could now be unaware of the core charges: that, as American minister to France (1784-89), the widowed Jefferson took as his mistress a teenaged slave girl, Sally Hemings, reputedly the half-sister of his late wife, and led with her a long dalliance resulting in an uncertain number of children of mixed race.

That there is slight evidence of this alleged liaison, and much negative evidence, seems to make little or no difference. The pseudo-historical drama is now deeply inscribed in public consciousness by movies, televised “docudrama,” sloppy journalism, and historical polemics. It conforms to a mythic pattern, and such patterns are in their nature resistant to prosaic facts, especially when tinged by romance.

William Hyland Jr., as a practicing lawyer, frames his contribution to the controversy with courtroom rules. He summons virtual witnesses, testimony, and evidence in Jefferson’s defense and the case, so far as it goes, is compelling. There are, of course, essential differences between a legal process and the more empirical processes of historical inquiry; and in the latter there can be no final acquittal.