You know, this works best in venues where people don't immediately (mis-)judge you by trying to read between the lines of what you say.Bill Glasheen wrote: Report the facts and let them speak for themselves.
The irony of course is that in adding a disclaimer to try to avoid being judged I am then judged based on the disclaimer. Obviously can't please everyone.
I call it a supposed relationship, and you correct me to say the same thing. Honestly Bill, if I were to read between the lines of the way you have been replying to my posts lately I would say you have taken offense to me for some unknown reason.Bill Glasheen wrote:Glenn wrote: the supposed relationship
IF the relationship happened
Although apparently it was made a big deal at the time by his opposition, and became a politicized topic during his presidency. Various excerpts from the Wikipedia article I linked above:It would only have been hidden by contemporary Jefferson worshipers of Judeochristian persuasion. God forbid that Saint TJ was intimate with a "Negro."
It really wasn't that big a deal at the time. In TJ's case - if it happened - it was perfectly reasonable.
Nice to know politics hasn't changed much in 200 years.In the September of 1802 it was reported in a Virginia news paper that Jefferson had for many years "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves." "Her name is Sally," and continued on to presume that Jefferson had "several children" by her.
Although there had been rumors of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and a slave before 1802, the article that had been published had spread the story widely. It was used in contrivance by Jefferson's Federalist opposition and was published repeated number of times in many newspapers throughout the end of Jefferson's presidency.
Prior to 1802, vague insinuations had been published in the Washington Federalist newspaper regarding Jefferson's alleged involvement with slaves.[18] In 1802, James T. Callender, a muckraking political journalist and former supporter of Thomas Jefferson, published a claim in the Richmond Recorder newspaper that Jefferson was the father of five children by Sally Hemings
It is not, however, noted by Callender, that Jefferson was a single man at the time of Callender's article--widowed for almost exactly 20 years. His wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, died September 6, 1782, after suffering complications from the birth of the couple's seventh child. On her deathbed, she made her husband promise he would never marry again--a vow he kept.[25] Callender's journalism centered on loathing of miscegenation. He believed his readers would share his sense of racial outrage: "Jefferson before the eyes of his two daughters," wrote Callender on September 28, 1802, "sent to his kitchen, or perhaps to his pigstye, for this mahogany coloured charmer." [26] Callender himself was reportedly disgusted that whites would ever mix with blacks, and was said to have a leading role in attempts to rescind formal social affairs frequented by white men looking for black women.[27]
Callender exploited racist views to denigrate Jefferson and undermine his presidency. In his newspaper articles, Callender called Hemings a "wench" and a "slut as common as the pavement." He mocked her eldest son, allegedly fathered by Jefferson, as "President Tom."[28] She was, he wrote, an "African Venus."[29] Missing was any concern over sexual abuse of slaves by their masters or any mention or moral question that such an affair could be rape and any concern at all for Sally Hemings.
Many editors of the day repeated Callender's bigoted story line because of its ability to damage Jefferson rather than as a means for attacking the issue of slavery. Editors reprinted Callender's story or carried the allegations in their own coverage of the Jefferson Administration. Newspapers in Boston and Philadelphia added their racially charged observation that Jefferson's two daughters were likely "weeping to see a negress installed in the place of their mother."[30] The editor of the (Lynchburg) The Virginia Gazette challenged Jefferson for crossing the racial divide: "Why have you not married some worthy woman of your own complexion?"[31] To the Palladium, Hemings was a "sable damsel."[32] The Boston Gazette called her "A negro-wench,": "Black is love's proper hue for me (Jefferson), And white's the hue for Sally" (sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy).[33] The Philadelphia Port Folio called Hemings "Sooty Sal" in the printed lyrics of another Jefferson-bashing tune conjured by Jefferson's political opposition. Two of most famous ballads recorded were "Long Tom" an "Dusky Sally". It is said that the poet, William Cullen Bryant, was the author one the poems printed about Sally and Jefferson. .[34]
These Federalist publishers were clearly motivated by political rivalry, like the Gazette of the United States' Bronfon. Because of that, they missed the chance to score political points critical of slavery. Instead, they seemed to revel in the racist imagery of Callender's story.
In The Federalist Press and Slavery in the Age of Jefferson, historian John Kyle Day notes Federalist anti-slavery critics sought to drive northern voters from Jefferson rather than striking a blow against slavery itself.[35] He says their tone expressed sarcasm rather than moral condemnation. "If Federalists were genuine antislavery political reformers, they should have expressed moral outrage at Jefferson's sexual exploitation of his slave Sally Hemings," argues Day. When Federalist periodicals did comment upon the Hemings scandal, the tone was more of sarcastic humor and bitter jest than any public outrage and/or moral condemnation of Jefferson's treatment of Hemings. This is not surprising, writes Day, since the Federalist press gave scant support to women in general, and a slave woman in particular.[36] Regardless of the motives or goals in attacking Jefferson, Federalist editors likely shared Callender's disgust with miscegenation. If not, they would have found his articles offensive, counterproductive, and refused to print them.
The racist attitudes become more apparent when the Hemings allegation is contrasted with another charge leveled against Jefferson at about the same time. As the Hemings scandal unfolded, Jefferson was pilloried for his youthful attempts in 1767 to seduce Betsey Walker, the wife of his friend John Walker. Both the language and the tone of the accusation are telling and veer sharply from the racist disrespect heaped on Sally Hemings. Callender referred to her as a paragon of innocence. He applauded her for repulsing Jefferson's advance "with the contempt it deserved."[37]
Jefferson had defenders among Republican editors, but even they failed to attack Callender's racism. Instead, they attacked his character and his alcoholism, or picked apart his allegation with logical retort. Meriwether Jones wrote in the Richmond Examiner, "Is it strange therefore, that a servant of Mr. Jefferson's at a house where so many strangers resort, who is daily engaged in the ordinary vocations of the family, like thousands of others, should have a mulatto child? Certainly not...."[38]
Racial innuendo trumped civilized discourse in the Callender articles--underscored by the fact that Jefferson's attitudes on slavery were never presented, although they were a matter of record long before 1802. It is well documented that Jefferson struggled with the nature and morality of racial slavery.
Thomas Jefferson himself never commented publicly on the issue, though some of his remarks have been interpreted as indirect denials.
In a private letter he expressed his fear about the effect the social relations supporting slavery would have on those who would suddenly find themselves free: "For men probably of any color, but of this color we know, brought from their infancy without necessity for thought or forecast... Their amalgamation with the other color, produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."[66] Some take this as expressing an unqualified opposition to racial mixing. In his Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson confessed to a physical aversion towards dark-skinned Africans. It would take 101 years before the Jefferson-Hemings story again stirred major conflict. In 1974, it emerged in the pages of Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, written by University of California, Los Angeles Professor Fawn M. Brodie. She argued that the story of sexual liaison between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was likely true. Brodie presented both figures as vulnerable and all too human--Jefferson not only fathered one or more of Hemings' six or seven light-skinned children, but he maintained a loving and probably monogamous relationship with her for 38 years.
In a private letter, Jefferson bewailed his small number of progeny. On June 25, 1804, Jefferson wrote to Governor John Page on the occasion of his daughter Mary Jefferson Eppes' death.[67] "Having lost even the half of all I had, my evening prospects now hang on the slender thread of a single life [his daughter Martha Randolph]. Perhaps I may be destined to see even this last chord of parental affection broken!"
In another private letter to Secretary of the Navy Robert Smith dated July 1, 1805, Jefferson denied all "charges" made against him, except for one, that he had attempted to seduce his married neighbor, Betsey Walker, saying the accusation was "the only one founded in truth among all their allegations against me." There is disagreement on whether this is a denial of the several charges the Walkers made, or of all charges the Federalists made, including the Hemings allegations.[68][69]
Later, in 1816, Jefferson wrote to George Logan that to deny something publicly increases the attention given to it. "I should have fancied myself half guilty, had I condescended to put pen to paper in refutation of their falsehoods, or drawn them respect by any notice from myself."[70]
In 1826, Jefferson wrote to Henry Lee, "There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world."[71][72]
According to biographer Henry S. Randall, Jefferson's daughter Martha, roused to indignation by Irish poet Thomas Moore's couplet linking her father with a slave, thrust the offending poem in front of him one day at Monticello. Jefferson's only response was a 'hearty, clear laugh.'"[18]
