The Secrets of History by May David

Author:May, David [May, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2014-04-03T21:00:00+00:00

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This genteel consensus was tested with the 1974 publication of Fawn Brodie’s “intimate history” of Thomas Jefferson. The first major biographer to accept the Hemings story, Brodie presented a portrait in stark contrast to the traditional image of a monkish Jefferson, a man who, after his wife’s death, devoted himself to philosophy and politics. Brodie’s Jefferson remained a passionate lover. In France, before the arrival of Sally Hemings, Jefferson met an artist named Maria Cosway, to whom he wrote a remarkable love letter consisting mostly of a debate between “My Head and My Heart.” Most biographers have interpreted the letter as a victory for Jefferson’s head; Brodie, however, saw the heart as the winner. Brodie was convinced the Cosway-Jefferson relationship was both passionate and sexual.

But it was her portrait of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship that generated the most controversy. In addition to her efforts to rehabilitate the reputations and credibility of Callender and of Madison Hemings, Brodie presented a great deal of psychological evidence. For example, she noted that in his 1788 diary of a tour of Germany, Jefferson used the word “mulatto” eight times to describe the color of the soil; in Brodie’s interpretation, it was Sally Hemings’s mulatto color and not Germany’s soil that was on Jefferson’s mind. In a 1789 letter to Cosway, Jefferson described himself as “an animal of a warm climate, a mere Oran-ootan”; Brodie points out that in his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson had indiscreetly written that “the Oran-ootan preferred the black woman over those of his own species.”

In another letter to Cosway, Jefferson described a painting he’d just seen of Sarah delivering Hagar to Abraham. Jefferson called the painting “delicious” and added: “I would have agreed to have been Abraham though the consequence would have been that I should have been dead five or six thousand years.” Brodie was quick to remind readers of the significance of the biblical story: Sarah, who was barren, gave Hagar (whom most artists depicted as dark skinned) to Abraham so that she could bear him a child. To Brodie, Jefferson’s lustful description could only be an unconscious admission of his love for Hemings.

Brodie’s book was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year, and many general interest newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, reviewed it favorably. The historical establishment, however, was unconvinced. Dumas Malone, whose multivolume Jefferson biography won a Pulitzer Prize, said the book ran “far beyond the evidence and carries psychological speculation to the point of absurdity; the resulting mishmash of fact and fiction, surmise and conjecture is not history as I understand the term.” Merrill Peterson, author of the most widely respected one-volume biography of Jefferson, called Brodie “obsessive” and concluded there was “no need to charge off in defense of Jefferson’s integrity when we have no solid grounds for doubting it.”

Indeed, much of Brodie’s psychological evidence does seem far-fetched and some of it is just outright wrong; for example, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the word “mulatto” to describe the color of soil was common in eighteenth-century America.

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