A Slimy Turn of Events at Monticello

When Dan Jordan left the presidency of Monticello in 2008, the job was gifted to Leslie Greene Bowman (MA, history, University of Delaware). Prior to Monticello, Bowman oversaw Winterthur, a historic house in northern Delaware.

During her tenure at Monticello, Bowman created a new visitor center, opened the upstairs of Monticello which was long closed to visitors due to its narrow staircase (Jefferson hated wasted space, hence no grand staircase), and rebuilt several buildings on and nearby Mulberry Row, where many of the slaves of Monticello worked. Bowman also excelled in fundraising.

On leaving the presidency, Bowman said:

It has been the greatest honor of my career. I will cherish the work and those alongside me who made it possible.

What exactly did Bowman accomplish?

The answer is a bold, calculated smear campaign against Thomas Jefferson.

Bowman’s focus during her tenure was Jefferson’s avowed bout with slavery: his duplicity or Janus-facedness. Says Bowman:

I have had the privilege to be a steward of one of the world’s most precious places, both a World Heritage Site for its expression of human creative genius, and an International Site of Conscience for its painful history with slavery.

While Jefferson wrote so beautifully about the equality of all persons and the evils of slavery, adds Bowman, he could be a tyrannical planter, who owned over his life over 600 slaves and let overseers whip mercilessly his slaves.

Bowman’s lasting legacy, a slimy legacy, was the move to counter “decisively,” but not probatively, any notion that Jefferson did not father all of Sally Hemings’ children. To do that, she went to measures, extreme.

Just how did she accomplish that?

She disallowed formally any discussion of the possibility that Jefferson’ non-involvement with Hemings. That was a two-step process which occurred in 2018. The first step was to root Sally Hemings at Monticello. The second step was to decree formally that all of Hemings’ children were Jefferson’s.

Rooting Sally Hemings

Writes Natalie Dreier of the National/World News in 2018:

Historians have made a discovery just in time for the July 4th holiday. They have found the living quarters for Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore six children to one of the country’s founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson.

Where, at Monticello, was this bedroom?

Michael Cottman of NBC News says that Hemings’ bedroom, in the South Wing of Monticello, was “adjacent to Jefferson’s bedroom.” Reporter Cecile Borkhataria writes that it was “next to Thomas Jefferson’s [bed]room.” Reporter Krissah Thompson says, “The room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom.”  Being so close to Jefferson’s sleeping quarters, it was facile for Hemings to sneak into Monticello for a “quicky,” whenever Jefferson’s libido demanded satisfaction. When Jefferson was interested in dirty sex, he could have snuck into the squalid room of Hemings, perhaps with her sister watching.

There was something nefandous. All involved in the reconstruction of Hemings’ room admitted that no one knew if the room under reconstruction was Hemings’. Why was there need to reconstruct the room as if there were no question of it being Sally Hemings’?

The answer, I think, is that giving Hemings a room—her own room (though she likely shared a room with a sister)—gives the avowed liaison some material warrant, as it were. If Monticello showcases a room for Hemings and only for Hemings, it proffers material evidence for visitors to Monticello of Sally Hemings’ existence as well as Jefferson’s libidinal need of her.

The Marxist Manifesto of Monticello

The pièce de résistance was what happened shortly after the “discovery” of Sally Hemings bedroom: Leslie Greene Bowman’s Marxist Manifesto of 2018.

In June 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) declared that the official position of the Foundation is that Thomas Jefferson fathered all six of Sally Hemings’ children. There is no need for skepticism. The evidence pro-paternity overwhelms. Jefferson’s paternity, for all intents and purposes, can be taken as factual.

As the Thomas Jefferson Foundation began planning The Life of Sally Hemings, an exhibit that relies on the account left by her son, Madison Hemings, it became apparent that it was time to reexamine how to characterize Jefferson’s paternity. For nearly twenty years, the most complete summary of evidence has remained the report authored by the Foundation in January 2000. While there are some who disagree, the Foundation’s scholarly advisors and the larger community of academic historians who specialize in early American history have concurred for many years that the evidence is sufficiently strong to state that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six children with Sally Hemings. In the new exhibit exploring the life of Sally Hemings, her choices, and her connection to Thomas Jefferson, as well as in updates to our related online materials and print publications, the Foundation will henceforth assert what the evidence indicates and eliminate qualifying language related to the paternity of Eston Hemings as well as that related to Sally Hemings’s three other surviving children, whose descendants were not part of the 1998 DNA study. While it remains possible, though increasingly unlikely, that a more comprehensive documentary and genetic assemblage of evidence could emerge to support a different conclusion, no plausible alternative with the same array of evidence has surfaced in two decades.

Some comments.

First, they state that the most complete summary is their own report of January 2000, and that smacks of self-service. Since publication, that report has been challenged by a number of compelling books: Bob Turner’s The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (2001), Cynthia Burton’s Jefferson Vindicated (2005), William Hyland’s In Defense of Thomas Jefferson (2009), and my own Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming (2013) and Did Thomas Jefferson Really Father Sally Hemings’ Black Children? (2021). While none of those books proffers the sockdolager that shows that there was no relationship, all offer compelling reasons for doubt, and all shift the burden of proof where it properly belongs: on the pro-paternalists, who base their claims on evidence, thin-ice.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has typically dealt with the cogent arguments in those books by ignoring them. Cogency does not like to be ignored. Yet they can do that, as they have prestige enough to control the Jeffersonian narrative. Because it was the residence of Thomas Jefferson, visitors and scholars assume that the narrative at Monticello is truthful. Yet it is politicized, not veridical. They also have money enough to manipulation the discourse. With money, they control the media and nullify contradictory views.

Second, “there are some who disagree” is massively understated. Many disagree. If you disagree with their official position on the liaison, if you disagree with what is now their manifesto, you run the risk of being dubbed “racist,” which is the kiss of death in liberal academic circles. Consensus among scholars today is, thus, forced, because of fear of being racist. Truth has become irrelevant. Jefferson may have had a relationship with Hemings. That is important to know. Yet we wish to know that as a result of open debate on both sides of the issue which examines all the available, relevant evidence. If such debate shows anti-paternity is unlikely, then the anti-paternity adherents will have gained by, as Socrates has said, “an exchange of error for truth.” Yet TJF disallows open debate because they control the intellectual climate at Monticello. With open debate, they run the risk of being shown to be pedantic, dogmatic, and wrong. Thus, if Jefferson did have an affair with Hemings, we ought to demand compelling evidence of it. We are instead given bedizened verbiage. A scholarly pro-paternity wave of hands among members of TJF—that  is in effect what happened in their 2000 committee report—many of whom are unqualified to have a vote, ought not to convince anyone.

What is bothersome about Bowman’s 2018 report, still the official word at Monticello, is the political posturing of those in TJF. The issue of Jefferson’s paternity has been decided ex cathedra, without full discussion of all relevant evidence, and by a select few “authorities” on Jefferson who never had doubts about Jefferson’s paternity in the first place. No one who dissented was part of the decision-making. That is how it has been at Monticello for a long time. That needs to change, because members of TJF are creating Jefferson’s history, not reconstructing it. It is an insufferable situation, suffocative of truth.

TJF is content with its removal of qualifiers because they are content that the testimony of Sally Hemings’ son Madison Hemings is trustworthy and correct. As I have shown (Hemings’ testimony), it is not. We cannot merely assume its veridicality. We cannot, as Gordon-Reed asserts, merely treat it as primary testimony.

The greatest danger with what the TJF was doing under the “leadership” of Bowman was its complete childish insouciance concerning claims contrary to those they embrace, even if those contrary claims were well-supported. That is censorship and cancerous in a democracy. There is insufficient evidence to decide the issue of Jefferson’s paternity, and yet Bowman, through her manifesto, essentially Marxist, removed the qualifiers. Thus, something that might be true became, by decree, true. Yet in such a case, we must be skeptical, not dogmatic. TJF disallows skepticism. Bowman has decided for us how we ought to think about Jefferson. That is her true legacy as head of Monticello. That is officially how things still stand at Monticello.

As John Stuart Mill has shown in On Liberty, the closest thing to a liberal’s bible, freedom of opinion and critical discussion of matters unsettled by reason, are needed for truth. Thomas Jefferson in Query XVII of his Notes on the State of Virginia said the same thing. It is a paradox of unspeakably large proportion that the people who have run Jefferson’s Monticello for the past 30 years have had such an aversion to Jefferson’s priceless liberal values and such indifference to truth.

Bowman ended her duties—she was very likely asked to step down—as president in 2023. Jane Kaminsky then assumed the presidency the following year. With the parting of Bowman, Annette Gordon-Reed would resign from the board of TJF on January 2, 2024. When Gordon-Reed joined the board, Bowman stated, “Annette has been critical in our efforts to restore the voices of the men and women who were enslaved at Monticello, underscoring our commitment to history that is honest, complicated, and inclusive.” The history practiced under Bowman had been complicated and inclusive, but certainly not honest.

Enjoy the video below….

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily the views of the Abbeville Institute.

M. Andrew Holowchak

M. Andrew Holowchak, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy and history, who taught at institutions such as University of Pittsburgh, University of Michigan, and Rutgers University, Camden. He is author/editor of over 70 books and over 325 published essays on topics such as ethics, ancient philosophy, science, psychoanalysis, and critical thinking. His current research is on Thomas Jefferson—he is acknowledged by many scholars to be the world’s foremost authority—and has published over 230 essays and 28 books on Jefferson. He also has numerous videos and two biweekly series with Donna Vitak, titled “One Work, Five Questions” and "The Real Thomas Jefferson," on Jefferson on YouTube. He can be reached at [email protected]

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