Cozenage And Incomplete History
There are no “alternative facts.”
There’s
Whoppers
Mendacity
Tall tales
Prevarication
Misrepresentation
Even (and this is “best of show,”)
Cozenage
Just as there’s no “alternative history,” there is incomplete history.
Incomplete history is:
Saying Jackie Robinson started his professional career on April 15, 1947 as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers. [No mention of his being the first African- American to play in MLB.]
The revision of an “educational periodical for Florida’s K-6 graders” [CNN online report March 22, 2023] to read “Rosa Parks showed courage. One day, she rode the bus. She was told to move to a different seat. She did not. She did what she believed was right.” The initial text reportedly said Parks “was told to move to a different seat because of the color of her skin.”
The removal - albeit temporarily – of the biographies Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter; Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa by Veronica Chambers and Julie Maren, and Sonia Sotomayor (Women Who Broke the Rules Series) by Kathleen Krull and Angela Dominguez from public school shelves and libraries in Florida’s Duval County.
Incomplete history is
“Thomas Jefferson was a statesman, diplomate, architect, philosopher, Founding Father and Third President of the United States (1809-1809), and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.”
Real history is
“Thomas Jefferson held all those positions. Nonetheless, despite his historic assertion ‘all men are created equal,’ much of Jefferson’s wealth was dependent on his slaves at Monticello and those he rented and leased to cotton growers and others before eventually trading/selling them to pay-off a portion of his debts.”
The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, founded in 1923, is the custodian of Jefferson’s beloved Monticello plantation and maintains a remarkable website – www.Monticello.org – covering “all things Thomas Jefferson.” In its “Mission Statement and Vision,” the Foundation explains:
“Today, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation remains committed to a twofold mission:
preservation -- to conserve, protect, and maintain Monticello in a manner which leaves it enhanced and unimpaired for future generations -- and
education -- to interpret and present Thomas Jefferson to the widest possible audiences, including scholars and the general public.”
[As we present an aspect of Real History that some would excise from America’s grade and high schools, we draw heavily upon and are grateful for the materials provided by the Foundation. Unless otherwise indicated, quotes are taken directly from their site www.monticello.org.]
With the death of Peter, a successful planter and surveyor, fourteen-year-old Thomas inherited his father’s approximately 5,000-acre plantation of Shadwell at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But Jefferson dreamed of living on a mountaintop. In 1768 he oversaw the clearing of 250-square-feet on the top of the mountain overlooking Shadwell; he would build and rebuilt Monticello over a forty-year period and referred to the home as “my essay in Architecture”. This – initially – one-room structure would become the home he shared with Marth Wayles Skelton following their marriage in 1772.
“The cherished companion of my life” died ten years later and, despite giving birth to six children, only two – Martha (“Patsy”) and Mary (“Maria” or “Polly”) - survived to adulthood.
Jefferson inherited slaves from his father and his father-in-law and bought and sold enslaved people. “In a typical year, he owned about 200, almost halve of them under the age of sixteen.” In addition to Monticello, Jefferson owned other slaves on properties throughout Virginia and,
“…over the course of his life, he owned over 600 enslaved people. These men, women and children were integral to the running of his farms and building and maintaining his home at Monticello.”
After studying at the College of William and Mary for two years, Jefferson read the law for five years and recorded his first legal case in 1767, before being elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses (colonial legislature) in 1769. In 1774, he drafted a “Summary of the Rights of British America” – an in-your-face challenge to England’s George III, noting that Virginians did not wish to separate from the mother country.
Two years later, as a member of the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson was chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence.
“The Declaration has been regarded as a charter of American and universal liberties. The document proclaims that all men are equal in rights, regardless of birth, wealth, or status; that those rights are inherent in each human, a gift of the creator, not a gift of government, and that government is the servant and not the master of the people.
“Jefferson recognized that the principles he included in the Declaration had not been fully realized and would remain a challenge across time, but his poetic vision continues to have a profound influence in the United States and around the world.”
Jefferson left the Continental Congress in 1776, returning to Virginia, where he would eventually serve as a member of the House of Delegates and then as governor (1779-1781), before being appointed (1784) to join Benjamin Franklin and John Adams as a United States Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Versailles, working to promote American interests throughout Europe until November 1879, returning home
“a man transformed from Jefferson the Virginian into Jefferson the man of the world, envisioning an America true to its founding principles of self-government while rivalling the artistic, scientific, and cultural achievements of Europe.”
Despite a paucity of diplomatic successes, his European venture
“made a profound impact, transforming his thought and taste in virtually every subject that interested him, including Architecture and Design… Botany… Science and Technology… Fine Art… Food and Wine….”
Initially, the Minister Plenipotentiary and widowed father was accompanied by his eldest daughter Martha but, following the death of his youngest daughter Lucy in Virginia, he summoned his daughter Mary to Paris, accompanied by the fourteen-year-old slave Sally Hemings, the Black daughter of Jefferson’s white father-in-law and half-sister to Jefferson’s late wife.
“Sally Hemings worked for two and a half years (1787-89) in Paris as a domestic servant and maid in Jefferson’s household. While in Paris, where enslaved people could petition for their freedom, she negotiated with Jefferson to return to enslavement at Monticello in exchange for ‘extraordinary privileges’ for herself and freedom for her unborn children. Decades later, Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings’s children – Beverly and Harriet left Monticello in the early 1820s; Madison and Eston were freed in his will and left Monticello in 1826. Jefferson did not grant freedom to any other enslaved family unit.”
“...Jefferson gave the Hemingses special positions, and the only slaves Jefferson freed in his lifetime and in his will were all Hemingses, giving credence to the oral history. Years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson fathered at least six of Sally Hemings’s children. Four survived to adulthood and are mentioned in Jefferson’s plantation records. Their daughter Harriet and eldest son Beverly were allowed to leave Monticello during Jefferson’s lifetime and the two youngest sons, Madison and Eston, were freed in Jefferson’s will…”
The “Conclusions” entry of the “Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (January 2000) explains:
“Based on the examination of currently available primary and secondary documentary evidence, the oral histories of descendants of Monticello's African-American community, recent scientific studies… the Research Committee has reached the following conclusions:
“…The DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children appearing in Jefferson's records. Those children are Harriet, who died in infancy; Beverly; an unnamed daughter who died in infancy; Harriet; Madison; and Eston....”
On the website page “Monticello Affirms Thomas Jefferson Fathered Children with Sally Hemings,” the Foundation unequivocally declares:
“The issue of Jefferson’s paternity has been the subject of controversy for at least two centuries, ranging from contemporary newspaper articles in 1802 (when Jefferson was President) to scholarly debate well into the 1990s. It is now the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s view that the issue is a settled historical matter.
“A considerable body of evidence stretching from 1802 to 1873 (and beyond) describes Thomas Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings’s children…
“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….”
Thomas Jefferson was roughly thirty years older than Sally Hemings, a slave whom he inherited through the estates of his wife Martha and her father. He enjoyed the absolute power to emancipate her and all his slaves.
He did not.
Whatever intimate or emotional relationship Jefferson might have had with Sally Hemings, she was his slave and he had absolute control over her body.
When she had the opportunity to emancipate herself in France, she remained enslaved and continued to bear children fathered by her owner in order to secure their freedom and the freedom of other family members upon the death of their slave owner.
On July 4, 1826 at about five o’clock in the afternoon, almost eight-hundred miles north of Jefferson’s beloved Monticello, the Second President of the United States John Adams, the last surviving member of the original American revolutionaries who forged a new political system in North America, uttered his last words: “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”
He was mistaken.
Thomas Jefferson died at 12:50 in the afternoon – four hours before Adams.
The previous evening, when awakened to be given a dose of laudanum, an opiate, he told Robley Dunglison, the attending physician, “No, doctor, nothing more.”.
His final words on the night before he died are clouded by myth and the memories of Dunglison – “Is it the Fourth?”; “This is the Fourth?” to Nicholas Trist, the husband of Jefferson’s granddaughter, Virginia Randolph, to which Trist nodded ascent, though he found the deception “repugnant”; and “This is the Fourth” - a statement according to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph.
“Randolph writes that Jefferson called in his enslaved domestic workers ‘with a strong and clear voice.’ But what he actually said to them, Randolph unfortunately does not reveal. Jefferson lingered until 12:50 in the afternoon, but Randolph is clear that his last words were spoken that morning to the servants.”
“I am miserable till I owe not a shilling,” Jefferson wrote Nicholas Lewis forty years earlier. The Monticello website notes “He probably was never out of debt his adult life.”
His debts quadrupled in 1774, when he assumed his father-in-law’s commitments and he died owing more than $107,000 – roughly $3.5 million today.
In January 1827, central Virginia newspapers announced:
"EXECUTOR'S SALE. WILL BE SOLD ... ON THE FIFTEENTH OF January, at Monticello … the whole of the residue of the personal property of Thomas Jefferson…130 valuable Negroes, Stock, Crop, &c. Household and Kitchen Furniture."
While Jefferson proclaimed “All men are created equal,” in the end his slaves were simply property to be sold in satisfaction of his debts.
[Although trans-Atlantic slavery had been outlawed by several European nations and in some of the American colonies and despite proclaiming “All men are created equal,” Jefferson’s attitudes toward and practice of slavery were more complex than the simple statement “He owned slaves.” We’ll explore more of that True History in the next edition of AuthenticHealers.com.]