Defending the Founders

A bicentennial is, of course, an appropriate time for a revisionist look at a nation's beginnings. Two recent books became bestsellers by taking just such a view, each portraying the revered Thomas Jefferson and George Washington in a new and unflattering light. Last week Virginius Dabney, a proud Virginian, historian and retired editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, came to the defense of the founding fathers in an outspoken Charter Day address at Virginia's venerable College of William and Mary. He sharply assailed Fawn Brodie, author of Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, and Gore Vidal, who wrote the historical novel Burr, for pretending to sound scholarship.

Dabney's primary target was Brodie, who portrayed Jefferson in Freudian'terms as suffering from a guilt complex stemming from his paternity of mulatto children at Monticello. The trouble with that tidy theory, Dabney argued, is that it only works if Jefferson was indeed the father and he insisted that there is no reliable evidence to support that assertion--and much evidence to the contrary. Dabney enlisted statements from three Jefferson historians to refute the paternity claim. He said that Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson of the University of Virginia and Julian P. Boyd, editor of the papers of Thomas Jefferson, all agreed that the Brodie book was based on "half-truths, unwarranted assumptions and grievous misinterpretation of the known facts."

According to Dabney, the report that Jefferson had fathered the children was spread in a newspaper article in 1802 by one James T. Callender, whom Dabney described as "a vicious unscrupulous drunkard" who was angry at President Jefferson for refusing to appoint him postmaster at Richmond. An Ohio newspaper revived this charge in 1873, citing what Dabney termed the "testimony of two aged blacks." Historian Malone called the testimony a contrived bit of "abolitionist propaganda."

Serpent's Glance. The most solid evidence, according to Dabney, is that there were mulattoes at Monticello and some were related to Jefferson--but were fathered by Jefferson's father-in-law John Wayles and two nephews. The liaisons of the nephews with two of the Jefferson servants, Sally and Betsey Hemings, thus resulted in children who bore a likeness to Jefferson. While most of the evidence refuting the Jefferson paternity is noted by Brodie the historians complain that she dismissed it in her "obsession" with the mulatto question.

Dabney attacked Vidal mainly for his characterization of Washington as variously having a "cold, serpent's nature," casting a "serpent's glance" and employing "serpentine cunning." No major historian or biographer of Washington has ever before found any such reptilian element in Washington's personality, Dabney contended.

In view of Aaron Burr's hatred of Jefferson, Dabney does not find it surprising that Vidal's Burr considered his enemy "a hypocrite" and "the most deceitful" man he had ever known. But it is absurd, argued Dabney, for Jefferson also to be termed "an intellectual dabbler" who "never did any one thing particularly well." To the contrary, Dabney insisted, Jefferson was "perhaps the most brilliantly versatile man America has produced."

Historian Malone's conclusion, as told by Dabney, was that Brodie and Vidal "cannot rob Washington and Jefferson of their laurels, but they can scribble graffiti on their statues. It is unfortunate that dirty words are so hard to erase, and it is shocking that the scribblers should be so richly rewarded."

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