It was important to Gordon-Reed's thesis that the letter of Ellen Coolidge be discredited (which she termed "Jefferson's Grandchildren versus Madison Hemings"). But she did not address the issue of the room layout at Monticello or the observation by Coolidge that the room was not accessible without detection. Did Gordon-Reed avoid that critical issue by reversing what Coolidge said? It is true that mistakes of inadvertence do occur, and there were eight such minor mistakes in Gordon-Reed's transcription of the Coolidge letter plus changing "disbelief" to "belief," in addition to the sentence alteration.
Mr. Kiracofe dismisses Ellen's letter as not "making for a very strong case." But of course, this merely does what Gordon-Reed did and that is to evade the issue. Was Ellen Coolidge's observation accurate? One does not have to spend a good part of their early life at Monticello, as Coolidge did. Really, one visit is enough to wonder how Jefferson carried on this twenty-five liaison undetected. Perhaps a more interesting question is why the accessibility of the room was never addressed by Monticello, either in its 2000 Research Committee Report or in the material currently on its website.




Richard E. Dixon
Editor, Jefferson Notes
Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society
703-691-0770
fax 703-691-0978
fax 703-691-0978


> [Original Message]
> From: Henry Wiencek <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 10/28/2006 10:55:48 PM
> Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Transcribing Civil War Diaries
>
> I think that Mr. Dixon deserves a lot of credit for discovering the error in
> the transcription of the Ellen Coolidge letter in the Gordon-Reed book.  The
> Coolidge letter is one of the essential documents in the Hemings controversy
> and the Gordon-Reed transcription completely reverses the meaning of that
> particular sentence, which is a very important one.  I am convinced that it
> was an inadvertent mistake, but we are fortunate that Mr. Dixon and others
> have loudly called attention to it.  If they had not, the erroneous
> "evidence" might be widely quoted.  Gordon-Reed did not make reference to
> that sentence in her main text and did not build any of her arguments on it,
> as far as I can tell.
>
> For what it's worth, there have been errors in the transcriptions of the
> newspaper statement of Madison Hemings about his ancestor, Captain Hemings.
>  In the original newspaper column Madison said Captain Hemings commanded a
> "trading vessel."  In the Gordon-Reed transcription this appears as a
> "tracking vessel" and in the Fawn Brodie transcription it is a "whaling"
> vessel.
>
> I am embarrassed to say that in my first published piece about Thomas
> Jefferson I stated with certainty that Monticello is in the Blue Ridge.  I
> was then residing in New York and to a Yankee one Virginia mountain range
> was as good as another.  No power on earth, even the Internet, can fully
> expunge that error of mine, and I still cringe when I see Monticello, from
> the top of my street, firmly fixed in the Southwest Mountains with the Blue
> Ridge in the misty distance.
>
> Henry Wiencek
> Charlottesville
>
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