I am willing to stand corrected Adams; and I do not believe I said anything one way or the other about TJ when he was married.
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Paul Finkelman, Ph.D.
President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
Albany Law School
80 New Scotland Avenue
Albany, NY 12208
518-445-3386 (p)
518-445-3363 (f)
[log in to unmask]
www.paulfinkelman.com
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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of David Kiracofe [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Saturday, July 02, 2011 12:07 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] Jefferson and sexuality
Paul,
I'm not sure John Adams was that prudish; at one point he recorded a quite ribald story involving a lusty gentleman, a country girl, and her horse. But I agree that we really need to be very careful about applying a later cultural norm to an earlier era. That does not necesssitate accepting as truth every allegation of infidelity or hanky-panky or whatever. People were what they were. And no doubt most were moral and upright, certainly within the cultural bounds of their time.
But it seems just as wrongheaded to insist that Jefferson never could have been unfaithful to his wife (John Walker reported that Jefferson's advances on Betsey Walker lasted long after his marriage) or that it is impossible for him to have had sex with Sally Hemings long after his wife's death. I'm no lawyer so I have only a layman's understanding of hearsay and circumstantial evidence and even the notion of proof "beyond a shadow of a doubt," but there does seem to be enough aambiguity in it all for us to step back and consider just what questions we're trying to answer, and what are the appropriate categories we should be using.
David Kiracofe
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From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Finkelman, Paul <[log in to unmask]> [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, June 30, 2011 1:27 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Jefferson and sexuality
We should remember that the Founders were not a generation of up-tight Victorians (except for maybe John Adams perhaps, who would have been a proto-Victorian). Franklin had an out of wed lock child and wrote some pretty racy things; Jefferson had children with Sally; Hamilton probably had an affair with his sister-in-law; numerous lesser southern founders (than Jefferson) had sex and children with their slaves; some scholars have suggested that the signs all over New England that "Washington slept here may have a double meaning; pornography was not unknown; this was the age of Tom Jones and Fanny Hill after all. English gentlemen notoriously had mistresses (there is a wonderful half-nude of one in Yale museum of British art). So, why should we be shocked by Jefferson's poetry or his relationships to women?
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