Dear Mr. Barger: Because you do not hesitate to pepper this list with a surfeit of repetitive messages expressing your vehement and intransigent judgment of facts, probabilities, and persons (living and dead) in the Jefferson-Hemings matter, I trust that you will not begrudge a note of respectful admonition to yourself. Please allow me, therefore, to invite your consideration of the following points, attention to any one of which might enable some of your readers to view your messages as more than noisy and predictable nuisances, as you surely do not intend them to be. (1.) A more adequate and consistent understanding of oral history. On the one hand, you repeatedly dismiss and disparage the study of oral history--sneering at Dr. Dianne Swann-Wright, the scholar who headed the Monticello commission that examined the Jefferson-Hemings history in light of the DNA evidence, as "an oral slave historian" (a message of April 30); discounting the census record listing Madison Hemings as TJ's son as "just another attempt to use oral history" (a message of April 29); and mocking the now-disproved Woodson oral history of descent from TJ as "the old long false ORAL family claim" (a message of May 5). On the other hand, you repeatedly trumpet the claim that "Eston Hemings['s] . . . family oral history had ALWAYS been that they descended from 'a Jefferson uncle'" (a message of April 30) and insist that accordingly the 1998 DNA tests "proved that Eston's family oral history was correct and that Eston's DNA was that of 'a' Jefferson, Randolph, as they had always claimed, NOT Thomas" (a message of April 29). May I suggest that as a matter of intellectual consistency you cannot have it both ways? And that in any case both judgments betray an ignorance of the dynamics and appropriate uses of oral history? Historians and folklorists since the mid-twentieth century have devoted a great deal of thought to understanding how oral histories and traditions can--and cannot--be used to shed valuable light on both the past and the present, and to establishing standards for scholarship accordingly. There is an extensive literature available on this topic should you care to peruse it before continuing to fling your own judgments on the subject incontinently about the Internet, as you do both on this list and on Amazon.com. I will not here attempt to review the records you cite in light of those standards, except to draw your attention to the following well- established facts. (a) Oral history tells us at least as much about the present in which it is voiced as about the past which it claims to convey. (b) Oral history is not inherently more or less truthful or accurate than written history: accounts of both types must be carefully evaluated for their sources, circumstances of production, biases, probable effects of knowledge or ignorance, degree of correlation with established fact, and other human filters before their veracity can be assessed for its factual utility in any given instance. (c) Because oral history is by definition unwritten, and therefore unfixed in historical time, we cannot assume its transhistorical consistency. In other words, as you will doubtless be gratified to learn, we cannot be certain that the facts of his parentage that Madison Hemings committed to print in 1873 were the same as those he might have recounted in, say, 1838. But by the same token, we also have no evidence that Eston Hemings's descendants "ALWAYS" (as you repeatedly put it) claimed descent from "a Jefferson uncle" rather than from Thomas himself, inasmuch as we have no means of documenting their oral tradition for any period older than that recalled by the inevitably imperfect memories of those who first submitted it to be recorded in writing in the late twentieth century. (2.) A more careful attention to the biases inherent in your own language. You claim to be interested in "truth" (or, if you would prefer, "TRUTH"), insisting that (as you put it in a message of May 1), "I find nothing objectionable about the 'possibility' that TJ had a sexual relationship with Sally. . . . I am not biased other than trying to see the truth revealed to the public." I am sorry, sir, but your constant, harshly juridical language belies this claim. You repeatedly accuse--I use the term advisedly--others of deeming TJ "guilty" of a relationship with SH (e.g., in messages of April 29, May 1, May 3, May 5, etc.), or of "accusing him" of such (e.g., in a message of May 3), and you express the wish that TJ could "defend himself" (e.g., in a message of May 5). You repeatedly accuse assorted historical actors whose accounts of the subject contradict yours of "lying" or of being "liars" (examples too numerous to mention, and much remarked in previous threads). You refer to other possible candidates for the paternity of SH's children as "suspects" (e.g., in messages of April 29 and May 3). A genealogist whose work you doubtless value discloses a similar outlook when she titles her book on the relationship "Jefferson Vindicated`" (it is difficult to believe that a book bearing such a title represents anything other than a sustained attempt to reach a foreordained conclusion, which is not how persuasive historical analysis is made). It seems clear, therefore, that whether or not you acknowledge it, you and at least some of those who share your viewpoint regard any possible TJ-SH sexual relationship as a crime. Because TJ is someone you claim to admire, may I suggest that so long as you continue to maintain this view of his possible connection with SH, it will be impossible for you to approach the known facts in the case, and to attempt their plausible interpretation, in anything remotely resembling an unbiased manner?--much less to begin to understand TJ's own understanding of his actions should they somehow prove beyond even your doubts to have taken place? At the very least, your use of such language is likely to make your arguments appear inherently biased to those very readers you wish most to persuade. ` (3.) A minimal courtesy to those who disagree with you. If you are familiar with TJ's correspondence, you may perhaps have relished, as have I, his ability to be courteous--unfailingly, if sometimes chillily or even freezingly, courteous--to all his correspondents, even those he profoundly disliked or who proffered arguments he deemed contemptible. I do wish you could emulate him in this matter; it is a wise strategy in debate as well as a humanely elegant style. Specifically, you do your own argument great injury when you continually dismiss all those who disagree with you about the possibility or probability of a TJ-SH sexual relationship-- historians, biographers, genealogists, archaeologists, geneticists, descendants of assorted historical actors, members of the news media and of the general public--as mere shills for "political correctness" and "historical revisionism," or as gullible dupes of the same (as in your messages of April 30, May 3, May 5, etc.). As a mere matter of strategy, how do you expect to persuade anyone whom you begin by insulting? And as a matter of fact, your portrayal of those you disagree with is demonstrably inaccurate (note that I do not accuse you of lying; simply of being inaccurate--a courtesy you refuse to extend to others). You are not going to win an argument whose inherent legitimacy you refuse to accept. And you are not going to persuade either the scholars or the broad public you desire to influence if you cannot recognize what is obvious to any fair-minded person: that many of those who disagree with you evince a commitment to accuracy and a capacity for discerning judgment at least equal to your own. As a scholar who has followed the arguments and counter-arguments on the subject of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings since my adolescence, more than three decades ago, changing my own best guess about the likelihood of the relationship from skepticism to probability as new facts have come to light, I am viscerally disinclined to take seriously the arguments of someone who deems me a priori guilty (sic) of bad faith. Please consider this letter an attempt to overcome my aversion to conversation with you on that ground alone, and--more importantly--consider that I may well speak also for any number of others whose intellectual honesty and professional integrity you are so blithely and unfoundedly eager to impugn. You might wish to consider why your historical conclusions cannot stand on their own merits without requiring that you traduce those who disagree with them. If there are biases and fixed agendas to be fairly acknowledged, dear sir, are they not your own? --Jurretta J. 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