LIAR Dianne Swann-Wright

Dr. Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, appointed a research committee of Monticello staff members, including four Ph.D.'s and one medical doctor, and charged the committee with evaluating the DNA study of Dr. Eugene Foster and associates, assessing it within the context of all other relevant historical and scientific evidence, and recommending the impact it should have on historical interpretation at Monticello. It is such a shoddy piece of scholarship that this writer is embarrassed to admit that the University of Virginia is his alma mater.   This error must be corrected.

The committee relied heavily on the DNA evidence which showed a match between only one of Sally Heming's children, while ignoring that there was a mismatch with another of her children and that none of the other children showed a DNA match.  But the committee accepted the scientific evidence as proof of Jefferson being the father of one child while rejecting the very same scientific evidence that proved conclusively that he was not the father of another, and omitting the fact that there was no scientific evidence of Jefferson being the biological father of the other children, to support their conclusion that:

"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."

A match in the DNA evidence doesn't constitute scientific evidence that Mr. Jefferson was the father.  It proves only that any one of the 25 male relatives of Mr. Jefferson who were in Albemarle County at the time were the father. But a mismatch reduces the probability that Mr. Jefferson was the father of Thomas Woodson to less than one in a billion.  While the committee accepts a "Monte Carlo analysis" that the chances of Mr. Jefferson not being the father of all six children is less than 1 in 100, it rejects the one in a billion chance that the DNA evidence is wrong.  This is shoddy advocacy at its very best.  You simply cannot claim that someone who has a one in a billion chance of being the father "most likely was the father".

If Mr. Jefferson lied about it, this would be the first time in recorded history that he did.  Why LIE about a great Christian like this?  Why intentionally misrepresent his moral position?  Why smear this good man's excellent reputation, and thus the moral integrity of the entire nation, solely to promote the sale of a scurrilous book?  Why did the "mainstream media" jump all over this story without checking to see if there was a shred of accuracy in it first?

There's no excuse for this posthumous character assassination of Mr. Jefferson, not even the claim that it might have been due to some incredibly sloppy scholarship by another hyphenated FEMINIST LIAR Annette Gordon-Reed!

The Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission

Coolidge Letter Transcription
Discrepancy

On October 25, 1858, Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, wrote a letter to her husband Joseph in which she argued that the charge that Jefferson was sexually involved with Sally Hemings was false. This is a photocopy of one portion of that letter:

The handwritten letter, a photocopy of which is included in Appendix E of the TJMF Report, is not particularly difficult to read. The following is the passage in question, with the mistranscribed portion in bold face and underlined:

"His apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there, and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze."

In the transcription of this letter that appears in Appendix E of Professor Annette Gordon-Reed's book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (see page 259), this key sentence was altered in such a way as to totally reverse the clear meaning of the original:

"No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze."

N.B. This error in transcription could not be ascribed to a simple omission of words, since "to the public gaze" was changed to "in the public gaze." Without the change of "to" into "in," the altered sentence would have contained a grammatical error.

The Scholars Commission notes that it has no information about how or why these errors occurred, but it is clear that they have had an unfortunate impact upon the scholarship of even the leading historian at Monticello. While Appendix E to the TJMF Report included both versions, Lucia Stanton (former Director of Research at Monticello and currently Shannon Senior Research Historian at Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies) did not notice the error and indeed quoted the inaccurate Gordon-Reed version of this key sentence in response to questions from the Scholars Commission.

As one member of the Scholars Commission remarked: "Someone once said that if you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, they would recreate all of the great literary works of history (or something like that). But the odds of a single human being 'accidentally' changing 13 words in a single sentence in a manner that just happened to totally reverse its meaning, and just happening to have made the 'errors' in the most critical sentence of the document, strike me as being high."

Prof. Robert F. Turner
tjshcommission@mindspring.com

Copyright @ 2007 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party