http://www.weirdrepublic.com/episode154.htmThe Sally Hemings Slander
The mental life of liberals was kidnapped by postmodernism – a theory that rejects the notion of objective reality and substitutes in its place the perspective that everything, observed or imagined, is a creature of someone’s personal interpretation. To liberal postmodernists reality and morality are “relative,” the hand puppets of their personal predilections. For them, imagining something makes it so.
A signature moment in postmodernism came in 1994 when the Reverend Al Sharpton received thunderous applause for declaring to an audience of professors and students at New Jersey’s Kean University that “White folks was in the caves while we [black folks] was building empires . . . We built pyramids before Donald Trump ever knew what architecture was . . . we taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got to it.”
In an America where universities no longer require students who are not majoring in history to actually learn any history, the preposterous inventions of racial fantasists like Al Sharpton are bound to excite the uneducated. The Reverend Al, by the way, never spent a minute in any theological seminary; he’s a one-hundred-percent self-taught blabber machine. When Sharpton was 10 years old he was surprised to learn that he had been deemed a “man of the cloth” by a Pentecostal preacher who thought Sharpton was “inspired.” That’s all it took. In his autobiography Sharpton tells us that, “It wasn’t until I was older that I understood it empowered me to marry people and bury people and all that. At ten years old, it was just a certificate to me. I was glad to have it, but I didn’t understand it.” (Go and Tell Pharaoh, p.31)
Sharpton’s real stock in trade is agitation and he’s not particular about where his inspiration comes from. For example, when Sharpton says things like “We was the Original Men” he’s repeating a line lifted straight from Wallace Fard, the itinerant umbrella salesman who authored the black-supremacist theology of the Nation of Islam. Sharpton’s theology is not rigorous; it’s more like a mood poem – if it feels good, then to Hell with coherency. Sharpton panders to a community of ignorant blacks who share a common mythic false history.
The myth that blacks built the Egyptian pyramids is only one of hundreds of flattering fictions cherished by millions. In truth, the Egyptian pharaohs adamantly resisted the colonization of any part of Egypt by black tribesmen to the south. A stone monument erected at Semna, near the second cataract of the Nile as early as 1879 BC drew a clear line in the sand. In translation it reads:
“Southern boundary, made in the year 8 under the majesty of the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khekure who is given life forever and ever, in order to prevent that any Negro should cross it, by water or by land, with a ship [or] any herds with Negroes; except a Negro who shall come to do trading in Iken or with a commission. Every good thing shall be done with them, but without allowing a ship of the Negroes to pass by Heh, going downstream forever.”
As late as the reign of Cleopatra the rulers of Egypt were still jealously guarding their bloodlines as a way of maintaining their legitimacy. Cleopatra was a bloodline descendent of the Ptolemys, a group of Macedonian Greek generals who conquered and ruled Egypt from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC. The widely believed myth that Cleopatra was black is based on the thin evidence that one of Cleopatra’s father’s thirteen concubines was a black woman, but given the history of the Ptolemys, there is no chance that the daughter of a black concubine would ever have been allowed to call the legitimacy of Ptolemy rule into question. It’s just one more baseless assertion rooted in an emotional desire to create a more illustrious history for black people. It’s a very human thing to do.
The Sally Hemings Slander
After emancipation, former slaves who had been called by a single name all of their lives (John, Mary, etc.) felt a need to have a family name like free-born people. Because of the natural desire to have a well-regarded last name, many former slaves chose the last names of the most illustrious men in American history. That’s why so many blacks today are named Franklin, Washington and Jefferson. It was a very human thing to do. It did no harm.
True harm would be caused by falsely claiming genuine ancestry from one of these illustrious Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson holds iconic status in American history because he is celebrated as the principal author of our Declaration of Independence. His luster has been tarnished somewhat in recent years by the claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered a child by his black slave Sally Hemings. This claim has been exploited by liberal postmodernists seeking to diminish the entire American experiment in self-government. This claim is unsupported by the evidence.
DNA tests done in 1998 established no more than the probability that one of more than two dozen Jefferson males fathered Sally Hemings’ youngest son, Eston. So the shot at Thomas Jefferson was just another “Cleopatra-was-black” shot in the dark. No fewer than seven Jefferson men were at Monticello when Eston was conceived in the summer of 1807. Eston’s descendents have repeatedly acknowledged that, as children, they were told that they were not descendents of Thomas Jefferson, but of an “uncle.”
This would suggest Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, better known as “Uncle Randolph” around Monticello. We know from letters that Randolph was invited to Monticello less than two weeks before the start of Sally Hemings’ window of conception. An 1847 oral history titled “Memoirs of a Monticello Slave” recounts that when Randolph came to Monticello it was his custom to “come out among the black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” Randolph may have visited Monticello with any, or all, of his five sons, all in their teens and 20s and all of them carrying Jefferson DNA.
The first version of the “Black Sal” slander was published in the Richmond Recorder in 1802 and it made the claim that Sally Hemings’ eldest son was named Tom. After Jefferson’s death a former slave named Thomas Woodson claimed to be that Tom; he said he had been sent away to live with the Woodson family soon after the Black Sal story hit the streets. But when DNA tests were completed on six descendents of Thomas Woodson’s sons the tests proved conclusively that Thomas Woodson could not possibly have been a child of any Jefferson family male.
There is no evidence that Sally Hemings or her sons were favorites of Thomas Jefferson. Sally was never legally freed; her two sons were freed by Jefferson’s will, but they received no land, house, tools or money as did the freed sons and grandsons of Sally’s mother Betty Hemings.
The very first claim that Thomas Jefferson had sexual relations with Sally Hemings was made by the embittered slander monger and notorious liar James Thompson Callendar who had demanded that Jefferson, who had been elected president in 1800, appoint him the postmaster of Richmond, Virginia. Callendar believed that Jefferson was in his debt because of Callendar’s unscrupulous press attacks against Jefferson’s presidential opponent, John Adams. When Jefferson refused to appoint Callendar postmaster, the inveterate lie merchant vowed “ten thousand fold vengeance.” Callendar became a fulminating geyser of articles denouncing Jefferson as an atheist and a secret agent of the French. After that he declared that the atheistic French agent Thomas Jefferson had taken a young slave girl as his “concubine” while in Paris in the late 1780s.
The objective historical truth is that Sally Hemings was in Paris to attend to Jefferson’s young daughters who lived in a Catholic boarding school on the other side of Paris and faraway from where Jefferson was residing. During her time in Paris Sally Hemings lived in the servant’s quarters at the school.
Even Jefferson’s staunchest political rivals – John Adams and Alexander Hamilton – dismissed Callendar’s claims as bunk. Both men had been stung by Callendar’s lies and both men were deeply impressed by Jefferson’s strength of character.
So there is no credible evidence that Thomas Jefferson had sexual relations with any slave ever. Not even the Hemings family oral history points a finger at Thomas Jefferson. It’s just another self-serving slander from the grievance chorus of black America that has enriched itself by exploiting white people’s guilt. So toss it onto the only pyramid that blacks ever built – the pyramid of self-serving myths. You could squeeze it into the pyramid right there between the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s nasty myth that the Jews are developing a weapon that will kill only black people and leave everyone else unharmed and the stupid myth of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan that “to this very day” sharks gather by the thousands at one spot in the Atlantic Ocean in anticipation of more black slaves being flung into the water from passing slave ships.
The lazy and the ignorant will always be with us, but we could make an effort to clean up the myth-generating mess that the liberal postmodernists have made of history education in America. Here’s a start: As a young lawyer Thomas Jefferson gave free legal representation to slaves seeking their freedom. Beginning in 1769, Jefferson pushed for legislation to outlaw the importation of slaves into Virginia and to permit the manumission of slaves. Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence boldly denounced slavery. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson declared, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep for ever . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”
So why did Jefferson free only five slaves in his will? The answer is sad and simple: Jefferson died deeply in debt. Under Virginia law Jefferson’s slaves were property and an inseparable part of his estate and subject to the claims of Jefferson’s creditors.
When the Thirteenth Amendment to outlaw slavery everywhere in America was introduced in the Senate in 1864 its authors intentionally chose the language that Thomas Jefferson had created in 1784 for his unsuccessful effort to outlaw slavery in the Northwest Territories. It was their way of honoring Jefferson for his contributions to the continuing cause of American liberty.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2013
March 18, 2013
Topic: Al Sharpton Makes Up History (Read 479 times)