Dumas Malone spent about four decades on Jefferson and couldn't get himself to acknowledge what was staring him in his face
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Not everyone accepted it, but 18th Century people were pretty realistic about sex. People knew that men had mistresses. TJ was widowed at 39, & lived to 83. They wouldn’t have assumed he was celibate.
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yeah, it makes sense that denial was part of later Victorian (and even post-Victorian) prudery.
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I love that Ken Burns' 1997 documentary on Jefferson came out not long before the DNA evidence finally shattered the denial. It means that we get to see some Very Serious People scoff at the possibility and condemn even entertaining the idea.
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A 1976 episode of “The Jeffersons” referred to Jefferson & Hemings as historical fact, and I was shocked to discover 20 years later that Jefferson scholars were still denying it.https://youtu.be/JgzRn2euWnA?t=402 …
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It's very similar to the Shakespeare Authorship Question. The very first thing ever printed about Shakespeare in 1592 made clear he didn't write the plays.pic.twitter.com/OtSMXQw76n
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Theres a lo t of reasons for that. Past the obvious biases in favor of overly lionizing certain figures and racism, most (all I've known of)known contemporarh accounts were from people who would not have been out of place trying to besmirch his reputation.
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Right? His opponents tried to make it a scandal and he laughed it off.
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