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Location : Wasted Space
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 |  Subject: The hypocrisy of Jefferson  Fri Apr 17, 2009 10:09 pm | |
| Feminist and academic Cassandra Pybus is inadvertently drawn to flawed characters, writes Andrew West.
CASSANDRA PYBUS has man trouble. Every time this award-winning Australian historian starts sifting through the lives of famous men of letters and politics, she finds a life complicated or compromised by sex.
"I am terribly drawn to people like this," she says, in her office overlooking the front lawn of the University of Sydney, where she is now a professor. "I'm a long-standing feminist and I always have a puzzlement about male sexuality. Why does it always get them into trouble? Why does it drive them so much? I never go looking for it. It just kind of rears up."
In 1993 she dissected Tasmania's famous sex scandal of the 1950s, in which the eminent philosopher Sydney Sparkes Orr was accused of seducing an 18-year-old woman in his class. Rather than seeing Orr as the victim of a puritan conspiracy, Pybus concluded he ultimately came to revel in his status as a martyr.
A few years later, in a biography of the arch-conservative Australian poet James McAuley, she speculated on whether he might have been a repressed homosexual. "That got me into a lot of trouble," she says.
Now she has turned her attention to a giant of American history, one of its founding fathers and its third president, Thomas Jefferson.
In recent years, Pybus - who will today convene an international symposium on Jefferson at Sydney University - has been the Coca-Cola visiting research fellow at Jefferson's former home, Monticello, in Virginia. And she has drawn some very unflattering conclusions about the man revered for his words in the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal …"
"He is the man who wrote the thing that Americans learn to say in school," Pybus told the Herald. "But no one who has looked closely at Jefferson has gone on to be in awe of him."
Her problem is most obviously with the contradiction that Jefferson, the founding democrat, was also an unrepentant slave owner who, unlike many of his contemporaries in Virginian society - including his law professor and mentor - refused to free his slaves after the revolution.
Pybus says it is simple - Jefferson could not let go of the chattels who, in his words, "laboured for his happiness". "With Jefferson, his desire to be a 'great man' in the historical sense," she says, "is undermined by his self-indulgence. The [slaves] can't be let go because his happiness matters more than anything else - his comfort, his fine wines, his beautiful houses, his indolent life so he can read books and sprout flowery rhetoric.
"He says all men are created equal but he won't free his own because who's going to look after the garden."
During her research, she discovered references to Jefferson "chastising" or flogging his slaves, to their living in hovels, and to a less honourable reason for his involvement in the revolution. Jefferson, she argues, owed vast sums of money to British merchants, while the colonial governments also refused to let him claim land owned by native Americans.
But she is most appalled - and that is no journalistic exaggeration - by Jefferson's treatment of Sally Hemings, the slave girl with whom he had a relationship, probably starting when she was under age, and who bore him six children.
While the relationship is still subject to debate, in 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation largely accepted DNA evidence that pointed to the president's paternity of the Hemings children.
Annette Gordon-Reed, a celebrated US historian who will attend today's symposium, published The Hemingses Of Monticello: An American Family last year, further bolstering the evidence about Jefferson's relationship with his slave girl.
"Jefferson comes a cropper because he wants to have sex with this girl who resembles his dead wife," says Pybus.
Even worse, is that Jefferson refuses to free Hemings or their children, but in the end exiles his children to Kansas where, because of their light skin, they can pass - just - for whites. "Now that is truly repugnant," she says. "He never taught them to read. His [white] daughters did, knowing they were their half-brothers and sisters, but this 'great man' kept them as his slaves and when they turned 21 he wrote that they had run away. I can never forgive him for that. Whatever else he has done, and however great his soaring rhetoric, that is so low."
Yet despite this indictment, Pybus believes that in the age of Barack Obama, the first black US president, Jefferson would have been gracious enough to concede his error in writing that African-Americans lacked the intelligence, or the "faculty" to be free. "I think Jefferson would have had the capacity to say, 'I am really pleased that I was wrong about that' … or I hope so."
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