Letters to the Editor
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‘Spitzer Without Tears’
Your “Spitzer Without Tears” editorial tars President Jefferson with the same brush it wields with Hamilton and President Kennedy as being one of our country’s “public servants [who] had extramarital affairs” [Editorial, “Spitzer Without Tears,” March 11, 2008].
This charge is without proof. Jefferson was never unfaithful to his beloved wife, Martha, and when she died, he suffered what today would be called a nervous breakdown.
Some years later, in Paris, the widower became deeply involved with Maria Cosway; it is not known whether theirs was a sexual relationship. They corresponded for the rest of their lives.
The effort to smear Jefferson as an unfaithful husband emerges out of the same shameful strategy as the attempt to portray him as the lover of his slave, Sally Hemings.
There are two solid reasons why such a liaison was unlikely. First, Jefferson was a “one-woman man.” At the time of his assignment in Paris, when he was supposed to have begun his affair with Hemings, he was in love with Cosway. Carrying on affairs with two women at the same time was not in Jefferson’s nature.
Second, at the time the alleged affair with Hemings was to have started, she was 14. While it is possible that, after Cosway left Paris, Jefferson might have been capable of having an affair with a slave, it is extremely unlikely that he would have engaged in sexual relations with a minor.
Jefferson had faults, but they did not include the criminal behavior of being a statutory rapist or child-molester.
Incidentally, there is a very easy way to determine if Jefferson was the father of any of Hemings’s children. According to an article in this newspaper on February 11, a lock of his hair is included with those of other presidents in a collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
There is no reason a test cannot be done comparing his DNA with that from hair of (exhumed) children of Hemings. (Previous studies with a variety of relatives’ DNA have been scientifically inconclusive.) Are those who trumpet Jefferson’s “guilt” as unassailable afraid new tests would prove them wrong?
The allegation of Jefferson’s marital “infidelity,” like that of his affair with a slave, is part of a strategy aiming to discredit one of our greatest leaders, a champion of democracy and liberty.
His first act in office was ripping up the “Alien and Sedition Acts,” under which Americans were imprisoned for criticizing the government.
AVIVA CANTOR
New York, N.Y.
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