Word: dabneys
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...Southern Waspdom. Richmond's Country Club of Virginia, once a haven for FFVs (First Families of Virginia), now has 5,600 members (family membership is $5,000, plus annual dues starting at $660) and does not demand a blue-blood test of applicants. Nowadays, as the eminent Virginius Dabney, retired editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch (and a member of the club), puts it, "an interest in tennis, golf, swimming, bridge or fiscal solvency is a more valid qualification than one's birthplace or forebears...
...Dabney's primary target was Brodie, who portrayed Jefferson in Freudian'terms as suffering from a guilt complex stemming from his paternity of mulatto children at Monticello. The trouble with that tidy theory, Dabney argued, is that it only works if Jefferson was indeed the father and he insisted that there is no reliable evidence to support that assertion-and much evidence to the contrary. Dabney enlisted statements from three Jefferson historians to refute the paternity claim. He said that Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson of the University of Virginia and Julian P. Boyd, editor of the papers...
According to Dabney, the report that Jefferson had fathered the children was spread in a newspaper article in 1802 by one James T. Callender, whom Dabney described as "a vicious unscrupulous drunkard" who was angry at President Jefferson for refusing to appoint him postmaster at Richmond. An Ohio newspaper revived this charge in 1873, citing what Dabney termed the "testimony of two aged blacks." Historian Malone called the testimony a contrived bit of "abolitionist propaganda...
Serpent's Glance. The most solid evidence, according to Dabney, is that there were mulattoes at Monticello and some were related to Jefferson-but were fathered by Jefferson's father-in-law John Wayles and two nephews. The liaisons of the nephews with two of the Jefferson servants, Sally and Betsey Hemings, thus resulted in children who bore a likeness to Jefferson. While most of the evidence refuting the Jefferson paternity is noted by Brodie the historians complain that she dismissed it in her "obsession" with the mulatto question...
...Dabney attacked Vidal mainly for his characterization of Washington as variously having a "cold, serpent's nature," casting a "serpent's glance" and employing "serpentine cunning." No major historian or biographer of Washington has ever before found any such reptilian element in Washington's personality, Dabney contended...