If the very mention of the names Jefferson and Hemings in the same  
sentence causes you to do violence to your computer, please repair the  
damage and delete this message.

If not, however, those (few?) list members still interested in *new*  
perspectives on the subject of those two families may wish to read the  
extended review of Annette Gordon-Reed's new book, The Hemingses of  
Monticello, published in The New Republic magazine on October 22 by  
Professor Gordon S. Wood of Brown University and available on the Web  
at http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=7a626d8a-bbf4-4669-bc35-80a33b2cbbd9 
.

Along with Edmund S. Morgan of Yale -- who lauded Gordon-Wood's  
achievement in the New York Review of Books on October 9 (see http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21855) 
  -- Wood is, as many of you know, probably the most widely respected  
of historians whose scholarship concerns the American Revolution and  
the Early Republic.

Below is some of what he has to say; so that I don't violate  
copyright, you'll need to turn to http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=7a626d8a-bbf4-4669-bc35-80a33b2cbbd 
  to read the rest.

One other truly important point needs to be made:  Gordon-Reed's book  
is not only, or even primarily, about the relationship between Thomas  
Jefferson and Sally Hemings.  It is about the entire Hemings family,  
and their relationship with the Jefferson family.  As the first  
biography of an entire slave family (if another exists, I do not know  
of it), it is an extraordinary achievement.  For that reason alone --  
even if you are completely unpersuaded by Gordon-Reed's understanding  
of Sally Hemings's place in history -- this work deserves your  
attention as a historian, professional or amateur, of Virginia's past.

-- Jurretta Heckscher


American Unions
Gordon S. Wood,  The New Republic, Wednesday, October 22, 2008: 35-39.
http://www.tnr.com/toc/story.html?id=7a626d8a-bbf4-4669-bc35-80a33b2cbbd9
      The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
      By Annette Gordon-Reed

. . . Of course Jefferson could never openly recognize [Beverly  
Hemings]. Neither could he publicly acknowledge his relationship with  
Sally Hemings, nor could he publicly regard what he called racial  
"amalgamation" as anything other than "a degradation." Why this should  
have been so is only one of the many questions that Gordon-Reed  
attempts to answer in this very important and powerfully argued  
history of the Hemings family.

Although Gordon-Reed was trained as a lawyer, she has the imagination  
and the talent of an expert historian. In addition to being a  
professor of law at New York Law School, she has also become a  
professor of history at Rutgers University. And with this book Gordon- 
Reed explores Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings and the rest  
of his household slaves with a degree of detail and intimacy never  
before achieved. If anyone had any doubts about whether Sally Hemings  
was Jefferson's concubine, The Hemingses of Monticello should put them  
to rest.

In 1998, Nature magazine published a brief article reporting on DNA  
tests that strongly suggested that Jefferson was the father of the  
last son of his slave Sally Hemings. Although the general public was  
excited by this finding, many historians thought it simply confirmed a  
relationship that they had already come to accept--largely owing to a  
book that Gordon-Reed published a year earlier, Thomas Jefferson and  
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. In that work, Gordon-Reed had  
devastatingly criticized the manner in which professional historians  
had treated the possibility of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison. She  
approached the controversy as a lawyer investigating how historians  
analyzed and used evidence and conceived of proof. Out of white pride  
or hero worship, she concluded, the Jefferson scholars had mishandled  
or ignored evidence of a relationship between Jefferson and his female  
slave, and had demanded a burden of proof that was impossible to  
attain. Above all, they had played down the extent of racial mixing  
that existed in the country and had ignored black testimony. Why,  
Gordon-Reed asked, should historians have dismissed out of hand  
Madison Hemings's claim that Jefferson was his father?

There is also, of course, the long oral tradition of the black heirs  
of Thomas Woodson claiming that their ancestor was actually the first  
of Hemings's children--a claim that, unfortunately for the Woodson  
heirs, the DNA finding does not substantiate. The best that Gordon- 
Reed can do with this embarrassing Woodson problem is to say that "it  
seems clear that the Woodson family is connected to the Hemingses,"  
with "the only question that remains" being "exactly what that  
connection is."

In her new book Gordon-Reed has not abandoned her incisive legal  
approach to evidence, but here she has essentially become a historian,  
and a superb one. She has set out to do what she thinks professional  
historians should have been doing all along. With great historical  
imagination, she has done far more than put together a convincing case  
for the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. She has also reconstructed the  
complicated and intimate relations between black and white families in  
Jefferson's household over several generations. And perhaps most  
important, she has uncovered the many expressions of humanity by both  
blacks and whites existing within a fundamentally inhumane institution.

Gordon-Reed's long, dense, and fascinating volume makes abundantly  
clear that there was no single slave experience in the Virginia of the  
early republic. "Tempting and romantic as it may be to construct a  
monolithic population of slaves who acted cohesively across color and  
genetic lines because of their common enslaved status," she writes,  
"it is more realistic to accept that different individuals and  
families had different understandings about where they stood in  
relation to other slaves, within the slave system, and, indeed, within  
America's racial hierarchy." The mixed world of the Jefferson-Hemings  
families "shows the problem with seeing slavery through the eyes of  
twentieth-century residential Jim Crow."

Indeed, suggests Gordon-Reed, there may even be a lesson for our own  
time from all this racial mixing that has created various distinctions  
among blacks. "There has been a tendency throughout American history,  
and into the present day," she remarks, "to see black people as  
symbols or representations rather than as individual human beings."  
Whites have too often assumed that "the concept of individual as  
opposed to group identity is meaningless for blacks." Although blacks  
themselves have contributed to that assumption of group identity, her  
book shows how wrong that assumption is. She wisely insists that  
"there was not then, as there is not now, one way to be black."

History, according to Gordon-Reed, "is to a great degree an  
imaginative enterprise." And since the evidence of the Hemingses and  
the other slaves in Jefferson's Monticello is so sparse and  
fragmentary (Jefferson scarcely ever mentions Sally Hemings in his  
extant papers), Gordon-Reed needed a lot of imagination to write this  
book. Conceding that "there is something strange" about Sally  
Hemings's "near-invisibility in Jefferson family exchanges," she has  
had to rely a great deal on conjecture and "reasonable inferences"-- 
and on what she refers to as "connect the dots." At times Gordon- 
Reed's effort reminds one of Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon in  
Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, putting together "out of the rag-tag and  
bob-ends of old tales and talking" a story of shadows that seemed more  
imagined than real.

Despite all these difficulties, Gordon-Reed's account of the Hemingses  
at Monticello is persuasive. And it turns out that there exists much  
more evidence for her to work with than one might initially assume--or  
we might better say that she has uncovered much more evidence than  
other historians have been able to uncover. Although Gordon-Reed  
concedes that we know very little about Sally Hemings and her  
attitudes about her life as a slave, we do know quite a bit about the  
lives and attitudes of the other Hemingses, and we can use that  
knowledge to help us to understand Jefferson's relation to his young  
concubine. Gordon-Reed exploits that knowledge beautifully. By  
mastering a multitude of inter-related facts and coincidences, and by  
putting together and explaining dozens of complicated Jefferson- 
Hemings family relationships, black and white, she has indeed  
connected a multitude of dots, and thereby answered the many doubts  
some historians have had that Jefferson could have been sexually  
involved with his mulatto slave.

To answer these doubts, Gordon-Reed has occasionally had to rely on  
some exceedingly ahistorical generalizations about the ways all people  
behave regard//less of time or circumstance. Although she is well  
aware of "the danger of 'essentializing' when making statements about  
people of the past--positing an elemental human nature that can be  
discerned and relied upon at all times and in all places," she  
nonetheless believes that there are "some elements of the human  
condition that have existed forever, transcending time and place." If  
there were no such common elements, she correctly contends, historical  
reconstruction would be impossible. So in order to explain how  
Jefferson might have become attracted to the beautiful mulatto teenage  
slave who was sharing his residence in the Hotel de Langeac in Paris,  
she begins by assuming that "males and females, even of different rank  
and race, engage in light banter that acknowledges the other's gender.  
That is one of the ways relationships--licit and illicit--are formed."  
So, too, in order to explain why Hemings might have felt some degree  
of equality with her master, Gordon-Reed posits that "oppressed  
peoples do not always internalize the stories that their oppressors  
tell about them." . . . .

Most of Gordon-Reed's assumptions about human nature are  
commonsensical and not jarring, though her repeated reliance on them  
does occasionally make one uneasy. Still, she has more than her  
generalizations about human nature to make her case for the  
complicated relationship between the Jefferson and Hemings  
families. . . .

We will never know what the relationship was really like, since  
neither Jefferson nor Hemings talked about it. But in the absence of  
words, Gordon-Reed uses Jefferson's actions, his relations with  
Sally's male relatives, and the experience of other planters with  
concubines to tease out what it might have been. That the master of  
Monticello showed special affection toward some of his slaves suggests  
that his relation with Sally was consensual, and it may even have  
involved a degree of love. . . .

Despite the gross inequalities of power between masters and slaves,  
Gordon-Reed suggests with this example and others that some slaves  
could occasionally have some control over their lives. In other words,  
"slavery was not just one, enormous act of oppression against a  
nameless, interchangeable mass of people." It involved millions of  
acts of oppression through several centuries against which individual  
human beings used whatever means available to them to assert their  
humanity. All the Hemingses of Monticello did just that: they asserted  
their humanity. . . .

The major problem that Gordon-Reed faced in dealing with the Jefferson- 
Sally Hemings relationship is explaining why there is so little record  
of it. Jefferson seems to have been scrupulous in trying to avoid  
mentioning Sally in any of his writings. He never acknowledged his  
slave children, publicly or privately; he simply noted their births in  
his Farm Book, along with the new colts that he acquired and the hogs  
that he killed. Even Madison Hemings admitted that although Jefferson  
"was affectionate toward his white grandchildren," he "was not in the  
habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us [Hemings]  
children." And because Jefferson's grandchildren, and not Jefferson  
himself, taught Madison how to read and write, Jefferson presumably  
took little interest in their education. Although Gordon-Reed tries to  
play down Madison's criticism of his father, in the end she concedes  
that Jefferson could never truly see Madison and his other slave  
children "as human beings separate from him and his own needs,  
desires, and fears."

Other Virginia leaders--such as George Wythe, Jefferson's friend and  
law teacher--were not quite so cool and secretive in dealing with  
their mixed-race offspring. But Jefferson and his white family thought  
that the third president was special, and that he had a special  
American legacy to protect. . . .

By setting the Jefferson-Sally Hemings liaison in historical context,  
by placing it within a complicated web of family and white-slave  
relationships at Monticello, Gordon-Reed has disclosed what Jefferson  
and his white family tried to hide. But she has done more. She has  
thrown an extraordinary amount of light on what she calls "the shadow  
world of slavery," and has revealed a complex reality of white-black  
relations that one does not usually find in history books. Although  
Gordon-Reed defends Jefferson in many places in her story and  
humanizes both him and many other individuals, both white and black,  
she certainly does not lose sight of the essential horror of  
slavery. . . .




______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html