I guess I am really confused here.  I have read AGR's books.  I disagree with her assumptions, and am bemused by the deep attention she gives to what, to me, seems like a relatively minor episode.  Where those who have lauded the work for the psychological insight it gives to what slavery does to human relationships--and the book certainly offers that--I see another incremental addition to the literature on slavery.  The book confirms what I already know about slavery, but it does not really add that much to what I have already learned from other, similar works.  The book is good--and worth reading--even if one disagrees with AGR's basic assumption that Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship.  But I do not find it to be a seminal work, that changes the way we think about slavery and its meaning in American history and American culture.

But just what do we take AGR's *political* point to be?  I do not see in her work, for example, an argument for greater government oversight of the economy.  I don't see an argument for public ownership of business enterprise.  I do not see a focus in her work on justifying and legitimating a larger federal government.  I do not see an attempt to vilify large corporations.  I do not see any effort to argue that unregulated capitalist enterprise harms the environment.  If the central issues of progressives or socialists or leftists have to do with these kinds of issues, I do not see them present in AGR's work.  If anything, this work is conservative, in the sense that it finds the essence of what it means to be American in a set of political ideals, rather than in ethnic tribalism.  Jefferson, of course, is (along with Lincoln) one of the statesmen who best articulated those ideals--a point that AGR goes out of her way to affirm in the book.  Clinton Rossiter could read this wo!
!
rk and find in it much with which to agree.

What I do see as a focus of the book is an insistence that slavery distorted fundamental human relationships.  I see a powerful focus on the humanity of the slave, and a protracted condemnation of slavery for the toll it exerted on the humanity of everyone who came into contact with it.  In this sense, AGR has simply extended Jefferson's own criticism of slavery in NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA.  Just like Jefferson, and with considerably greater psychological nuance, AGR demonstrates that the experience of owning slaves corrupted the humanity of the slaveowner, as well as the slave.  We don't really want to condemn this author for being quintessentially Jeffersonian now, do we?  There is a deep irony in the criticism presented by some on this list, Mr. South among them--if we don't like AGR's argument about slavery, then we pretty much also have to dislike Jefferson's.  But doesn't that pretty much mean Jefferson's ardent defenders on this list are throwing the baby out with!
!
 the bathwater?  

I just do not see how the focus of this book, in today's political environment, can be said to be all that controversial.  It simply does not speak with any clarity or directness to the pertinent public issues that confront us right now.  From reading this book, I get precisely no idea at all about what AGR might think about the Wall Street bail out that is dominating our public attention right now.  What's the big deal?  How has AGR written something that will selectively please only modern, populist, Democrat liberals, and not the modern, populist, Republican liberals who oppose them in today's politics? (There simply are no real conservatives, in a Burkean sense, who have any significant public following today--American politics is a fight within liberalism, not a confrontation between liberals and conservatives).

Mr. South tries to impose a political agenda on the book that AGR has written.  But he can only do that because, manifestly, he has not actually *read* the work.

All best,
Kevin

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:21:44 EDT
>From: [log in to unmask]  
>Subject: Re: FW: Censorship and the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings Controversy  
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Another example of the "free thinking herd" of academia.  Once someone  comes 
>up with an idea that fosters their political agenda they don't want to  know 
>or hear about anything that kills the momentum thereof.
> 
>Since when did a law school graduate suddenly become the toast of the  
>historical writing world, Ms Annette Gordon-Reed?
>
>
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Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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