If what Mr. Barger says is true--if the letter was composed by a third party, with his own agenda, would not that make this source similar to documents like Nat Turner's recollections or Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative?  Turner's "Confession" was narrated to a white lawyer, Thomas Gray--and it is notoriously difficult to separate what is Gray's interpretation from what is authentically Turner's.  Likewise, Rowlandson's narrative was mediated by Increase Mather, who collected and edited it, and who arranged for its publication.  Both Gray and Mather had their own motivations, which must be accounted for in any careful reading of the documents they helped produce.  While it is tempting to read both documents as straightforward and transparent, scholars have demonstrated pretty powerfully that we have to treat both documents with care.  (For a similar argument about readings documents with careful attention to the contexts in which they are written, see Peter Hoffer's superb essay on the sources, at the conclusion of his recent account of the Stono Rebellion.)   In the cases both of Gray and Mather, however, the events described in the documents they helped produce were of relatively recent origin, whereas in the case of Heming's account, the events happened many decades earlier. 

An oral history taken down many decades after the events it purports to describe, and mediated through the mind and values of a third party, strikes me as much less useful than the kinds of documents that Lucia Stanton has used so powerfully in her terrific accounts of slavery at Monticello.  To my eye, our conversation would be more fruitful if we focused on those kinds of sources, and not on something as methodologically tenuous as the Madison Hemings narrative.  It seems to me that we use documents like Hemings' only in the absence of less methodologically problematic sources.  Since we have such sources readily at hand, and can use them profitably to construct a pretty damning account of slavery at Monticello--one that fully implicates Jefferson in the evils of slavery--discussion of the pros and cons of using Heming's narrative strikes me as something of a distraction.

Mr. Barger seems most concerned to protect Mr. Jefferson's reputation.  But if that is the case, the question of whether or not Jefferson had sex with, and children by, Sally Hemings is largely irrelevant.  Jefferson's treatment of the slaves on his plantation was thuggish--he was and is thoroughly implicated in, and complicit in, the evils of slavery.  I am agnostic on the Hemings question.  Unlike Professor Finkelman, and many others, I am not persuaded that the evidence for that relationship is conclusive; I find it easy enough to imagine alternative plausible explanations, although I do think that Jefferson's paternity is the most likely.  "Most likely," of course, is not the same thing as "conclusively proven."  But so what?  If our concern is the culpability of Jefferson, I don't need the Hemings evidence in order to make the argument.  Jefferson indicts himself with his own words, as Professor Finkelman and many others have amply demonstrated.

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Kevin R. Hardwick
Associate Professor
Department of History, MSC 8001
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia 22807
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