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Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture
The publication of DNA test results showing that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of one of his slave Sally Hemings's children has sparked a broad but often superficial debate. The editors of this volume have assembled some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture. The DNA tests would not have been conducted had there not already been strong historical evidence for the possibility of a relationship. As historians from Winthrop D. Jordan to Annette Gordon-Reed have argued, much more is at stake in this liaison than the mere question of historians must ask themselves if they are prepared to accept the full implications of our complicated racial history, a history powerfully shaped by the institution of slavery and by sex across the color line. How, for example, does it change our understanding of American history to place Thomas Jefferson in his social context as a plantation owner who fathered white and black families both? What happens when we shift our focus from Jefferson and his white family to Sally Hemings and her children? How do we understand interracial sexual relationships in the early republic and in our own time? Can a renewed exploration of the contradiction between Jefferson's life as a slaveholder and his libertarian views yield a clearer understanding of the great political principles he articulated so eloquently and that Americans cherish? Are there moral or political lessons to be learned from the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the way that historians and the public have attempted to explain their liaison? Sally Hemings and Thomas History, Memory, and Civic Culture promises an open-ended discussion on the living legacy of slavery and race relations in our national culture.
- GenresHistoryAmerican History
280 pages, Paperback
First published October 22, 1999
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November 14, 2024
ESSAYS FROM A CONFERENCE HELD AFTER THE DNA TEST RESULTS
Editors Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onus wrote in the Acknowledgements section of this 1999 book, “The Conference that led to the publication of this book was held at Monticello and the University of Virginia on March 5 and 6, 1999… Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and professor of history department of the University of Virginia, moderated … a public panel session at the conference. The panel included most of the authors in this volume as well as Dr. Eugene Foster, the retired University of Virginia pathology professor who coordinated the DNA tests of Jefferson, Hemings, and Woodson…”
The Editors explain in the Introduction, “On November 1998, when Nature magazine published a brief article reporting on DNA tests that strongly suggested that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s last son, it was both news and no news at all. The New York Times ran a front-page article… Oprah Winfrey staged a family reunion between Jefferson’s white descendants and his black ones. For a few months, the DNA test and its implications were the stuff of public discussion… At the same time, for many people, particularly professional historians, the story was something of a nonevent or even an anticlimax. For years, most of the students we have taught, as well as good numbers of our colleagues, have believed that Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings’s children. At most, the scientific evidence, which in itself is far from definitive, only confirmed what traditional sources as well as our professional judgment had suggested: some sort of long-term relationship existed between Jefferson and the slave woman who... since 1802, when James Callander first published the charge… had been rumored to be his concubine.
“Yet no one who relied upon biographies of Jefferson… by professional historians would have known that there was an emerging consensus … that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children… almost all the Jefferson biographers and most of the historians ---particularly white ones… have either insisted that a liaison was either impossible or highly unlikely or declared themselves agnostic on the issue. Among historians… there was something of a paradox … the many [historians] who have assumed such a relationship have not bothered to publish their thoughts… By and large, only those biographers who are deeply invested in Jefferson… have written about the possibility… and then primarily to cast doubt upon it… Historians, rather than biographers, have been … believing … in the possibility and even the likelihood of a sexual relationship… The significance of the DNA evidence, then, is two: it has forced a realignment of public perception and academics’ interpretations… That is the purpose of this volume: for historians to reflect upon and begin attempting to explain the significance of the liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings… On March 5 and 6, 1999… we brought together a group of specialists… The essays in this volume represent this group of historians’ reflections.” (Pg. 1-3)
Gordon S. Wood observes, “That many of us thought Jefferson was incapable of sexually using a slave like Sally Hemings is interesting, since… Jefferson was in most respects a typical slaveholder. Although he always condemned slavery, he owned one of the largest slave populations in Virginia.” (Pg. 21)
Winthrop D. Jordan notes, “it seemed to me that in Jefferson’s eyes Sally Heming may have seemed nearly ‘white’ to him, without altering his assessment that she stood in a separate category as a slave… Jefferson may well have regarded Sally Hemings as close to his own kind in both color and voice even while she was clearly so distant in both status and gender.” (Pg. 48)
Philip D. Morgan states, “the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, as with all slaveowner-slave relationships, was ultimately a forced embrace. Jefferson owned and controlled Sally Hemings. Sexual access to slave women was one of the prerogatives of ownership… Modern notions of romance---seeing Hemings and Jefferson as America’s premier biracial couple---should not be projected onto unions born of trauma, dependence, and constraint.” (Pg. 75)
Joshua D. Rothman says of James Callender’s charges, “That a personal grudge motivated James Callender is not surprising... What… did Callender really know about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?... Callender got most, if not all, of the information for his first round of articles directly from individuals who lived in Albermarle County, and he may even have made a special trip there after being released from prison… The accuracy of this information strongly suggests that some of Callendar’s informants had, or knew people who had, extensive familiarity with domestic life at Monticello over the course of at least a dozen years.” (Pg. 97-98)
Rhys Isaac argues, “The long fidelity of an attractive, fertile woman such as Sally, living in a crowded, sexually alive community, indicates that she regarded herself as Jefferson’s woman, and was so regarded by all the relevant males in the community. She was his ‘plantation wife,’ although not his acknowledged legal wife to bear him children who would be heirs at law; neither was she his acknowledged parlor-and-dining-room wife to share in the entertaining of his many guests. These exclusions surely enabled Jefferson’s and grandchildren to both ‘have’ this inescapable knowledge and to strenuously deny and repress it.” (Pg. 119-120)
He continues, “We know … that Sally and Thomas’s descendants believed that these two loved each other but understood that disparity of status made a marriage impossible… The Hemings descendants have asserted that… the great ancestor made due provision for his children. They have honored Jefferson as a white man who… kept his word to a black woman, and kept his promise for the children that she bore him.” (Pg. 123)
Jan Ellen Lewis notes, “Everyone said that Sally Hemings’s children looked like Thomas Jefferson. That had been one of the chief items in James Callender’s 1802 newspaper article… The family resemblance must have been remarkable indeed, for even Jeff Randolph acknowledged them.” (Pg. 136)
Later, she adds, to say that Thomas Jefferson would not have acknowledged his relationship with Sally Hemings, whatever it was, because of race and slavery is only to say that some lies beget other lies, something we would do well to remember.” (Pg. 143) Later, she adds, “The white Jeffersons never acknowledged that they had black Jefferson kin. The Hemings children, however, knew that they were the disfavored children of a loving and powerful man.” (Pg. 149)
She acknowledges, “In order to protect the reputation of the family patriarch, some of the white Jeffersons blamed some of the other white Jeffersons for fathering Sally Hemings’s children… Perhaps it makes little difference whether Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children or whether it was one of his nephews. In either case, Jefferson kept on his plantation as slaves persons who were his kin.” (Pg. 152)
She continues, “Does it make a difference if Jefferson lied? This, finally, is the question we confront: the meaning of a lie or lies told in private… about a private matter. Jefferson certainly threw his allies and his family off the track. It also seems that he conducted his relationship with Sally Hemings with sufficient discretion that his family either did not know about it, or, more likely, could avoid confronting its reality. If Jefferson… misled, he did it to protect himself---that is, his reputation, and his family… as well as their notions of themselves as a family near perfect in its happiness.” (Pg. 154)
Jack N. Rakove points out, “There was always an obvious circularity in the … denials that a man like Jefferson would ever have engaged in a longstanding sexual relationship… with … Sally Hemings. At bottom, all these denials rested on the same assumption: it would simply have been out of character for Jefferson… Yet if, in fact, Jefferson and Sally carried on a relationship… all those assumptions about his character would have been wrong, or at least radically incomplete.” (Pg. 213) He asks, “If Jefferson, with his belief in reason and equality and progress, could do no better, then what could be expected of the rest of American society?... Treating Jefferson not as a hypocrite or slacker but as someone grappling with questions he could solve neither intellectually nor morally may help us to think anew...” (Pg. 220)
Annette Gordon-Reed notes, “If Jefferson’s biographers had not seen the role that Sally Hemings played in his life, what else hadn’t they seen? It is not as if no one at the time noticed that Jefferson had a mistress and numerous children with her on his home ground… The existence of this hole in the historical record is quite a commentary on the way history and biography have been practiced.” (Pg. 239) Later, she adds, “one has to decide just what Jefferson did with or to Hemings… Was he a rapist? Could there have been love between the two of them? Should that matter to us? It matters now, and probably always will.” (Pg. 247)
Gordon-Reed concludes, “we do not and never will have the details of what went on between Jefferson and Hemings and their children. This does not mean we have nothing to go on… drawing reasonable inferences from actions, attempting to piece together a plausible view of the matter… a good amount of history is necessarily based on just this sort of methodology… The image of Jefferson and Hemings as multicultural heroes is fake… While it is easy to think of the ‘larger issues’… I suspect that the most difficult issues are the seemingly ‘small’ ones… we must now face the question of how to accommodate the new knowledge into Jefferson’s biography.” (Pg. 251)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying this issue.
Editors Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onus wrote in the Acknowledgements section of this 1999 book, “The Conference that led to the publication of this book was held at Monticello and the University of Virginia on March 5 and 6, 1999… Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and professor of history department of the University of Virginia, moderated … a public panel session at the conference. The panel included most of the authors in this volume as well as Dr. Eugene Foster, the retired University of Virginia pathology professor who coordinated the DNA tests of Jefferson, Hemings, and Woodson…”
The Editors explain in the Introduction, “On November 1998, when Nature magazine published a brief article reporting on DNA tests that strongly suggested that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s last son, it was both news and no news at all. The New York Times ran a front-page article… Oprah Winfrey staged a family reunion between Jefferson’s white descendants and his black ones. For a few months, the DNA test and its implications were the stuff of public discussion… At the same time, for many people, particularly professional historians, the story was something of a nonevent or even an anticlimax. For years, most of the students we have taught, as well as good numbers of our colleagues, have believed that Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings’s children. At most, the scientific evidence, which in itself is far from definitive, only confirmed what traditional sources as well as our professional judgment had suggested: some sort of long-term relationship existed between Jefferson and the slave woman who... since 1802, when James Callander first published the charge… had been rumored to be his concubine.
“Yet no one who relied upon biographies of Jefferson… by professional historians would have known that there was an emerging consensus … that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children… almost all the Jefferson biographers and most of the historians ---particularly white ones… have either insisted that a liaison was either impossible or highly unlikely or declared themselves agnostic on the issue. Among historians… there was something of a paradox … the many [historians] who have assumed such a relationship have not bothered to publish their thoughts… By and large, only those biographers who are deeply invested in Jefferson… have written about the possibility… and then primarily to cast doubt upon it… Historians, rather than biographers, have been … believing … in the possibility and even the likelihood of a sexual relationship… The significance of the DNA evidence, then, is two: it has forced a realignment of public perception and academics’ interpretations… That is the purpose of this volume: for historians to reflect upon and begin attempting to explain the significance of the liaison between Jefferson and Sally Hemings… On March 5 and 6, 1999… we brought together a group of specialists… The essays in this volume represent this group of historians’ reflections.” (Pg. 1-3)
Gordon S. Wood observes, “That many of us thought Jefferson was incapable of sexually using a slave like Sally Hemings is interesting, since… Jefferson was in most respects a typical slaveholder. Although he always condemned slavery, he owned one of the largest slave populations in Virginia.” (Pg. 21)
Winthrop D. Jordan notes, “it seemed to me that in Jefferson’s eyes Sally Heming may have seemed nearly ‘white’ to him, without altering his assessment that she stood in a separate category as a slave… Jefferson may well have regarded Sally Hemings as close to his own kind in both color and voice even while she was clearly so distant in both status and gender.” (Pg. 48)
Philip D. Morgan states, “the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, as with all slaveowner-slave relationships, was ultimately a forced embrace. Jefferson owned and controlled Sally Hemings. Sexual access to slave women was one of the prerogatives of ownership… Modern notions of romance---seeing Hemings and Jefferson as America’s premier biracial couple---should not be projected onto unions born of trauma, dependence, and constraint.” (Pg. 75)
Joshua D. Rothman says of James Callender’s charges, “That a personal grudge motivated James Callender is not surprising... What… did Callender really know about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?... Callender got most, if not all, of the information for his first round of articles directly from individuals who lived in Albermarle County, and he may even have made a special trip there after being released from prison… The accuracy of this information strongly suggests that some of Callendar’s informants had, or knew people who had, extensive familiarity with domestic life at Monticello over the course of at least a dozen years.” (Pg. 97-98)
Rhys Isaac argues, “The long fidelity of an attractive, fertile woman such as Sally, living in a crowded, sexually alive community, indicates that she regarded herself as Jefferson’s woman, and was so regarded by all the relevant males in the community. She was his ‘plantation wife,’ although not his acknowledged legal wife to bear him children who would be heirs at law; neither was she his acknowledged parlor-and-dining-room wife to share in the entertaining of his many guests. These exclusions surely enabled Jefferson’s and grandchildren to both ‘have’ this inescapable knowledge and to strenuously deny and repress it.” (Pg. 119-120)
He continues, “We know … that Sally and Thomas’s descendants believed that these two loved each other but understood that disparity of status made a marriage impossible… The Hemings descendants have asserted that… the great ancestor made due provision for his children. They have honored Jefferson as a white man who… kept his word to a black woman, and kept his promise for the children that she bore him.” (Pg. 123)
Jan Ellen Lewis notes, “Everyone said that Sally Hemings’s children looked like Thomas Jefferson. That had been one of the chief items in James Callender’s 1802 newspaper article… The family resemblance must have been remarkable indeed, for even Jeff Randolph acknowledged them.” (Pg. 136)
Later, she adds, to say that Thomas Jefferson would not have acknowledged his relationship with Sally Hemings, whatever it was, because of race and slavery is only to say that some lies beget other lies, something we would do well to remember.” (Pg. 143) Later, she adds, “The white Jeffersons never acknowledged that they had black Jefferson kin. The Hemings children, however, knew that they were the disfavored children of a loving and powerful man.” (Pg. 149)
She acknowledges, “In order to protect the reputation of the family patriarch, some of the white Jeffersons blamed some of the other white Jeffersons for fathering Sally Hemings’s children… Perhaps it makes little difference whether Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s children or whether it was one of his nephews. In either case, Jefferson kept on his plantation as slaves persons who were his kin.” (Pg. 152)
She continues, “Does it make a difference if Jefferson lied? This, finally, is the question we confront: the meaning of a lie or lies told in private… about a private matter. Jefferson certainly threw his allies and his family off the track. It also seems that he conducted his relationship with Sally Hemings with sufficient discretion that his family either did not know about it, or, more likely, could avoid confronting its reality. If Jefferson… misled, he did it to protect himself---that is, his reputation, and his family… as well as their notions of themselves as a family near perfect in its happiness.” (Pg. 154)
Jack N. Rakove points out, “There was always an obvious circularity in the … denials that a man like Jefferson would ever have engaged in a longstanding sexual relationship… with … Sally Hemings. At bottom, all these denials rested on the same assumption: it would simply have been out of character for Jefferson… Yet if, in fact, Jefferson and Sally carried on a relationship… all those assumptions about his character would have been wrong, or at least radically incomplete.” (Pg. 213) He asks, “If Jefferson, with his belief in reason and equality and progress, could do no better, then what could be expected of the rest of American society?... Treating Jefferson not as a hypocrite or slacker but as someone grappling with questions he could solve neither intellectually nor morally may help us to think anew...” (Pg. 220)
Annette Gordon-Reed notes, “If Jefferson’s biographers had not seen the role that Sally Hemings played in his life, what else hadn’t they seen? It is not as if no one at the time noticed that Jefferson had a mistress and numerous children with her on his home ground… The existence of this hole in the historical record is quite a commentary on the way history and biography have been practiced.” (Pg. 239) Later, she adds, “one has to decide just what Jefferson did with or to Hemings… Was he a rapist? Could there have been love between the two of them? Should that matter to us? It matters now, and probably always will.” (Pg. 247)
Gordon-Reed concludes, “we do not and never will have the details of what went on between Jefferson and Hemings and their children. This does not mean we have nothing to go on… drawing reasonable inferences from actions, attempting to piece together a plausible view of the matter… a good amount of history is necessarily based on just this sort of methodology… The image of Jefferson and Hemings as multicultural heroes is fake… While it is easy to think of the ‘larger issues’… I suspect that the most difficult issues are the seemingly ‘small’ ones… we must now face the question of how to accommodate the new knowledge into Jefferson’s biography.” (Pg. 251)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying this issue.
February 20, 2022
Good information but was probably a little more
Academic that I wanted. I learned quite a bit I didn’t know
Academic that I wanted. I learned quite a bit I didn’t know
May 9, 2024
An excellent set of essays reflecting on the Jefferson-Hemings relationship.
April 2, 2012
Meh. I read some of the essays in this book for a project I don't particularly want to do for a class I'm not getting much out of, but am required to take.
Basically, the project is going to be looking at the stories people told about Sally Hemings before the 1998 DNA evidence that Jefferson fathered some of her children. I am not interested in TJ or early American studies, so this project, and therefore this book did not interest me.
However, on a more objective note, the essays I read were fairly interesting and informative. They posed good ideas about what the DNA evidence actually means for people that study early American lit and culture. Plus, for history essays the ones I read were surprisingly pleasant to read.
Basically, the project is going to be looking at the stories people told about Sally Hemings before the 1998 DNA evidence that Jefferson fathered some of her children. I am not interested in TJ or early American studies, so this project, and therefore this book did not interest me.
However, on a more objective note, the essays I read were fairly interesting and informative. They posed good ideas about what the DNA evidence actually means for people that study early American lit and culture. Plus, for history essays the ones I read were surprisingly pleasant to read.
Read
January 24, 2016This is a set of essays regarding *who else* but Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. It's an interesting collection, looking at the mind set of the American South and the black slave, with a strong empathize on the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, his slave (who was also his dead-wife's half-sister.) Some of the essays were a bit hard to read, both in form and with the subject at hand, but coming from different authors gave much more depth to the "discussion" then having just one author's view point.
Want to Read
December 23, 2016* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, co-edited by Peter Onuf, assembles some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Thomas Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Sally Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture. #civilwar #slavery #civilrights #history
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, co-edited by Peter Onuf, assembles some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Thomas Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Sally Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture. #civilwar #slavery #civilrights #history
October 26, 2012
This is the second and maybe third time I've read this marvelous book, and I can't recommend it enough. The book is a collection of papers delivered in Charlottesville in 1999 and covers much much more than Jefferson and Hemings. It's about the role or race, culture in the US and the myths we live by. Each essay is a gem. It's hard to pick one that stands out, but Jack Rakov's Our Jefferson may be it. If I could give it 6 stars I would.
October 5, 2013
Fantastic. An important and multifaceted analysis of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and of what the paternity of Thomas Jefferson to Hemings' descendants means for American history and civic culture.
July 30, 2016
Interesting at times, dry at other spots.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews