The Jefferson - Hemings ControversyHistory on trial Main Page

AboutTime LineEpisodesJefferson on Race & SlaveryResources
Episodes
>
>

1) Onuf is especially insightful in his depiction of how Jefferson has fared in historiographical judgment, noting that, as scholars have become more interested in the future of democracy, Jefferson's stock has risen. He also notes how the emerging consensus about Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings has tended to alleviate some of the tension between Jefferson as apostle of liberty and Jefferson as slaveholder. As he notes, "Jefferson as lover--no matter how unequal the lovers' power--is a more sympathetic character than Jefferson the owner and exploiter of his fellow human beings."
Kevin Butterfield

2) The story of Hemings and Jefferson stands for so much more in the minds of many Americans than just another presidential sex scandal. It stands for the crime and seduction of miscegenation; the ambiguities of black and white racial identities and meaning; the coexistence of prejudice and power with family, intimacy, and sex.
Stephanie Camp 275

3) Jan Lewis and Peter Onuf wisely place Hemings's name first in the title, in counterpoint to how little can be known about her; many of the essays, in fact, focus almost exclusively on Jefferson. But the profession has been made to travel considerable distance in a short time.
Martha Hodes 883

4) This is a fine collection that is accessible to specialists and nonspecialists alike. The essays are strongest in their analysis of racial issues. They are not as successful at analyzing the particularly gendered constructions of male-masterâ€"female-slave intimacies. Despite the editors' explicit desire to re-center Hemings, most essays focus on the meanings of interracial sex to slave-owning men rather than to the enslaved women. Most also do not engage the history of sexuality, despite its seeming centrality to the Hemings-Jefferson controversy. . . . While this book provides a slew of racial explanations in response, most of the scholars do no unpack the transhistorical assumption that Thomas Jefferson's sexual behavior was determinative of his identity.
Sharon Block 1476

5) As Jefferson's granddaughter wrote to her husband, "There are such things as moral impossibilities." Until the publication of Gordon-Reed's book, most historians publishing on the matter were inclined to agree. The code of "public silence" that Jefferson's daughters must have participated in took on another life among their children and grandchildren: it became historical fact. Obscured, Jefferson's miscegenation, like America's, became a mythâ€"the myth of "Dusky Sally," or simply "The Miscegenation Myth"â€"and sex across the color line became, for too many, a new and surprising phenomena. These two magnificent volumes remind us that racial intermixture, and its complicated compromises, is not only our bright future; it is also our hideous, hidden past.
Stephanie Camp 282

6) What is impressive about the book is that given the near unanimity on the basic factâ€"that Jefferson and Hemings had a long-term sexual union, the fruits of which were several childrenâ€"there is still so much that is interesting and thought-provoking that can be said. The essays look to the past, both the past of the historical world of Jefferson, Hemings, and the black and white families of Monticello, and to the past of the historians' conceptions and misconceptions of this world. The chapters also look to the future. Knowing what we do now, how do we regard or disregard Jefferson; can Americans come to terms with their own racial heritage, "which may or may not include a dark-skinned ancestory," as Clarence Walker asks; and finally, how do we grade our own work as historians investigating and narrating the story? The questions are important, the answers various.
Barbara Oberg 567

7) But in light of the DNA findings published in the November 1998 issue of the magazine Nature, anyone who pretends to understand Thomas Jefferson's peculiar hilltop world will have to contends with the essays collected in this splendid anthology.
Douglas Egerton 640

8) Interracial relationships were at once the source of neighborhood gossip and bound by a code of secrecy, what Rothman brilliantly calls a "cultural code of public silence." Black-white affairs became real scandals only when news of them circulated beyond local gossip networks and moved into the public realm, such as when Callender reported on Jefferson and Hemings and their children. Kept in the "public silence," liaisons between elite white men and black women were not scandalous because they did not violate the sexual mores of the antebellum South.
Stephanie Camp 280

9) One wonders what stories will emerge once legitimizing national myths derive not only from Thomas Jefferson but also from Sally Hemings.
Robert Levine 91

10) Yet it's not at all clear what Thomas Jefferon's political legacy, his racist writings, his slaveholding, his proclamations against slavery, his fear of miscegenation, and his (apparently) active miscegenation mean to us when taken together. Why do we care about this, particularly the purported relationship with Hemings, and what is it precisely we are caring about?
Aaron Garrett

11) Little wonder, then, that the Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson relationship poses such a challenge to Jefferson's historians. The basic conditions that slave women faced are enormously difficult to imagine or understand and require more attention than they have received from scholars whose primary interest lies in Jefferson. Since the DNA tests, Sally Hemings's story has become part of Jefferson's story. She can no longer be casually dismissed, as was true as recently as 1995 when Joseph Ellis called the Sally Hemings story "a tin can tied to Jefferson's reputation by James Callender in 1802 that has rattled through the ages and pages of history books ever since."
Mia Bay 423

12) Gordon-Reed, a lawyer, treats her evidence with a lawyer's precision, rather than the historian's search for patterns. Despite her claims to being less interested in whether the Hemings story is true than in the historiographical and methodical problems it has raised, Gordon-Reed's intensive detective work compellingly demonstrates that a relationship did occur. The details, hypotheses and questions that emerge in the uncovering of the story are rich, much richer than the conclusiveness and sterility of the DNA results.
Stephanie Camp 276

13) Now comes a final question arising from this diverse and wonderfully contradictory collection composed of beautifully written essays. Such fine writing is certainly attributable mainly to a group of talented scholarsâ€"and yet why, exactly, is there such a high proportion of lyricism in these pages? Why such generous use of metaphor, of poetic construction and meditative phraseology Is a lyrical tone the optimum voice for writing about that white cannot be comprehended? Is lyricism, bordering on elegy, the best resort when it comes to grasping the elusive nature of sex in history? Beyond Hemings and Jeffersonâ€"but encompassing themâ€"this volume raises important questions about writing the histories of race and sexuality.?
Martha Hodes 885

14) Rarely has a debate changed as rapidly as this one. As late as 1997 a majority of scholarsâ€"including this reviewerâ€"doubted James Callender's allegations, but with the publication of the DNA results, combined with a wealth of circumstantial evidence, it is now difficult to find historians who challenged the notion that Jefferson and Hemings practiced what Rhys Isaac calls a "custom-of-the-place marriage." What remains is to make sense of these new findings, and this anthology goes a long way toward making that happen.
Douglas Egerton 642

15) Is interest in the racism of past and hallowed philosophers and statesmen the obsession of a politically correct society gone amok? Or is it an acknowledgement of the ways in which the racist ideas of our forebears still hold sway over our present social and political concerns? Does racism of a thinker like Thomas Jefferson irremediably infect his writings and his legacy? Must it stalk him, creeping from century to century?
Aaron Garrett

16) Even more exciting than her authentication of the story itself is Gordon-Reed's argument with historians of Jefferson: the Jefferson "defenders." Gordon-Reed accomplishes three major intellectual and historiographical feats: she authenticates the documentary record pointing to the existence of an intimate relationship between Hemings and Jefferson; she analyzes the entire extant historical record to challenge the deniers of such a relationship and to prove the existence of the relationship; and she exposes the methodological malpractice of Jefferson's "defenders." It turns out that to uncover the truth about the story is one and the same historical project as exposing the barnacle-like layers of ideology, prejudice, and presentism that have shaped the conclusions of Jefferson's many biographers.
Stephanie Camp 277

17) Hemings appears early and often in this book [Boles and Hall, Seeing Jefferson Anew]: she is discussed as early as the second page of the first essay (Onuf's), and she figures prominently in three of the remaining six contributions. She has as many page citations in the index as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Jefferson's wife, Martha--combined. Clearly, we have entered a new phase in Jefferson studies, and Hemings has a lead role.
Kevin Butterfield

18) This is a remarkable group of essays. A short review cannot begin to do justice to the richness and range of the collection and the issues raised in it. Reviews of compilations more often than not begin by noting the unevenness of the contributions. I would take the opposite tack here: the essays are of uniformly high quality, and each makes an important individual contribution to getting the whole story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson told as thoroughly as it probably ever will be.
Barbara Oberg 566

19) One might hope for a resolution to such a bundle of conflicts and perspectives, but it doesn't appear forthcoming. From O.J. to death-row defenses, DNA analysis has functioned recently in American culture as a scientific meeting ground for race, sex, sin, and death. But in Jefferson's case, DNA has failed to resolve much at all, establishing only that one of Sally Hemings's children was fathered by Jefferson or his brother.
Aaron Garrett

20) Joshua D. Rothman's essay situates the Hemings-Jefferson story in its own period, examining the social meanings of its telling. Historians of Jefferson have dismissed James Callender . . . yet Rothman points out that Callender's flagrant political vendetta did not make him a bad reporter. Besides, we now know that Callender got most of the story right.
Stephanie Camp 280

21) "These are only hints and guesses / hints followed by guesses," wrote T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets. Eliot's poetics are easily transposed to the craft of history, and it is rare indeed that archival traces and our subsequent conjectures are proven or disproved by evidence from the laboratories of science. . . . In the face of the protagonists' silences, then, scholars will continue to labor in the realm of hints and guesses.
Martha Hodes 883-84

22) If this book is about Hemings and Jefferson, it is also about the practice of history, the evaluation and use of evidence, and the work of historians over a lifetime. In this book, historians take stock of themselves and their professional judgments. How is it that historians (biographers and the "Jefferson coterie" especially) got it so wrong, or did not bother to publish their thoughts, and the popular historians (Fawn Brodie), novelists (Barbara Chase Riboud), and a lawyer (Annette Gordon-Reed) got it right? The question is implicit in many of the essays, explicit in a few, and is bound to shake our faith in ourselves.
Barbara Oberg 568

23) All of the essays in the collection say something fruitful about the problem of discussing a figure like Jefferson, his legacy, and race in America. And they provide a range of perspectives, from putting the Jefferson-Hemings affair in historical context to considering its meaning in terms of Jefferson's legacy, that practice of history, cultural memory, and the weight of the present.
Aaron Garrett

24) This collection is useful but, perhaps because it was rushed into print, somewhat troubling. Despite the fact that, as Annette Gordon-Reed demonstrated in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, professional historians have regularly attacked the few who have asserted the existence of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship, Lewis and Onuf assert rather glibly in their introduction that the Nature article was a "nonevent."
Robert Levine 90

25) Miscegenation in America is often a spectacular story, even when neither participant is famous: black/white liaisons in the United States are imbued with the love and hate, attraction and repulsion, desire and fear that exist across the color line. At the same time, though, miscegenation is a commonplace. Black and white couples, families, affairs, sexual predations share the banalities of all sexual and intimate relations. Most important, they are far from new and their status as scandal or surprise has not been static.
Stephanie Camp 279

26) The landscape will never be the same again for Jefferson studies, for the American understanding of this American icon, and for our knowledge of ourselves.
Barbara Oberg 569

27) Our response to Jefferson varies according to the impact his hypocrisies and declarations have had on our lives.
Aaron Garrett

28) In the end, the DNA evidence does not change Hemings's race or her status as a slave. Instead, it pushes us to come to a fuller reckoning of how the intimate corruptions of slavery played out in the daily lives of white southerners such as Thomas Jefferson.
Mia Bay 423

29) That DNA evidence hasn't resolved the question of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings is, perhaps, fitting, since it's not even clear what the question is. What was Jefferson guilty of: rape? Love? Hypocrisy? Being a typical member of the Virginia planter class? Being an atypical bundle of contradictions?
Aaron Garrett

30) Jefferson was perhaps the most striking and articulate example of the fusion of American slavery with American freedom. That he had an ongoing sexual relationship with an enslaved woman only deepens Jefferson's embodiment of the contradictions that constitute both this nation and the South.
Stephanie Camp 275

31) Why is the idea that Jefferson might have loved Hemings so dangerous? The likely answer is sex and raceâ€"and more particularly miscegenation. . . . This kind of discomfort is part of what makes the issue so loaded. And defenses of Jefferson as a man incapable of an "illicit" affair with a slave sometimes seem to mask a Jeffersonian horror at the fact that blacks and whites were often not as "distinct" as whites might have pretended.
Aaron Garrett

32) But I would suggest that Rakove is leaving out something very important in his analysis: that narratives depend quite literally upon genealogies and that to disrupt, or reconceived, a genealogical line necessitates disrupting and reconceiving its concomitant narratives.
Robert Levine 91

33) Although the last few years' debate about Jefferson hasn't solved any problems or come to many agreements, it offers an opportunity to look at a man about whom we know a great deal (although perhaps not as much as we'd like) and a woman about whom we hardly know anything. The mysteriousness of their relationship for their progeny on both sides of the color line and for those of us who are attempting to understand it is made more apparent, which is perhaps all one ought to ask for.
Aaron Garrett

34) Despite the editors' [Lewis and Onuf] explicit desire to re-center Hemings, most essays focus on the meanings of interracial sex to slave-owning men rather than to the enslaved women.
Sharon Block 1476

35) Some of these chapters look at the family and household in light of the new evidence. Lucia Stanton and Diane Swann-Wright, in a masterfully presented dialogue format, recount their trip to Harlem . . . to gather the oral histories of descendants of Monticello's African Americans. . . . Swann-Wright and Stanton's researchâ€"much of which was, as they note, gathered "around kitchen tables"â€"is a striking example of the strong and creative anthropological/cultural/historical work that has been coming out of Monticello in recent years.
Barbara Oberg 568

36) Because the anthology, as its title indicates, is primarily about Hemings and her historical portrayals, none of the authors really tries to resolve the contradictions between Jefferson's overt racism and his (apparent) romantic attachment to a woman he regarded as physiologically inferior.
Douglas Egerton 641

37) In particular, a historical reading of Sally Hemings will require Jefferson scholars to consider the possibility that she lived as a slave woman, rather than as a woman Jefferson understood as white. Moreover, as such, she can be assumed to have very little agency relative to Jefferson and might well be viewed as a woman locked in a sexual association with Jefferson that falls outside the categories we use to describe relationships in which neither party is classed as chattel property. To twentieth-century eyes, these propositions may not cast Jefferson in flattering light. But in the end I am not sure they say anything different about Jefferson than he does about himself, at least implicitly, in Notes on the State of Virginia. Describing the impact of slavery on the slaveholder in that work, which he finished after his relationship with Hemings is now believed to have begun, Jefferson seems little inclined to claim the "honor" so often attributed to him by his biographers. Instead, he describes a set of power relations in which honor is highly unlikely. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions and the most unremitting despotism on the one part," he wrote, "and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this and learn to imitate it . . . and [are] thus nursed, educated in tyranny. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances."
Mia Bay 423-24