Mixed Race Studies

The Enigma Of Jefferson: Mind and Body In Conflict

The New York Times
1998-11-07

Dinitia Smith

For contemporary historians, Thomas Jefferson has always been an enigma, and the new DNA evidence that he fathered at least one child by his young slave Sally Hemings simply deep ens the mystery of the man. On the one hand, Jefferson was the author of some of the most glorious sentences in the English language, his ringing affirmation of the equality of all men in the Declaration of Independence. On the other, he was a slaveholder who wrote some of the vilest sentiments of racism in his only book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1785. Blacks, Jefferson wrote, have “a very strong and disagreeable odor,” they are incapable of uttering more than “a plain narration.” Jefferson also said that racial amalgamation “produces a degradation… to which no one can innocently consent.”

Most historians now believe that his relationship with Hemings probably endured for many years, if not from 1787, when Hemings, then 13 or 14, arrived in Paris as a “nurse” to Jefferson’s daughter.

Now that the new evidence is in, how can the inconsistencies in Jefferson’s character be explained?…

…But how could Jefferson have sustained a relationship with Hemings that may have lasted for 38 years if he thought that black people smelled, that they were stupid and childlike? “In general, in order to retain someone in slavery, you have to dehumanize them,”  said Edmund Morgan, author of “American Slavery, American Freedom: the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia.”  “It was a standard thing that went with slavery.” 

Jefferson was also surrounded by examples of sexual relationships between masters and slaves. He had witnessed the relationships of two men he deeply admired, his father-in-law, John Wayles, and his law professor, George Wythe, with enslaved women.

Another reason Jefferson may have been able to reconcile his relationship with Hemings with his opposition to miscegenation, Ms. Gordon-Reed points out in her book, was that Hemings was his wife’s half sister, the daughter of John Wayles and his slave consort. Jefferson had been devastated by his wife’s death, and he had promised her he would never remarry. Perhaps Hemings, who was known to be beautiful, bore some of his wife’s characteristics.

But perhaps most important, Hemings, under Jefferson’s notions of race mixing, may have been in some way “white”  in his eyes. Indeed, in the 1830 census of Monticello, Hemings was listed as white. Jefferson also believed that blacks became “white”  when they had a certain amount of white blood in them, a theory he illustrated once in a complex mathematical chart drawn up in a letter to a friend. “Let ‘h’ and ‘e’ cohabit,”  Jefferson wrote, and “the half of the blood of each will be q/2 + e/2 +a/8 + A/8…”  He concluded that the more white blood they had, the more “the improvement of the blacks in body and mind.” …

Read the entire article here.

The Monticello Mystery-Case Continued

William and Mary Quarterly
Volume LVIII, Number 4 (October 2001)
Reviews of Books

Alexander O. Boulton, Professor of History
Stevenson University (formerly Villa Julie College)

The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty. Edited by Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001. Pp. 207.)

A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson. By Byron W. Woodson, Sr. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001. Pp. xviii, 271.)

Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello, By Lucia Stanton. Monticello Monograph Series. (Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000. Pp. 192.)

In October 1998 the announcement that DNA analysis identified Thomas Jefferson as the most likely father of a child by his slave Sally Hemings seemed to bring to a conclusion a historical debate that had been waging for years. Any remaining doubts about Jefferson’s paternity were apparently removed when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the organization that owns and operates Jefferson’s historic Charlottesville, Virginia, home Monticello, issued a report soon afterward declaring that “the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings.” Several notable scholars of Jefferson quickly reversed their previous denials of the affair. A book on the subject issued by the University Press of Virginia and a Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly, both containing articles by leading historians, presented the new consensus “that virtually all professional historians will accept that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings’s children.”

Now, two new books have shattered the illusion that a kind of historical finality had been achieved…

Read the entire article here.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2008
800 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
6.5 × 9.6 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33776-1
816 pages
6.1 × 9.2 in

Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

Winner of the National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

So begins this epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—Annette Gordon-Reed’s “riveting history” of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings—the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony—but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson’s estate.

We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson’s daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson’s slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826.

As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture

University of Virginia Press
1999
325 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8139-1919-3

Edited by

Jan Ellen Lewis
Rutgers University

Peter S. Onuf
University of Virginia

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 paternity: 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 Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture promises an open-ended discussion on the living legacy of slavery and race relations in our national culture.

Contributors:

Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School
Rhys Isaac, College of William and Mary
Winthrop D. Jordan, University of Mississippi
Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University, Newark
Philip D. Morgan, Institute of Early American History and Culture
Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University
Joshua Rothman, University of Virginia
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
Lucia Stanton, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Dianne Swann-Wright, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Clarence Walker, University of California at Davis
Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

University of Virginia Press
January 2009
144 pages
5 1/2x 81/4
Cloth ISBN 0-8139-2777-0

Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History
University of California, Davis

The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question of “Did they or didn’t they?” But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize. Mongrel Nation seeks to uncover this complexity, as well as the reasons it is so often obscured.

Clarence Walker contends that the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings must be seen not in isolation but in the broader context of interracial affairs within the plantation complex. Viewed from this perspective, the relationship was not unusual or aberrant but was fairly typical. For many, this is a disturbing realization, because it forces us to abandon the idea of American exceptionalism and reexamine slavery in America as part of a long, global history of slaveholders frequently crossing the color line.

More than many other societies—and despite our obvious mixed-race population—our nation has displayed particular reluctance to acknowledge this dynamic. In a country where, as early as 1662, interracial sex was already punishable by law, an understanding of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship has consistently met with resistance. From Jefferson’s time to our own, the general public denied—or remained oblivious to—the possibility of the affair. Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. It took the DNA findings of 1998 to persuade many (although, to this day, doubters remain).

The refusal to admit the likelihood of this union between master and slave stems, of course, from Jefferson’s symbolic significance as a Founding Father. The president’s apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs—and the often alarming demands of those beliefs—than it does about the interaction between slave owners and slaves. Much more than a search for the facts about two individuals, the debate over Jefferson and Hemings is emblematic of tensions in our society between competing conceptions both of race and of our nation.

The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

Carolina Academic Press
January 2010
ISBN: 978-0-89089-085-1
Hardback

Robert F. Turner, Associate Director at the Center for National Security Law
University of Virginia School of Law

In 2000, the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society asked a group of more than a dozen senior scholars from across the country to carefully examine all of the evidence for and against the allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, and to issue a public report. In April 2001, after a year of study, the Scholars Commission issued the most detailed report to date on the issue.

With but a single mild dissent, the views of the distinguished panel ranged from “serious skepticism” to a conviction that the allegation was “almost certainly false.” This volume, edited by Scholars Commission Chairman Robert F. Turner, includes the “Final Report”—essentially a summary of arguments and conclusions—as it was released to the press on April 12, 2001. However, several of the statements of individual views—which collectively total several hundred carefully footnoted pages and constitute the bulk of the book—have been updated and expanded to reflect new insights or evidence since the report was initially released.

Genealogy as Social Memory: Making the Public Personal

The 7th Annual Committee on Historical Studies, Sociology Department and International Labor Working Class History Journal Joint Conference
History Matters: Spaces of Violences, Spaces of Memory
New School for Social Research
2004-04-23 through 2004-04-24

Karla Hackstaff, Associate Professor of Sociology
Northern Arizona University

“Race, like nature and sex, is replete with all the rituals of guilt and innocence in the stories of nation, family, and species. Race, like nature, is about roots, pollution, and origins. An inherently dubious notion, race, like sex, is about the purity of lineage; the legitimacy of passage; and the drama of inheritance of bodies, property, and stories”
(Haraway 1995, p. 213).

In May 2002, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation which runs Monticello and is comprised of the descendants of Thomas and Martha Jefferson voted to deny membership and associated burial rights to the descendants of Sally Hemings—a slave who appears to have had children by Thomas Jefferson (San Francisco Chronicle, May 12, 2002, p. D4).  This decision was somewhat surprising because in 1998 genetic tests appeared to confirm what Hemings’ relatives had claimed through oral history for years—that at least one, if not all, of Sally Hemings’ children had descended from Thomas Jefferson. Still, the white descendants concluded that the historical and scientific evidence was “insufficient.”…

…First, within sociology there is a large and growing literature on the formation of racial/ethnic identities, relations, and the accompanying constructions of inequalities (e.g. Azoulay 1997; Brah and Coombes 2000; Collins 2000; DaCosta 2000; Haraway 1995; Nagel 1994; Omi and Winant 1994; Pedraza and Rumbaut 1996; Song 2001; Waters 1990; Worchel 1999). Given that race, ethnicity, and nationality organize many genealogical associations, clearly, race and ethnicity are constructed in the process of doing genealogy. Although ‘race’ as a biological construction has been widely rejected, it is no less real for being a social construction. As many scholars have shown, racialethnic constructions must be sustained, and are neither invariant nor universal.  Ethnoracial identities are sustained through various practices, policies, and institutions—including families.  Because interracial relations have been taboo, we still assume and to a large degree produce families that appear monoracial (DaCosta 2000). Intermarriage has grown substantially in recent decades—there were ten times as many couples categorized as interracial in 1990 as had been the case in 1960; still, in 1990 interracial marriages were just three percent of all marriages in the United Stated (DaCosta 2000, p. 9-10). By 2000, six percent of marriage households were interracial (Simmons and O’Connell 2003).  The practices of adoption agencies and sperm banks often, if not always, produce monoracial families as well. In short, ethnoracial identities continue to be crucial to family constructions…

Read the entire paper here.

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (review)

Henry Wiencek. The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Xx + 361pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-312-19277-8.

H-Net Reviews: in the Humanities & Social Sciences
April 1999

Catherine Clinton

HISTORIES OF RECONCILIATION

It was with joy and fear that I finished Henry Wiencek’s breathtaking saga, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White. Joy, in that I was introduced to such a compelling cast of characters, set within riveting contexts, drawn with insight and erudition, illuminated by vivid, narrative that pulls the reader toward the important reckoning slavery continues to create for us all. Fear, in that the resonance of this story, the compelling quality of the author’s prose, the superior level of his research, both with oral histories and archival digging, may set too high a standard for future work.

But we must all swallow our fears, and let Wiencek’s remarkable confrontation with slavery wash over us. The author allows us to make a journey along with him, by letting us know how he innocuously began his investigation of a North Carolina plantation, and then spent seven years tracking down the remarkable Hairston family from its colonial roots to the present. On the brink of the Civil War the white Hairstons owned forty-five plantations in four states, with combined slave holdings of over ten thousand slaves: Samuel Hairston of Oak Hill, Virginia had land and slaves worth nearly five million dollars–reputedly the largest slaveowner in the South. But Wiencek also began his quest by attending an African American family reunion of Hairstons, with nearly a thousand in attendance from all over the country. His curiosities, his hesitancy, his reverence all interlace his analysis. He joined up on the amazing trek toward their African-American past, guided by the voices of blacks forced to keep counter-accounts, unabashedly determined to restore some balance to whitewashed tales of a plantation past dripping in nostalgia…

Over the past twenty years, numerous scholars have been able to demonstrate the way in which shadow families and white male sexual coercion could and did shape conficts within southern culture, in particular I am thinking of Carol Bleser and Drew Faust on James Henry Hammond, Kent Leslie, Jean Yellin, Adele Logan Alexander, Deborah White, Jacqueline Jones, Mary Frances Berry and Darlene Clark Hine, among others, on African American women’s responses, and Nell Painter, Peter Bardaglio, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and this reviewer, among others, on white women’s responses.  Although much of this scholarship has become conventional wisdom within southern women’s history, it has been resisted mightily by many scholars working on slavery and on the nineteenth century more generally. The fact that rape, coercion and concubinage were institutionalized within ante-bellum southern slavery remains a contested issue.

The passionate opinions exchanged in late 1998 over DNA testing of descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s female slave, Sally Hemings, has created more than a tempest in a teapo–more like a hurricane, gale winds creating havoc and bluster among historians of early America.

So much of the evidence” concerning interracial heritage, short of DNA testing, remains dificult to dig up. Much of this evidence remains within the realm of oral histories passed down in families–most often black families. It is stumbled upon by modern historians, in the majority white scholars, who have limited access to African American family lore. I am reminded of the white southern scholar who confided to me that when he went to interview a black family in the 1980s he was surprised to see a large portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan, hanging in their home–but was informed Forrest was an ancestor!

The issues surrounding mixed race legacies are topics that I believe academically trained scholars continue to stumble over and continue to stumble around. So it should be no surprise that the most compelling books dealing with this constellation of concerns have been produced by those outside the academy: Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White and Edward Ball’s National Book Award-winning Slaves in the Family…

…The way in which black and white Hairstons are able to confront or deny their mixed heritage becomes a running theme of the book as well. Does Peter W. Hairston, the white patriarch with whom the author began his quest, really want to know the truths about his family, especially his grandfather? How are Ever Lee Hairston, an outspoken black woman, and Lucy D. Hairston, a white southern lady of the old school, able to make their peace?…

Read the entire review here.

“Miscegenation” Making Race in America

University of Pennsylvania Press
2002
216 pages
6 x 9, 19 illus.
Cloth: ISBN 978-0-8122-3664-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-2064-3

Elise Lemire, Professor of Literature
Purchase College, State University of New York

In the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, as the question of black political rights was debated more and more vociferously, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists imagined that political equality would be followed by widespread inter-racial sex and marriage. Legally possible yet socially unthinkable, this “amalgamation” of the races would manifest itself in the perverse union of “whites” with “blacks,” the latter figured as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. In Miscegenation, Elise Lemire reads these literary and visual depictions for what they can tell us about the connection between the racialization of desire and the social construction of race.

Previous studies of the prohibition of interracial sex and marriage in the U.S. have focused on either the slave South or the post-Reconstruction period. Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper‘s Last of the Mohicans, Edgar Allan Poe‘s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word “miscegenation” was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: The Rhetorical Wedge Between Preference and Prejudice
• 1. Race and the Idea of “Preference” in the New Republic: The Port Folio Poems About Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
• 2. The Rhetoric of Blood and Mixture: Cooper’s “Man Without a Cross”
• 3. The Barrier of Good Taste: Avoiding A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Wake of Abolitionism
• 4. Combating Abolitionism with the Species Argument: Race and Economic Anxieties in Poe’s Philadelphia
• 5. Making “Miscegenation”: Alcott‘s Paul Frere and the Limits of Brotherhood After Emancipation
• Epilogue: “Miscegenation” Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments