{"id":54850,"date":"2017-08-26T22:38:55","date_gmt":"2017-08-26T22:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54850"},"modified":"2017-08-27T02:21:07","modified_gmt":"2017-08-27T02:21:07","slug":"sally-hemings-thomas-jefferson-and-the-ways-we-talk-about-our-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54850","title":{"rendered":"Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and the Ways We Talk About Our Past<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2017-08-24<\/p>\n

Annette Gordon-Reed<\/strong><\/a>, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
\nHarvard University<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nA photograph of Monticello<\/a> from the late 1800s. Credit University of Virginia Library<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

It has been 20 years since the historian Annette Gordon-Reed published \u201cThomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy<\/a>,\u201d a book that successfully challenged the prevailing perceptions of both figures. In a piece for The New York Times Book Review, submitted just before the tragic events in Charlottesville, Va.<\/a>, Gordon-Reed reflects on the complexities that endure in our understanding of Hemings and the language we use to characterize her.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sally Hemings<\/a> has been described as \u201can enigma,\u201d the enslaved woman who first came to public notice at the turn of the 19th century when James Callender<\/a>, an enemy of the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson<\/a>, wrote with racist virulence of \u201cSALLY,\u201d who lived at Monticello<\/a> and had borne children by Jefferson. Hemings came back into the news earlier this year, after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced plans to restore a space where Hemings likely resided, for a time, at Monticello. A number of news reports as well as comments on social media discussing the plans drew the ire of many readers because they referred to Hemings as Jefferson\u2019s \u201cmistress\u201d and used the word \u201crelationship\u201d to describe the connection between the pair, as if those words inevitably denote positive things. They do not, of course \u2014 especially when the word \u201cmistress\u201d is modified by the crucial word \u201censlaved.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I published my first book, \u201cThomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy<\/a>,\u201d in 1997, most people knew of Hemings from two works: Fawn Brodie\u2019s biography \u201cThomas Jefferson: An Intimate History<\/a>\u201d (1974) and Barbara Chase-Riboud\u2019s novel \u201cSally Hemings<\/a>\u201d (1979), both of which sought to rescue Hemings\u2019s personhood. More typically, the scholarship written to disprove her connection to Jefferson routinely diminished Hemings\u2019s humanity. The arguments that the story couldn\u2019t be true because Jefferson would never be involved with \u201ca slave girl\u201d and that such a person was too low to have influenced Jefferson recurred in various formulations in historical writings over many years, as if the designation \u201cslave girl\u201d told readers all they needed to know. My first book was designed to expose the inanity of those, and other, arguments. I wrote a second book, \u201cThe Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family<\/a>,\u201d to flesh out Hemings\u2019s personal history…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a piece for The New York Times Book Review, submitted just before the tragic events in Charlottesville, Va., Gordon-Reed reflects on the complexities that endure in our understanding of Hemings and the language we use to characterize her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1245,459,8,20,693],"tags":[1219,918,2327,477],"class_list":["post-54850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-biography","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-virginia","tag-annette-gordon-reed","tag-sally-hemings","tag-the-new-york-times","tag-thomas-jefferson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54850"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54850\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54862,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54850\/revisions\/54862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}