Scott McLemee: Sally Hemings ... 10 years later
[Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week.]
Ten years ago, the University of Virginia Press issued what turned out to be a very well-timed book , Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at New York Law School. In late 1998 came the results of a DNA test showing a match between descendants of Hemings and of Jefferson — corroborating the story (first put in the public record by an anti-Jeffersonian journalist in 1802) that the author of the Declaration of Independence had sired a number of children by one of his slaves. One part of the “American controversy” referred to in Gordon-Reed’s subtitle was over.
But not all of it was. The real subject of the book was not the question of whether Jefferson and Hemings had (as the preferred expression nowadays would call it) a relationship. Rather, Gordon-Reed’s attention was focused on how historians had, over the years, gone about weighing the evidence, one way or the other. She argued that they often seemed prone to examining the record with a certain implicit syllogism in mind: “No decent white person could be involved in an affair with a black slave. Jefferson was a decent white person. Therefore, Jefferson could not have been involved with a black slave.”...
Reviews of Gordon-Reed’s book began appearing in the major historical journals in 1998, just before the DNA findings were announced. And most took her analysis – both of the documentary evidence and of the biases often exhibited by scholars – as a virtuoso performance. The days were coming to an end when Joseph Ellis could refer to the Hemings story as a “tin can tied to Jefferson’s reputation” by political opponents in 1802 that “has rattled through the ages and pages of history books ever since.” It turns out that Ellis was actually hearing the death rattle of an old consensus.
But the lead essay in the most recent issue of Reviews in American History suggests that the collapse of former presuppositions has not, in itself, created an advance in historical understanding. “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era” by Mia Bay, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, examines some of the recent scholarship only to find that Hemings “is rarely considered in light of what we know about the history of slavery – and experiences of slave women in particular.” In consequence, “a new but still profoundly ahistorical Hemings figures prominently in several recent works on Jefferson.” What ends to disappear from some accounts “is nothing short of her status as a slave.”...
The most jaw-dropping instance Bay cites is E.M. Halliday’s book Understanding Thomas Jefferson, (HarperCollins, 2001). Pointing out that Sally Hemings’s mother, Betty, had enjoyed a certain degree of upward mobility through sexual relations with John Wayles (that is, with Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law), Halliday speculates that “it is hard to believe that Betty Hemings failed to give her lively, pretty daughter advice on how to behave toward Master Jefferson upon entering his household.” With a teenage girl training her seductive arts on him, the poor widower never had a chance, Halliday argued.
Considerably less risible is Joshua D. Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Historians have given it acclaim as a subtle analysis of how the reality and ubiquity of interracial sexual liaisons were dealt with by an antebellum culture that officially forbade them.
As Bay sees it, however, Rothman’s chapter on Jefferson and Hemings is just a little too subtle about “the admixture of consent and coercion at play in their liaison.” The idea that a teenage slave girl had any consent to give in a sexual relationship with her master is perhaps taking voluntarism too far. “Sally did not have to return to Virginia with Jefferson at all,” according to Rothman, since “she surely could have gained emancipation with a small amount of effort.”...
Read entire article at Inside Higher Ed
Ten years ago, the University of Virginia Press issued what turned out to be a very well-timed book , Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at New York Law School. In late 1998 came the results of a DNA test showing a match between descendants of Hemings and of Jefferson — corroborating the story (first put in the public record by an anti-Jeffersonian journalist in 1802) that the author of the Declaration of Independence had sired a number of children by one of his slaves. One part of the “American controversy” referred to in Gordon-Reed’s subtitle was over.
But not all of it was. The real subject of the book was not the question of whether Jefferson and Hemings had (as the preferred expression nowadays would call it) a relationship. Rather, Gordon-Reed’s attention was focused on how historians had, over the years, gone about weighing the evidence, one way or the other. She argued that they often seemed prone to examining the record with a certain implicit syllogism in mind: “No decent white person could be involved in an affair with a black slave. Jefferson was a decent white person. Therefore, Jefferson could not have been involved with a black slave.”...
Reviews of Gordon-Reed’s book began appearing in the major historical journals in 1998, just before the DNA findings were announced. And most took her analysis – both of the documentary evidence and of the biases often exhibited by scholars – as a virtuoso performance. The days were coming to an end when Joseph Ellis could refer to the Hemings story as a “tin can tied to Jefferson’s reputation” by political opponents in 1802 that “has rattled through the ages and pages of history books ever since.” It turns out that Ellis was actually hearing the death rattle of an old consensus.
But the lead essay in the most recent issue of Reviews in American History suggests that the collapse of former presuppositions has not, in itself, created an advance in historical understanding. “In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era” by Mia Bay, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, examines some of the recent scholarship only to find that Hemings “is rarely considered in light of what we know about the history of slavery – and experiences of slave women in particular.” In consequence, “a new but still profoundly ahistorical Hemings figures prominently in several recent works on Jefferson.” What ends to disappear from some accounts “is nothing short of her status as a slave.”...
The most jaw-dropping instance Bay cites is E.M. Halliday’s book Understanding Thomas Jefferson, (HarperCollins, 2001). Pointing out that Sally Hemings’s mother, Betty, had enjoyed a certain degree of upward mobility through sexual relations with John Wayles (that is, with Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law), Halliday speculates that “it is hard to believe that Betty Hemings failed to give her lively, pretty daughter advice on how to behave toward Master Jefferson upon entering his household.” With a teenage girl training her seductive arts on him, the poor widower never had a chance, Halliday argued.
Considerably less risible is Joshua D. Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Historians have given it acclaim as a subtle analysis of how the reality and ubiquity of interracial sexual liaisons were dealt with by an antebellum culture that officially forbade them.
As Bay sees it, however, Rothman’s chapter on Jefferson and Hemings is just a little too subtle about “the admixture of consent and coercion at play in their liaison.” The idea that a teenage slave girl had any consent to give in a sexual relationship with her master is perhaps taking voluntarism too far. “Sally did not have to return to Virginia with Jefferson at all,” according to Rothman, since “she surely could have gained emancipation with a small amount of effort.”...