Review by New York Times Review
Annette Gordon Reed examines the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. SOMETIME around 1800, an anonymous American artist produced an arresting painting entitled "Virginian Luxuries." It depicts a slave owner exercising two kinds of power over his human property. On the right, a white man raises his arm to whip a black man's bare back. On the left, he lasciviously caresses a black woman. The artist's identification of these "luxuries" with the state that produced four of our first five presidents underscores the contradiction between ideals and reality in the early Republic. No one embodied this contradiction more strikingly than Thomas Jefferson. In 1776, when he wrote of mankind's inalienable right to liberty, Jefferson owned more than 100 slaves. He hated slavery but thought blacks inferior in "body and mind" to whites. If freed, he believed, they should be sent to Africa; otherwise, abolition would result in racial warfare or, even worse, racial "mixture." Yet in his own lifetime, reports circulated that Jefferson practiced such mixture with his slave Sally Hemings. In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed, who teaches at New York Law School and in the history department of Rutgers University, published "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy." Reviewing the evidence, she concluded it was likely that Jefferson had fathered Hemings's children. But her main argument was that generations of Jefferson scholars had misused historical sources to defend the great man's reputation. For example, they had dismissed as worthless the recollections of Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings's son, who described his mother's relationship with Jefferson to a journalist in 1873, while accepting at face value the denials of Jefferson's white descendants that such a relationship existed. The book caused a sensation in the sedate world of Jefferson scholarship. Shortly after it appeared, DNA testing established a genetic link between a male Jefferson and Eston Hemings, Madison's brother. Today, Monticello's Web site discusses the controversy in a way that leaves the distinct impression of Thomas Jefferson's paternity. Gordon-Reed has now turned her attention to an even more ambitious project. In "The Hemingses of Monticello," a work based on prodigious research in the voluminous Jefferson papers and other sources, she traces the experiences of this slave family over three generations. Engrossing and suggestive, it is also repetitive (we are frequently reminded that the law does not necessarily reflect social reality) and filled with unnecessary pronouncements about human nature (e.g., "Youth in females has attracted men in all eras across all cultures"). Readers will find it absorbing, but many will wish it had been a shorter, more focused book. Gordon-Reed's account begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735 as the daughter of an African woman and a white sea captain; she bore at least 12 children, half with an unknown black man, half (including Sally) with her owner, John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law. (This made Sally Hemings the half sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles, who died in 1782, after which he never remarried.) The Hemings family went to Monticello as part of Martha's inheritance. Individual members eventually found their way to Paris, New York, Philadelphia and Richmond, allowing Gordon-Reed to present a revealing portrait of the varieties of black life in Jefferson's era. When she died in 1807 at 72, Elizabeth Hemings left behind 8 living children, more than 30 grandchildren and at least 4 great-grandchildren. The most fascinating parts of Gordon-Reed's book deal not with Sally Hemings herself but with other all but unknown members of her extended family. Initially because they were related to Jefferson's wife and later because of his own connection with Sally Hemings, the family was treated quite differently from other slaves at Monticello. The women worked as house servants, never in the fields, the men as valets, cooks and skilled craftsmen. Jefferson paid some of them wages and allowed a few to live in Charlottesville or Richmond and keep their earnings. Because of their independent incomes, her sons were able to provide Elizabeth Hemings with goods unavailable to most slaves. As Gordon-Reed relates, archaeological excavations have revealed among her possessions pieces of Chinese porcelain, wineglasses and other products of the era's consumer revolution. THEIR status as a "caste apart" from the other slaves did not diminish the Hemingses' desire for greater freedom. In 1792, at her own request, Jefferson sold Sally's older sister Mary to Thomas Bell, a local merchant, who lived openly with her and treated their children as his legal family. Three years later, Jefferson allowed their brother Robert to work out an arrangement with a white resident of Richmond to purchase and free him. Less happy was the fate of Sally's brother James Hemings, who accompanied Jefferson to Paris, where he studied cuisine. During the 1790s, James asked for his freedom and Jefferson agreed, so long as he trained his successor as chef at Monticello. A few years later, James Hemings committed suicide. Gordon-Reed sensitively traces the career of this restless, solitary man, acknowledging that "we simply cannot retrieve" his inner world or why he took his own life. Unfortunately, when it comes to the core of the book, the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, she is less circumspect. In 1787, at the age of 14, Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson's daughter Polly from Virginia to Paris, where Jefferson was serving as American minister. According to Madison Hemings's account, at some point she became Jefferson's "concubine." When Jefferson was about to return to America in 1789, according to Madison, Sally Hemings, pregnant and aware that slavery had no legal standing in France, announced that she was going to remain in Paris. To persuade her to accompany him home, Jefferson agreed to a "treaty" whereby he would free her children when they reached adulthood. Most scholars are likely to agree with Gordon-Reed's conclusion that Jefferson fathered Hemings's seven children (of whom three died in infancy). But as to the precise nature of their relationship, the historical record is silent. Was it rape, psychological coercion, a sexual bargain or a long-term loving connection? Gordon-Reed acknowledges that it is almost impossible to probe the feelings of a man and a woman neither of whom left any historical evidence about their relationship. Madison Hemings's use of the words "concubine" and "treaty" hardly suggests a romance. But Gordon-Reed is determined to prove that theirs was a consensual relationship based on love. Sometimes even the most skilled researcher comes up empty. At that point, the better part of valor may be simply to state that a question is unanswerable. Gordon-Reed's portrait of an enduring romance between Hemings and Jefferson is one possible reading of the limited evidence. Others are equally plausible. Gordon-Reed, however, refuses to acknowledge this possibility. She sets up a series of straw men and proceeds to demolish them - those who believe that in the context of slavery, love between black and white people was impossible; that black female sexuality was "inherently degraded" and thus Jefferson could not have had genuine feelings for Hemings; that any black woman who consented to sex with a white man during slavery was a "traitor" to her people. She cites no current historians who hold these views, but is adamant in criticizing anyone who, given the vast gap in age (30 years) and power between them, views the Jefferson-Hemings connection as sexual exploitation. As a black female scholar, Gordon-Reed is undoubtedly more sensitive than many other academics to the subtleties of language regarding race. But to question the likelihood of a long-term romantic attachment between Jefferson and Hemings is hardly to collaborate in what she calls "the erasure of individual black lives" from history. Gordon-Reed even suggests that "opponents of racism" who emphasize the prevalence of rape in the Old South occupy "common ground" with racists who despise black women, because both see sex with female slaves as "degraded." This, quite simply, is outrageous. After this rather strident discussion, which occupies the best part of four chapters, Gordon-Reed returns to her narrative. She relates how in 1802 the Richmond journalist James Callender named Hemings as Jefferson's paramour and how throughout his presidency newspapers carried exposés, cartoons and bawdy poems about his relationship with "Yellow Sally." Gordon-Reed makes the telling point that while Callender called Hemings a "slut as common as the pavement," she was hardly promiscuous. She gave birth only at times when Jefferson could have been the father. Neither Jefferson nor Hemings responded to these attacks. But whatever his precise feelings about the relationship, Jefferson certainly took a special interest in their children. Gordon-Reed notes that while other Hemings offspring were named after relatives, Sally Hemings's sons bore names significant for Jefferson - Thomas Eston Hemings (after his cousin) and James Madison and William Beverley Hemings (after important Virginians). In the end, Jefferson fulfilled the "treaty" he had agreed to in Paris and freed Sally Hemings's surviving children. He allowed their daughter Harriet and son Beverley (ages 21 and 24) to leave Monticello in 1822. Very light-skinned, they chose to live out their lives as white people. Jefferson's will freed Madison and Eston Hemings as well as three of their relatives. The will did not mention Sally Hemings, but Jefferson's daughter allowed her to move to Charlottesville, where she lived with her sons as a free person until dying in 1835. For the other slaves at Monticello, Jefferson's death in 1826 was a catastrophe. To settle his enormous debts, his estate, including well over 100 slaves, was auctioned, destroying the families he had long tried to keep intact. "The Hemingses of Monticello" ends at this point. Only in an earlier aside do we learn that Madison Hemings's sons fought in the Union Army during the Civil War. One was among the 13,000 soldiers who perished at the infamous Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. I am glad to hear that Gordon-Reed is at work on a second volume tracing the further history of this remarkable family. Did the Jefferson-Hemings relationship amount to rape, psychological coercion or a long-term loving connection? Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University and the editor of "Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World," which has just been published.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the long-awaited sequel to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed delivers a powerful composite portrait of the African American family whose labors helped make Jefferson's Virginia residence a fountainhead of American culture. Primary interest naturally attaches to Sally Hemings, the gifted black woman who chose at age 16 to live as Jefferson's enslaved mistress in America rather than as a free woman in France. But Gordon-Reed highlights the family role of Sally's mother, Elizabeth Hemings, whose experience in bearing children to both black and white fathers schooled her in the racial dynamics of early America. Biracial relationships immensely complicated life at Monticello, where the Virginia planter famous for declaring the equality of all men counted among his slaves four of his own children, fathered in a union he never publicly acknowledged. Gordon-Reed teases out telling clues from correspondence and journals of the Hemingses' struggle for dignity despite the cruel constraints of slavery. That Jefferson finally freed his children by Sally does not obscure those restraints, nor does it hide the tragedy visited upon other Monticello slaves when Jefferson's posthumous debts licensed the auctioneer to break up black families to increase their market value. A must-have acquisition for every American history collection.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. This is a scholar's book: serious, thick, complex. It's also fascinating, wise and of the utmost importance. Gordon-Reed, a professor of both history and law who in her previous book helped solve some of the mysteries of the intimate relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, now brings to life the entire Hemings family and its tangled blood links with slave-holding Virginia whites over an entire century. Gordon-Reed never slips into cynicism about the author of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, she shows how his life was deeply affected by his slave kinspeople: his lover (who was the half-sister of his deceased wife) and their children. Everyone comes vividly to life, as do the places, like Paris and Philadelphia, in which Jefferson, his daughters and some of his black family lived. So, too, do the complexities and varieties of slaves' lives and the nature of the choices they had to make--when they had the luxury of making a choice. Gordon-Reed's genius for reading nearly silent records makes this an extraordinary work. 37 illus. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This multigenerational saga traces mixed-race bloodlines that American history has long refused fully to acknowledge. Blending biography, genealogy, and history, Gordon-Reed (history, Rutgers Univ.; law, New York Law Sch.; Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy) brings to life the family from which Sally Hemings (1773-1835) came and the family that she and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) created. Sally bore five surviving children for the man who penned the Declaration of Independence and later became the new nation's third president. In a three-part, 30-chapter tour de force through voluminous primary and secondary sources, including Jefferson family correspondence, Gordon-Reed reconstructs not simply the private life and estate of an American demigod but reveals much of the characteristic structure and style of early Virginia society and the slavery that made possible much of the Old Dominion's position and pleasure. Moreover, she ushers forth slaves from the usual shadows of historical obscurity to show them as individuals and families with multifaceted lives. This is a masterpiece brimming with decades of dedicated research and dexterous writing. It is essential for any collection on U.S. history, Colonial America, Virginia, slavery, or miscegenation. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/08.]--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe, AZ (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The unusual history of an enslaved family whose destiny was shaped over the course of four decades by Thomas Jefferson. Gordon-Reed (Law/New York Law School, History/Rutgers Univ.; Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 1997, etc.) grudgingly comes to a sympathetic view of Jefferson, who inherited the mixed-race Hemings family when he married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. By 1784, he was a widower living in Paris as head of the American commission, accompanied by manservant James Hemings, whom Jefferson took along so he could receive training as a French chef. In 1787, James's 14-year-old sister Sally came to Paris with Jefferson's daughter Polly; sometime during the French sojourn, she became her master's mistress. Back in Virginia, Jefferson installed Sally in a fairly pampered life at Monticello; he sired her numerous children and emancipated them upon his death in 1826. The author painstakingly sifts through the evidence about their relationship and examines the convoluted attitudes that influenced Jefferson's behavior. Sally's white father was also Martha Jefferson's father; Jefferson's wife and his slave mistress were half-sisters who owed their radically different destinies to the Anglo-Virginian system of bondage. The colonists had adopted the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem (you were what your mother was) rather than the English rule (you were what your father was). By the perverse logic of this system, any drop of white blood ameliorated the work slaves were assigned and their chances of being freed. Jefferson encouraged James Hemings and his brother Robert to learn skills and to move freely in the world. There is no clue in the life of this intertwined family that Gordon-Reed does not minutely examine for its most subtle significance. She concludes that Jefferson was above all a most private man, who espoused abhorrent racial theories in public but behaved relatively well (by the standards of the era) toward his own slaves. Ponderous but sagacious and ultimately rewarding. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
