Annette Gordon-Reed, Aug. 24, 2017, New York Times
Image from article, with caption: A photograph of
Monticello from the late 1800s
It has been 20 years since the historian Annette Gordon-Reed published “Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” 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.,
Gordon-Reed reflects on the complexities that endure in our understanding of
Hemings and the language we use to characterize her.
Sally Hemings has been described as “an enigma,” the enslaved woman who
first came to public notice at the turn of the 19th century when James Callender, an
enemy of the newly elected President Thomas Jefferson, wrote with racist virulence
of “SALLY,” who lived at Monticello 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’s “mistress” and used the word “relationship” to describe the connection
between the pair, as if those words inevitably denote positive things. They do not, of
course — especially when the word “mistress” is modified by the crucial word
“enslaved.”
When I published my first book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An
American Controversy,” in 1997, most people knew of Hemings from two works:
Fawn Brodie’s biography “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History” (1974) and
Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel “Sally Hemings” (1979), both of which sought to
rescue Hemings’s personhood. More typically, the scholarship written to disprove
her connection to Jefferson routinely diminished Hemings’s humanity. The
arguments that the story couldn’t be true because Jefferson would never be involved
with “a slave girl” 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 “slave girl” 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, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” to flesh out Hemings’s
personal history.
As the battle over whether Hemings and Jefferson had been in a relationship
has receded, the question of what type of relationship they could possibly have been
in has come to the fore. A recent Washington Post piece, reflecting on the
terminology used in the announcement of the restoration project, insisted that
Hemings should be seen primarily as Jefferson’s “property,” noting that by law he
could compel her to have sex — rape her — whenever he wanted. Another Post article
about Hemings that appeared earlier in the year had used the words “mistress” and
“relationship,” drawing critical responses: One commenter said that Hemings should
be thought of as “a sex trafficked slave”; even Teen Vogue weighed in: “As a slave,
Hemings was not afforded the privilege of self-determination, meaning she didn’t do
what she wanted; she did what she was told.” These were understandable
interventions given the desire so many people still have to portray slavery as less
monstrous than it was. At the same time, the talk in these rejoinders of Hemings as
simply “property,” as if she were akin to an inanimate object or nonsentient being,
turns aside decades of historiography that makes clear that enslaved people, when
they had chances, often acted to shape their circumstances to the extent that they
could. The language echoes the arguments of Jefferson scholars who treated
Hemings’s legal status as the definitive answer to the question of what did and did
not happen in her life.
It’s true: Hemings was, by law, Jefferson’s property. But she was also a human being.
Contingency, which historians know is always in operation, plays a crucial role in
human affairs, and it did so in the way the law of property shaped Hemings’s story.
Enigmatic as she may be, Hemings had a vision of her life and self that she imparted
to her family. Her son Madison Hemings relayed that vision in recollections notable
for their bare-boned clarity and the extent to which his statements can be
corroborated. Her vision should always matter when we write about her. Law was
pivotal to Hemings’s understanding of her life. She knew its power. For a brief but
life-defining moment — just over two years — she, unlike the vast majority of
enslaved people, was in a place where the law was on her side. It was a tool she could
use. Very critically, both she and Jefferson believed that.
Sally Hemings had the extraordinary experience of living in pre-revolutionary
Paris. Throughout the 18th century, every petition for freedom in the city was
granted. She, and undoubtedly her brother James, eight years her senior, who had
been in France training to be a chef for three years before she arrived, understood
that the laws of Virginia did not automatically apply in France. Jefferson was on
the defensive about this his entire time in the country. That is almost certainly why he
put James and Sally Hemings on the payroll with the other servants at his residence,
the Hôtel de Langeac. The siblings were paid wages near the very highest rate in the
city for a chef de cuisine and chambermaid. They had access to other people of color,
as their neighborhood had the greatest concentration of such people in Paris, a small
group who helped one another. There were lawyers who filed petitions on behalf of
the enslaved. They did so pro bono and for money, which the Hemings siblings had.
At some point, Sally Hemings became “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” in the words
of Madison Hemings. In 1789, pregnant by Jefferson, she refused to return to
Virginia and be “re-enslaved.” Were she to return, any child she bore there would be
enslaved. This was a bold gambit for a 16-year-old, even at a time, unlike today,
when females that age were not thought of as children. The age of consent in Virginia
in the 1780s was 10, and was raised to 12 in the 1820s. It is easy to see how her
experiences, and the energy and optimism of youth, led her to think she could do
this. She had learned to speak French well, and she was not alone. She had James,
whose decision near the end of his stay to hire a tutor to help him perfect his French
grammar suggests he thought they could survive there. They had seen a different
world, with different possibilities in it.
As always, context matters: None of the other young people at the Hôtel de
Langeac — not Jefferson’s daughters, not his secretary, William Short — wanted to
return to America. His eldest daughter, Martha, was thinking of ways to remain. To
get Sally Hemings to come back with him, Jefferson promised her a good life at
Monticello, and that their children would be freed when they became adults.
Madison Hemings said that his mother “implicitly relied” on Jefferson’s promises, a
statement that troubled me when I first wrote about Hemings — subjects often
exasperate biographers. It was not until I began researching my second book that I
could find any probable reason why she might do this.
Hemings and Jefferson did not exist in a vacuum. They were part of a web of
family relationships at Monticello that mattered to both of them. Hemings shared a
father, John Wayles, with Jefferson’s wife, Martha. Such connections were rarely
meaningful to the whites involved, and the enslaved likely had no expectations about
them. But the connection clearly meant something to Jefferson, who saw the
Hemings family through the prism of his deep feelings for his wife, whose death
before he went to Paris shattered him.
Sally Hemings could not have missed Jefferson’s response to her family. For
stretches of her childhood, until he freed them, Jefferson didn’t know where her
brothers were, as they went off to “hire their own time” (which was against the law)
and keep the money they earned. Hemings and her sisters, unlike all others on the
mountain, were totally exempted from fieldwork, even during harvest time. An
overseer remembered Jefferson instructing him not to exercise any power over the
Hemings women. What did this mean for the institution of slavery in America? What
did it mean for the hundreds of other people Jefferson enslaved during his lifetime?
Virtually nothing, as it did not transform American slavery or change the lives of
others enslaved on Jefferson’s plantations. But it meant a great deal to the six
Hemings-Wayles children, who had very different lives and destinies than others
enslaved at Monticello. The need to write about enslaved people sociologically —
what happened to the group as a whole — should not foreclose considerations of
individual enslaved people’s lives. We learn much about the institution from both
perspectives.
Hemings, with the aid of what she and Jefferson considered to be the power of
French law, extracted promises from Jefferson. When they returned to Virginia,
however, his power was again plenary. He could have reneged on it all. But he did
not. He kept his promises, as Madison Hemings notes, asserting in another part of
the recollection that this was a rare thing for whites to do when dealing with blacks.
Of the near 700 people Jefferson owned over the course of his life, Sally Hemings
and her children were the only nuclear family to leave slavery at Monticello at
Jefferson’s evident direction.
Though enslaved, Sally Hemings helped shape her life and the lives of her
children, who got an almost 50-year head start on emancipation, escaping the
system that had engulfed their ancestors and millions of others. Whatever we may
feel about it today, this was important to her.
Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law and history at Harvard. Her most recent
book, written with Peter S. Onuf, is “‘Most Blessed of the Patriarchs’: Thomas Jefferson
and the Empire of the Imagination.”
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