Brent Staples, New York Times; article contains links and additional illustrations; JB: the 100+ comments to this article -- dare I say more interesting than the article itself -- are intriguing examples of readers' thoughts on the all-American question, "Who are we as Americans?"
A recently opened exhibit at Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia estate gives new recognition to Sally Hemings and the role of slavery in the home — and in his family.
Image from article, with caption: A view of Thomas Jefferson's home from the main avenue where enslaved people were quartered at Monticello.
Plantation wives in the slave-era South resorted to willful blindness when their husbands conscripted black women as sexual servants and filled the household with mixed-race children who inevitably resembled the master. Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, was several years dead when he set off on this path, fathering at least six children with Martha’s enslaved black half sister, Sally Hemings. The task of dissembling fell to the remaining white Jeffersons, who aided in a cover-up that held sway for two centuries and feigned ignorance of a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings that lasted nearly four decades.
The foundation that owns Monticello, Jefferson’s mountaintop home near Charlottesville, Va., broke with this long-running deception last month when it unveiled several new exhibits that underscore the centrality of slavery on the founder’s estate. The most important — in the South Wing, where Sally Hemings once lived — explores the legacy of the enslaved woman whom some historians view as the president’s second wife and who skillfully prevailed on him to free from slavery the four Jefferson-Hemings children who lived into adulthood.
The exhibit underscores the fact that the Jefferson estate was an epicenter of racial mixing in early Virginia, making it impossible to draw clear lines between black and white. It reminds contemporary Americans that slave owners like the Jeffersons often held their own black children, aunts, uncles and cousins in bondage. And it illustrates how enslaved near-white relations used proximity to privilege to demystify whiteness while taking critical measure of the relatives who owned them.
Masters who maintained black “second families” are a familiar presence in the chronicles of the slave trade. Madison Hemings, the third of the Jefferson-Hemings children who survived into adulthood, offered his account of second-family life at Monticello in a poignant, strikingly detailed memoir published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873. He explains that his mother was born of a union between Martha’s widowed father, John Wayles, and his enslaved lover, Elizabeth Hemings, and was conveyed to Jefferson as property when Wayles died. It is widely known that Sally Hemings traveled to France in 1787 — Jefferson was serving as a diplomat there — and learned French while serving in the family’s household on the eve of the revolution.
We learn from Madison’s account that during that time in France, Sally Hemings became pregnant with Jefferson’s child and considered remaining in the country, where she would be a free woman, instead of returning to slavery in Virginia. She agreed to return only after Jefferson promised her “extraordinary privileges’’ and gave a “solemn pledge” to free any children the two might have once they reached adulthood. Jefferson kept his pledge, making Sally Hemings the only enslaved parent at Monticello to see all of her children freed.
This negotiation suggests that the 16-year-old Sally Hemings had considerable insight into Jefferson’s mind and some sense of what he could be obligated to do. She saw her surviving children — Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston — reap what the historian Annette Gordon-Reed describes as “an almost 50-year head start on emancipation, escaping the system that had engulfed their ancestors and millions of others.”
That Jefferson conceded to Sally Hemings suggests that he did not view her through the abjectly racist lens he deploys against African-Americans in his infamous book “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Musing on this subject two decades ago, the historian Winthrop Jordan suggested that her training as a lady’s maid, lightly colored skin and diction that probably matched Jefferson’s — if not his late wife’s — narrowed the social distance between them. Sally Hemings would have been keenly aware of this.
Madison refers to Jefferson affectionately as “father” throughout his memoir, noting that he was “uniformly kind to all about him,” but as the historian Jan Ellen Lewis has written, “The Hemings children knew … that they were the disfavored children of a loving and powerful man.” Indeed, Madison depicts his family at Monticello as lying beyond the reach of the warmth and congeniality that Jefferson reflexively extended to his white grandchildren.
Madison seemed genuinely and affectionately interested in his white relatives — who never acknowledged their black relations and referred to them as slaves, “these parties” or “the yellow children.” He cast a gimlet eye on James Madison’s wife, Dolley, who was visiting Monticello when he was born and promised Sally Hemings a gift in exchange for naming him Madison: “But like many promises of white folks to the slaves,” he said dryly, “she never gave my mother anything.”
The interracial tableau that played out at Monticello was familiar in the plantation South. The 19th-century diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut, for example, likened plantation husbands to “the patriarchs of old’’ who lived openly in one household with their wives and their concubines, noting bitterly that “the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children.” White widowers like John Wayles and Thomas Jefferson who forged relationships with black women they owned were less controversial but equally common. Nevertheless, historians ridiculed Madison’s story, dismissing him as a social-climbing fabulist.
His credibility was gradually restored during the late 20th century, after historians like Fawn Brodie, Winthrop Jordan and Gordon-Reed re-evaluated this issue in light of corroborating evidence that forced Monticello to ratify Jefferson’s paternity. Fittingly, the new exhibit tells the Sally Hemings story through Madison’s testimony.
This places Sally Hemings at the center of plantation life, where she clearly belongs. It also shows that Jefferson’s baronial mountaintop estate was just like any other plantation when it came to matters of sexual conduct.
Brent Staples joined the Times editorial board in 1990 after working as an editor of the Book Review and an assistant editor for metropolitan news. Mr. Staples holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago. @BrentNYT
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