Thought-provoking article: "What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right"....

[Peace Patriot]

62. You need to read "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"

...written by Annette Gordon-Reed, an African-American professor of law and history (New York Law School, Rutgers).

Best book on Jefferson ever written! And it's written mostly from the point of view of the Hemings family--Sally Hemings, Jefferson's slave wife, her brothers, her extended family, her forebears. Extraordinary research, especially given the difficulties of this research (for instance, Jefferson's white family and descendants tried to erase Sally's memory), but even more wondrous analysis of the cultural situation that the Hemingses and their mixed race 'white' relatives and Jefferson himself were born to and lived.

Gordon-Reed treats them ALL as PEOPLE. This is, really, her main point. She has an amazing understanding of the breadth of complication in human beings. She does not shrink from the evidence that Jefferson LOVED Sally Hemings AND her brothers, and they loved him, and that HE considered them his FAMILY and acted very well towards them, indeed, despite the mind-bogglingly hypocritical and brutal white supremacy culture that they were all born to.

That said--this well-researched and compelling argument of the book, that Jefferson basically loved the Hemingses and they him--Gordon-Reed never lets up on slamming Jefferson for the SYSTEM of slavery, for the anonymous misery of the lives of his OTHER slaves, for the condition of his wife Sally and her brothers AS slaves, and for not doing anything about it all, even after they had lived in Paris in the midst of the Enlightenment, where one of Sally's brothers, James Hemings, had the run of Paris, at Jefferson's leave, and became a master chef, at Jefferson's expense. In Paris, they were free. In Virginia, they were not. And never the twain shall meet--because Jefferson, for all his lofty ideals, would not or could not transform Virginia society. He PREFERRED Parisian society, where slavery was forbidden and equality was real, but he ACCEPTED the "hick" society of Virginia, where owning slaves was the basis of the economy, as unchangeable, at least in his lifetime.

I held out for the whole book, constantly asking the questions, "Did he rape her?" and "Can she really have consented to the relationship?" Because Jefferson has always been a hero of mine, and I wanted to know just how compromised he was. I have the ability to change my mind about historical figures and narratives, as well as current ones, if I encounter convincing evidence that I have been wrong about them. I was LOOKING for evidence on Jefferson, because it is so difficult to reconcile the idealistic and revolutionary man with the slave-owner. And what better tutor could I have than an extremely erudite African-American woman law professor of the 21st century? Annette Gordon-Reed, of the impeccable research and brilliant analysis and compelling narrative!

Well, she taught me about Jefferson all right. She taught me that he was the most amazingly mixed up man that ever was! She put me in his soul, looking at the world with his eyes, and in the souls of his slave wife and her brothers and other family members, looking at the world with their eyes. What an experience!

She convinced me that Thomas Jefferson did NOT rape Sally Hemings (and there is no evidence whatever that he raped others--he seems to have been an exception among white male slaveowners, though he lived in and tolerated a society in which master-slave rape was commonplace). As to her consent to be his wife "without portfolio" so to speak, she consented--she loved him, for sure--but she was young and his literal slave at the beginning of this relationship, so I don't know if their 'common law' marriage would hold up in a court of law today. As the relationship developed, she surely consented to it, and she had the opportunity, in Paris, to leave him and be supported by her master chef brother, who also had the option to leave him. They both could EASILY have walked into a court in Paris and declared themselves free, as MANY slaves from the colonies were doing in Enlightened Paris, and James could easily have made a living there--and Sally could possibly have also done so, on her own, as a seamstress or free servant. She also could have married freely.

They both CHOSE to return to Virginia with Jefferson. By that time, they WERE a family. Jefferson was paying James a salary and would later ASK him to be the White House chef (when James was living in Boston) and reacted to James' refusal like a hurt father toward a stubborn son. (He did not punish him for it in any way.) It is also probable that Sally bargained for Jefferson's promise to free her children.

Please do read this book before you dismiss Thomas Jefferson as a rapist. I am convinced, after reading it, that he was not. We really owe it to the memories of ALL of these people to UNDERSTAND who they really were, the culture that they were born to and that weighed upon them every day, wherever they were, throughout their lives. It's easy enough to condemn people who are caught in cultural traps. It's not so easy to put yourself in their places and really grasp the whole of their lives, and all of the contradictions, pressures, ambivalence, sorrows and desires that characterize human life. God knows we need this kind of understanding today, in our multi-cultural, globalized world.

Jefferson was a man so committed to the Enlightenment that he re-wrote the New Testament, editing out all of its patriarchal nonsense. (It's called "Jefferson's Bible.&quot He was a man with the sensibility to notice and write about the evil effect of slavery on BOTH master and slave! (--in his Virginia chronicles). He was a man who at times felt repulsed by black people and fell in love with one--and treated her well and treated her brothers like sons! He was a man who could see past slavery, to a world without slavery--who put THAT in the Declaration of Independence, but did NOT fight with his fellow slave-owners when they edited it out. He was a man like the dramatic characters Oedipus and Hamlet, living a tragedy, and becoming increasingly aware of the tragedy in the course of his life, and his slave wife Sally was very like Antigone, in some respects--committed to the principle of family--and a bit like Ophelia, although Sally was a lot studier than Ophelia and grew up to be an amazing woman, lost in the shadows of history that did not want to acknowledge her. Gordon-Reed resurrects her, in all her beauty and quiet wisdom, in all her tragedy and magnificence--and she saves Thomas Jefferson from condemnation, in my opinion, just as Sally Hemings would have wished.