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  • Sally Hemings, Founding Mother
  • Martha Hodes (bio)
Clarence E. Walker . Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009. xii + 128 pp. Notes and index. $22.95.

The genetic evidence linking Sally Hemings' son Eston to Thomas Jefferson forever changed the landscape of Jefferson scholarship, and yet more than ten years on, the debates have hardly vaporized. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello, embraced Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children in 2000, but a minority opinion stubbornly stuck by Jefferson's single cloaked denial and the denials of descendants claiming that "historical accuracy should never be overwhelmed by political correctness." The next year, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (founded shortly after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concurred with the DNA-based conclusions) sponsored a commission that refuted the scientific evidence, and published The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty, an essay collection of considerable convolution and belligerence. In 2002, the Monticello Association (the organization open to all lineal descendants of Jefferson) voted to bar descendants of Sally Hemings from membership.1

Political correctness, indeed. In Thomas C. Holt's assertion that "the powerful will always have the upper hand in defining and enforcing 'correctness,'" we find a better invocation of that phrase, and in Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Clarence E. Walker likewise inverts the accusation leveled by the minority dissenters, instead recognizing political correctness as a weapon of dismissal against any "decentering of white Americans as the central agents of American history" (p. 93).2

The problem of Sally Hemings in American history comes intertwined with the problems of slavery and freedom; race and racism; and race, sex, and love. Walker takes up all of these challenges, ultimately offering a revised story of national origins: the United States, he contends, was a "mixed-race" nation from the start, "in which Jefferson and Hemings, as a mixed-race couple, rather than George and Martha Washington, should be considered the founding parents" (p. 2). Revising the founding myth is no longer an original enterprise of course, and like others, Walker wants to place slavery [End Page 437] squarely into the master narrative. But more than that, Walker wants to place sex between people of European descent and people of African descent at the heart of the republic's creation.

Easily a one-sitting read, Mongrel Nation is divided into two chapters, "Sexuality" and "Character and History, or 'Chloroform in Print'" (the last phrase taken from Mark Twain's Roughing It, invoked to mean "an anesthetic designed to blot out the place of race, slavery, and sex in Jefferson's world and, more broadly, in the national myth" [p. 92]). Reading the book from start to finish feels a bit like listening to an erudite—if sometimes irreverent and slightly rambling—soliloquy, a kind of "My Dinner with Clarence Walker."3 At one point, inside a couple of pages, we hear about passing and Philip Roth, then about W. E. B. Du Bois, then Hayden White and De Tocqueville, all as a lead-up to a point about "the hegemony of whiteness" in Jeffersonian America (p. 38). Statements that might be book-defining arguments are sprinkled throughout, often without sustained discussion, much as in a breathless monologue by a thoroughly engaging colleague.

To begin with, Walker wants us to understand Hemings and Jefferson in a transnational context. Why, he asks, should the United States be exempt from the acknowledgement that colonial settler societies were "racially creolized" from the start? Walker's answer lies in the "deification of Jefferson" and the anxiety of some white Americans "about interracial sex and its role in the creation of the American people" (p. 2). It occurred to me here that even the Jefferson apologist John Chester Miller noted—more than thirty years ago—that there was "nothing inherently implausible" in the Hemings affair, since it was "not uncommon for slaveowners to make slave women their concubines." (Sally Hemings herself was the daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law and the enslaved Elizabeth Hemings, making her the half-sister of Jefferson's wife.) Unlike Walker, though, Miller also fumed that if Jefferson did...

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