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  • Slavery, Race, and American Literary Genealogies
  • Robert S. Levine (bio)
Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing. Katherine Clay Bassard. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 183 pp.
Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787-1845. Jared Gardner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xvii, 238 pp.
Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. x, 216 pp.
Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. Teresa A. Goddu. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. x, 227 pp.
Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture. Edited by Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. x, 280 pp.
National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Dana D. Nelson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. xiv, 344 pp.
We Wear the Mask: African Americans Write American Literature, 1760-1870. Rafia Zafar. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xi, 249 pp.

As readers of this journal surely know by now, the DNA results are in, and Thomas Jefferson has been determined almost certainly to be the father of at least one of his slave Sally Hemings's children (see Eugene A. Foster et al., "Jefferson Fathers Slave's Last Child," Nature, 5 November 1998: 27-28). What is the significance of these DNA findings, if any, for American literary studies? At a conference held at the University of Virginia on March 5 and 6, 1999, a group of distinguished historians and cultural critics met to address the significance of the findings for American historical and cultural studies, and the papers were published later that year in Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, edited by Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf.

The collection is useful but, perhaps because it was rushed into print, somewhat troubling. Despite the fact that, as Annette Gordon-Reed demonstrated in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), professional historians have regularly attacked the few who have asserted the existence of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship, Lewis and Onuf assert rather glibly in their introduction that the Nature article was a "nonevent" (1), because "[f ]or years, most of the students we have taught, as well as a good number of our colleagues, have believed that Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemings's children" (1). If that is the case (and it should be pointed out that the claim that Jefferson was the father of all of Hemings's children goes even farther than Foster's claim), then that says much about the prudent ways of university-based Jeffersonians, though only Gordon-Reed, in a self-vindicating essay included in the volume, addresses the failure of most white historians to take black oral testimony seriously in this particular instance. Though the volume has a number of fine essays, including Philip D. Morgan's "Interracial Sex in the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World, c.1700-1820," which traces the complexity and variety of relationships between white men and black women during this period, and Joshua Rothman's "James Callender and Social Knowledge of Interracial Sex in Antebellum Virginia," which helps us better to understand why southerners chose to ignore Callender's accusations about Jefferson's sexual relationship with Hemings, it has to be said that the most thoughtful and fully realized essay on Jefferson in the volume is Jack N. Rakove's "Our Jefferson," which essentially argues that the results from the DNA testing should not change our view of Jefferson or the Jeffersonian tradition at all. As Rakove explains, we have always been aware of the [End Page 90] contradictory status of Jefferson as egalitarian and slaveholder. Moreover, he defends Jefferson from charges that he was a proslavery advocate, reminding us that the concerns he expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia about a possible race war were meant to advance the cause of emancipation (albeit of a protocolonizationist variety). Rakove concludes his well-argued essay by warning historians against assuming "moral superiority" (227) in their attempts to undo an American (Jeffersonian) "narrative [that] hinges on the...

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