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Introduction
- University of Virginia Press
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Introduction The Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings affair has been an issue in American political, social, cultural, and racial life since 1802, when James Thompson Callender, a transplanted Scottish newspaperman living in Virginia, published a story in the Richmond Recorder accusing Jefferson of being Sally Hemings’s lover and the father of children she bore after returning to the United StatesfromasojourninParis.Giventhatthesexualexploitationof female slaves has always been an integral part of all slave systems, Callender’s accusation thus placed Jefferson squarely in a tradition of master-slave relations that dates back to ancient times. Callender has been called a muckraker and described as a “misshapen little man who made a career of spewing venom.”1 I do not doubt that Callender was an unpleasant character, but in making public Jefferson’s relationship with his slave Sally Hemings he nevertheless performed a public service. His revelation showed that Jefferson was a more complex white supremacist than was suggested by query 14 of his Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he disparaged the physical and mental characteristics of black people. Some have concluded on the basis of this and other published writings that Jefferson would never have slept with a black woman. Callender’s suggestion that Jefferson was an “amalgamationist” was, and is, thus anathema to Jefferson’s partisans, to whom the charge has been both libelous and politically motivated. It should notbeforgotten that Jeffersonhadpoliticalenemies,andinaracial state, in which whiteness was and continues to be both a fetish and Walker00intro.indd 1 Walker00intro.indd 1 10/24/08 11:38:35 AM 10/24/08 11:38:35 AM 2 | mongr el nation an icon, what better way to wound a prominent white politician than to accuse him of sleeping with a black woman? Regardless of Callender’s motivation, however, the reaction to his revelation illuminates the great discomfiture of some white Americans, past and present, when forced to contemplate Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. The importance of Callender’s exposé resides above all in the reactions it has evoked in Jefferson’s political allies, members of his family, historians, and modern Jefferson apologists.2 The Jefferson-Hemings affair, given Jefferson’s place in the pantheon of the Founding Fathers, raises questions about the national identity or racial provenance of the United States. Using it as a pointofdeparture,Iwanttopositinthisbookanewmythoforigin of the United States. That is, I am suggesting that at the moment of its creation the nation was not a white racial space but a mixedrace one, in which Jefferson and Hemings, as a mixed-race couple, ratherthanGeorgeandMarthaWashington,shouldbeconsidered the founding parents of the North American republic. I realize that this may be disturbing to some, and particularly to my peers in American colonial history, but studies of other colonial settler societies indicate that they began as racially creolized societies.WhyistheUnitedStatesregardedasanexceptiontothis rule?Theanswertothisquestionmaylieinanearliergenerationof American historians’ conception of America as a white nation and theirdeificationofJeffersonastheapotheosisofwhitemanhood.It may also reside in some white Americans’ unease about interracial sex and its role in the creation of the American people. In brief, the attitude of some white Americans toward the very idea of a liaison betweenJeffersonandHemings,ambivalentatbestandmoreoften deeply hostile and resistant, is representative of a congenital racial tension in American society. Examples of this disquiet about the third president of the republic and his slave concubine can be seen in the public’s and the Walker00intro.indd 2 Walker00intro.indd 2 10/24/08 11:38:35 AM 10/24/08 11:38:35 AM [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:07 GMT) Introduction | 3 historical profession’s responses to several rounds of discussion in the past half-century about the Jefferson-Hemings affair. First, Winthrop Jordan’s examination of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in his book White over Black (1968) presented a provocative analysis of Jefferson, Hemings, slavery, and race. Although he did not embrace Callender, Jordan did note that the president was presentatMonticelloninemonthsbeforeeachofhisbondwoman’s children was born. Jordan wrote that “Jefferson’s paternity can be neither refuted nor proved from the known circumstances or from the extant testimony of his overseer, his white descendants or the descendants of Sally, each of them having fallible memories and personal interest at stake.”3 Jordan’s work has to be placed in the broader context of the change in American attitudes about race, sex, and sexuality that began during the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s.4 By the 1960s all kinds of sex and sexuality that had been unthinkable...