Beyond Biography, Through Biography, Toward an Integrated History

To comprehend the nature and existence of Annette Gordon-Reed's muchheralded, exquisitely crafted, triumphant history of Sally Hemings and her family, it helps to look back a decade, to a set of developments in public history and scholarship that Gordon-Reed herself helped initiate.

In Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed carefully evaluated the evidence for Jefferson's paternity of some or all of Hemings's children, beginning with that testimony first put into print publicly by James Thomas Callendar in 1802 and later confirmed in published interviews by Hemings's descendants. She admitted the hearsay nature of the positive evidence and made her best case by undermining the other side's arguments, showing that it amounted to far less than "proof" of Jefferson's nonpaternity. The testimonies relied upon by Virginius Dabney, John C. Miller, Merrill Peterson, Douglass Adair, et al. derived from Jefferson's family and partisan supporters. Indeed, nineteenth-century defenders of Jefferson had more reasons to dissemble or even destroy evidence, but their words had been taken at face value well into the twentieth century. Especially in the wake of Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), the dismissal by what Brodie called "the Jefferson establishment" of testimony suggesting a sexual relationship, including Hemings family oral history, showed a "basic disrespect for readers of history" insofar as it did not stand up to the same evidentiary standards to which those historians claimed fealty—unless, that is, one simply assumed that slaveholders and their families told truer stories than slaves and their children did. ¹

By 1997 fewer historians believed that to be the case. Embarrassed at being called to task so expertly and carefully by someone outside the profession (Gordon-Reed is a lawyer by training), they began to reconsider the pat answers they gave to students. ² The burden of proof shifted. In an alternatively legalistic mode, some called for genetic analysis as the only possible way to settle the matter. In 1999 a DNA study of male Jefferson and Hemings descendants confirmed a genetic link, though one that excluded members of the Woodson family, who also claimed descent. Joseph J. Ellis immediately jumped the Jefferson establishment ship, coauthoring the article in Nature magazine that announced the DNA study and proclaiming that the evidence for paternity actually confirmed the essential truth of his larger analysis, in American Sphinx (1996), of Jefferson's contradictory, self-deceptive nature. Fraser D. Nieman, an archaeologist at Monticello, performed a statistical probability analysis of the coincidence of Jefferson's visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings's later pregnancies, concluding that anyone else's paternity seemed highly unlikely. Conferences in Charlottesville, which yielded speedy publications, reconsidered the entire question of slavery at Monticello, Jefferson's personality, and his ideas about race and slavery. Gordon-Reed's carefulness in interpretation and her disinclination to gloat about having been proved right helped set the constructive tone for these interchanges. In January of 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation itself abandoned the leaky vessel of what then could no longer even be called the Jefferson establishment, issuing a statement that it believed that Jefferson at least had a longstanding sexual relationship with Hemings, that he was probably the father of all six of her children, and that interpretation at the house site would in the future take this into account. The next year, for Jefferson's birthday, President Bush had dozens of white and black descendants to lunch at the White House. ³ The question was no longer whether Jefferson had sex with one of his slaves. It was what to make of that fact.

In books and conference sessions, leading historians urged subtlety and caution. In the press, however, Jefferson began to appear as a kind of founding hypocrite—at best— and at worst a founding rapist. Jefferson's reputation was going downhill fast. Despite what Ellis had called a sesquicentennial "Jeffersonian surge" circa 1993, biographies and televised miniseries of the new millennium...