Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

One Sexuality

One Sexuality Walker01.indd 11 Walker01.indd 11 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM Walker01.indd 12 Walker01.indd 12 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM My purpose in this chapter is to place the affair of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in the broader context of what Philip D. Curtin terms the “plantation complex.”1 When viewed from this perspective, the relationship wasneitherunusualnoraberrant,butnormative.Sexbetweenmen of the master class or race and their slaves has always been a given in both “societies with slaves and slave societies.”2 I also want to suggest an alternative reading of female slave sexuality that moves beyond the idea of Hemings as a victim of rape. Not all sexual encounters between black slave women and white men were rapes. In a world where there was no such thing as consensual sex, the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings can be located on a continuum of sexual practices. Historians of sexuality and slavery must move beyond the idea propounded by Havelock Ellis that sexuality can be understood, as Jeffrey Weeks observed, “in terms of neat categories and typologies.” “Sexuality as presented and sexuality as lived,” Weeks wrote, “always overflows the common-sense knowledge that people, including historians, have imposed on it.”3 Wherever European males went during the fifteenth century and afterward, they created new societies and peoples by mating withwomenfromsubjectpopulations.4Interracialsexualrelationships (often termed miscegenation today and amalgamation before 1864) were common in the Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial possessions.5 The peoples produced by these unions were treated in varying ways by their European conquerWalker01 .indd 13 Walker01.indd 13 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM 14 | mongr el nation ors. On the whole, Protestants were more troubled than Catholics by the process of racial intermixture, as a number of studies of amalgamation/miscegenation have shown. Portugal is emblematic of one of the more racially relaxed colonial powers. Writing about the seventeenth century, the Portuguese historian Antonio de Oliveira Cadornega, author of the Historia General das Guerras Angolanas (GeneralHistoryoftheAngolanWars), observed,“The soldiers of the garrison and other European individuals father many children on the black ladies, for want of white ladies, with the result that there are many Mulattoes and Coloureds (pardos).” The process of interracial mating in Portuguese colonies began before the sixteenth century, wrote Cadornega, when some of the Portuguese in the Senegambia “were able to marry into the ruling families.”ThisformofinteractionwasalsocommonintheCongo, where “for many decades [the Portuguese] mixed amicably with the Congolese in general and mated freely with the women in particular .”6 Crossing the Atlantic, the Portuguese, “being in want of wives, whereby to propagate their virtues,” said Cadornega, “took to themselves Indians and Negresses” in São Paulo, Brazil.7 Commenting in the second quarter of the sixteenth century on the ubiquity of interracial sex on the island of São Tomé, a Portuguese pilotoffhandedlyobserved,“Theyallhavewivesandchildren,and some of the children who are born there are as white as ours.”8 Within São Paulo, “the vast majority of women with whom the old Paulistas mated were Indians, if only because they could not afford to buy Negresses. This mixed Luso-Indian race formed the bulk of the population in the southern captaincies by 1614.”9 In the provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco, on the other hand, mulattoes predominated because of a vast “importation” of black slaves.10 Sex across the color line was no less widespread in Britain’s North American colonies. Yet for the British, interracial sex came to be a major source of social unease. Within the British colonies of the Americas, only in the West Indies were the social and culWalker01 .indd 14 Walker01.indd 14 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM 10/24/08 11:39:50 AM Sexuality | 15 tural proscriptions of interracial sex publicly flouted. Writing in the 1770s, Edward Long, the historian of Jamaica, described racial amalgamationtherewithadistastethatwasheightenedbyhisperception of race mixing in the Spanish colonies of the New World. In the Spanish empire, Long saw a more developed version of the “degeneracy” unfolding in the English colony of Jamaica, where he lived. Long asked his readers to turn their “eyes to the Spanish dominionsandbeholdwhatavicious,brutal,anddegeneratebreed ofmongrels[has]beenthereproduced,betweenSpaniards,Blacks, Indians, and their mixed progeny. . . . [His readers] must be of...