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

Notes

Introduction 1. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), 529. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA, 1997). 2. In the twentieth century, the most forceful defenders of Jefferson’s reputation have been historians and Jeffersonophiles. See, e.g., Douglass Adair, “The Jefferson Scandals,” in Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (Indianapolis, 1974), excerpted at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/ cron/1960scandal.html; Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals (New York, 1981); Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vols. 1, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948), and 4, Jefferson the President, First Term, 1801–1805 (Boston, 1970); Alf J. Mapp Jr., Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim (Lanham, MD, 1991); John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears (New York, 1977); Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1962); and Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson: A Life (New York, 1993). 3. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), 466. 4. Two books that chart the joys and pitfalls of interracial sex in the 1960s are Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York, 1990); and Mark D. Naison, White Boy: A Memoir (Philadelphia, 2002). See also Anatole Broyard’s memoir, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York, 1993); this book, which deals with Bohemian life and interracial sex in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, indicates that what became public in the 1960s was developing in the 1940s. 5. For these changes, see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1998). 6. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1974); Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings (New York, 1979). A masterful and insightful essay about the reaction to these two womNotes Walker03notes.indd 101 Walker03notes.indd 101 10/24/08 11:40:41 AM 10/24/08 11:40:41 AM 102 | Notes to Pages 4–7 en’s works and what historians and others have said about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is Scot A. French and Edward Ayers, “The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943–1993,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), 418–57. Another thoughtful analysis of the historical debate about Jefferson and Hemings is Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, VA, 2006), chap. 6. 7. French and Ayers, “Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson,” 440. 8. See Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 296; and Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 195–96. 9. French and Ayers, “Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson,” 427. 10. Ibid. 11. Garry Wills, “Uncle Thomas’s Cabin,” New York Review of Books, 18 April 1974, 26–28. 12. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), 1. For the DNA evidence, see Eugene A. Foster, M. A. Jobling, P. G. Taylor, P. Donnelly, P. deKnijff, Rene Mierement, and C. TylerSmith , “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” Nature 196 (5 November 1998): 27–28. See also Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “Founding Father,” ibid., 13–14. 13. See Andrew Burstein, Jefferson’s Secrets (New York, 2005); Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA, 2000); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); and John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, 2003). 14. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990), ix. 15. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (New York, 1997), 309. 16. Ibid. 17. Joel Williamson, New People (New York, 1980), xiii. 18. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), introduction. 19. Winthrop D. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definitions of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (April 1962): 183–200. 20. Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York, 1973), 115. Walker03notes.indd 102 Walker03notes.indd 102 10/24/08 11:40:41 AM 10/24/08 11:40:41 AM Notes to Pages 7–13 | 103 21. “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings...