Racism and the Craft of History

Documenting sex in history is a tenuous enterprise. When Winthrop D. Jordan asserted his doubt that Thomas Jefferson had had sexual intercourse with the married Maria Cosway, he pointed out that “An almost equally persuasive case could be made that Jefferson was masturbating during the Cosway affair.” Jordan also, however, felt the question to be of no import. ¹ Indeed, does it matter whether Thomas Jefferson had sex after the death of his wife, either with Maria Cosway, or with his slave Sally Hemings? Scholars differ on this point, but in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Annette Gordon-Reed moves the debate about Hemings beyond the fact of the liaison to examine the racism that has plagued historical method in writings about Hemings and Jefferson—racism that has persisted despite the historiographical revolutions in the study of slavery over the last thirty years. In this compelling work, the author focuses closely on “the way the story has been discussed, particularly by those who deny it” (p. xiii).

As a Harvard-educated lawyer and professor of law, Gordon-Reed’s central accusation concerns the inconsistent assessment of evidence on the part of Jefferson’s biographers. First and foremost, this is a book about the craft of history, and to prove the Hemings-Jefferson liaison false at some later date would not discredit the arguments in these pages. As long as we inhabit the realm of documents rather than DNA, this study matters profoundly for the historical profession.

A number of essential facts about Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson are not in dispute. 1) Jefferson’s father-in-law had a liaison with one of his slaves and the nearly-white Sally Hemings was among their children, thus making Hemings the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. 2) When Jefferson was minister to France between 1784 and 1789, the young Sally Hemings was sent to Paris to serve Jefferson’s daughter. 3) Two of Sally Hemings’s children ran away from Monticello, and the other two were freed by Jefferson’s will. Jefferson did not mention Sally Hemings in his will, but soon after his death in 1826, she became free as well.

Alongside the question of what came to pass between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson stand two other, more readily ascertainable, sets of facts: the documentation of the Hemings-Jefferson story, and the treatment of that story by scholars. Only a few primary sources address the issue with any directness. 1) In 1802, after President Jefferson declined to appoint James Callender postmaster at Richmond, the notorious Callender took revenge by publishing allegations about a liaison with Sally Hemings. 2) In 1858, Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, wrote to her husband stating that her brother, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, believed that the father of Sally Hemings’s children was Samuel Carr, Jefferson’s nephew. 3) In his 1862 dictated memoir, Jefferson’s loyal Monticello overseer, Edmund Bacon, stated that he had witnessed a man other than Thomas Jefferson emerging from Sally Hemings’s room on many occasions. 4) In 1868, Jefferson biographer Henry S. Randall wrote to historian James Parton recounting an 1850s conversation with Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, in which Randolph stated that Peter Carr (the brother of Samuel) was the father of Sally Hemings’s children. 5) In two memoirs published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, Sally Hemings’s son, Madison Hemings, identified Thomas Jefferson as his father; another Monticello slave, Israel Jefferson, remembered Hemings as Thomas Jefferson’s “concubine.”

As for the treatment of the story, biographers through the late twentieth century largely dismissed the possibility that Thomas Jefferson could have engaged in such an exploitive act. Then in 1974, UCLA historian Fawn M. Brodie devoted a chapter of her Jefferson biography to delineating a loving, thirty-eight-year relationship between Hemings and Jefferson. ² The best-selling book was immediately maligned by others in the...