Review: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, by Annette Gordon-Reed

Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy
by Annette Gordon-Reed
University of Virginia Press, 1997

Gordon-Reed makes explicit at the beginning of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings that she is not trying to prove that they had a sexual relationship. The book was released a year before the DNA test results that convinced even many skeptics of the idea, and at the time Gordon-Reed was writing there were few, at least in academic circles, that believed that Jefferson could have fathered Hemings’s children.

Despite this, however, Gordon-Reed makes a strong case for the plausibility of the relationship. She focuses primarily on inspecting what previous Jefferson historians have said on the subject, the evidence they’ve used, and the methods by which they’ve come to their near-universal conclusion that the relationship was in no way possible—and finds them on all counts severely lacking. In a methodical style that’s saved from tedium by her dry, often cutting wit, Gordon-Reed examines the way the discussion of Jefferson and Hemings had progressed through the years, pointing out the ways in which the evidence has been twisted by historians to defend Jefferson against the charge of miscegenation.

Take for example one of the most astute and convincing portions of the book, the discussion of the memoirs of Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son, and of the statements of Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson. Gordon-Reed demonstrates that the way historians have framed these two pieces of evidence—Hemings’s statement that Jefferson was his father, Randolph’s statement that Jefferson was not—is both blatantly racist and, because of this, just as blatantly inaccurate. Historians have characterized Madison Hemings negatively to establish him as an unreliable narrator, while at the same time implying Randolph is a trustworthy and reliable source.

Gordon-Reed demonstrates, however, that many of Hemings’s statements can be corroborated by other sources (and Hemings’s descriptions of Monticello are in fact used by historians as trustworthy descriptions of what life was like there), while Randolph’s statements are at their heart not factually true. (Randolph claims that his mother, Martha Jefferson Randolph, told him that Jefferson could not have fathered Sally Hemings’s children because he was not at Monticello when they would’ve been conceived. Thanks to Jefferson scholar Dumas Malone’s exhaustive timeline of Jefferson’s whereabouts during most of his adult life, we know that Jefferson was in fact at Monticello nine months before each of Hemings’s children was born.) “It is a strange turn of events,” Gordon-Reed says dryly, “when individuals who held other human beings in bondage are given presumptive moral superiority over their captives.”

It is in this kind of textual and historiographic analysis that the book is strongest. However, the nature of the discussion, especially at the time the book was written, necessitates quite a bit of speculation. In this speculation the arguments Gordon-Reed puts forward become less convincing, relying largely on broad statements and assumptions.

Gordon-Reed’s treatment of Sally Hemings throughout the book is nuanced, sensitive, and humanizing—all things, as she demonstrates sometimes painfully, that had been lacking in depictions of Hemings up to that point. Gathering together contemporary descriptions and extrapolating from what sources we have (here, it should be noted, her extrapolations ring consistently true), Gordon-Reed manages, if not a portrait, a description of Hemings that flies in the face of persistent stereotypes of her used by historians. Though not a biography (that would come later, in her Pulitzer-winning The Hemingses of Monticello), Gordon-Reed nonetheless grants humanity to Hemings and her children in a way that had been—and continues to be—sorely lacking among historians.

There are few other women who feature or even cameo in the book. Harriet Hemings, Sally’s daughter, is sketched briefly. Martha Jefferson Randolph—Jefferson’s daughter and T.J. Randolph’s mother—plays an understandably unsympathetic role, but even then Gordon-Reed resists applying openly derogatory adjectives to her, letting her words (she is the one who told her son that Jefferson couldn’t possibly be the Hemings children’s father) speak for themselves.

However, when it comes to Maria Cosway—a woman Jefferson had a brief if unconsummated dalliance with in Paris—that the adjectives begin to make an appearance. Though she presents historians’ often as she says “hostile” descriptions of Cosway without condoning them, it is in her interest to make Cosway—whom she is discussing because of the way she’s pitted against Sally Hemings by historians—look at the very least not as good as the historians making the comparison would have her seem. (Playing on historian Douglass Adair’s rather cringeworthy description of Cosway as “delectable,” Gordon-Reed comments, after a laundry-list of Cosway’s supposed sins, “Delectable? That depends upon one’s taste.”)

Gordon-Reed’s point—that Cosway, a white woman, has been treated better by historians than Hemings—is indisputable, and well-taken. Historians’ characterization of Cosway can best be termed “unfortunate”; their characterizations of Hemings—when they treat her as a person at all—are much more than that, backed by deep and systematic racism. Gordon-Reed’s treatment of Cosway, however, while in service of a greater and ultimately more important point, can alas be included in the aforementioned “unfortunate” category.

Though by now inescapably dated by the subsequent DNA evidence, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings should remain an important touchstone in the conversation surrounding the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, not least of all for its ability to present a convincing case (whatever its intent) for the truth of the relationship. It is not dated at all, however, in its examination of previous Jefferson historians, and it stands as an important work of historiography. Its astute and often devastating analysis of historians’ bigotry, and the direct line it draws between that bigotry and their flawed—by any measure—depiction of history, remains continuingly relevant.