As I explained in class, by next Monday March 29, please read Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and Jefferson's writings on race and slavery. Then prepare yourself for a little debate. Students with last names beginning with A-L should prepare to take the "guilty" side of the question, last names M-Z the "not guilty." The graduate students can be the jury and ask questions and help decide the penalty if the verdict is guilty.
Students are free to organize themselves and appoint spokespeople, or I will just call on people. Students who are more comfortable with writing or can't come to class can answer in the comment thread below.
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9 comments:
If we're trying to prove Jefferson's guilt beyond the normal "reasonable doubt" caveat, it seems to me that the criteria has not been met. Yes, the evidence is overwhelmingly on the side of guilty, but the ideas presented are hardly foolproof. I am most skeptical of the idea that Hemmings's children "looked like Jefferson." As stated in class, this is a very subjective way of judging lineage and there were a number of Jeffersons that could have produced look-alike offspring. Additionally, if any of the Jefferson family besides Thomas did conceive (a) child(ren) with Hemmings, the same Y chromosome would have been passed on to the child(ren) as would have been passed on through Thomas Jefferson. It is hard to argue with any of the circumstantial evidence, but the fact remains that there is no proof of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemmings, leaving more than a reasonable doubt of his guilt.
I have to say that after hearing all the arguments in class, I am surprised to admit that I was persuaded that there may be reasonable doubt that Jefferson is not the father. Of course, I was assigned the “guilty” side, which I originally believed anyways. However, after hearing “evidence,” it seems that Jefferson may not be the father to Sally Hemings children. The argument that convinced me was that Hemings children could be from any Jefferson relative & just because the children may resemble him does not mean that Jefferson is the father. I also know of a case where my friend’s brother looks just like her, even though he was adopted from Russia. The fact that Sally Hemings is the half sister of Jefferson’s wife could explain why he gave her such preferential treatment (who knows… maybe it was his wife’s dying wish)! On the other hand, Jefferson did shield them from the normal “slave” reality, which obviously meant that he went out of his way to do this. It seems that Jefferson’s ambivalence towards slaves could be due to his relationship with Sally Hemings too. Maybe he was a racist & after getting to know her (and maybe loving her), he changed his ideas about slavery. I am not sure when he made his first racists statement compared to his “alleged relationship with her,” but it could be a conspiracy theory! Overall, what I’m saying is that my opinion changed from being SURE he was guilty to having some reasonable doubt that he might not be… so good job on the “not guilty side.” However, I think I would have to vote that he was guilty and that his relationship with Sally Hemings was due to him missing his wife and the fact that marrying / falling in love with her sister after her death would not be very unusual for the time period that we are looking at.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
When arguing for the innocence of Thomas Jefferson one need look no further than Madison Hemings. All you have to do is look at what Madison had to gain by creating this myth. If he told people that he, a former black slave, was the son of Thomas Jefferson it would make white people reconsider their thoughts on race. He was intelligent and well manored, as was his brother Eston (who is also suppossed to be descended from Jefferson). He wanted to show people that blacks were equal in every shape, way, and form to their white counterparts. Jefferson was also probably the most famous and well respected Virginian of all time. If he fathered children with a black women and then granted that women and their children freedom it would look as if Jefferson was compassionate to the black race. This could be used by abolitionist and early equal rights activists. This myth could go a long way in transfoming the racist ideals still very engrained in Southern culture at this time.
I was thinking of today’s discussion of punishment for Thomas Jefferson’s conduct with Sally Hemings. Our jury found him guilty based on DNA evidence, circumstantial evidence, and witness testimony. There are three ways to go about punishing him.
One is to base his punishment on the laws at the time. Two clauses of the US Constitution prohibit ex post facto laws: Art 1 § 9 and Art 1, § 10. This means that he is not subject to any laws made after the crime was committed. In that scenario, he should not be punished at all, because what he did was perfectly legal at the time.
Another way is to punish him based on the laws of today. By today’s laws, sex with a slave cannot be seen as anything other than coerced sex, whether Ms Hemings seemed to consent or not, because the entire nature of the master/slave relationship is one of coercion. Sex by coercion is rape. If there is anything that our modern legal system takes seriously, it is sex crimes. Politicians routinely fall over each other trying to increase the penalties on sex offenders. By today’s laws, Jefferson would probably be imprisoned, and would be registered as a sex offender for life. His future neighbors would be notified of his sex offender status. Because he is dead, he cannot be imprisoned. But he does have a sort of official residence: the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC. By today’s standards, it would be appropriate to permanently engrave “SEX OFFENDER” on the Jefferson Memorial. To do this would require legislative action. In today’s polarized political climate, the only way a piece of legislation like that could get through is if politicians saw that opinion polls favored it, and they thought they could use it for political advantage. To sway opinion, there would have to be a concerted effort on the part of the media to build up moral outrage among various interest groups. The religious right could be sold on the sexual depravity of the former president, feminists on his misogynistic tendencies, minorities on the racist element, etc. Use the word “rape” enough and it might just get the job done. But that raises philosophical questions about the changing nature of morality over time. Students laugh when they enter Pickard Hall on the MU Quad and see that all of the penises have been broken off of the classical statues. When it was done, it may have been deemed a moral necessity. Now it seems puritanical and absurd. Would future generations view the engraving of “SEX OFFENDER” on the Jefferson Memorial in a similar light?
The third way to look at this is as a sort of mental exercise, not grounded in any legal basis, and outside of the confounds of the morality of today or of the early nineteenth century, but given a special morality of its own. Not fully excuse his actions because they were decorous behavior to the time, but not bringing the full moral indignation of the present. We can ambiguously say “Shame on you Mr. Jefferson,” and leave it at that. As to his other accomplishments, they are irrelevant to this discussion. They were works of the mind, not of the flesh. By all accounts, his intellectual achievements were exemplary. His personal conduct was not.
As a “jurist” I am responding to the previous posts. From my perspective, this was neither a criminal nor a Constitutional issue, but rather a historiographical issue. Gordon-Reed needs to be read with one eye on past scholarship that mistreated the issue of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison. As I proposed in class this morning, it should be noted how Jefferson scholars, writing in an age of historical consensus, misled readers by asserting “their” Jefferson could not commit such an atrocious act as miscegenation. By going back and re-examining the evidence objectively, Gordon-Reed accomplishes two things (amongst others): 1.) she is presenting a reasoned case that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship may have occurred and 2.) she is harshly criticizing scholars such as Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, Noble Cunningham, Andrew Burstein, Winthrop Jordan, John Chester Miller, and the irrepressible Virginius Dabney (a journalist related to Jefferson, no-less) for continually perpetuating the notion that “their” beloved Jefferson could stoop so low as to prowl around Mulberry Row looking for sexual gratification.
It is important to understand that this book marked a turning point in the historiography of Jefferson studies. It shook the very foundation of the field, forcing scholars to question the closely-guarded orthodoxy that Jefferson—whether through his own racial biases, his benign mastery of Monticello, or a lack of sexual desire—had a prolonged affair with a slave mistress that produced several children. This work presents a logical attempt to examine the extant historiography on Jefferson’s life through a disinterested observation. Gordon-Reed maintains that most biographers, historians, and journalists study Jefferson with pre-conceived notions and prejudices relating to the Hemings affair, and as a consequence, do not discuss the lives of Sally Hemings and her children, thereby perpetuating a historical fallacy.
Gordon-Reed is not afraid to criticize the scions of Jeffersonian studies, namely Malone and Peterson—both of whom held the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professorship at the University of Virginia. She does so because both Malone and Peterson categorically denied the assertion that Jefferson fathered children with a slave mistress, with Peterson viewing it as a ploy by Federalists to sully the character of Jefferson (he also saw some motivation by abolitionists to discredit the institution of slavery), whereas Malone’s “rejection of the story has been pivotal to maintaining the consensus” (Gordon-Reed, 3). Indeed, Malone labored for forty years to complete his six-volume biography of Jefferson, and because of its meticulous attention to every minute detail of the Master of Monticello’s life, it is rightly referred to as the definitive biography. Malone, however, mentioned Sally on only SEVEN pages in his 3,326 page biography, and he only discussed the Hemings family on four. Thus, it is safe to say that Hemings was a non-entity for the two former UVA Professors, especially Malone.
Thus, the purpose of Gordon-Reed’s study was not a systematic re-reading of Thomas Jefferson’s life, his writings on slavery (as Douglas R. Egerton caustically suggests in his review), or to “convict” him based on twenty-first century laws and social norms not yet devised, but rather to demonstrate a true “historical fallacy”: the mangling by scholars of the Jefferson-Hemings affair, Sally’s life, and the life of her children. Gordon-Reed succeeded admirably in that endeavor, and her book became the definitive treatment on the subject, as well as the first (and often only) work referred to by historians writing about Jefferson, post-DNA. She has demonstrated that historians who claim to be objectively examining their subject do not always uphold the “objectivist creed” in that they strove to protect “their” Jefferson, because the Jefferson “they” knew so intimately possessed neither the capacity nor the desire to engage in a nearly four decade-long sexual relationship with his “property.” They were protecting a man they admired; a man they had spent their entire careers studying, and the man they knew did not father children with Sally Hemings, and such a ludicrous claim, according to Cunningham, “belongs in a work of fiction, not of history” (Cunningham, IN THE PURSUIT OF REASON, 116). This is indeed, a historical fallacy.
It cannot be said, however, that Gordon-Reed has rendered the work by Malone, Peterson, or Cunningham entirely obsolete. Their scholarship on Jefferson's career will remain relevant for some time. Gordon-Reed has, however, made Dabney’s bitter diatribe useless, forever relegating his nasty vituperations to dwell on the dusty shelves of used book shops, which is exactly where I found my copy. Thus scholars, as a result of Gordon-Reed’s study, were forced to recognize the “plausibility” as opposed to the “possibility” of a Jefferson-Hemings affair, and one may assert on the basis of her argument—independent of the DNA evidence—that the "old orthodoxy” of Tommy and Sally has been forced to revel in the obscurity of the historical underworld.
This post is in response to David Melies. I am a bit puzzled as to your intent when discussing Madison Hemings. You asserted that “when arguing for the innocence of Thomas Jefferson” we should examine Madison’s narrative and what he “had to gain by creating this myth.” Are you referring to the “myth” of the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, or are you referring to the scholarly assertion that S.F. Wetmore intended to use this particular slave narrative in order to smear the former slave-holding South? Further, what do you mean by writing that “this myth could go a long way in transforming the racist ideals still very engrained in Southern culture at this time”? Clarification would be greatly appreciated.
Now, here is my rebuttal. Gordon-Reed, by objectively examining Madison Hemings statement to S.F. Wetmore, restored a tremendous amount of agency to not only his story about his mother’s relationship with Jefferson, but to the genre of slave narratives. In many ways, this book is Madison’s story, and what he had to say has finally been given a more objective treatment by an author, which is quite a departure, since his statement has been summarily disavowed by Jefferson scholars as a fabrication of a former abolitionist journalist out to vilify the South. Moreover, Gordon-Reed considers it “incorrect” to treat the oral history of the Randolphs and the Carrs as “being of more value” than Madison Hemings’s statement (Gordon-Reed, 103). Indeed, she considers the scholarly acceptance of the Randolphs and Carrs oral history to be an issue of “black against white,” under circumstances in which “whites for the most part have controlled the assemblage and dissemination of information,” for “this way of proceeding is not designed to help reach a better understanding of the truth; it is, instead, designed to protect a particular image of the truth” (Gordon-Reed, 103).
In this instance, Gordon-Reed is absolutely correct: it is objectionable for scholars to accept—at face value—the accuracy of a statement based solely on its source, all while denying the veracity of another simply because the subject in question is a former slave. “Hemings’s statement,” according to the author, cannot “be portrayed as the outlandish tale that Jefferson defenders and other commentators would have the American public belief” (Gordon-Reed, 58). Indeed, she asserts that “it is time to lay to rest the allegation that an individual who had been involved with the abolitionist movement either invented the notion that Madison Hemings was the son of Thomas Jefferson or put Madison Hemings up to saying that he was,” writing that this “dubious” myth “can now be established as having no historical validity” (Gordon-Reed, 211).
Steve- Yes, I understand that Gordon-Reed's book was historiographical in nature. I was discussing Professor Pasley's hypothetical "punishment" for our class's "conviction" of Jefferson. I think you are correct that Gordon-Reed exposed a glaring historical fallacy in the Jeffersonian narritive. The argument she builds is persuasive, and unlike Professor Pasley, I think the DNA evidence is the "clincher." It does not directly tie the Hemings line to Thomas Jefferson himself, but it does link them to his family’s DNA, and it rules out the Carr family. There is no evidence linking any other Jefferson’s brother Randolph or Randolph’s sons, or any other member of Jefferson’s family. But there is plenty of evidence linking Thomas Jefferson to Sally Hemings. There will always be those who will defend Jefferson and cling to any “reasonable doubt” possible, but science as eliminated some of the more credible alternative theories. As you said, much of this comes from racial biases and unrealistic lionizing of Jefferson’s character.
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