Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings Relationship

• Date: 01 September 2013
• DOI: 10.1177/1065912912453519
• Published date: 01 September 2013
• Author: Fred Lee
• Subject Matter: Articles

453519PRQXXX10.1177/1065912912453
519Political Research Quarterly XX(X)Lee
Regular Article
Political Research Quarterly
66(3) 500 –515
Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings
© 2012 University of Utah
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Relationship: Nationalist Historiography
DOI: 10.1177/1065912912453519
prq.sagepub.com
without Nationalist Heroes, Racial
Sexuality without Racial Significance
Fred Lee1
Abstract
This essay examines how two Jefferson biographies represented the Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings relationship in
the post–civil rights movement era: Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson (1974), a controversial publication that claimed
that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other, and Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx (1996), one of the last mainstream
biographies to deny that they had any children together. The story in both cases serves as an allegory of founding
authority and national membership. The author finds that Ellis and Brodie characterize Jefferson as a fallible founder to
affirm that founding ideals can accommodate and overcome racial differences and injustices.
Keywords
founding, historiography, race, Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson
Here, the incipient scientific racism of Thomas Jefferson’s
Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence,
Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) emerges as at least
with his plantations and slaves” (Gordon-Reed 1997,
as important as the nonracial, revolutionary lines he
125). While all but seventy-eight of the four hundred
authored in 1776. . . . The two Jeffersons suggest a com-
audience member jurors agreed on the verdict of “not
plicated history of interdependence between race and
guilty,” the very enactment of this mock trial speaks to
nation, racism and nationalism as ways of imagining kin-
very real contemporary concerns.2 The framing of the
ship, community, economic activity, and political society.
charges, which Gordon-Reed argues took hypocrisy for
granted, exemplifies how judgments of Jefferson in our
—Nikhil Pal Singh (2004)
times have put this founder’s authority under exacting
In fact, historians begin from present determinations.
racial scrutiny. Nowhere is this trend more evident than
Currents events are their real beginning.
in those academic and popular representations of
Jefferson the slave master that center on Sally Hemings,
—Michel de Certeau (1988)
the oft-reputed “slave mistress” of Monticello.
There is a broad consensus among scholars that the
Introduction: Racial Revisions of
story of Jefferson and Hemings is a politicized site of
Revolutionary Narratives
remembrance, one that I contend stands for the inter-
twined legacies of republican founding and racial slav-
In October 1994, the Association of the Bar of the City of
ery. A testament to the central role founders play in
New York held a mock trial of Thomas Jefferson before
American memory is that historians, legal scholars,
an audience of lawyers, historians, and judges.1 As
Annette Gordon-Reed observed from the audience, the
issue to be decided “was whether examples of hypocrisy
1The University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
in Jefferson’s life significantly diminished his contribu-
Corresponding Author:
tions to American society.” Charles Ogletree and Drew
Fred Lee, Department of Political Science, The University of
Days, two African American attorneys, argued on behalf
Connecticut, 365 Fairfield Way, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.
of the prosecution and defense: “Each talked about
Email: fred.lee@uconn.edu

---

Lee
501
cultural theorists, and literary critics are still debating the
nationalisms (see Adeleke 1994). Still, post-hagiographic
political significance of their relationship today. Clarence
biographies assumed that the nation is essentially “good,”
Walker (2009, 29), for example, contends that the United
a fiction that gave rise to the privatized problem of “char-
States, a “mongrel” nation, “should recognize Sally and
acter” in the first place. The representation of nationalist
Thomas as its founding parents” because the norm of
histories without nationalist heroes is the first paradox
amalgamation in the New World belies the myth of white
characteristic of those accounts of the Hemings–Jefferson
American origins. Gordon-Reed (2008, 325), for her
relationship that I explore.
part, recenters the Jefferson story on Sally, James, and
Renewed interest in Jefferson’s involvement with
other Hemingses to investigate the foundations of Hemings arose against the backdrop of a critical reex-
“American consciousness” in slavery and other institu-
amination of America’s involvement with slavery (see
tions of white domination. These critical countermemo-
Jordan 1968; Genovese 1974; Davis 1975).3 This is not
ries of the founding period contest the optimistic claim
to say that the question of Hemings received an adequate
that a “postracial” United States has left behind its racial
response. Post–civil rights era biographers could mar-
preoccupations. In the post–civil rights era politics of
ginalize race when discussing Hemings’s and Jefferson’s
history, Walker and Gordon-Reed challenge a prominent
genders and sexualities and, what is more, could even
raced and gendered allegory of sole agents and singular
declare irrelevant the racial differences between the two.
origins: the notion that the (white male) fathers, acting as
Instead of using “color-blind” rhetoric to articulate racial
the exclusive agents of the revolutionary process, gave
views problematized after the official repudiation of rac-
birth to the nation in an unrepeatable act of foundation.
ism (Bonilla-Silva 2006, 55), Jefferson scholars did
Historical imaginations from the past half century
something not as fully analyzed by critical race theorists—
have turned toward questions of whether and how to rep-
they used openly racial rhetoric to portray the Hemings–
resent the past as racial, continuing a venerable national
Jefferson relationship as a “color-blind” one. In this
tradition of confronting and more often evading prob-
essay, I demonstrate that race-blind representations of
lems of racial recollection. Enacted in public rituals,
Jefferson and Hemings’s relationship are of a piece with
monuments, popular associations, and literary fictions, a
nationalist narratives that solicit identifications from
whitewashed remembrance of the civil war promoted
their audiences with a redeemed founding. The represen-
interregional reconciliation by forgetting emancipation
tation of racial sexuality as devoid of racial significance
as a meaning of the struggle, declaring northern and
is the second paradox characteristic of the two biogra-
southern causes to be equally just, and erasing African
phies I closely read.
American agency (Blight 2001). This “master narrative”
The first is Fawn Brodie’s (1974) Thomas Jefferson:
corresponded to the policies that ameliorated postbellum
An Intimate History, the best-selling psychoanalytic case
regional animosities by reunifying and nationalizing the
history that contended that Jefferson and Hemings loved
polity on the basis of black exclusions (Marx 1998, 144).
each other for almost four decades. Based on the oral
Late-nineteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century sto-
testimony of Madison Hemings, Sally’s son, Brodie’s
ries of northern against southern brothers, like contem-
version of the story remains the template for most schol-
poraneous stories of the revolutionary band of brothers
ars who accept that Hemings and Jefferson had several
who became founding fathers, remembered the nation in
children together.4 Contemporaneous Jefferson scholars
ways that represented its members, past and present, as
ridiculed Brodie, ostensibly for deploying Freudian
already and naturally “white.”
reading strategies and blurring what she considered an
Recent criticisms of racially exclusive stories of sin-
artificial boundary between private and public life.
gular national origin are, in part, informed by 1960s to
Moreover, this was a case of a white woman taking the
1970s racial movement activisms’ extension of political
side of a black man to argue that “a group of white males
contest into the terrain of everyday life (Omi and Winant
did not know what they were talking about” (Gordon-
1994, 96). Such cultural and political shifts invite us to
Reed 1999, 239). No doubt, the hostile reception Brodie
reimagine the U.S. “constitution”—in the expansive
received within scholarly circles was also the result of
sense of unspoken norms and informal membership—as
the limited interpretive frameworks of “traditional” bio-
multiple in its foundations (Allen 2004, 6-7). A sure sign
graphical researchers and their institutional supports
of the civil rights movement’s status as a refoundational
(Brandwein 2006, 235). More interesting, though, is the
moment is the critical pressure exerted on founding fig-
warmer reception she received from the broader reading
ures that followed in its wake. In explaining how Jefferson
public, which—after the race-based mass protests and
could live with and off of slavery, post–civil rights era
civil disorders of the late 1960s and early 1970s—proved
biographers provided intricate, ambivalent portraits of
ready to accept the redemptive message of Brodie’s trag-
Jefferson in lieu of the simplified, unequivocal hagiogra-
edy. Brodie relies on color-blind love to make repara-
phies that...