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Yvettep
Veteran Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 1679
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 11:42 am: | 
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Excerpts only. A longish piece, but worth a read: http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/02/21/mclemee
Ten years ago, the University of Virginia Press issued what turned out to be a very well-timed book , Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at New York University. In late 1998 came the results of a DNA test showing a match between descendants of Hemings and of Jefferson — corroborating the story (first put in the public record by an anti-Jeffersonian journalist in 1802) that the author of the Declaration of Independence had sired a number of children by one of his slaves. One part of the “American controversy” referred to in Gordon-Reed’s subtitle was over.
But not all of it was. The real subject of the book was not the question of whether Jefferson and Hemings had (as the preferred expression nowadays would call it) a relationship. Rather, Gordon-Reed’s attention was focused on how historians had, over the years, gone about weighing the evidence, one way or the other. She argued that they often seemed prone to examining the record with a certain implicit syllogism in mind: “No decent white person could be involved in an affair with a black slave. Jefferson was a decent white person. Therefore, Jefferson could not have been involved with a black slave.”
...In short, statements from African-American sources were treated by Jefferson scholars as somehow intrinsically unreliable – a point made especially clear in the case of Merrill Peterson’s book The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Oxford University Press, 1960). One source of the claim that Jefferson had fathered children with one of his slaves was, he wrote, “the Negroes’ pathetic wish for a little pride and their subtle ways of confounding the white folks.”
And so for decades the majority of Jefferson scholars demonstrated their staunch refusal to be taken in by subtle Negroes...
...“In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era” by Mia Bay, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, examines some of the recent scholarship only to find that Hemings “is rarely considered in light of what we know about the history of slavery – and experiences of slave women in particular.” In consequence, “a new but still profoundly ahistorical Hemings figures prominently in several recent works on Jefferson.” What ends to disappear from some accounts “is nothing short of her status as a slave.”
“Hemings is largely a cipher,” notes Bay, “a blank slate on which any story can be written.” We have no documents by her. (In this regard it bears quoting Israel Jefferson, the butler at Monticello. He recalled the president telling General Lafayette that, yes, it might be convenient to have some slaves who could read, but “to teach them to write would enable them to forge papers, when they could no longer be kept in subjugation.”)
...“Her life falls between social and political historiographies,” writes Bay in her essay, “two literatures rarely in dialogue with each other.” And in this twilight zone, it seems, some writers are imagining all kinds of stories in which Sally Hemings – legally defined in her own lifetime as a piece of property – enjoyed subtle power and definite agency.
The most jaw-dropping instance Bay cites is E.M. Halliday’s book Understanding Thomas Jefferson, (HarperCollins, 2001). Pointing out that Sally Hemings’s mother, Betty, had enjoyed a certain degree of upward mobility through sexual relations with John Wayles (that is, with Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law), Halliday speculates that “it is hard to believe that Betty Hemings failed to give her lively, pretty daughter advice on how to behave toward Master Jefferson upon entering his household.” With a teenage girl training her seductive arts on him, the poor widower never had a chance, Halliday argued.
Considerably less risible is Joshua D. Rothman’s Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Historians have given it acclaim as a subtle analysis of how the reality and ubiquity of interracial sexual liaisons were dealt with by an antebellum culture that officially forbade them.
As Bay sees it, however, Rothman’s chapter on Jefferson and Hemings is just a little too subtle about “the admixture of consent and coercion at play in their liaison.” The idea that a teenage slave girl had any consent to give in a sexual relationship with her master is perhaps taking voluntarism too far. “Sally did not have to return to Virginia with Jefferson at all,” according to Rothman, since “she surely could have gained emancipation with a small amount of effort.”
That she didn’t – that, instead, she returned to Monticello and remained in an intimate relationship with Jefferson that lasted for decades – certainly suggests a complicated arrangement. But not one in which the girl had any autonomy, however much we may want to give her agency ex post facto.
“What other options did Hemings actually have?” asks Bay. “She had no property, had just begun to master French, and had less then two years experience as a lady’s maid. No evidence suggests she could read or write....A lawsuit would have been a daunting prospect for her, as would have been the prospect of living on her own in France.”
The latter would also have meant being cut off from her family. Bay complains that Jefferson scholars have largely ignored both “Hemings’s ties to a vast network of blood relatives and the issue of what that network might mean to her given the status accorded to kinship among enslaved African-Americans.” What is emphasized instead are Heming’s white blood ties: “Now that Hemings is a historical figure,” writes Bay, “she seems to be changing color.”
...Bay ends her essay with a quotation from Jefferson that is, on the whole, as balanced and incisive as any comment on the topic could be. It appears in Notes on the State of Virginia, and was published around the time Sally Hemings was bearing their first baby. “The whole commerce between master and slave,” he wrote, “is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions and the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other,” he wrote. “Our children see this and learn to imitate it....The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”
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Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 8506
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 12:08 pm: |
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It never ceases to amaze me how deluded White foks are about themselves, ESPECIALLY with respect to those who they consider great like Thomas Jefferson. |
Yvettep
Veteran Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 1684
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 12:35 pm: |
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ABM: As Arsenio would have said: It's just one of those things that make you go "Hmmmm..." LOL |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3691
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 01:15 pm: |
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It never ceases to amaze me how deluded White foks are about themselves, ESPECIALLY with respect to those who they consider great like Thomas Jefferson.
(They aren't deluded.
They know all this stuff.
They'll be damned before they admit it to Negroes, though) |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 8514
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 01:18 pm: |
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Chris,
Well. I would agree that SOME White foks know the truth. And they're largely the one's who run every dayam thing.
But MOST White foks are clueless and are mostly riding the coattails of the few who actually know better. |
Chrishayden
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Chrishayden
Post Number: 3695
Registered: 03-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 01:28 pm: |
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But MOST White foks are clueless and are mostly riding the coattails of the few who actually know better
(That is letting them off the hook. They know. They just ain't letting any Negroes get the ups on them by admitting it.
It is all about who got the ups.) |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 8518
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 01:42 pm: |
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Chris,
You give White foks too much credit. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7406
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 01:50 pm: |
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Thomas Jefferson was a flawed man. As evidenced by the statement quoted, he was a living example of the "spirit being willing, but the flesh weak." Why are the Jefferson-surname black folks so eager to trace their lineage to him? Maybe because he was also a great man. |
Yukio
Veteran Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1876
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 02:52 pm: |
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I'm sure, that is a part of it cynique. But I think their claiming his lineage can also be seen as a living testimony of the contradiction that the U.S. represents, that is the dual emergence of slavery and freedom in the what we call the "united states." |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7411
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 02:58 pm: |
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Yes, Sally Hemmings is a paragon, a representation of every black slave woman who submitted to her white slave master. Every black American is a reminder of this travesty, and its the unacknowledged shame of this nation. |
Yukio
Veteran Poster
Username: Yukio
Post Number: 1877
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 04:30 pm: |
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Cynique: submit is not the word! |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7416
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 04:58 pm: |
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Well, Yukio, submitting is about "yielding to the force and power of others". I guess it depends on where a female slave ranked in the pecking order. Some of the house servants may have willingly submitted to their masters and the ones back in the slave quarters may have had no choice but to submit. According the article Sally was something of a "vamp" so maybe she had no problem with being submissive. |
Yvettep
Veteran Poster
Username: Yvettep
Post Number: 1689
Registered: 01-2005
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 05:31 pm: |
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According the article Sally was something of a "vamp" so maybe she had no problem with being submissive.
No--Actually, it may have not been clear because of my cuts--but this is one of the points of argument: Between those scholars who would have her be a "vamp" and those who say this is wishful thinking on the part of folks who do not want to acknowledge the vast power differential between a teen-aged, female, owned person separated from her family on one hand and TJ on the other. |
Cynique
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Cynique
Post Number: 7419
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 06:24 pm: |
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Are there others who speculate that over a period of time and after a bunch of kids that Sally was a willing consort to her master? |
Urban_scribe
AALBC .com Platinum Poster
Username: Urban_scribe
Post Number: 367
Registered: 05-2006
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - 06:48 pm: |
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Read Clotel or The President's Daughter by William Wells Brown. This is a novel based on the Hemings/Jefferson fiasco. However, the first 50 pages are factual supported by documentation. After that point, Wells Brown gives his spin on events. This novel is in the public domain and, if your eyes can stand it, can be read in its entirety on the internet. If not, you can order the paperback on amazon. |
Abm
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Abm
Post Number: 8530
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 10:37 am: |
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It's difficult for any of us to get into the mind of Sally Hemmings. Obviously she was a slave, so her ability to wholly consent to much of ANYTHING was quite circumscribed.
But Thomas Jefferson is arguably the creator of the United States. He was an immensely important, famous man. He was vastly intelligent and stately. Most depictions of him suggest that he was probably better looking than your average White male slave owner.
And most accounts of Jefferson's and Hemming's relationship suggest that he probably treated her better than how MOST slaves were treated at that time.
So given what I can only assume to be the particulars of them and their dealings, I think it's POSSIBLE that Sally Hemmings at some point, perhaps only briefly, felt that Jefferson loved her and that she loved him. |
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