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Gordon-Reed Tackles the Head and Heart [AGR 122-27]
Greg Jakes
[1] The "Head vs. Heart" struggle is a dilemma nearly everyone faces. Even the great Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrestled with the issue directly in his letters with Maria Cosway, in which he explicitly details a verbal argument between his head and his heart. A well accepted fact is that Jefferson was very cognitive, as evident by his endeavors as an inventor, scientist, and painstaking record-keeper, seemingly proving that this man would surely side with his head on every matter. This has been a primary argument against how he could have had an affair with a lowly slave girl while considering the dire ramification on his political and professional careers. A thoughtful, calculating man such as Jefferson would never consider such an atrocity. Annette Gordon-Reed challenges this argument directly, though, in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (122-27). She presents Jefferson's defenders' assertions one by one and cites such weaknesses inherent in each as the lack of documentation and the tenuous nature of their arguments. To help push her own claims, she assumes that the affair was a true event, leaving her reasoning surprisingly strong in most places but weak in others, and definitely opening it up to further analysis by the reader.
[2] Gordon-Reed starts by pointing out the trouble in using Jefferson's "Head and Heart" letter to infer his thought processes in other situations, such as the affair with Sally Hemings. The letter explicitly involves Jefferson and Maria Cosway--no one else. Therefore, Gordon-Reed contends that just because his mind overrules his heart in this example, it doesn't mean that the struggle always results in that outcome. However, scholarly Jefferson defenders do make that leap from his letter to the Sally Hemings relationship, even though it is a flawed idea. Gordon-Reed argues that in order to understand the motives behind one of Jefferson's actions, one must traverse the "difficult mental terrain" and know exactly what Jefferson knew and considered at the time of each decision. Another question she raises is how to distinguish the difference between the head and the heart. Does Jefferson or the historian determine the difference? What if there's some overlap? Gordon-Reed states that Jefferson most likely used a combination of head and heart when dealing with the Hemings affair, by "keeping his mouth shut, staying above the fray, and letting his enemies reveal themselves for the small men they were" (123). This is a valid and believable conjecture. There's no doubt that the man could have teetered the line between head and heart when making his decisions.
[3] Gordon-Reed brings up the notion of Jefferson combining his head and heart again when faced with the historian Andrew Burstein's accusation that it would have been "uncharacteristically imprudent" of Jefferson to father two additional children with Sally after the charges were made public (124). Her response, at first, seems irrelevant. She states that Burstein is assuming that the affair is false and not weighing the issue as if the relationship did happen, and is, therefore, making this charge of reckless behavior. One would assume that if Jefferson is acknowledging the possibility of two additional children, then he must be acknowledging the possibility of the relationship. In this way, Gordon-Reed's wording is rather ambiguous, but the arguments she provides next are decently strong. First, she reminds readers that Jefferson was a plantation owner, first and foremost, and would not want the accusations of outside journalists to control the operations in his own establishment. Second, if Madison Hemings' memoir is to be believed as factual, the allegations became public fourteen years after the relationship started. Five children, three of which died as infants, may have resulted from the affair during this time as well. Gordon-Reed argues that Jefferson could not have displaced himself from this woman if he was this deeply involved with her. She asserts that if he abandoned Sally at this time, after all she's sacrificed, it would be more than a case of a man listening to his head over his heart, it would be a case of a "man with little heart and not a shred of honor or decency" (125). Here, Gordon-Reed makes a compelling argument. There's no way Jefferson could have been that heartless to leave Sally just because of some incriminating newspaper articles from the outside.
[4] Gordon-Reed further disproves the heartless perception of Jefferson when she details his marriage with Martha Wayles. Jefferson controversy defenders will admit that the historical records clearly show that Jefferson truly loved his wife, so how can they argue that he was ill-equipped to love another woman? Furthermore, Gordon-Reed states how Jefferson encouraged his wife to go through numerous painful childbirths when she was obviously unable to healthfully bear many children. His head had to know the suffering he was putting her through, but his heart greatly desired this love to engender more children. This argument works well to debunk the allegations that Jefferson was heartless, but it reveals more of the trickiness in dividing the head and heart emotions, because his heart should also tell him that he is hurting the one he most dearly loves. So in that regard, Gordon-Reed's conjecture of heart over head is a little weak, but her argument still remains relevant. Jefferson did truly love his wife, so why couldn't he love another, especially the half-sister of his wife?
[5] Gordon-Reed then closes out her "Head and Heart" argument with a simple fact: no one can completely judge Jefferson's sensuality based on the documents he left behind. This isn't necessarily a powerful case to prove that the affair did happen; actually, it suggests that either side can't be totally proven, but it's nevertheless important to point out. Gordon-Reed charges that the historical psychoanalysts that defend Jefferson are too declarative and close-minded. They act as if they know Jefferson well enough to attest to the nature of his interpersonal relationships, even though such an attempt would even be difficult for two people who personally know each other, never mind someone who is only understood through snapshot documents. Gordon-Reed states that sexuality is "influenced by a myriad of hidden subtleties and nuances" (125). Documents alone can't provide the answer.
[6] Then she reminds readers that Jefferson, who was so deliberate and persistent in record keeping, burned and destroyed all the correspondence between himself and his wife after her death. Surely, there was some insight into his life that he felt was inappropriate for future scholars to find. Jefferson was an intelligent man; he knew that historians would pour over his documents in an attempt to understand how the great man's mind worked. Therefore, he seized the opportunity to shape the records to display the man he wanted. Gordon-Reed suggests that this view of him may have been vastly different from the true day-to-day Jefferson. The correspondence with his wife was most likely the best insight into his expression of head and heart, but unfortunately those documents don't exist. Considering all the missing details, Gordon-Reed ends the section by stating how historians can't develop a full picture of the man, besides presuming that there was certain, possibly revealing, information contained in those destroyed documents. Readers are left to infer their own conclusions. Gordon-Reed does well in discrediting the Jefferson defender's "Head and Heart" arguments but leaves readers with an inconclusive and anticlimactic, yet unavoidable, end.
