| Episodes |
Gordon-Reed Plays the Public's Heartstrings [AGR 169-72]
Chris McHugh
with comment by Hannah Masse
[1] In her Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Annette Gordon-Reed attacks renown scholar Garry Wills's argument that Jefferson and Hemings could not have had a love affair (169-72). To do this she leans heavily on the general public's leanings towards political correctness; no one wants to hear a racist. Wills argues that it is "psychologically implausible" that Jefferson had a "love affair with one of his slaves" because he was committed to "beauty and refinement" and wanted to "hover above the squalor and horror of . . . slavery" (169). Gordon-Reed, however, does not directly attack this comment; she, instead, brings up a point Wills made in another article, refuting Fawn Brodie's assertion of a love-based affair. Wills wrote there that Sally Hemings was "like a healthy and obliging prostitute" whose payment was the eventual freedom of her children and herself (169). She uses this comment to attack Wills's character and bring the reader's attention away from his seemingly well thought-out analysis of Jefferson's state of mind.
[2] In order to discredit Wills, Gordon-Reed first explains that one cannot be "like a . . . prostitute." If one has sex for the sole purpose of some payment, in any form, then one is a prostitute; there is no middle-ground. Gordon-Reed pulls on the heartstrings of her readers by explaining that it is extremely cruel to use "prostitute" to describe a "woman who was a slave, particularly when there is no evidence to support the claim" (169). Somehow, because she was a slave, calling Hemings a prostitute is crueler than calling any other woman a prostitute. (see comment by Hannah Masse) Never mind the fact that a slave, in the view of some, has far more to be gained through prostitution than a free woman. One should also ignore the idea that Wills's evidence, which Gordon-Reed claims he lacks, is the historical fact that Sally Hemings and her children were all eventually freed, and his interpretation is that this was because of an agreement between Hemings and Jefferson.
[3] Gordon-Reed first argues against the very idea of this arrangement. If Jefferson agreed to give Sally Hemings's children their freedom as payment for services given, why, when there was so much focus on Monticello and this relationship, did he free them so publicly? (170) He could have had a relative free them, or, with political and social pressure on him, he could have decided that upholding an agreement with a slave was not worth his reputation, and not freed them at all. Of course, implies Gordon-Reed, Jefferson could not have been one of those men who holds to his promises no matter what; it could not have been the case that Jefferson saw the refusal to free the children as going back on his word; and there was never the possibility that going through relatives would have delayed the freeing of the children, who were all freed at the age of twenty-one.
[4] Gordon-Reed's second argument is based on evidence that Hemings had no sexual relations with other men at Monticello, and, if Hemings were a prostitute, then there should have been nothing stopping her from these relations (171). Gordon-Reed refutes the idea of Hemings fearing Jefferson's wrath at her "promiscuity" with the simple question, if he saw her as a prostitute, "why should he care?" This argument is based on her earlier comment that there is no middle-ground in prostitution; one either is a prostitute or not. However, Gordon-Reed ignores the possibility that Hemings might have been willing to give her body for freedom, but nothing less, and that no other man at Monticello had the ability to give her freedom.
[5] At this point, out of nowhere, Gordon-Reed deems it necessary to revisit the vileness of Wills's suggestion that Hemings was a prostitute. She says that, on the surface, there is no difference between the relationship of Jefferson and Hemings and those of other slaves and their masters. This means that all women slaves who had this kind of relationship, including "a good number of the female forbears of black America," were prostitutes (171). If that is the case, Wills is saying that most black Americans today are offspring of prostitutes! Gordon-Reed says that while Brodie had to prove a thirty-eight-year-long relationship was romantic with actual evidence, which she thinks is unnecessary, Wills had no burden of proof. In fact, according to her, "he filled the gaping hole in his analysis . . . with the most common stereotype of black women: that they are all prone to being whores."
[6] Next, Gordon-Reed compares Wills's views to those of a Thomas Gibbons, who in 1802 says that Hemings was "the most abandoned prostitute of her color -- pampered into a lascivious course of life, with the benefits of a French education, she is more lecherous than the other beasts of the Monticellian Mountain." According to Gordon-Reed, Gibbons is so disgusted by Hemings moving beyond what he sees as her rightful place, that she (Hemings) becomes "literally monstrous in his eyes." She also compares Wills to three other historians -- Malone, Adair, and Miller -- saying that all four of them arrive at the same conclusion, though through different means; Jefferson was "a true white man -- impervious to the influence of blacks, in perpetual and total control of every aspect of his relationships with them."
[7] In one short line in a response to Brodie, Wills proves himself to be a racist of the worst kind, so his assertion, in an entirely different essay, of the psychological improbability of a loving relationship between Jefferson and Hemings is invalid.
Comment
As you say, Gordon-Reed thinks it especially horrible to call a black woman a prostitute, more so than a white woman. I feel as though by making this judgment, Gordon-Reed discredits her argument against Wills' racist claims. By making this comment, Gordon-Reed is acknowledging the racial differences and an inequality between blacks and whites. Isn't this the same thing that Wills is doing, just in a harsher way? While I do not agree with Wills' suggestion that Sally was a prostitute, I believe that Gordon-Reed is a bit hypocritical in her argument.
