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Doin' the "Historians' Scramble": An Overview
Most members of the so-called Jefferson Establishment were dead on November 1, 1998 -- Douglass Adair in 1968, Julian Boyd in 1980, Dumas Malone in 1986, even Virginius Dabney in 1995 -- but not their spirits. Joseph Ellis quipped that, "in retrospect," it seemed like the only folks resisting the truth of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship on that landmark date were the "white descendants in the Jefferson family and the majority of professional historians." But the DNA results changed that, at least for the historians (the white descendants, as we saw in episode 9, stonewalled post-DNA reconciliation efforts with the Hemingses and Woodsons). Miraculously, the scales fell from many eyes. Once blind, they now could see. Except for what Jan Lewis called "a handful of vociferous deniers," one historian after another testified to the "seismic effect" of the scientific data. Lucia Stanton described historians hopping off the fence, and "Within hours of the study's release," said Fraser Neiman, "at least some long-time skeptics had become believers." Neiman continued that "serious doubts about the evidence and duration of the relationship and about Jefferson's paternity of Hemings's six children can no longer be reasonably sustained." Seemingly speaking for the profession at large, Ellis said that "proven beyond a reasonable doubt" sounds the right way to characterize the case now and that "the new scholarly consensus is that Jefferson and Hemings were sexual partners." Ellis, Winthrop Jordan, and Andrew Burstein even publicly re-examined their prior work on the relationship and the controversy, reflecting on and criticizing their prior positions. After a series of shocks to the official narrative beginning in the 1970s, then, the Jefferson-Hemings controversy, as we said last episode, had finally gone through the looking glass.
But what now? What happens after the "we shoulda knowns," the "aw, shuckses," and the mea culpas? What happens is a scholarly dance we might call "The Historians Scramble." Seizing the day, on December 8, 1998, Lewis and Peter Onuf announced a conference at Jefferson's own University of Virginia March 5-6, 1999. The organizers observed that past Jefferson biographers failed to get the story right "because they relied too heavily on the authority of previous scholars and apologists" and weren't prepared "to accept the full implications of our complicated racial history." Participants were invited to "reconsider their own assumptions and practices" and to "reflect on how these stories are constructed and the purpose they serve." The result of the conference was a collection of eleven essays published as Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (1999). A second immediate attempt to stimulate and register scholarly reaction to the DNA results was the collection of six essays in a special forum section of the William and Mary Quarterly, the premier journal in Early American history, about a year after the DNA revelation. Now that a Jefferson-Hemings liaison was "fact," scholars were encouraged to "widen their lenses," to explain the significance of the liaison, to explore its nature (as if fiction hadn't done that already, as we've seen), to inquire into its lessons for the writing of history, and to track its impact on our understanding of American culture in the broadest sense. Can we, suggested forum moderator Lewis, "begin to see new worlds, to craft new interpretations, to engage the past in new ways, and to ask old questions anew?"
So, where did the thoughts of the current crew of distinguished Jefferson scholars go in search of such newness when given the opportunity to respond to the DNA results? Let's take a look at some examples. Several of the responses were what we might call Jefferson-centric -- focusing on his reputation, his politics, his peers, his report card -- and thus seem a bit tangential to the main currents of the controversy we have been following. Ellis, for instance, doesn't see much change at all in Jefferson's public reputation; rather, he sees this new truth striking Jefferson at an especially vulnerable point in regard to the scholarly community. The paradox of his current scholarly portrait now takes "on the look and smell of unmitigated hypocrisy." The bottom line for Ellis is that Jefferson is more sphinx than ever (the title of his award-winning book was American Sphinx). Onuf (now Thomas Jefferson chair at UVA, the position held by Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson) shows interest in how the way Jefferson treated his Hemings shadow children is connected to his political views on emancipation and expatriation. Werner Sollors contextualizes Jefferson relative to similar "gossip" about sex and race surrounding other presidents. For example, President John Tyler was rumored to have an illegitimate, mixed-race daughter, and Andrew Johnson was publicly accused of having a colored concubine. None of these gossipy stories -- part of the "din of democracy" according to Sollors -- hurt any of the office holders, even President William Clinton, who was rumored to have a black baby. And, in fact, adds Sollors, such gossip might possibly be a "stabilizing element" by symbolically connecting excluded social groups to the "sites of power." Jack Rakove seems the most committed of all to defending "Our Jefferson," seeing his contradictions over slavery as more "moral honesty" than "rank hypocrisy." For Rakove Jefferson's articulation of such principles as popular consent and religious freedom trump his shortcomings on matters of "slavery and race." "I find myself growing more partial to Jefferson with each year," he admits.
All well and good, but the trajectory of the controversy we have been tracing has been away from Jefferson to his relationship with Sally and through her to the African American community. Thus, followers of our miniseries will likely find more relevance and resonance in the contributions of Burstein, Lewis, Stanton, Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, Philip Morgan, Rhys Isaac, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Clarence Walker. For instance, Burstein, Morgan, and Isaac provoke thought on the all-important question of the nature of the relationship. Burstein completely drains the Brodie and Chase-Riboud romance from our conception of Jefferson's relation with Sally. Attentive to the best medical advice of his day, Jefferson, according to Burstein, simply combined regular sexual activity with diet and exercise in a regimen for better health. There is no "Hollywood solution" for the mystery of the nature of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship: a concubine was an acceptable outlet for his sexuality (one thinks of Chase-Riboud's Martha snarling, "You were nothing to him! A convenient slave paramour, a . . . receptacle!"), and coercion can not be dismissed as the controlling mechanism. Morgan's view of the relationship is only slightly less chilling to romance. He sketches "the patterns of interracial sex" in the Chesapeake and wider Atlantic worlds to show that Jefferson's behavior probably fell somewhere between deep commitment and outrageous abuse: "the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings, as with all slaveowner-slave relationships, was ultimately a forced embrace." The fact is that "Jefferson owned and controlled Sally Hemings." "Sexual access to slave women was one of the prerogatives of ownership," Morgan starkly reminds us, though "such a relationship did not have to be based solely on heartless domination; it might have involved a measure of affection."
Isaac offers a similarly wide spectrum of ways to envision the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. He sees two Monticello's, a first Monticello built on an "uninhabited -- perhaps uninhabitable -- eminence," a mythologized "temple of married love, a sacred place for himself and [his wife] Martha as they retired from the world"; and a second Monticello, "publically segregated but intimately joined by a secret relationship that had to be known by everyone there." In building the first house, Jefferson "had made a maximum separation from the supporting African American communities." So, as he built the second Monticello, what story did Jefferson tell himself and perhaps Sally to mythologize their union? Did he tell a story of conquest, a biblical story such as Abraham being given the slave Hagar as "wife," a lyrical passage about secret love from Ossian, a sensual story from Sterne's Sentimental Journey or the "bawdy mirth" of his Tristram Shandy, the "Sarah delivering Agar to Abraham" painting by Adriaen van der Werff, or the "salacious" story of Suliman the Magnificent, Ottoman Emperor, and his 500-strong seraglio? "The leads for these and many other stories of virile prowess and patriarchal assertion that could be both erotic fantasies and forms of social display," Isaac says, "are plentiful."
Note, however, that Burstein, Morgan, and Isaac all focus on Jefferson in the relationship and, while certainly provoking productive thought, thus, perhaps, they don't ultimately takes us too far into the new territory anticipated on Day One of the new official narrative. Reviewing the Lewis and Onuf anthology, for instance, Sharon Block points out that "despite the editors' explicit desire to re-center Hemings [she is, after all, given primacy in the title, an external sign that we have gone through the looking glass], most essays focus on the meanings of interracial sex to slave-owning men rather than to the enslaved women," perhaps an indication of how difficult it is for even so momentous a day as November 1, 1998, to make a difference in scholarly habits in the short-run. Thus, the sector of scholarly re-thinking about the nature of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is haunted by Sollors musing about "what stories will emerge once legitimizing national myths derive not only from Thomas Jefferson but also from Sally Hemings, not only from Richard M. Johnson [presidential candidate in 1835 who acknowledged a mixed-race relationship] but also from Julia Chinn, and not only from Andrew Johnson but also from Dolly, Liz, and Florence [Johnson's slave and her children]."
Perhaps better examples of actual new thinking at this stage of the controversy can be found in the studies of the "White Jeffersons" and the "Black Jeffersons" (what we called in episode 4 "the tales of two families") using, metaphorically, "the other end of the telescope," to borrow from Stanton's title. What, for instance, did the Jefferson-Hemings liaison look like from the perspective of the aggrieved Jefferson family? Lewis takes us deeply for the first time into the minds of the white Jeffersons, those loved ones Jefferson defenders could not imagine him hurting by coupling with Hemings. Lewis reminds us of the influential defensive and deflective stories grandchildren Ellen Randolph Coolidge and Thomas Jefferson Randolph told -- stories, rather, they, sadly, had to tell to imagine themselves a happy family. Taking their grandfather's evasion as denial, these white Jeffersons crafted a narrative that assigned blame to other white Jeffersons (again, cf. episode 4). "These things happen in families," Lewis remarks melancholily; "Jefferson's family told themselves that they were a happy family, and so deeply did they believe their family narrative that the story engraved itself on the unconscious." "It would appear then," she concludes, "that the chief audience for the lie about the Carrs was the white Jeffersons themselves." Lewis reminds us that every family has its secrets, and she helps us understand the need for self-preservation and family pride that gave origin to the white oral tradition that was the foundation of the former official narrative.
And what did the Jefferson-Hemings liaison look like from the perspective of the Jefferson-Hemings descendants, both actual and figurative? Stanton and Swann-White, leaders of Getting Word, Monticello's African American Oral History Project, have tracked actual descendants of Madison Hemings, "who always remained a member of the black community," and Eston Hemings, "who at age forty-four crossed the color line, determined to live as a white man." They are learning much about the ambiguities and absurdities of racial definition from uncovering such artifacts as a photograph of Eston's grandson and a friend, costumed in blackface, dressed as pickaninnies, leering at girls in virginal white dresses. This image of the young man "mocking what he was," said Swann-White, a black woman, "slapped me in my own face," and "I needed the back of my chair to brace me from the insult, the disrespect." On the other hand, "could he have been unaware of his racial heritage," thought Stanton, a white woman, "acting like other white Americans who found the donning of blackface a titillating amusement? Or was he conscious of his own masquerade, drawn to it unwillingly by the pleas of others or by his own need to fortify his whiteness by ridiculing blackness?" Such individually explosive emotional moments of new experience for both blacks and whites together confronting the fruits, if you will, of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship typifies the promise of new knowledge from the ongoing Getting Word project.
And what did the Jefferson-Hemings liaison look like from the perspective of the Jefferson-Hemings figurative descendants? Both Annette Gordon-Reed and Clarence Walker, both African American, report that black people greeted the news of November 1, 1998, with "We told you so." Blacks saw the conflicted Jefferson as "the foremost exemplar of the true American spirit and psyche," as symbolizing the "difficulty some white Americans have in dealing with their own racial heritage, which may or may not include a dark-skinned ancestor." The rejection of the story was but another example of the doctrine of white supremacy, of the symbolic "denial of black ties to the founding of the nation," of symbolic disavowal of the "legacy of colonialism." And rejection of the idea that there could be love between Jefferson and Hemings served similarly to exclude blacks from personal value, for love is a leveler, for love balances power. The possibility that white men and black women in slavery loved each other is "often forgotten in our cynical and highly politicized readings of the past," says Walker, pointing to the full use of her "sexual agency" by Harriet Jacobs as example. So blacks and whites were "fighting a symbolic cold war over the affair," says Gordon-Reed, but the DNA shows that blacks' connection to this piece of history is "real and concrete" (emphasis added). That concrete reality is the possibility of a new beginning. The real Harriet Hemings was not sold into slavery as was her fictional counterpart in William Wells Brown's novel (episode 3). The real Harriet Hemings was given money and put on a stagecoach to freedom.
Perhaps, then -- hoisting Gordon-Reed's thoughts a bit out of context -- we should consider Jefferson "as a spiritual and literal father to Americans, both black and white."
That would be Giving Word.
