| Episodes |
1) I have to say, I am truly fascinated by the concept of a white Sally. Really, doesn't that one fact change everything? On one hand, it gives us a "Jefferson-out." For example: "Ohh, he didn't slum in the back shed with some nasty black girl fitting all of the descriptions he made in ‘Laws.' She was near-white! And pretty! And practically lived in his house." On the other, even-more-fun hand, it makes this all so much more sinister. So, Mister Jefferson, it's immoral and ugly and somewhat disgusting if she looks black. But if she resembles your wife . . . ahh, it's something else entirely, isn't it? I'm forced to recall all the references Jefferson made to Roman slaves in "Laws." About how they mixed freely, intermarried with free people, could be freed without fear of a mess, because they were white slaves. Go back and read those sections of "Laws." Coupled with the insight into "White Sally," whom we knew about, but I for one hadn't really thought about. This makes Jefferson's mind suddenly much clearer.
Anonymous , Lehigh University
2) Apparently, neither [Fawn Brodie] nor any of the other writers who have cited this document [the Memoir of Madison Hemings] in recent years inquired into the circumstances of its original publication. Any document must be viewed by the historian in its actual setting of time and place, and there is all the more reason for him to do so if it deals with events that occurred long before it was written.
Malone and Hochman 524
3) Slaves and servants sometimes had the peculiar advantage of seeing the master under more intimate circumstances than anyone else except members of the family. The master might, indeed, be even more relaxed in the presence of his slaves than of his relatives. Relatives have been known to write biographies, with or without the assistance of their subject, but the master would hardly fear or hope for a sketch by a slave, especially if the slave could neither read nor write. On the other hand, the value of the slave's observations and comments might be lessened by his limited intelligence. Within the area of his competent observation, however, his reminiscences might be as acute and as reliable as those of the more erudite.
Rayford W. Logan 561
4) Is there anyone in this time period without an agenda?
Anonymous , Lehigh University
5) When read in its entirety, Coolidge's letter has the sound of a statement for posterity rather than a true effort to impart information to an intimate contemporary correspondent. It seems to have been written with an extreme amount of self-consciousness to be used exactly as it has been used: to provide a defense of Jefferson from a member of his own family.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 89
6) The very simplicity of his [Isaac Jefferson's] story is its best watermark of authenticity.
Rayford W. Logan 562
7) Let us say in our own behalf that this note on evidence is intended as neither an attack on the sincerity of Madison Hemings, who appears to have been an estimable character, nor as a rounded critique of his story, which we find unacceptable in important respects for reasons not presented here. We would not exaggerate the significance of the fresh light we have shed on the circumstances of its appearance. But, quite clearly, the story [the Memoir of Madison Hemings] was solicited and published for a propagandist purpose.
Malone and Hochman 526
8) It seemed as though all of the writers for this section were using Jefferson's morality and good nature as a defense for the man. In my mind if he was such a good master, so forgiving, kind, and reasonable, why is it so impossible that he fell in love with one of his slaves? Clearly Jefferson had a different approach to owning slaves. Despite the fact that he took part in such a practice, he clearly had some level of moral objection to it and that is why he didn't punish the slave who stole from him and even granted many of his slaves freedom in the end. To me his morality and the treatment of his slaves does not give me reason to doubt the affair at all. In fact, it gives me reason to believe that he saw slaves as people. People who were in part a part of his own family, and it is very likely that he could fall in love with one of them. Especially one as beautiful as Sally Hemings is described.
Alexandra Horowitz, Lehigh University
9) Madison Hemings's race and previous condition of servitude put him at a distinct disadvantage in a contest between his word and those of Jefferson's grandchildren. His status gave historians license to attribute base motivations and bad character to him.
Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings 95
10) Whatever be the answer to this question, it is far more important to note that the McGregor manuscript [of Charles Campbell's account by Isaac Jefferson] published here contains one passage that was not included in the William and Mary copy. Since the former was clearly the one intended for publication, the passage in question [describing Sally] bears witness to Campbell's meticulous concern for the responsibility of the historian.
Rayford W. Logan 564
11) Samuel Carr was a convenient scapegoat because, in fact, he did have a black family. He fathered several children with a free woman of color, Judith Barnett, and this black family lived in a settlement of free blacks north of Charlottesville that came to be known as Free State.
Henry Wiencek 215
12) Jeff's account hints at a sympathy for his enslaved relativesâ€"a dangerous sentiment for a slave masterâ€"and hints also at a divide in the family. His sister Ellen called these peopleâ€"unquestionably her own blood kinâ€"the "yellow children" and spoke of them with disdain as "a race of half- breeds. . . . The thing will not bear telling." We sense feelings of astonishing intensity and relentlessness. At Monticello the "yellow children" lived in the glare of those hostile feelings every day. No act of loyalty or devotion could mitigate those feelings, because for Ellen the mere existence of these children defiled the reputation of her grand-father. This is strikingly different from Jeff, who spoke of the Hemingses neutrally, even sympathetically.
Henry Wiencek 215-16
13) Jeff had connections to the African-American community his sister might not have known about, and at almost the same time he was making his revelations to the biographer about the mixed-race children of Monticello, he offered crucial help to a Charlottesville "black" family trying to cross the legal line into whiteness.
Henry Wiencek 216
14) But in his grandfather's case, Jeff Randolph and the partisans who followed him put on the iron mask of denial, knowing the immense symbolic importance of keeping the Founder pure. That image of purity has been a potent talisman, a charm against knowledge of a past in which virtue was assailed on all sides, a talisman against everything that cannot bear telling.
Henry Wiencek 218
15) Madison Hemings bequeathed a narrative that changed American history when he stated bluntly, in an 1873 newspaper interview, that Thomas Jefferson was "my father." When his recollections came to wide attention in 1974 thanks to Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, they collided with the modern imperative to find redemption almost everywhere we look.
Henry Wiencek 219
16) Madison Hemings's recollections are much more than an item of evidence in the Hemings-Jefferson controversy. They take us deep into the psychology of slavery at Monticello. In telling his life story, Madison did not begin with his famous father, as one might expect. Instead, he went back to the remote past, unfolding a narrative as it had been told and retold in the Hemings family. It is a story of origins, of beginnings, and of the archetypes of the New World in distant times. It is a story of the first father and the beginning of amalgamation, the amazement of whites and blacks at the first mixed-race people, and the overthrow of the father. In just a few lines, it evokes the feel of myth.
Henry Wiencek 220
17) These events had taken place more than a century and a quarter before Madison's telling of them. The story must have been repeated many times in the Hemings family. It points to a deep, abiding sense of dislocation and loss and to the struggle of the slaves to comprehend people who regarded children as cash and severed blood ties with "no compunctions of conscience". . . . In the contest between the father and the master, the master wins and keeps the mixed-race child out of base curiosity, to observe it as if it were a joke of nature. The first master defeats the first father, makes him disappear, and sets himself in the father's place. That is the dark heart of this foundation story. The master's ultimate prize is to take the girl as his concubine and establish, perversely, a perpetual lineage in slavery.
Henry Wiencek 221
18) Our human yearning for immortality expresses itself in children, but fathering children by a slave condemned the offspring to slavery, perpetuating not just the master's lineage but the master's power. It is the ultimate expression of mastery to hold power after death, because for the master life is power and power is life. . . . In Madison's account, his mother broke the power of the masters when she broke the lineage of enslavement established by John Wayles.
Henry Wiencek 221
19) "Extraordinary privileges" echoes the "extraordinarily large price" Captain Hemings had offered Wayles. Sally Hemings succeeds where Captain Hemings had failed. She lays hold of the future, but only by consenting to become the master's concubine: she sacrifices herself for her children. What is missing from Madison's account is a declaration of love. A transaction has taken place, not a love affair.
Henry Wiencek 222
20) Madison was a forthright speaker: he did not shrink from saying that his grandmother had children by four different men. He reported bluntly that his mother became Jefferson's "concubine," a harsh word to use of one's mother, and he used the same word of his grandmother's relationship with John Wayles. Elsewhere in his recollections Madison describes in warm terms the emotional bond between Thomas Jefferson and his wife, Martha: "intimacy sprang up between them which ripened into love." This is vastly different from "my mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine."
Henry Wiencek 223
21) Madison's account suggests that they endured a peculiarly deep estrangement from Jefferson: "he was affectionate toward his white grandchildren," but toward his black offspring "he was very undemonstrative. . . . He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children." Madison did not offer a single anecdote about Jefferson. His impressions of him were vague and generalâ€"distant glimpses of the master on his terrace and in the shopsâ€"and one wonders whether he ever saw Jefferson up close or ever heard him say a word. In their accounts the former slaves Israel Jefferson and Isaac Granger, especially the latter, tell more about Jefferson than his son does. Madison's recollections, aside from making his lineage known, "do not suggest that he identified with Jefferson in any way," as the Monticello historian Lucia Stanton puts it.
Henry Wiencek 224
22) In place of affection the Hemings children received their promised privileges. When they were very young, they were exempted from labor. Madison and his siblings "were permitted to stay about the ‘great house,' and only required to do such light work as going on errands. Harriet learned to spin and to weave in a little factory on the home plantation. . . We were always permitted to be without mother, who was well used." Her only tasks were "to take care of his chamber and wardrobe, look after us children and do such light work as sewing." Madison regarded this as the fulfillment of the promise Jefferson made in Paris that Sally would receive extraordinary privileges. It also speaks to the harshness of life for Monticello's ordinary slaves. Apparently, it was extraordinary for children to be with their mothers.
Henry Wiencek 224
23) This extreme hostility Madison endured in Ohio may explain the element of family tension in his memoir. He was the only surviving Hemings child willing to make a public statement about their origins, and he was the only Hemings-Jefferson offspring who still regarded himself as black. Madison's siblings had entered the realm of denial. . . . Proud of his African blood, Madison seemed disappointed and even bitter that his siblings passed into the white world, notably in his remark that Harriet "thought it to her interest . . . to assume the role of a white woman." Because his siblings had all crossed the color line into whiteness and silence, this story and others like it were buried and denied, even by the offspring of the hidden unions. The slave era was over, and the truth of that era would be lost if Madison did not speak up, as if to say, as Ishmael does in Moby-Dick: "I only am escaped alone to tell thee."
Henry Wiencek 227-28
