The Sally Hemings Case

Abstract

Concerning Gordon S. Wood's derogatory remarks about me in what he agrees is a valid historical speculation in his review of Conor Cruise O'Brien's book [NYR February 20], I reply not as a novelist, but a specialist on this controversy. In Sally Hemings, I vulgar ized one of American history's best-kept secrets and changed the image of Jefferson in the public mind. Dr. Wood fails to note that I also speculated on the paragon between Jefferson, Hemings, and the French Revolution. But neither I, nor Jefferson's political enemies, nor James Callender, nor the English, nor the abolitionists, nor anyone else invented the story of Sally Hemings. Jefferson did, in his paradoxical, intellectually complex, inimitable way, as poignantly divided in his private life as he was between enlightenment and its shadow, racism. The decisive factor here is the disparity of race and the rhetoric of miscegenation. Dr. Wood's approach is typical. Take a half-truth and use it to denigrate irrefutable evidence to the contrary as questionable: If Jefferson did sleep with Sally in Paris, he ought to be charged with abuse: the girl was only about (sic) fourteen. Indeed, Hemings was between fourteen and fifteen when she arrived in Paris, but be tween sixteen and seventeen when she returned to Virginia, certainly, by eighteenth-century standards, a marriageable woman. So much for child abuse. Moreover, her presence in Jefferson's life at that time may be the reason his letter index for 1788 has mysteriously disappeared, the only missing index of Jefferson's years of letter writing. Another half-truth protects the extraordinary blood ties between Jefferson and Hemings which made her Jefferson's own sister-in-law, half-sister to his dead wife, and aunt to his legitimate white daughters. (Hemings's mother, Elizabeth, had given Jefferson's father in-law, John Wayles, seven children, the youngest being Sally Hemings.) This is probably why, in 1787, Hemings was sent to Paris with Jefferson's daughter. She stayed almost two years and returned pregnant, according to the 1873 memoirs of her son Madison. Hem ings remained by Jefferson's side until his death in 1826 and produced seven children: