Sally Hemings Research Articles

Negotiations by Destiny O. Birdsong

Reviewed by: Negotiations by Destiny O. Birdsong Phill Provance (bio) negotiations Destiny O. Birdsong Tin House https://tinhouse.com/book/negotiations/ 152 pages; Print $16.95 Poets, arguably more so than other writers, inherit a great challenge in the responsibility of titling their work. It can be difficult enough to meaningfully encapsulate the breadth of personal experience and translate emotional themes into verse, let alone come to terms with such weighty subjects in a single [End Page 100] word or phrase. When a title must bear not only the weight of expression but that of a sociopolitical statement as well, that challenge only increases. After reading Destiny O. Birdsong's debut poetry collection, Negotiations, some will be left wondering when and how that title was settled upon. Was it an emotional state within which she began, a word plucked from work (the collection's first and title poem), a place landed upon after completion? Perhaps it derived from the exploratory meaning of the term. In the course of the collection, the reader traces Birdsong's journey through her own mental landscape, traveling from point A to point B in a way that, according to Elizabeth Acevedo, is ferocious "in how it grapples with womanhood, sexuality, assault, and race." In other words, Birdsong negotiates the fraught terrain of these contentious issues, trailblazing through them with a sequence of dialogues, both personal and widely social and cultural, that serve not only as mediations but as bold interventions as well. With the first poem ("Negotiations")–even the first line–we are confronted with Birdsong's fearlessness: My pussy is not made of microfiber.I can't put it on my head to conduct business,or plan insurrections. It's not big enoughto hide in, dear reader. It's not bulletproof.It can't be offered to neo-Nazis as a lurefor conversion therapy. That didn't workfor Sally Hemings. I know it can't work for me. Birdsong is unafraid to bring forth story after story, headline and history, with a marked rapidity in nearly every poem in the collection. With this first poem's initial stanza alone, she evokes a staggering multitude of issues: violence, the patriarchy, LGBTQ issues, hate and bigotry, and the complex reckoning with American history Sally Hemings brings to light—not to mention a chilling foresight with the placement of "insurrections," considering the collection was composed before the tragedies at the Capitol had yet occurred. Birdsong doesn't shy away from saying as much as she can about the state of the world in the space she has available. She will not shrink from what she sees, nor what she wants us to see. "But I could drive to Charlottesville tonight," Birdsong continues, "sweep [End Page 101] blood from its holy soil, like Sally's skirts / dragging the late summer's scorched leaves / across the cobble" working her way to a thesis point in the next important lines "Every day, a woman's ghost / catches on something. Sally's last decade / was spent with her children free, but always under / the threat of her high color." Birdsong's writing highlights that constant agitated state of alertness when "always under the threat" of one thing or another: skin color, gender, sex, economic status. Her continued deployment of Sally Hemings in the text provides a rich, deeply fraught historical nexus to bind these disparate issues together with an elegant efficiency. These are heavy poems that ask to be read two or three times over in order to find every kernel of reference and implication. The sense that there is something else yet to learn in turn might send us off to research what the writer/speaker is trying to make understood. Then there are those things she knows we know, that we know must be remembered. Birdsong's poems are as internally explorative as they are informative of struggles with the external world, blending twisted and lost history with contemporary expressions of those hoary ghosts in our day-to-day. "Elegy for the Man on Highway 52" is partly a wrathful response to her own victimization in an incident of road rage. It takes the form of...

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Cassandra Good Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf. (Williamsburg, Va.: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. [viii], 422. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6563-4.) Open the acknowledgments section of nearly any book on gender and sexuality (and plenty more on politics) in the early American republic published during the past several decades, and Jan Lewis's name will appear. Lewis had an outsize influence on these fields through both her mentorship and her published writings. This volume does a great service in compiling and contextualizing thirteen of her previously published articles, many of which were scattered across different edited volumes. Reading Lewis's articles together shows both the coherence of and the evolution in her thinking over the course of nearly forty years. Lewis's work was often ahead of its time, engaging early on with the gender and cultural turns as well as with new approaches to the study of emotional history. The book begins with a short introduction by Lewis's close friends and fellow Jefferson scholars Peter S. Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed, followed by four thematic sections. It closes with an acknowledgments section by Lewis's husband, Barry Bienstock, that sheds light on his late wife's relationships with various scholars in the field. The volume came together as a tribute to Lewis and a legacy for her granddaughters after her death in 2018, at a time when Lewis was still actively producing important scholarship. The first section, "Gender in the Early American Republic," is introduced by Carolyn Eastman and demonstrates Lewis's interest in exploring the political roles women played during this period. While Lewis's article "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic" is well known, her articles on women's pervasive political presence in early national Washington, D.C., and the brief period of women's suffrage in New Jersey between 1776 and 1807 are equally important. Her extended engagement with Jürgen Habermas is somewhat an artifact of its time, but all three articles are key parts of a conversation that more often features Linda K. Kerber, Catherine Allgor, and Rosemarie Zagarri. Nicole Eustace introduces the section on emotional history, rightly noting that Lewis's work anticipated a field that has flourished in recent years. The section's first article, "Domestic Tranquillity and the Management of Emotion among the Gentry of Pre-Revolutionary Virginia," largely echoes the first chapter of Lewis's book The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (New York, 1983). In a piece titled "Mother's Love: The Construction of an Emotion in Nineteenth-Century America," Lewis explores what she calls "emotionology of motherhood" in the antebellum era, fusing ideas about religion, gender, and emotion (p. 144). The final article, featuring Angelica Schuyler Church, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, focuses on the intersection of politics and emotion. Lewis also brought her interest in the politics of the early republic to her work on the Constitution. As David Waldstreicher notes in the third section's introduction, Lewis convincingly demonstrated the central importance of [End Page 760] gender and slavery in Revolutionary and constitutional thought (p. 175). All three articles in this section demonstrate Lewis's rigorous attention to language and logic, clearly elucidating the ways women and enslaved people served as props in larger debates about representation, citizenship, and sectionalism. In the final section, introduced by Onuf and Gordon-Reed, Lewis applies her understanding of gender, family, politics, and slavery to Thomas Jefferson. All four of these articles come from edited volumes and may not be well known to readers, but the standout of the group, "White Jeffersons," deserves attention. First published in 1999, the essay offers an impressionistic, sometimes almost elegiac reflection on what Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings (which was, at the time, newly proved) meant for Jefferson...

Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf

Reviewed by: Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis ed. by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf Nancy Isenberg Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic: The Essays of Jan Ellen Lewis. Edited by Barry Bienstock, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Peter S. Onuf, with contributions by Carolyn Eastman, Nicole Eustace, and David Waldstreicher. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 432 pages. Cloth, ebook. The late leading scholar of the early republic Jan Ellen Lewis was one of those rare historians who was not afraid to explore new areas of research. Her interests were broad, extending to women’s history, constitutional questions involving race and gender, the history of emotions, and the cultural meaning of republicanism. Though her career began in the field of Thomas Jefferson studies, she took an unorthodox stance and refused to depict him as an iconic Renaissance man in the way many historians did. Rather, she explored his emotionally wrought family relations and his traumas and dramas within the domestic sphere. Impressively, Lewis showed how Jefferson’s domestic idiom traveled outside the home, shaping the political, social, and legal thought that lay at the heart of heroic treatments of him. At the same time, although she did not paper over his complicity with slavery and his blindness and privilege as a wellborn first son at home among his peers in Virginia’s gentry class, she also avoided the reductionist pose of turning Jefferson into a modern-day villain. Anyone who reads the new collection of her essays, Family, Slavery, and Love in the Early American Republic, will discover her to have been a gifted writer and a sharp thinker on Jefferson and his times. Jefferson has long been the most provocative and problematic founder. Because he wrote with feeling and best expressed the nation’s ideals, many Americans have developed an almost personal relationship with him and feel a compelling need to know him beyond his words. Yet for many he is elusive, baffling, and self-protective. He presented his political enemies—whether British or American—as unscrupulous, vile characters, which explains why popular writers, journalists, and historians have often found themselves forced to declare their allegiance: Are you on Jefferson’s side or not? Lewis’s scholarship cut through the emotional morass that engulfs Jefferson’s legacy. In tackling Jefferson, Lewis made it clear that she never wanted to compose a biography. As literary critics have observed, biography presents the danger of assuming a coherent self and imputing logical explanations for behavior rather than accepting each individual life as a bundle of [End Page 630] contradictions.1 Lewis’s historical gift lay in ferreting out dubious rationalizations and logical inconsistencies. In one powerful essay, “The White Jeffersons” (1999), she showed that Jefferson, a loving father and grandfather, conditioned his white family so that they would still lie for him long after his death, inventing cover stories to mask the truth about his relationship with Sally Hemings. In excruciating detail in “The Blessings of Domestic Society” (1993), she reveals Jefferson’s suffocating “never-ceasing love” (310) for his white daughters. Within the family fold, happiness bore psychological costs.2 Lewis’s scholarship helped shape a version of cultural history influenced by literary and linguistic analysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, new historicism, and anthropology. She directed this approach to examining whether the early republic, for all its revolutionary inheritance, transformed the system of patriarchy it had inherited from the British. What she found might be called “republican double-talk,” with double-talk defined as that which “appears to be earnest . . . but is in fact a mixture of sense and nonsense.”3 The ideology of the Enlightenment and republicanism made Americans at once optimistic and deeply suspicious of their fellow citizens, forcing them to contort their lofty abstract principles—and nowhere more acutely than in gender relations. If government relied on the will of the people, as most in the early republic accepted, citizens needed to be...

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

AMERICA’S RACIAL STAIN The Taint Argument and the Limits of Constitutional Law and Rhetoric

Musical Monticello: Classical Music and America

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation is here used as a case-study examiningclassical music’s foundations in the United States. Among other titles, Jefferson was a statesman, diplomat, slave master, and avid violinist. He is remembered as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. President. Early documentation suggests he was a gifted musician, reading notation at age nine and practicing “no less than three hours a day” for “a dozen years”. Music played an important role in the courtship of his wife, Martha Skelton Wayles, a harpsichordist and singer. They parented six children, of which two daughters survived to adulthood. Both received substantial keyboard training and their eldest inherited her father’s “taste and talent for music”. Upon their mother's death in 1782, Thomas began a complicated relationship with his late wife’s enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings. She became pregnant at sixteen and bore six of Jefferson’s children, four of which survived to adulthood. While Jefferson’s white daughters learned keyboard, two of his enslaved black sons were taught violin. It is likely that Jefferson himself taught them using the treatises of his expansive musical library, notably Geminani’s “Art of Playing the Violin”. A year after Jefferson’s death, the two sons were given their freedom; the youngest’s profession is listed as “musician” in the 1850 census; he is remembered as an “accomplished caller of dances”. These sons span the full stylistic gamut available in 19th century American music: from fiddle to violin. Thomas Jefferson and his family represent the kernels of America’s musical traditions, and the way they have morphed in parallel with America itself. The musical ecosystem of Monticello plantation is a dynamic location to discuss colonial music’s intersections with class, race, gender, and national identity.

Human Events and Whited Sepulchres

Human Events and Whited Sepulchres Virginia Scharff (bio) Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. New York: Liveright Publishing Company, 2021. 140 pp. Images, books and articles consulted. $15.95. In 1988, when my son Sam was three, Chevron Oil transferred my geologist husband from Denver, Colorado to Houston, Texas. We moved to a nice townhouse complex on the west side of the city, interim home to Oil Patch nomads from all over the world. Families from Nigeria and the Netherlands, Indonesia and the Emirates, Louisiana and Colorado gathered around the pool in the abundant hot weather, and mingled at holiday parties thrown by the remarkably hospitable women managing the complex. During the Houston rodeo, the managers turned the rental office into an Old West saloon and dressed in cowgirl gear, complete with a serve-yourself bar open throughout business hours. It was the friendliest and most diverse place I have ever lived. We had some trouble finding daycare for Sam. We eventually settled on The Memorial School of the Oaks, a nearby place with a name that sounded like a funeral parlor, but which we were assured was among the best preschools in the city. One day, when I picked Sam up and drove him home from school, he was bubbling over with joy. "We had history lessons today!" he told me, excited to share knowledge he knew I would value, aware (so early!) that I was a historian and spent my days reading and writing at my desk, surrounded by piles of files and books. "Great!" I replied. "What did you learn?" "We learned about George Washington, Mom! Did you know he wrote the Declaration of Independence?" This brought me up short; I admit, I went there. "Well actually, Sam," I lectured, "Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence." This did not faze him. "And we also learned about the heroes of the Alamo!" he enthused. Dreading the answer, I asked, "And what did you learn about them?" He stood very straight, put his hand over his heart, and spoke in a deep voice with a perfect Texas accent I had never before heard issue from his little mouth. "Brave men fought and died!" he intoned. Welcome to Texas. [End Page 110] I tell this story to suggest that Americans—Texans included—have always been a diverse and complex lot. We care about our nation's history. But in the wake of the violence perpetrated by Donald Trump and his followers on the far right, this time feels different, though not unprecedented. Battles over American history have always mattered, and occasionally (as in the era of the Civil War) grown vicious, even violent. In recent months, local school boards have been overrun by threatening White mobs, incited and organized on Facebook. Red-faced activists howl about "critical race theory," a shorthand term for teaching anything that acknowledges our systematically racist past, present, and potentially, future. Reactionary governors like Texas's Greg Abbott rail against the New York Times's 1619 Project and stoke cultural fires. State legislatures (including Texas's) are passing laws mandating social studies standards so byzantine that principals and teachers cannot be faulted for simply wanting to…give up. Why teach history when everyone is so angry, when every lesson presents a political minefield, when "parents' rights" are used to justify open season on educators? Never have historians had to be more courageous, more measured, or more deft in approaching subjects we thought were settled matters. The bravest among us would argue that this is precisely the time to step up and communicate the truth of our history to as big an audience as possible. Such interventions might stir opposition, but then again, they might just make a difference. Enter Annette Gordon-Reed, MacArthur fellow, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Gordon-Reed, the most prominent Jefferson scholar in the world today, has been recognized for her deep and illuminating scholarship on the entwined histories of the Jefferson and Hemings families. That body of work, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997) drew on her skills as an attorney and law professor to...

Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto

Reviewed by: Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto Danielle Bainbridge (bio) Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2020, 264 pp., $26.95 paperback, $99.95 cloth. In her latest monograph, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women's Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights, Samantha Pinto theorizes "uncertainty" and "vulnerability" to problematize the mire of issues surrounding Black women's early celebrity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A central inquiry regards the question of Black women political actors' rights as they navigated the complex world of early celebrity culture. Pinto's approach is both familiar and destabilizing, as she draws into conversation diverse sources on the topic of Black women's embodied performances and the history of subjectivity and agency as it collides with their nascent celebrity. She weaves together a diverse array of resources on rights, performance, and celebrity such as Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, Daphne Brooks' Bodies in Dissent, Uri McMillan's Embodied Avatars, Patricia Williams' The Alchemy of Race and Rights and Joseph Roach's It. Pinto argues that Black women's transgressive performances of personhood in public life were not simply attempts at engaging in larger freedom struggles nor were they solely a performance strategy or a question of civic engagement. Rather, the acts of public appearance were central to the questions of rights and vulnerability for many early celebrities. Pinto is invested in the category of rights as central to the phenomena of celebrity for the "infamous" Black women subjects in her study and how their performances resist the over-simplification of categories like "freedom" and "unfreedom." Pinto asserts early in the text that, "Black women celebrities are also at the cultural, conceptual, and representational center of debates about rights, humanity, and freedom" (4), rather than relegating them to the margins of our attention and theoretical concerns in the debates about rights. By demonstrating the subtle negotiations of Black women celebrities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pinto makes the case for how her text "reimagines these celebrity genealogies both as they critically intersect with the formation of human rights discourse around individual civil rights and entitlements, and as they represent a variety of black women's experiences as embodied political subjects of modernity who engage with pleasure, risk, violence, desire, ambition, and vulnerability" (3, 4). Additionally, she lays claim to the term "infamous" to describe the subjects in her monograph rather than relying purely on the rubrics of "celebrity" because "it also includes the disapproving public attention of fame, as well as a legal valence in its history as describing a state of rightlessness [End Page 365] (Paik 2016), a deprivation of right as legal 'consequence' (OED 2017)" (9). By reimagining and applying what she terms "corrective history" to the lives of her subjects (Phillis Wheatley, Sally Hemings, Sarah Baartman, Mary Seacole, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta), Pinto centers their archival remnants and continued infamy in the debates about rights and Western modernity. If it feels like the categories that Pinto is working with (celebrity, rights, modernity, history, infamy) are larger than life, that's because they match the larger-than-life personal narratives and archives of the women in her text. Chapter one focuses on the lives and many archival and contemporary representations of Black poet Phillis Wheatley. Pinto situates Wheatley, her life, and her multiple legacies at the center of the early American project of Western human rights. Her analysis claims Wheatley as both a celebrity and a political actor whose assertions of literacy (in the face of claims that Africans were incapable of the act) and the creation of art rendered her at once highly visible and extremely important, therefore ". . . tying her to blackness and rights, positively and negatively" (26). In chapter two, we are introduced (or rather reintroduced) to the infamous story of Sally Hemings, who is most famously remembered through her relationship with/to founding father Thomas Jefferson. By evaluating the ". . . contradiction between the notion that 'all men are created equal' and the decades-long, scandalous (even in its own time) entanglement," Pinto centers Hemings...

Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison

Reviewed by: Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison Aston Gonzalez (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Martha Jefferson Randolph, Maria Jefferson Eppes, Harriet Hemings, Sally Hemings, Monticello Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America. By Catherine Kerrison. (New York: Ballantine Books, 2018. Pp. 448. Cloth, $28.00.) In Jefferson's Daughters, Catherine Kerrison examines an impressive array of historical sources to distinguish the complex lives of Martha [End Page 352] Jefferson Randolph, Mary "Maria" Jefferson Eppes, and Harriet Hemings. The former two women, the daughters of Martha Wayles Jefferson, and the latter, the enslaved daughter of Sally Hemings, led lives that diverged greatly from one another. Aimed mainly at a general audience, the book largely explains in three sections—each roughly dedicated to each daughter—the circumstances foisted upon them, and the decisions they made that sometimes challenged social norms. The three sections of the book move from Martha to Maria to Harriet, and correspondingly from the largest primary-source base to the smallest. Kerrison relies on personal correspondence, so it is not surprising that she provides readers with substantially clearer and more robust views of the lives and inner thoughts of Jefferson's two white daughters. Her voluminous archive supplies glimpses of Martha and Maria's challenges to their father's authority and their assertions of autonomy. Kerrison reconstructs the intimate conversations and friendships between Martha and her friends in the City of Light to bring readers into the world of their Parisian education and entertainment. Impressive are Kerrison's portrayals of Martha's emerging attraction to Catholicism and her apprehension about leaving France for Virginia. Kerrison convincingly presents a picture of a serious, but playful, and intellectually curious daughter whose interest in "male" topics afforded by her progressive Enlightenment education placed her on track to challenge Jefferson's stagnant expectations about women's roles back home. In her interpretation of the life of Jefferson's younger daughter, Maria, Kerrison shifts the focus from her relationship with her father to her relationship with her husband (171). She skillfully analyzes a single sentence written by Maria's husband, Jack Eppes, to Jefferson to show how the couple consulted each other before rejecting Jefferson's repeated proposal that they live very near Monticello. Still, Kerrison overemphasizes Maria's emotional maturity, especially during her childhood, given the evidence presented. The decision to leave Monticello due to her husband's career may instead be evidence of Maria conforming to gendered marriage expectations. Regardless, Kerrison productively shifts the primary focus to Maria as a means of de-centering Jefferson's control over her life. Throughout the book, Kerrison engages numerous bodies of scholarship that provide a foundation and offer an opening for her fresh understanding of Jefferson's daughters. She offers a corrective to scholars who have not taken Maria on her own terms. The thin collection of letters [End Page 353] authored by Maria makes that difficult given all of the correspondence about her, yet Kerrison expertly contextualizes her life and impressively triangulates Maria's agency and constraints. She takes issue with Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone, who claimed that Jefferson "did not succeed in molding his daughter [Maria] in his own image" (87). Given the preponderance of evidence that Kerrison marshals, it seems unlikely this was Jefferson's desire given his belief in innate and intended differences between men and women, regardless of their filial relationship to him. Incorporating the scholarship of architectural historians whose work underscores how the design of Monticello conveyed the intended order sought by Jefferson adds further to Kerrison's comprehensive analysis of Monticello's hierarchies. Furthermore, Kerrison's writing is clear and often witty, especially when she details the lives of Jefferson's white daughters, and immediately undercuts their elite pleasures with the harsh realities of the enslaved people toiling to build Jefferson's idea of himself. On the particular subject of the Hemingses at Monticello, Kerrison is in close conversation with Annette Gordon-Reed's work about the enslaved people at Monticello.1 Just as Martha passed along the lessons of her French education to her children, Sally Hemings likely passed on to her children...

Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald

Reviewed by: Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History ed. by Robert M. S. McDonald Edith Gelles Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. Edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. Foreword by Jon Meacham. Afterword by Gordon S. Wood. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2019. Pp. xxxii, 311. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4291-9.) The word Lives in this title may be interpreted in several ways, as shown in this marvelous new collection of essays, finely edited by Robert M. S. McDonald. The essays originated at a 2012 conference at Monticello to commemorate Peter S. Onuf, one of this generation’s master historians of Thomas Jefferson. Each of the other master historians featured in this volume examines the biographical interpretations of a particular era during the nearly two centuries since the third president’s death in 1826, excluding the present generation of Jefferson biographers. Interest in the third president has not flagged since his death; the mythologizing of Jefferson has been of industrial proportions. That is one way to read the titular “Lives.” Another way is that, with each generation, the perception of Jefferson’s character has shifted, reflecting the biographer’s own times. As Jon Meacham writes in the foreword, “there is no such thing as a totally objective life. Biographies . . . often belong to the ages in which they were written no matter how hard some historians may try It can be no other” (p. x). Finally, reading Lives in its verb form, it is clear that Jefferson still baffles biographers, and the challenge to define him continues. R. B. Bernstein, in his fine essay on Dumas Malone, quotes Hermione Lee that biography is “‘a mixed, unstable genre, whose rules keep coming undone [and] the only rule that holds good is that there is no such thing as a definitive biography’” (p. 220). In the end, it is fair to say that the essayists agree with Joseph J. Ellis’s incisive 1997 portrait of Jefferson as the “American Sphinx,” an icon that remains a puzzle. Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History is divided into three sections, reflecting the chronology of the biographies. Part 1, “Memory,” begins with a reflection on Jefferson’s own failed efforts to write a memoir, which is followed by a series of essays about the biographers who either knew Jefferson or knew people who were familiar with the paterfamilias. This group includes an adulatory great-granddaughter, Sarah N. Randolph, who, as the late Jan Ellen Lewis points out, emphasized Jefferson’s dislike of public life and claimed he “entered politics only out of ‘a lurking desire to leave to his children the honor’” (p. 87). Not all of the early authors were so romantic [End Page 449] or self-serving in their works. They emphasized Jefferson’s public life and his public service while suppressing his personal life, a slant that, in the period between the early nineteenth century and the Civil War, meant allowing scant attention to slavery, to Jefferson’s absence from public service during the Revolutionary War, and yes, to the scandalous story of his relationship with Sally Hemings. This rumor circulated after 1802, when the journalist James Callender published a reference to Jefferson’s so-called illicit affair. None of these essayists can get away from the subject of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings, perhaps a telling reflection of the current generation’s contextual focus. The conclusive evidence surfaced in 1998 when the scientific certainty of DNA confirmed the paternity of Hemings’s children. Earlier historians, like Henry S. Randall, whom Andrew Burstein insightfully analyzes along with James Parton, attributed paternity to Jefferson’s nephews, the notorious reprobates, the Carr brothers. Burstein’s Randall “showcased [Jefferson] as the most well-rounded, refined, and resilient of the founders”; “Randall’s work served as justification for all future monuments to the Jefferson whose ‘spirit-stirring pen’ enshrined a world-transformative humanism” (p. 63). Parton’s 1872–1873 biography echoed that sentiment: “‘If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right’” (pp. 77–78). In a transitional essay to the second part, Richard...

"Take Care of Me When Dead": Jefferson Legacies

"Take Care of Me When Dead"Jefferson Legacies Annette Gordon-Reed (bio) Keywords Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, Hemings family, slavery, racism "Take care of me when dead," Thomas Jefferson wrote on February 17, 1826, to James Madison, his friend of over fifty years. Although he would live another five months, Jefferson likely understood that the end was near. The final two years of his life, with the exception of his old friend Lafayette's two visits to Monticello on his triumphant return to the United States in 1824, had been a parade of horribles. His physical condition, particularly in the final year before he wrote this letter to Madison, was rapidly deteriorating. He was in constant pain that required ever increasing doses of laudanum that, no doubt, affected his mood and his day-to-day functioning. His financial affairs were in ruins. The lingering effects of the Panic of 1819 and his own flawed economic decisions—including co-signing notes for a relative who defaulted on the obligations—left him reeling.1 James Morton Smith, who edited three volumes of the correspondence between Jefferson and Madison, has written that "Despite their talent for epistolary camaraderie, the correspondence between these two Virginia gentlemen, these closest of friends, is characterized by a grave [End Page 1] formality, a dignified reserve, a mannered elegance, with little display of affection except for a friendly salutary close." Morton also noted that Jefferson confided to one of his granddaughters that it is "easier to write ten letters of business than one of the intangible affections of the mind." Although this letter does not stray far from the parameters of emotion that Morton discerned, the letter's final paragraph, with Jefferson's request that Madison take care of him after he was gone, casts a different light on the substance of the paragraphs that go before it. In his gloomy circumstances, Jefferson's mind roamed over the public and the private, touching on things that meant a great deal to him that he understood would be imperiled once he was gone.2 First, there was talk of the University, interspersed with a perhaps too-optimistic prediction about the number of students who would enroll, and there was an acknowledgement of the Virginia legislature's decision not to give the effort any more money. That discussion veered into Jefferson's perennial obsessions—politics, and their relationship to the American Revolution, and the role that young people, young white men, of course, would play in the still New Republic: In selecting our Law-Professor, we must be rigorously attentive to his political principles. you will recollect that, before the revolution, Coke Littleton was the universal elementary book of Law Students; and a sounder whig never wrote, nor of profounder learning in the orthodox doctrines of the British constitution, or in what were called English liberties. you remember also that our lawyers were then all whigs. but when his black-letter text, and uncouth, but cunning learning got out of fashion, and the honied Mansfieldism of Blackstone became the Student's Horn-book from that moment that profession (the nursery of our Congress) began to slide into toryism, and nearly all the young brood of lawyers now are of that hue. they suppose themselves indeed to be whigs, because they no longer know what whiggism or republicanism means. it is in our Seminary that that Vestal flame is to be kept alive. it is thence to spread anew over our own and the sister states. The spirit of the Revolution and the beneficial nature of the American Experiment could be imparted through the right books and the right [End Page 2] course of study—as could wrong notions—"toryism," "honied Mansfieldism." His new "Seminary" appears as a last best hope to keep alive the flame—and the disciples, the students who would one day form half of the state legislature, would carry the torch to other states.3 And then it was on to more personal matters, Jefferson's "mortification" at the very public controversy over the lottery that he had proposed as a scheme to help save himself from financial ruin. After listing the catalogue of events that had...

From the Transnational to the Intimate: Multidirectional Memory, the Holocaust and Colonial Violence in Australia and Beyond

In Australia, public remembrance, particularly relating to national identity and colonial violence, has been contentious. In this article, we take Australia’s recent bid to join the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) as an opportunity to identify national, local and multidirectional dynamics shaping public remembrance of the Holocaust and colonial violence in Australia. Joining IHRA signifies a belated national commitment to Holocaust remembrance, which has traditionally been fostered in Australia by survivor communities. Significantly, the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM) has recently ventured beyond survivor memory, positioning Holocaust remembrance as a platform to identify ongoing human rights violations against Indigenous Australians and other marginalized groups. While this multidirectional framework promotes an inclusive practice of remembrance, we argue that it may inadvertently flatten complex histories into instances of “human rights violations” and decentre the foundational issue of settler colonial violence in Australia. To explore the personal and affective work of remembering settler violence from an Indigenous perspective, we turn to two multiscalar artworks by Judy Watson that exemplify a mnemonic politics of location. the names of places contributes to a local and national public remembrance of settler violence by identifying and mapping colonial massacre sites. In experimental beds, Watson links her matrilineal family history of racial exclusion with that of Thomas Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings. This transnational decolonial feminist work takes the gendered and racialized body and intimate sexual appropriation as a ground for a multidirectional colonial memory, thereby providing an alternative to the dominant Holocaust paradigm and its idiom of human rights.

Trade books’ evolving depictions of Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president

PurposeHistory-based trade books are an essential classroom option for social studies and English teachers. Professional organizations in history, social studies, English, reading and literature promote these engaging, age-appropriate secondary sources. Research suggests that misrepresentations appear often within history-based curricula, yet the majority of empirical studies have been completed on textbooks. The purpose of this paper is to examine the historical representation of Thomas Jefferson within trade books.Design/methodology/approachThe data sample included trade books targeting various ages to make comparisons within and between grade ranges; the authors selected books published in distinctly different years to examine how Jefferson’s historical representation changed over time. The mixed methods content analysis used both open coding and axial coding.FindingsFindings included sanitized versions of slavery at Monticello and omissions of his relationship with Sally Hemings. Date of publication, particularly those published after 1999 as new scientific evidence emerged linking Hemings and Jefferson, and intended audience shaped patterns of representation about Jefferson’s privileged social position, authorship of the Declaration of Independence, political philosophy and involvement in the American Revolution, to mention a few. Heroification, a common historical misrepresentation, did not appear.Research limitations/implicationsLimitations included: uneven portions of the data pool as children’s and young adult trade books were not common in early and mid-twentieth century; organization of books by grade range is problematic due to inexact nature of ranking narratives’ complexity; and definitive conclusions cannot emerge from a single study. Future research should consider how trade books represent other historical figures, particularly slave-owning American presidents.Practical implicationsPractical suggestions, such as how to address misrepresentations using primary sources, are offered.Originality/valueThomas Jefferson, undoubtedly an impactful American, is frequently included in elementary, middle level and high school curriculum. The authors examined Jefferson’s historical representation within trade books.

Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

Slave Life at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello A. B. Wilkinson (bio) The Life of Sally Hemings, Monticello, Virginia, 06 2018 (ongoing). "My mother became Mr. Jefferson's concubine," Madison Hemings told a newspaper reporter in 1873, referring to his enslaved mother, Sarah "Sally" Hemings, and his father, Thomas Jefferson. For many years, historians were unaware of this interview or ignored it along with other evidence that gave credence to the eighteenth-century story. Today, in the twenty-first century, Madison shares his family's tale through a type of augmented reality exhibit at Monticello—Jefferson's plantation estate and historical landmark.1 The Life of Sally Hemings exhibit, which opened in June 2018, presents Madison's words, projected in light, within the confines of a small cellar room under the south wing of Jefferson's Renaissance-inspired plantation mansion. In the dark room with brick-layered floors and matching fireplace, Madison's words narrate key portions of his mother's and siblings' stories. Those who run the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which was established in 1923, make clear that awareness of the multifaceted connection between Sally Hemings and the third president of the United States is essential to understanding Jefferson and the nation's history. Formerly, many at the foundation had denied the possibility that Jefferson could have fathered Hemings's children, but over the past twenty-five years members have charted a new direction by encouraging people to "look closer" at the plantation estate and the Jefferson–Hemings story.2 The connection between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is an American story that represents the critical nuances, contradictions, and complexities within US slavery. How could the primary author of the Declaration of Independence hold in bondage hundreds of human beings, including several of his own children and their mother? How could a nation founded in freedom also hold 20 percent of its population in bondage? In short, Monticello encapsulates the US paradox of liberty and bondage—a contradiction that runs through the nation's history and leaves a legacy that we must continue to grapple with today. [End Page 247] A History of Denial In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, battles over what versions of history should be taught have sparked contentious debates about what information is most relevant to the field of American studies. Disagreements over history are nothing new, and the Jefferson–Hemings controversy has been one of the most famously debated chronicles in US history. The truth behind the paternity of Hemings's children and the naming of Jefferson as their father has been an area of contention and denial in the United States for over two hundred years. The extent of this historical debate requires no repetition here, for Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy adeptly addresses the history of denial behind the Jefferson–Hemings connection. The book was first published in 1997, the year before DNA evidence proved that Sally's descendants were related to a male Jefferson. Science, along with documentary evidence, ultimately show that Jefferson fathered her children. "There are," writes Gordon-Reed, "many things that have been designated historical truths on the basis of far less evidence."3 The general consensus among historians now agrees with Madison Hemings's version of the relationship between his mother and father, and the evidence existed long before DNA testing. Shortly after Madison's account became public in 1873, Israel Jefferson—an unrelated slave and personal servant to Thomas Jefferson—also confirmed that Sally Hemings was the "concubine" of his former master. He squarely placed the parentage of Beverley, Harriet, Madison, and Eston on the author of the Declaration of Independence.4 When historians rediscovered the Madison Hemings and Isaac Jefferson newspaper interviews in the 1950s, many Euro-Americans rejected the claims and attacked the validity of these accounts simply because they came from formerly enslaved African Americans. After midcentury, Monticello tour guides were usually Euro-American women, and they refuted guests who mentioned Sally Hemings and brought up any intimate connection with Jefferson. The guides dismissed the accusations as false and brushed them off as gossip and political slander. While the way the African American men—who led...

The Consummation of Critical Desire: Sally Hemings, Sexuality, and Black Feminist Political Imagination

The Consummation of Critical DesireSally Hemings, Sexuality, and Black Feminist Political Imagination Samantha Pinto (bio) Since 1802, Sally Hemings has almost exclusively existed in and through erotic speculation around enslaved womanhood. In particular, this essay looks at the fixation on and repetition of the consummation of Thomas Jefferson and Heming's relationship as embodying difficult desires for emancipatory politics in the study of black women's sexuality. I wish to examine the lure of consummation—both the sexual act and the fantasy of completion that is repeated in each representation of it—that haunts the study of Hemings. This essay also complicates ways of reading Black women's sexuality, sexual pleasure, and desire as wholly within the terms of "social death," Orlando Patterson's field-changing frame for thinking about the civic experience of Black life under chattel slavery that has gained refreshed life in the articulation of Afro-pessimist thought.1 Rather than make definitive claims about Black women's enslaved sexuality as either adherent or resistant to existing models of emancipatory Black subjectivity and subjection, I'd like to think about what a figure like Sally Hemings—what the subject of enslaved women's erotic lives—means when positioned as central to our understanding of Black political subjectivity, not as a field of study that has to be shoehorned into existing models of Black freedom as difficult teleologies of political completion or postscripts to inevitable political failure. Here the terms of consummation—the way it denotes both a singular event and a moment of contract or completion—might offer us a vocabulary for the imaginable limits or scope of inquiry when we talk about enslaved women's sexuality in frames that emphasize firm distinctions between resistance and [End Page 53] submission, consent and rape, pleasure and domination. I argue, along with contemporary scholars of Black erotics and enslaved women's history, that these modes, however complex the shades of gray in between, become the poles of our answers, and hence the accepted poles of the politics of Black feminist study, even when we take pains to blur their denotational lines. Consummation engages in the economy of success and failure of representation, and of consuming representation, of Black women's sexuality. I modestly ask us to think through the ways we consume narratives of enslaved women's sociality as the pinnacle of social death, and its concomitant partner-as-opposite, the height of agency. These acts of critical desire are both necessary to include and acknowledge but unnecessarily definitive of Black politics. This article suggests reading through the imaginative archive of Sally Hemings that might deem her either tragic or heroic, victim or agent, to instead build a case that positions violence, trauma, desire, pleasure, and risk as inextricably linked to, and unevenly distributed by, the vulnerable fact of human embodiment. It assumes the presence of these tense partners in sociality as the collective base of being a political subject, rather than as categories one either inhabits or doesn't. It puts Black women's sexuality at the center of our intellectual theories of politics, not as its exceptional or marginal subjects. And it imagines Sally Hemings as a figure for challenging the very basis of thinking about freedom, as we currently employ the term as the ultimate limit, and goal, for Black politics. Naming Sexual Social Death Contemporary debates about Sally Hemings hinge not on the question of did he or didn't he (have a long-term sexual relationship with a Black woman)? Nor do they rest on the question of are they or aren't they (the children of Jefferson who bear the Hemings name)? Instead, today, the question related to Hemings is about consent—did she or didn't she consent to her sexual relations with Jefferson? Think pieces in Teen Vogue and other venues make this starker: Jefferson was a rapist.2 We need to call Jefferson a rapist. Opinion editorials in the Washington Post echo this as they critique the use of the word "mistress" as a qualifier for Hemings's relationship to Jefferson, even in the most recent article about the restoration of "Sally...

Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles

Reviewed by: Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B. Boles Randolph B. Campbell Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty. By John B. Boles. (New York: Basic Books, 2017. Pp. 640. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) On April 29, 1962, while hosting a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners from the western hemisphere, President John F. Kennedy memorably remarked, “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” John B. Boles’s biography brilliantly attests to the accuracy of Kennedy’s comment. It is no exaggeration to say that during his eighty-three years (1743–1826), Thomas Jefferson sought to know everything about everything, and he came as close as seems humanly possible to that goal. Yet, while he was primarily an intellectual who loved ideas and books, Jefferson also contributed mightily to the “real-world” business of creating the United States. Boles deftly explains how Jefferson shaped the new nation in ways so numerous that only two of the most vital can be mentioned as examples in a brief review. First, the Declaration of Independence, by stating that the protection of individual life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the proper purpose of government, gave the United States undying liberal ideals. Jefferson would have been the first to admit that his nation, and he himself, did not live perfectly up to the ideal of equal human rights. But over the years, his eloquent promise has led the United States to advance a great deal toward making that idealistic goal a reality. The Louisiana Purchase as described by Boles provides a second example. New England Federalists strongly opposed the 1803 agreement with France, arguing that the Constitution did not authorize adding new territory to the United States, and Jefferson, a proclaimed strict constructionist, worried about the constitutionality of the action. The purchase, however, doubled the [End Page 120] size of the nation and assured control of the Mississippi River, so the president argued that the power to make treaties implied the right to use them to acquire new territory. Only a fool would have passed up such an opportunity to secure the future security of the United States because of what amounted to a constitutional quibble; fortunately, Jefferson was no fool. The Louisiana Purchase gave the United States a boundary with Spanish territory in the Southwest and led to Jefferson’s most important contacts with Texas. Boles briefly discusses the Dunbar-Hunter and Freeman expeditions on the Red and Arkansas Rivers in 1805–1806 and Zebulon Pike’s explorations in 1806–1807, but he notes that they received far less attention than the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery’s adventures in the Missouri River Valley and the Northwest. Boles also describes how Jefferson, always the expansionist, considered the possibility that the western boundary of the Louisiana Purchase extended to the Rio Grande but due to complications, both domestic and foreign, was unable to acquire from Spain even the small area centering on Baton Rouge called West Florida. As should be expected of a Jefferson biographer writing in the early twenty-first century, Boles emphasizes issues related to slavery. Jefferson, he writes, “has seen his reputation wane due to his views on race, the revelation of his relationship with Sally Hemings, and his failure to free his own slaves” (2). Boles points out that Jefferson considered slavery an evil and often suggested stopping its spread, but that he was unwilling to rid himself of the institution as did an Albemarle County, Virginia, neighbor, Edward Coles, who freed his slaves in 1819. Of course, Coles had to move to Illinois to emancipate his slaves, and the action changed everything in his life. There is no record that Jefferson ever considered such a step; moreover, he never accepted racial equality and always feared that blacks and whites could not live together in peace. He saw no urgency in ending slavery, preferring to believe, Boles writes, “that in God’s good time, emancipation would somehow be effected. In no other aspect of his life does Jefferson seem more distant...

Objects of Narrative Desire: An Unnatural History of Fossil Collection and Black Women's Sexuality

Objects of Narrative Desire:An Unnatural History of Fossil Collection and Black Women's Sexuality Samantha Pinto (bio) Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history—that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, disremembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possession" In the 2015 book The Sixth Extinction, regarding the current eco-historical moment of great extinction due to manmade climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert mentions in passing an astounding confluence for scholars of race and black feminist theory: the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and George Cuvier, two of the most infamous historical exploiters of black women's sexuality, for a set of fossils—the bones of a giant mammoth—in the mid-1790s (27–28). Jefferson, then vice president of the United States, had already begun his forty-year sexual entanglement with a woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. He was also an avid amateur naturalist and collector of fossilized bones unearthed in expeditions of settler colonialism across what was to become America. Cuvier, a young French scientist, would extend his scientific interest in and findings on fossils, eventually positing the first theory of extinction on which the work of Darwin himself is based. Cuvier would also be the person responsible for immortalizing [End Page 351] Sarah Baartman, the early nineteenth-century African performer otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus, in his drawings and racial science claims about her anatomy during her life and, following his 1815 public autopsy of her body, after her death. This seemingly unrelated convergence of the two men who represent the most infamous and intimate links between white supremacy and black women's embodiment reveals the shared material space between the fields of natural history and black feminist theory. Jefferson's and Cuvier's traffic in 'extinct' bones and in black women's bodies was engendered by systems of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, and today both fossilized bones of extinct animals and black women's historical bodies are mobilized to critique these systems in the cultural work of remembrance, knowledge production, and other labors for scientific and historical narratives of progress. This article argues that in analyzing the twinned com-modification of fossils and black women's bodies we might both trace the strange connections between their exploitation in the service of the seemingly opposed narratives of white supremacy and liberal progress and imagine the methodological possibilities of reading objectification not as the end point of our critique of scientific racism and the misogynoir of Western political thought, but as the generative space from which we can reimagine an embodied history of black women. The evidence of the scientific, sexual, and political desires that append to black women's historical bodies animates this piece as a companion object to fossils and as a way to think through the 'fossilization' of race, gender, and sexuality that happens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as in contemporary discourses around black women's history. Fossils stand as objects that are spectacularly rendered into the deep time of 'prehistory,' a temporal category that, as Dana Luciano reminds us, often serves to obscure and provide an alibi for contemporary practices of racialized and gendered violence and violation ("Tracking Prehistory" 174). This article excavates these unnatural narratives of natural history and black women's objectification through three sites. First, I read the convergence between Jefferson and Cuvier, Baartman and Hemings, and the circulation and display of fossils and black women's bodies through their shared participation in eighteenth-century collection as a performance and a narrative of progress. Second, I turn to an investigation of the scientific and public cultures formed in the wake of this earlier era, including [End Page 352] the institutionalization of racial science in the spaces of the museum and the expedition in the late nineteenth century, to imagine how collection and objectification were re-narrativized in these spaces. Here, I focus on...

Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt

Reviewed by: Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation by Nicholas Guyatt Douglas R. Egerton Nicholas Guyatt. Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation. New York: Basic Books, 2016. 403 pp. $29.95. Most Americans associate racial segregation with the Jim Crow South or with the antebellum urban North. Either way, the presumption holds that these were policies imposed by conservative and often reactionary politicians bent on upholding the prevailing racial order and rolling back Reconstruction-era reforms. In this smart and creative volume, British historian and Cambridge University lecturer Nicholas Guyatt argues instead that from the Revolutionary years through the Civil War, white liberals and reformers advanced notions of racial apartheid as a solution for their nation's woes. Baffled by the question of what to do with the early republic's large number of slaves or with the indigenous peoples just west of America's growing cities, progressives, Guyatt suggests, embraced racial separation as the answer, from Thomas Jefferson's advocacy of removal in his Notes on the State of Virginia to Abraham Lincoln's longtime support for African American colonization in Liberia. Guyatt begins by returning to a familiar question, and usually one investigated by Jefferson scholars. Having announced that the United States was a revolutionary nation, and one based on equality and consent of the governed, how might policy makers square such egalitarian pronouncements with the fact that the nation was twenty percent black or that nonwhites inhabited lands coveted by white settlers? One initial answer, and indeed one often repeated in these pages, was for the country to move toward colorblind equality by engaging in interracial relationships. President Jefferson, who, of course, practiced this policy with his enslaved sister-in-law, Sally Hemings, once assured a delegation of Mohicans and Delawares that "You will mix with us by marriage" (144). Jefferson's hopes that white men might incorporate native women into Euro-American society by marriage has been analyzed by scholars at least since Bernard Sheehan in the 1970s. But Guyatt demonstrates how frequently these proposals were advanced by important politicians; among them was William Crawford of Georgia, a onetime secretary of war, and James Monroe's secretary of the treasury. Crawford's advocacy of the strategy was made so frequently that it was discussed in a British tract entitled Colonial Policy, and was briefly endorsed by the editor of the Virginia Argus. When theory was put into practice, however, especially when the genders were reversed and the husband was an Indian, even New England reformers were aghast. While attending Connecticut's Cornwall School, an academy designed to educate those natives who embraced the tenets of "civilization," Elias Boudinot, a mixed-race Cherokee, fell in love with a local girl whose family had ties to the school. After their engagement became public, a mob that included the fiancée's brother torched the academy. Without abandoning their agenda of forced assimilation, white reformers increasingly began to argue that Native Americans had only once choice: relocate West, where the process of cultural adaptation could continue, or remain in the East and face extinction. The flip side of this ideological coin was the deportation of black Americans to West Africa. Here too, proposals for colonization were preceded by discussions of [End Page 147] racial mixing. Jefferson's French acquaintance, the Marquis of Chastellux, writing in Mathew Carey's Columbian Magazine, remarked that as the "well-established commerce" between white masters and female slaves was so common in Virginia, it should actually be encouraged by the government so as to give rise "to a race of mulattoes, which would produce another of Quarterons, and so on until the colour should be totally effaced" (130–31). Not surprisingly, Jefferson declined to shed further light on a practice that every planter's wife knew existed. The result, Guyatt observes, was that antislavery activists increasingly turned to colonization as the most plausible solution. Guyatt's lengthy discussion of the colonization movement becomes the heart of Bind Us Apart, and he does a superb job of pulling together the various strands of this often-misunderstood crusade. Having briefly toyed with the idea, William Lloyd Garrison broke with the...

Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time by Robert M. S. McDonald

Reviewed by: Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time by Robert M. S. McDonald Sarah Swedberg Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time. By Robert M. S. McDonald. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016, 311 pages, $29.95 Cloth. Robert M. S. McDonald's Confounding Father is obviously a labor of love. McDonald mined the archives for a record of the ways Thomas Jefferson's most ardent supporters as well as his bitter foes wrote about him from the time he sat down to write a draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until his death in 1826. From the very beginning, Americans disagreed vehemently about the scope and purpose of government. Jefferson's image became integral to this disagreement as he came to stand in for a "new liberal order" in opposition to the older ideal of "ordered liberty" (5). McDonald tells the story of the "growth and development" of Jefferson's "image among his contemporaries" by focusing each of his chapters on moments that tested that image: his role in writing the Declaration of Independence, an election he lost (1796) and an election he won (1800), the Sally Hemings's scandal, and his retirement, among others. In each of these chapters, Jefferson's detractors, New Yorker Alexander Hamilton first among them, worked to unmask what they saw as Jefferson's true persona and show him as a threat to the republic. His supporters wielded their pens and their presses to counter with a picture of a sincere and principled patriot. In each episode, the messaging varied little as the Federalists held to their refrain and the Republicans to theirs. Returning to the same people [End Page 298] and the same arguments over the course of a political career helps to show how entrenched political identities had become even early in the history of the republic. Only during the Embargo of 1807 did this shift, slightly, because both sides found themselves in the uncomfortable position of compromising their own deep-seated beliefs about the scope of the national government in order to continue to either attack or defend Jefferson, then president, and his policies. The Federalists believed that Jefferson represented everything that could go wrong with the American experiment in government. He was an American Jacobin, bent on bringing the fanaticism and atheism of the French Revolution to American shores. Leaked and sometimes badly-translated correspondence from Jefferson was their most powerful weapon. Federalists believed this correspondence proved, beyond a doubt, that Jefferson was hostile to "God, Washington, and the Constitution." In contrast, Republican pen-men wrote enthusiastically about his patriotism and contrasted him with the "anglo-mononarchic-aristocratic faction" represented by his early political opponent, John Adams (98). Jefferson's image was being created on both sides of the political divide for use as a political weapon, and that image focused not just on public policy or political vision, but also on personal conduct. In Chapter Six, "Race, Sex, and Reputation," McDonald examined the ways both friends and foes tackled the rumor that Jefferson not only had a slave concubine named Sally, but had fathered a son with her. In this chapter, McDonald was interested not so much in the affair, although he acknowledged that Jefferson and Sally Hemings almost assuredly had a continued sexual relationship. Instead, he placed the allegation into the framework of the book and situated it within the ways Jefferson's friends and foes used the rumors. The Federalists tried to use this information to discredit Jefferson while the Republicans attempted to move beyond the revelation and continue the work of governing. Jefferson was silent on the issue, adding fuel for his detractors and allowing his supporters to paint him as a good, disinterested republican. More tellingly, for McDonald, the ways both friends and foes used this information highlights the nationwide racism of the early republic and, particularly, the fears—north and south—of miscegenation. In each of his chapters, McDonald shows his readers how the main partisan political players built Jefferson's image for good or for bad. These [End Page 299] partisans sometimes seemed too uncomplicated in his telling. After all, in the early republican...

Thomas Jefferson and Us

Thomas Jefferson and Us David Sehat Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty. By John B. Boles. New York: Basic Books, 2017. 638 pages. Cloth, ebook. "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. By Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf. New York: W. W. Norton/Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2016. 399 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The Founding Fathers have had quite a run in the last few years. Starting in the early 1990s, books about the founding generation began to appear among the hottest publishing topics in nonfiction. Publishers rushed to bring out more and more accounts about the Founders in their various guises—as revolutionaries, as constitutional architects, as family men, and as literary participants in the wider republic of letters. Soon some historians were lamenting what H. W. Brands labeled "Founders Chic," the peculiar phenomenon in which the eighteenth-century Founders were deemed au courant gurus who supposedly provided cures for all contemporary ailments. But such complaints largely fell on deaf ears. The adulation has continued unabated.1 And yet there has been one key exception to this general celebration, one Founder who has seen his reputation plummet to an almost unimaginable depth. Thomas Jefferson used to be singularly revered as the author of the Declaration of Independence. Starting in the 1960s with the black freedom struggle, some critics began to see Jefferson as a more general symbol of the hypocrisy of the United States. Though he proclaimed that all men are created equal, he owned hundreds of slaves. An unseemly rumor held that those few he freed were his children, borne by his slave Sally Hemings. Still his reputation among many historians remained resilient. In 1974 when Fawn M. Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a psychobiography concluding that Hemings was in fact his concubine, most of Jefferson's latter-day scribes remained unconvinced.2 [End Page 771] But in 1997 Annette Gordon-Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy broke through the resistance. Employing a lawyerly sense of evidence and burden, she documented the way that many of Jefferson's biographers, so committed to a specific image of the man and so inclined toward a specific kind of written (and therefore white) historical record, had denigrated other evidence that pointed toward Jefferson's long-term sexual relationship with his slave. The following year, DNA evidence showed that someone within the Jefferson line had fathered Hemings's last child. The most likely person to do that would have been Jefferson himself. In short order, many historians concluded that Jefferson was the father of all of Hemings's children, having entered into a concubine relationship with her as a forty-year-old man while she was in her early teens, possibly as young as thirteen.3 The revelation shredded Jefferson's reputation. Although not everyone would agree with Paul Finkelman's assessment that "Jefferson is one of the most deeply creepy people in American history," after Gordon-Reed's book few historians would embrace him without caveat as the sage of Monticello, the prescient voice from the past.4 Now come two books suggesting that the widespread condemnation has gone too far. The most vigorous defense is from John B. Boles in a new biography, Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty, that seeks to present Jefferson, as the author explains, "holistically and within the rich context of his time and place" (2). When seen in that context, Boles argues, Jefferson becomes a figure easier to understand and even to admire. "Jefferson challenges us more thoroughly than any other Founder," Boles writes, "but in the end, he is the most attractive, most elusive, most complicated, most intellectual, most practical, most idealistic, most flexible, and most quintessentially American Founder of them all" (5). Unfortunately, Boles is so eager to rehabilitate Jefferson that many parts of the biography read like a brief for the defense. Regarding Jefferson's relationship with Hemings, Boles argues that their concubinage was likely characterized by "genuine affection—if not love itself" (153). He offers no evidence for this conclusion, nor for his later assertion that their entire relationship seems, retrospectively, "consensual" (265...

Filling in Gaps in the Historical Record: Accuracy, Authenticity, and Closure in Ann Rinaldi’s Wolf by the Ears

This novel, narrated by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings’ daughter, includes four historical inaccuracies: they contribute to a pitiful view of the slave-owning president. Determining authenticity requires a more subjective interpretive response: the depiction of Harriet Hemings’ life at Monticello and her decision to leave and pass for white does achieve a convincing degree of authenticity.