Tom and Sally’s Family: Mixing Race

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,
Annette Gordon-Reed, W.W. Norton, New York

By Lee A. Daniels:

Magisterial. And poignant.

These were words that came to mind after reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s stunning new book examining the lives and the place at Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, and in American history of the Hemings family – the family related by multiple black-white couplings to Thomas Jefferson, America’s third president and the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

Of course, we now know the truth of what was rumored for nearly two centuries. That Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved African American at Monticello and the younger half sister of Jefferson’s dead wife, had a relationship of nearly forty years which produced four children.

The irrefutable confirmation of that pairing and their progeny that came within the last decade owes much to Gordon-Reed, a law professor at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. Her 1998 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, built a powerful evidentiary case just as DNA testing of descendants of Jefferson’s family and of Hemings descendants indicated the Sage of Monticello was the father of at least one of her children.

Annette Gordon Reed

I confess that I was predisposed to think so highly of Gordon-Reed’s current work. For not only had I eagerly read “Controversy”, I had several years ago as editor of another publication commissioned an article from her on the topic. So, I’ve long known there was much more to say about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship and I knew what Gordon-Reed was capable of.

That “much more” she has now given us. Her panoramic exploration of the entire Hemings family from before the War of Independence to its dispersal from Monticello in the late 1820s after Jefferson’s death is an invaluable portrait of the complicated, tortured consequences of the Negro Slavery White America depended on for two and a half centuries.

Gordon-Reed shows us, via life in the unique setting of Monticello, that Negro Slavery in the American colonies and, after the War, the fledgling United States, had two powerful facets.

The one was its ruthlessly exploitative economic dynamic. The slave owners, indolent themselves and consumed with an unbridled egotism that produced a functional amorality, used the “means of production” – their enslaved Africans and African Americans – as one would use an inanimate tool or an animal: They would use them until they had no more utility (if that meant their death, so be it), or sell them for profit, or give them away to cement family or business alliances, or as “gifts” to family and friends.

It was this facet of Slavery which enabled Jefferson to record in his Monticello book of accounts the business activities of his slave empire with no indication of any feelings for his human property – some of whom, the Hemings, were his and his white family’s kin.

But, of course, the very humanity of Africans and African Americans inevitably made Negro Slavery in America a moral tragedy – and a family matter. The Hemings family enjoyed an anomalous position at Monticello precisely because they were literally, genetically part of Wayles-Jefferson-Randolph clan. That produced a certain favored status compared to all but a few of the other hundred or so enslaved blacks at Monticello.

As Gordon-Reed writes, for those held in bondage there, “the only route to freedom … was the possession of Wayles, Jefferson or Hemings blood. No one else had a chance.”

But, as she makes poignantly clear, only a few of the Hemingses found their way to freedom in the Antebellum Era. In his will Jefferson formally freed only five of his Hemings relations – and Sally Hemings was not among them because doing so would have destroyed his reputation and the standing of his white family. The requirement to be cruel that American Slavery imposed upon slave-owning whites far more often than not dictated their behavior toward their own family members on the other side of the color line, too.

The Hemingses were a “mixed-race” family created out of the evil of Negro Slavery in America. That means that they, like virtually all African Americans, were and are a uniquely American family, combining and defining within their family boundaries the two starkest characteristics of the American nation. The one is the great stain on America’s founding, chattel slavery. The other is the redemptive, long-fought-for attainment of the human rights Thomas Jefferson himself so powerfully – and hypocritically – declared inalienable. How ironic, fated and fortuitous that Gordon-Reed’s book appear at this very moment, two centuries and change from the creation of the mixed-race Hemings family, when the American people have elected “a black American of mixed heritage,” as Barack Obama described himself in The Audacity of Hope, to occupy the office Thomas Jefferson cast such an illustrious shadow over.

Lee A. Daniels is editor-in-chief of thedefendersonline.com