Thomas Jefferson is an American icon. Founding Father, author of the Declaration of Independence, minister to France, our first secretary of State, vice president and ultimately the third president. But it has become de rigueur to point to a necessary asterisk: that Jefferson, like all Southern aristocrats, was a slaveholder.
Irony abounds in history.
Yet Jefferson was no mere slave owner. He fathered seven children with his slave and mistress Sally Hemings.
In her important new book, "The Hemingses of Monticello," Annette Gordon-Reed takes an expansive look at what she calls "an American family." Rather than focusing exclusively on Jefferson and Sally Hemings, she sheds light on the Hemingses themselves, tracing the lineage back to Sally's mother, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth, the daughter of an African woman, was the property of the Wayles family; she was "given" to Jefferson when Martha Wayles Skelton became his wife. As an example of the incestuous, convoluted nature of family relations in slave Virginia, Martha and Elizabeth's daughter Sally were half-sisters. Martha died young, and Jefferson never married again.
Gordon-Reed is a lawyer who teaches at New York Law School; she is also a professor of history at Rutgers University. She has written about this material previously in "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy."
Here she argues that while historians have paid a great deal of attention to the so-called Middle Passage -- in which slaves were shipped, in utterly inhuman conditions, from Africa to the Americas -- the story of the slaves has largely been lost to history. It's far more instructive, she contends, to concentrate on one family as an illustration of master-slave relations among the upper-class planters in Virginia. And what better family than that of Jefferson?
When Jefferson was minister to France in the 1780s, he called for the 14-year-old Hemings to join him. She traveled with one of Jefferson's daughters. It was probably in Paris that Jefferson and Hemings began their sexual relationship, against the backdrop of a society in which there was a black community -- most of whom were free. Ultimately, Hemings returned with Jefferson to Virginia to be with her family.
