In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy through the University of Virginia Press. The book examined the history of the long-rumored sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and a 16-year-old slave girl named Sally Hemings that produced seven children. In that book, Gordon-Reed pointed out the inconsistencies in arguments that debunked the relationship offered evidence in support of it—pointing out that sexual relations between slave masters (even enlightened ones) and female slaves was characteristic of the era. The book sparked controversy—a separate DNA study carried out a year later established a genetic link between Jefferson and the Hemings family—and vaulted Gordon-Reed to both popular and academic prominence.
Now after seven years of exhaustive research, Gordon-Reed has completed a massive new work, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, Sept.) that promises to transform not only the study of Thomas Jefferson's life but also the very notion of how historians and ordinary Americans look at racial identity. The 608-page Hemingses of Monticello is an intimate and methodical look at Thomas Jefferson's entire family, a household composed of both his “legitimate” white family members and his enslaved family members, living side by side at Monticello.
Sally Hemings was the daughter of a slave, Elizabeth Hemings, and a slave owner, John Wayles, who was the father of Jefferson's “legitimate” wife, Martha—making Sally her sister as well as her slave. “It's hard to wrap your mind around the idea that your sister could be your slave,” Gordon-Reed says, “but we know it happened.”
A law professor at New York Law School as well as a professor of history at Rutgers University, Gordon-Reed was born in a small town outside of Houston, Tex.; she attended Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. In the third grade, she became interested in Jefferson when she read a child biography. “[Jefferson] struck me as the most interesting person, because of his love of books,” Gordon-Reed explains. “Even then I thought it was odd that someone who wrote the Declaration of Independence would be a slave owner.” She read Black Over White by historian Winthrop Jordan, “the first time I heard anything at all about Sally Hemings,” when she was 12.
What fascinated Gordon-Reed was that while the black community easily accepted the notion of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship, white scholars generally rejected it. “The fact that a slave owner had children with a slave, to black people, is a commonplace—that's our life story,” she says. To Gordon-Reed, it became an issue of racial and cultural authority, defining who could or couldn't question the conventional historical record, especially the record of such a towering American figure as Thomas Jefferson.
“It struck me as the [paradigm of the] black person as Invisible Man: our words don't count. I thought it was racist, and these were people who would never think that they were saying anything racist.”
But she's also careful to note that despite the topic, her first book was much sought after by the University of Virginia Press, and such Jefferson scholars as Lucinda Stanton provided her with important assistance. “The people there have become much more open about talking about slavery and, in fact, insist on it,” Gordon-Reed says. “People [realize] that you can't understand Jefferson without understanding slavery.”
The success of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was not a surprise for W.W. Norton executive editor Robert Weil—he wanted to publish it himself, but Gordon-Reed decided on the University of Virginia Press because of its prominence in Jeffersonian scholarship—and he was quick to sign up The Hemingses of Monticello.
Gordon-Reed emphasizes the differences between the two works. The first book “is mainly arguing about the arguments,” and the new book “is about all the Hemingses—that's why it's so long. There are lots of them.” She resisted making the book only about Sally.
“This is a book about the development of slavery in the context of a family,” she says. “I want these people, the Hemingses, to live as people on their own, and not as mere appendages to [Jefferson]. If you write about Jefferson, I'm hoping now, you've got to write about the Hemingses.”
