The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family | Annette Gordon-reed

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family | Annette Gordon-reed | A Pleasant Surprise

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The Hemingses of M...

	The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Annette Gordon-reed W.W. Norton & Co., 2008 - 800 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family's dispersal after Jefferson's death in 1826. It brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings's siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson's wife, Martha. The Hemingses of Monticello sets the family's compelling saga against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello. Much anticipated, this book promises to be the most important history of an American slave family ever written.

(20080928)

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Story of an interesting family

Following on the heels of several other studies of black families from the time of the Civil War, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty and the black upper class, Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class this book examines the story of the Hemings family and their connections to the Jefferson family. It is entirely intertwined with Monticello, Jefferson's home and estate. This is a very interesting story of a 'vanished world', the southern aristocracy and their sexual liasons with their slaves, a story often not told but one that is carved on the faces of their descendants. It is a story revealed, to a small degree, in Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (America: a Cultural History). A very nice book, for anyone interested in the period, Jefferson or African-American history this will dazzle and surprise. Excellently researched, a true bit of investigative reporting.

Seth J. Frantzman

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A Pleasant Surprise

There are some questions that can never be resolved in history, and they can drive you nutty. For example, did George Mallory ("the finest climber of his generation") make the summit of Everest in 1924 before he died on the mountain. Unless his camera or other physical evidence is found at the summit, we will never know for sure. Similar is the dispute over whether Thomas Jefferson fathered some, all, or none of the children of his slave Sally Hemmings. Without the invention of a time machine, we simply (despite DNA tests) will absolutely never know the answer. Much ink and effort has been shed on this issue, which while important I guess, will never be resolved. One of the principal instigators of this issue (along with the late Fawn Brodie) is the author of this long study, Annette Gordon-Reed, both a law and history professor. Her earlier book on the TJ-SH issue took the historical professional to task (particularly the Jefferson establishment centered at UVA) for overlooking what she considered to be definitive evidence that such a relationship existed. This set off quite a storm of controversy, which led to the DNA testing of Hemmings and Jefferson descendants.

I am pleased to report that this extensive 600 page plus volume does not (as I feared) constitute a further installment in the author's efforts to demonstrate the existence of such a relationship. Rather, the author is up to something much more serious and valuable and even unique. This is because she simply assumes from the outset that TJ fathered all of the SH children, adding only a few additional arguments to those she previously had made. Rather, her focus is the co-existence of these two families, one free and the other slave, in the Monticello of Jefferson. The families are intertwined in many ways, even setting aside the TJ-SH issue, over the course of 50 or so years. Through focusing on this one slave family, a whole range of fascinating issues are opened up for examination. For example, how did slaves live; could they work outside the slave relationship and earn money; how did the Hemmingses, who constituted virtually the entirety of the Jefferson household staff, function in their positions; how did they relate to the field slaves who did the heavy labor; what happened when TJ died and his assets (including slaves) had to be sold to pay creditors? For students of TJ, the book is a treasure trove of information and insights and adds greatly to our understanding of TJ the man and the world he created (perhaps a dream world) at Monticello.

The author's research is impeccable and extensive. She has rightly been criticized because much of the volume consists of her speculations and invocations of creative imagination to fill in the gaps of the historical record. While these criticisms as a matter of historiography are soundly based, I think they miss what Gordon-Reed is attempting to do, which is to put forward her best guess of what was occurring over this long period among and between free and slave residents of Monticello. It is, so to speak, one African-American historian's suggestion of a complete picture of Monticello life as it centered on the Hemings family and its interaction with that of Jefferson. For Gordon-Reed this is an necessary step to enable her to explore the whole range of issues that make the book so extremely valuable. Until we get that time machine, much can be learned from the author's hypotheses regarding life at Monticello with that most complex of American characters, Thomas Jefferson.

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Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and much, much more...

My parents took me to Monticello as a young girl, and I have been fascinated with Thomas Jefferson ever since. I was even more intrigued when I read about his relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Annette Gordon-Reed gives us a scholarly and extensive effort in her latest book, The Hemings of Monticello. This book is not just about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but much, much more.

Gordon-Reed starts with the Hemings matriarch. Elizabeth Hemings, the mother of Sally, had six children by John Wayles. Wayles was the father of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha. When Wayles died, his estate (including many of his slaves) passed to Martha and Thomas Jefferson. In this way, the Hemings found themselves at Monticello.

The story of Jefferson and Sally Hemings is pretty well known. They allegedly had six children together, four of who survived childhood. Oral history claims that in a "treaty" made between Jefferson and Hemings while they were in France, he agreed to free any children he and Hemings had when they became adults. Jefferson did free all four children (two of them in his will). Three of the four passed into the white world once they left Monticello. What is ironic is that Heming's sons were said to look more like Jefferson and had more common interests (building and music) than his white grandsons.
But much of this book belongs to Sally's older brothers, Robert and James. These two slaves were extremely close to Jefferson, and traveled extensively with him. James even accompanied Jefferson to Paris, where Jefferson paid to have him trained as a master chef. Both men were eventually freed by Jefferson in the 1790s.

There is a surprising amount of information on many members of the Hemings clan. Jefferson kept meticulous records of his expenses including salaries he paid his more talented slaves, maintenance items, clothing, gifts, etc. He also left over 40,000 letters in which the Hemings are often mentioned. The only negative is that Jefferson's daughter and grandchildren are said to have purged any letters from the collection that made reference to Sally.

What I found a bit disappointing about The Hemings of Monticello is that much of this story has been lost to history. This is certainly not the fault of Gordon-Reed, and she tries to deduce what might have happened in various situations. For instance, the Hemings were very deliberate in choosing names for their children, using the same names throughout generations that were important to them. Sally gave her children names from Jefferson's immediate family. "As with Sally Hemings and her children, this one-sided way of naming a group of siblings was the work either of a woman trying very hard to please a man or of a man who felt his children should bear his mark."

The author also spends much time trying to analyze Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a great man, but he was not a saint. His personal beliefs did not always mesh with his actions. But he was definitely a Renaissance man. Gordon-Reed writes "Monticello became an almost perfect projection of Jefferson's personality--his vaulting ambition, his respect for and adherence to aspects of a classical past, his faith in innovation and optimism about the future, his extreme self-indulgence, and his genius." All of these things affected his relationships with the Hemings family members.

The only critical observation I can make about The Hemings of Monticello is that author should have included more about the Hemings DNA study in the body of the book, as opposed a short summary in the footnotes. But otherwise, I couldn't wait to read this work and I was not disappointed.

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Hemings family misrepresented

While I appreciate author Gordon-Reed's prodigious research on the Hemings family of Monticello, she interjects too much of her personal opinions into her book. A more succinct book, roughly half the size of this one, would have been better.

Gordon-Reed's major failing is her insistence on imposing the modern racial-ethnic identity "African American" on the Hemings family. The European ancestry of the Hemings family is essential to understanding their situation. They had very little African ancestry and no African culture. They were, as Frank W. Sweet and Lawrence R. Tenzer have shown, essentially "white slaves." Moreover, the children of Sally Hemings were legally white (as opposed to "passing for white") once manumitted. As Jefferson himself wrote:

"Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem being adopted here."

I would also point out that only the white descendants of Sally Hemings (via her son Eston Hemings Jefferson) have passed a DNA test showing that they are descended from the Jefferson line. None of the black-identified Hemings descendants (via Madison Hemings) have passed a DNA test.

Legal History of the Color Line: The Rise And Triumph of the One-drop Rule

The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue

"Passing" for Who You Really Are: Essays in Support of Multiracial Whiteness

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reviews: page 1, 2

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