Books
Rutgers historian's new book offers window into the world of slavery
As a third grader, Annette Gordon-Reed read her first biography of Thomas Jefferson. Its name is now forgotten, but she was fascinated by what the book said about Jefferson – and even more intrigued by what it did not say about the black people it depicted with Jefferson in its illustrations. Clearly they had no identity of their own, for they were not even identified by name, she noticed.
Later, another book reinforced that perception: Winthrop D. Jordan’s White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812. It examined how historically African slaves and their descendants were regarded as inhuman property; as such, their memories and words carried no weight – not legally, not in society, and certainly not to historians or biographers writing about slavery or the South.
The third, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, awakened Gordon-Reed to Jefferson’s intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, but Fawn Brodie’s book was scorned by many who would not accept a Jefferson-slave relationship.
Those three books helped shape Annette Gordon-Reed into a Jeffersonian scholar intent not only on setting the record straight about the third president, Hemings, and their family, but also one determined to make the words of slaves matter and recognize them as keepers of history and truth. That was the impetus for her first book on the topic, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, in 1997 and remains so for her latest, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton).
Gordon-Reed’s first Jefferson-Hemings work created the type of stir usually accompanying mass media novels, not carefully researched scholarly books. If anything, the reaction to her latest book is even more stunning, including reviews in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Washington Post, New Yorker, Boston Globe, New Republic, and more. Gordon-Reed has given hosts of lectures and media interviews. The reaction hasn’t surprised her, considering the response to her first book. She is pleased by it, although not for reasons one might think. Gordon-Reed is more concerned about getting her core message across than book sales, and the media frenzy is helping to make that a reality.
“The Hemingses,” says Gordon-Reed, is about “far more than a relationship” between a man and a woman. She wants it to be a “window into the world of slavery, an illumination of our past, a past that brought us to where we are today.” She wants readers to see beyond Sally Hemings the slave to Sally Hemings the person, and she wants the Hemingses’ family recollections about their mother and Jefferson to be evaluated as carefully as those of the Jefferson children, not merely dismissed out-of-hand simply because they were the words of former slaves.
Gordon-Reed’s book also is a love story, although not the love story a reader might be expecting. It was Hemings’s love for her family that ultimately saved the day for the Hemingses of Monticello. “It’s a one-woman story of motherhood and family,” she says, the story of how the slave “successfully negotiated her children through the terrible system” which held her captive her entire life.
Could Hemings truly have loved Jefferson, and vice versa? “There could have been real affection,” Gordon-Reed notes, but “not in sync with 21st century notions of love and equality in a relationship.”
And how should Jefferson, the keeper of slaves as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence, be judged by history? “Jefferson was a great man but a human one. He contributed so much and should not be demonized,” she says. “We all have intellectual beliefs that we don’t necessarily act upon.”