>> Good afternoon, welcome to the William
G. McGowan Theater here at the National Archives.
I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States
It's a pleasure to welcome you here, those
of you here in the theater, those joining
us on the YouTube station and a special welcome to our
C‑SPAN audience.
Before we get to today's discussion, I'd like to let you know about two other programs
coming up soon.
Friday, Feburary 16th at noon, Professors Chris Myers Ashe and George Derek Musgrove will be here to
talk about their book, Chocolate City: A History
of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital, the tumultuous four century
of race and democracyin Washington, DC, a city that served as national battleground
for contentious issues, including slavery,
segregation, civil rights and a drug wars.
After a two‑year absence from public view,
Abraham Lincoln's original Emancipation Proclamation
will be on display in the East Rotunda gallery during President's Day weekend.
Don't miss this rare opportunity to see the original
Emancipation Proclamation.
The document will be made available for viewing
February 17th, 18th and 19th between the hours
of 10:00 and 5:30 each day.
To learn more about these and our public programs
and exhibits, consult our calendar of events
online at Archives.gov. There is a table outside where you can sign up to receive email updates.
Another way to get involved in the National
Archives is become a member of the National
Archives Foundation.
It supports all of our education and outreach
activities and their applications for membership
are in the lobby also.
Today's program takes a close look at Thomas
Jefferson's three daughters, Martha and Mariah
Jefferson and Harriet Hemings while depicting the life of Thomas Jefferson through their eyes.
Author Catherine Kerrison painstakingly researched their
lives using primary sources including court
cases and district courts of the United States
and deed books of the District of Columbia
here in the National Archives. In previous
accounts about Hemings family authors such as Annette Gordon-Reed made the case
that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings. For the first time, in Jefferson's Three Daughters
Mary Beth Norton of the New York Times book review writes, "Kerrison's beautifully
written book takes the relationship's the
existence as a given."
Christian Science Monitor review, "'Jefferson’s
Daughters' brings its period vividly to life,
a credit to Kerrison’s exhaustive research,
her passion for her subject, and her elegant
writing.
Catherine Kerrison is Associate Professor of history at Villanova where she teaches courses in colonial and revolutionary American and women's and
gender history.
She holds a Ph.D in American History from
the College of William and Mary, an author
of several scholarly articles and two books,
and presented her work in conferences in the
United States and abroad.
In the course of her research, she's won grants
and fellowships from organizations such as
National Endowment for the Humanities, Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation, and Virginia Historical
Society.
Her  first book, "Claiming the Pen Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South," won the
Outstanding Book Award from the History of
Education Society 2007.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Catherine
Kerrison.
[ Applause ]
>> Well, good afternoon, and thank you so
much for being here.
I can't tell you what a pleasure it is for
me and how exciting it is for me to be back
in Washington where I have done so much of
my research to be back in this building where
I have spent weeks working on this project,
so, it's wonderful to be here, and thank you
for coming.
So, I thought what I would do today, is to
present first a very brief overview of the
book, and then what I'll do is kind of zero
in on two of the stories that I think really
bring out the themes of the book, and why
I think these stories matter for today.
So, Thomas Jefferson had three daughters,
Martha and Mariah, by his wife, Martha Wells
Jefferson and Harriet by his slave Sally
Hemings.
I recount the journeys of these three different women
and how their struggles to define themselves reflect the possibilities
and limitations of the American Revolution.
Although all three women shared the same father,
the commonalities end there.
Martha and Mariah received a fine convent school
education where they lived in Paris during
their father's diplomatic posting there.
At that time Paris was a hot house of intellectual
ferment, the young Martha gentlemen met she
socialized with.
Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs in the
newly independents republic that their father
themselves have helped to establish.
12 year after their return from France, their
half sister, Harriet Hemings was born and
her life would follow a very different path.
She would grow up in slavery but leave Monticello
at age 21 with the assistance of Jefferson
himself and begin a new life free from bondage.
She boarded a coach bound for Philadelphia
with $50 in her pocket, money Jefferson himself
provided and for undecidedly uncertain prospects.
Their lives provide, I think, a unique vantage
point from which to examine the complicated
legacy of the American Revolution itself.
I wrote this book to show how their richly
interwoven stories and their own individual
struggle to shape their own destinies, shed
new light on the challenges we still face
in this nation today for the ongoing movement
towards human rights, as well, as, of course
the light it sheds on the personal and political
legacy of one of our most controversial founding
fathers.
So, today, I thought I'll open up this stories
of Martha, the eldest, and Harriet, the youngest.
So, Martha, born in 1772, was 10 years old
when her mother died.
She was a witness to Jefferson's agonized
grief and his companion when he traveled to
France in 1784.
So the young Martha learned her ‑‑ early
her vocation in life: Complete
devotion to her father.
She was barely 12 years old when her father
placed her in this elite convent school.
This is one view from the Courtyard and just
a partial view.
This entire building is the length of two
football fields so it gives you an idea of
the size.
So, this is again, from the inner Courtyard,
and Martha, the day that her father dropped
her off at this school, they would have entered
through doors concealed behind this bush,
but the mother superior's offices were up
here and there's a gorgeous staircase that
takes you from up here to the mother superior's
office.
This is from the street view, not quite as
impressive, but this is the chapel, the Roman
Catholic chapel, right, in which Martha would
attend services as well.
So, it was one of the most fashionable schools
in Paris, and certainly by a mile the most
expensive, there in an all female community,
headed by an Aristocratic Abbess and devoted
to the girl's intellectual life.
Martha would have the experience of a lifetime.
After a bit of a rocky start, she quickly
learned French, dove into her studies, into gossip with with
her friends, the chaperoned pleasures of life in Paris.
In the height of the women's influence of
the regime.
They arrived in Paris in August of 1784.
They leave in September of 1789.
So, two months after the crowd besieges, and
the storms of the gates of Bastille.
So, she gossiped about politics, French ideas
about love and marriage, and a wayward classmate
who's, quote, story you told me today of her
and the Eden boy, one of her confidants confessed,
really shocked me.
Deep thoughts and small pre occupied her.
She desperately wished that slavery would
cease, she implored her father for an advance
on her allowance.
Her lively intelligence, warmth and vivacity
won her many friends.
The portrait of the young girl that they painted
with their vivid memory, bounding down the
stair, four steps at a time in her coffee‑stained
apron, shopping for Parisian fashions, reporting
on the shifting alliances of the girl's creeks
as students move in and out of the convent
school.
Receiving a salute from the Marquis de LaFayette as he entered Paris to quell revolutionary unrest.
All of these are really a contrast.
The stately portraits of the matron, this
portrait was done in Philadelphia actually
about a year and a half before she died.
Years later, she would regale her children
with story of these days and remark repeatedly
that they were the happiest year of her life.
It was an experience I'm convinced that shaped
her vision of female education for her own
daughters, a vision that deviated markedly
from that which her father visited upon her.
So, before her departure for France, Martha
Jefferson had followed the traditional curriculum
for elite girls in 18th century America.
Music, dancing, a smattering of French, a bit
of reading and writing.
This, Jefferson once contended to a correspondent, would be sufficient preparation for protecting her
family fortunes if she was so unhappy as,
in his words, to marry a blockhead.
[ Laughter ]
>> Things were different at the French school.
There, Martha was introduced to geography,
history, arithmetic and modern languages, she read deeply
in French literature.
Attended the opera and theater, socialized
at Palace Royale.
This is the print of Palace Royale from 1784, named
for one of the king's relatives who built
this palace, finding he couldn't afford to
live in it, then enclosed it around a gorgeous
park, still one of the most gorgeous places
in Paris Then, within all of these arcades
were shops, and restaurants.
This is the place to go in Paris to see and
be seen, particularly on a Sunday.
She made friends with the daughters of the French aristocrats and English diplomats.
After a time in her own bearing and  posture, she was indistinguishable from the nobility.
When her sponsor, because of course you need
a reference to get into to the school, not
recognizing Martha on the playground one day, when informed who she was, she replied, oh, but truly,
she has a very distinguished air.
One of her English friends called her your
ladyship.
So clearly this young girl from Virginia,
had come a long way after five year of French
convent schooling.
And that's probably why Jefferson whisked
her home before she could be swept off her
feet by a young French Aristocrat.
Martha was 17 when they returned to Monticello
in December 1789.
Two months later she was married to a third
cousin, Thomas Randolph.
After her glory years in Paris, Martha tried
to make the most of the isolation of life
as a Virginia planter's wife.
Over the course of 28 years, she bore 11 surviving
children.
At Jefferson's retirement in 1809, she moved
back to Monticello, to live with him, and
devoting herself to his comfort, she identified
with his intellectual life with the pursuits
of the life of the mind and she devoted herself
to educating her children and particularly
her daughters to do the same.
So, how might female education be re-envisioned
in the early republic, particularly when one
enjoyed advantages of the best all female
academy in Paris.
In all of France and when one is the daughter of one of the chief architects of the American republic. It was going to be a challenge as the
very architecture of Monticello suggests.  So, this photo, I'm sure many much you have been to Monticello, this is taken from Jefferson's
library, looking through another room, and
then into his cabinet, into his study, Jefferson
became very enamored of the idea of apartments
when he was in Europe.
So, compare this three‑room apartment, devoted
to the mind of the sage of Monticello, with
this room, that's not quite 15 feet square,
where Martha managed the household, gave directions
to slaves, and taught her own 11 children.
But it's the letter of Martha's daughters
that give us the best sense of the complex
ways that Martha and her daughters tried
to answer that question about female education,
and refused to be bound by the gendered limitations.
In their letters, we can see both Martha's
lofty dreams to give her daughters the finest
education in America.
That is to teach them that women, too, were
rational beings.
And who could strive for the life of the mind.
But, against those lofty dreams, of course,
were the earthly realities of their lives
as women, and this is really key in their
lament about the waste of time spent carrying the
keys their words, that is when it was
their turn to manage the monthly housekeeping
chores so Martha's daughter, Virginia could
finally find time to write to her sister,
at length given up the Keys
after one have the most troublesome months
of housekeeping I ever had.
Mary complained of all she couldn't do because she carried the Keys, Cornelia, the most artistic of Martha's daughters, bemoaned, quote,
said books lying covered with unmolested dust, my drawing boxes locked and never opened while it was her turn
to carry the keys.
We see both dreams and reality in Virginia's
search for a quiet place to read at Monticello,
which of course during Jefferson's retirement
became a magnet for all manner of visitors,
invited and otherwise.
So, Virginia is seeking out a place where
visitors won't find her.
So she climbs up to the dome room.
When you open that door, there's a three foot
drop into this attic space.
So, she crows about converting this attic
space that she shared with wasps, to a room
of her own, furnished with a sofa, minus any
cushions a couple of cast‑off chairs and
two small tables.
It was, for her, a fairy palace.
This is her fairy palace, which Monticello
has since furnished with some furnishings
according to Virginia's description to try
to imagine what she might have done with it.
But it was her fairy palace that she didn't
intend to yield to anything, except perhaps
the formidable rats that she occasionally
sited in other attic spaces in the house.
Martha's influence over her daughter's curriculum
is particularly apparent in this study of
Latin.
Although Jefferson once remarked that the
greatest gift his father had given him was
a classical education, he had never considered
that for his own children.
Martha had learned French, Spanish and Italian
instead but she wouldn't deprive her girls
of Latin, just because they were not male
and again, it's through her daughter's letters
that we can see this.
When she was 23, Ellen recalled her visits
to her grandfather's retreat of poplar forest.
Here she ambled from room to room of the house
savoring memories where she spent seven to
eight uninterrupted hours on her Latin.
Having mastered enough to read Virgil in the
original.
Ellen swore I will never again tolerate a
translation.
The difference between the original and John
Dryden's translation she likened to that of
between a of glass rich old high flavored wine and same wine thrown into a quart of duck water. Indeed, trips to Poplar Forest
I have to contrast.
Jefferson does the same thing at Poplar Forest as he does at Monticello.
So this room is south‑facing and gets gorgeous
sunlight.
The girls shared a bedroom on the east‑facing
side.
There we go.
So, here's Jefferson's sunny reading room.
The trips to Poplar Forest were the closest
that Martha's daughters would come to realizing
what author Virginia Wolf would dream of in
1929, a room of one's own, a place into which
the world particularly with its demands on
women, could not intrude, a place devoted
only to the intellectual life.
So, certainly Martha had attempted to widen
considerably the boundaries of female education
with her gift of Latin, and Jefferson's perfect
confidence in her ability to educate her girls
in the privacy of his own home, was certainly
justified by the admiration and praise of
all of the visitors to Monticello.
But, lacking any public expression of her
many gifts, what mark could Martha Jefferson
Randolph hope to leave on the world?
Very little.
Her daughter, Ellen, feared tearfully
just three years after Martha had died in
1836.
She has passed away, and the world has not
known her, she lamented.
She left no memorial but in the recollection
of her friends and the hearts of her children.
A few short years and perhaps all record,
all remembrance of her name, her qualities,
will be gone.
For all that Martha Jefferson Randolph was,
for all her learning, all that she cultivated
within herself and her daughters, she was
invisible to the world.
Her brilliance confined to that fifteen‑foot
square sitting room that her father had designed.
With Jefferson's death, Martha was left destitute.
Her education, brilliant mind and manner,
and her famous connections, all insufficient
defenses against the vagaries of life.
Her story serves as a cautionary tale today,
I think, of the benefits and perils, for women,
of relying on men, even wealthy, well intentioned
men of reputation, for their life's meaning
and livelihood.
Ultimately, Martha could not and did not reject
her father or the role into which she was
born.
Harriet Hemings who was born in
1801, did.
She reinvented herself on the best terms that
she could, as a free‑born white woman and
her story opened up an entirely different
avenue of investigation and narrative.
And I just want to show you this ‑‑ much
simplified family tree.
Is John Wells at the top.
Wife number one is Martha Eppes.
They have a daughter.
Martha, Martha dies, as an adult Martha marries Thomas Jefferson and has Martha and Mary later called Mariah.
After John Wales third wife dies he begins
a relationship with his slave, Elizabeth Hemings. Who in fact who had been brought to his household by
by his wife number one, Martha Eppes.  They have six children together, the youngest was Sally Hemings.
Born in 1773, the year John Wales died.
Two things worth noticing here, first of all,
that Jefferson's wife, and Sally Hemings,
had the same father, John Wales.
The other thing to note, Jefferson's daughter,
Martha, and Sally Hemings, born within a year
of each other, they will be going through
their child bearing years together at Monticello.
Okay, so, we don't know exactly when Harriet
Hemings left Monticello, certainly by the
end of May, 1822, when she turned 21 years
old.
But we do know it caused quite a stir in the
little town of Charlottesville.
There was a great deal of talk about it, Jefferson's
overseer later remembered.
People said he freed her because she was his
own daughter.
From courthouse square where Harriet boarded
stage for Washington, you can easily see Jefferson's
home atop his little mountain.
There, on the square, over whiskeys or peach
brandy, the towns people had freely
discussed among themselves and with snooping
strangers, Jefferson's relations with Sally
Hemings and the children that look so much
like him.
Now, jawa agape they animatedly sought to explain why
Jefferson would free Harriet Hemings.
Everyone knew, as Jefferson himself had once
said, that, quote, a slave woman who brings
a child every two years is more profitable
than the best man on the farm.
That would certainly explain why Jefferson
had never done such a thing before, or why
he never did again.
Harriet's story might well have ended there
had it not been for her younger brother, Madison,
who told his family's story to an Ohio newspaper
in 1873, so just over 50 year after Harriet
left Monticello.
Somewhere along that road north to Washington,
Harriet discarded her enslaved identity for
that of a free‑born white woman.
She was, and if you sort of do the rough math.
I'm a historian, I don't do math.
But she was 7/8ths white.
It was a declaration of independence from her origins of breathtaking scope to rival that of her father's and like
his, her, too, was successful.
This was her likely arrival point.
Jesse Brown's famous hotel on Pennsylvania
Avenue boasted the largest assembly room in
the city, a fine restaurant and a bustling
depot stop.
Madison reported that Harriet, quote, married
a white man in good standing in Washington
City and raised a family of children.
She likely lived until at least 1863, for
in 1873 when Madison was telling the family's
story he said he had not heard from her in
about ten years, but during all of those
years he said, he was not aware that her identity
as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever
been discovered.
Nor, to my knowledge, had anyone really gone
looking.
So, I decided to take the plunge.
It became clear to me immediately that she
dropped the Hemings name, but knowing that,
as Annette Gordon Reed once said the Hemings
had a positive mania naming children after
family members.
I decided first to look at birth records to
see if I can find a mother of sons who bore
the names Beverly, Madison, or Eston which
is the distinctive names of Harriet's brothers.
They would stand out in the masses of William
and John and Thomas.
So, turns out, and many of you might know
this the District of Columbia didn't keep
both records until 1874, nor, of course, again,
as I'm sure many of you know, the Federal
Census doesn't begin to list name of every
person in the household until 1850.
But, the District did keep marriage records
beginning in 1811, because there were no Hemings
in the marriage register, I went through them
and listed all of the Harriets who married
between late 1821 and 1830.
By that point, Harriet would have been 29
and I think married.
That gave me a list of 59 Harriets and better still 59 husbands, because of course men
leave much more of a historical imprint in the records than women do.
Having a discreet list of 118 name, I thought,
okay, I got something to work with.
Still in search, of course, of the children's
name, no District birth records, I'm thinking will
I go to church records then I have to identify
which churches were around in D.C. in the
1820s and '30s and construct a genealogy of
those churches because many merged with other
congregations, moved, changed locations or
faded away all together.
So, any of you who have done your own family
history, I'm sure have encountered these kind
of challenges.
I read the 1850 and 1860 Censuses looking
for those distinctive names.
I looked through city directories.
Here's a sample page from the first city directory published in 1822, the year Harriet would
have arrived.
Notice here James Monroe President of the
United States residing at the president's
house, not to be confused with James Monroe
who was a engineer at the steam mill.
But the city directory helped me place these
men on the landscape.
Where in the city they lived and worked, identifying
their trade, giving some kind of an idea of
their economic standing.
Remember, Madison said his sister married
a man of good standing in Washington City.
In doing that, I eliminated with confidence
perhaps a third of the Harriets on my list and there
were a few who had me going for a while.
For a time I was chasing after Harriet Walker
who married a man named John Newton in 1825.
Her last name would be perfect, considering
that she had walked from Monticello, according
to Ellen.
And she also said, I've been keeping an eye
out for Beverly, who's first name was William
and did exactly what Harriet did which is
to say, leave Monticello, go to Washington
as a free‑born white person, he married
a white woman from Maryland and they had a
daughter and both Harriet and Beverly have
disappeared from that historical record, but
in ‑‑ with the case of Harriet Walker
I managed, through church records, to establish
that Harriet Walker and William B. Walker
were brother and sister, so I really thought
I was on to something until the Census record revealed that John Newton was a free man of color and Madison
was emphatic she married a white man.
I wondered if she was Harriet Free, but I
found her baptismal records inthe Rock Creek church records.
She wasn't the Harriet whose husband posted a notice in the local papers that he would not be responsible for any debts
incurred by his run‑away wife.
The one who had me going the longest and I'm
still going to keep up this search, was the
Harriet who married a Scottish immigrant carpenter
who had ten children of whom she buried four
and her husband was so successful when he
died she could afford to hire 30 carriages
for his funeral procession, clearly a man
of good standing.
If I cannot say definitively that I found
her, I certainly learned a good deal about
her times, her city, and the variety of people
who lived there, that helped me understand
better the woman she must have been, and her
choice to pass.
I've seen slaves chained together and paraded
down Pennsylvania Avenue.
The race riot that destroyed prosperous black
businesses in 1835.
The long wait for the abolition of slavery
in the nation's capital that does not come
until April of 1862.
And the long hard slog of free blacks throughout
the 19th century to prove themselves as fully
deserving of the rights of citizenship as
whites.
In other words, seeing the city through Harriet's
eyes, I watched with her the fate she escaped
by passing.
This shows the capitol building as it would
have appeared in 1822, before the first dome,
when Harriet arrived, and you can see these
poplars lining Pennsylvania Avenue were planted
by her father and here is post-1824 view of
the Capitol.
So, I also met the people who built this city,
staffed a growing bureaucracy and served an
expanding population of government officials,
clerks, and many transients.
I saw the daily labor of women to sustain
their families with their gardening, marketing,
cooking and sewing, women who died in child
birth and women who rose from child birth
only to bury children who died before they
really had a chance to live and in spite of
everything, with her intelligence and grit
and determination, Harriet Hemings blended
right in.
But of course, this isn't a story of unadulterated
triumph.
We need to think long and hard about what
it means to live one's life this way.
Unlike the family of her half sister, Martha,
whose voluminous letters map out lives devoted
to one another and Jefferson's legacy, Harriet lived out herlife in the oblivion of exlie.
Geographically severed from her mother and
two younger brothers, silenced by the weight
of institutionalized slavery, vanished into
white society, Harriet suffered the appalling
rapture of her birth family.
We don't know when her correspondence with
Madison began, we don't know what she knew
of her family's life after Jefferson died.
We don't know how or when she learned of her
mother's death nine years after her father
had died.
Slaves did not possess lineage, as historians
have pointed out.
The rope of captivity tethered you to an owner
rather than father and made you an offspring
rather than heir.
Jefferson may have thought of Harriet as offspring
but as the daughter of Sally Hemings and the grand daughter of the family matriarch
Elizabeth Hemings, Harriet was heir
of the proud Hemings line.
The passing forced her to bury that lineage. It was the price she had to pay to claim the right only accorded to whites in America.
Legal scholars have shown the story of her
grandmother who passed as white to obtain
a job at a Chicago department store
during the great depression of the 1930s.
Harris watched the pain split across her grandmother's
face when she told the story of those days,
remembering the monumental effort of self
effacement that they required.
Quote, she was transgressing boundaries crossing
borders, Harris now understands.
No longer immediately identifiable, because
her grandmother had moved from Mississippi.
Her grandmother, quote, could thus enter the
white world albeit on a false passport, not
merely passing but trespassing, unquote.
Surely echoing the lesson that Harriet Hemings
had learned a century earlier as she hid
her family's story behind the impassive facade of her white face. Harriet's grandmother
Harris' grandmother knew, that, quote, accepting
the risk of self annihilation, that is of
her black identity, was the only way to survive,
unquote.
Passing is still about survival.
Despite their numerical minority, black American,
both male and female are incarcerated in epic
proportions compared to whites.
Black parents have to teach their children lessons about
how to survive beyond their front door particularly
with police but that white parents do not. The long devaluation of black lives since the 17th
century has created what one commentator called
a white way of seeing.
This persists even in spite of video evidence
to the contrary.
Quote, the fleeing figure is coming this way,
the nearly strangled person is about to unleash
force.
The man on the ground will suddenly spring
to life and threaten the life of the one that
therefore takes his life.
Unquote.
The lesson we can take away from all of this,
is Americans are not color‑blind.
Quite the contrary.
The meaning of color remains so deeply significant
that whites insist on the right to know who
carries the drop of African blood that renders
a person black and they protest when it's
not visible,  as thoughh blacks have trespassed
on to the grounds of white privilege from
which, blacks are supposed to understand, they're
bad.
This is exactly the problem with Harriet Hemings.
In her birth into slavery, and its long history of oppression, she was black.
Anyone who looked at her they would have judged
her white.
She was neither legally free until 1865 because
Jefferson never gave her formal freedom papers.
She was not enslaved because she lived as
a free person.
She doesn't fit neatly in any of these categories
that seem to have had such clarity of meaning
to demarcate  people's lives in the American
experience and as far as her Randolph cousins
were concerned, Harriet Hemings was a trespasser,
too, probably barred from the privilege of their
common descent from Thomas Jefferson which, of course, the Randolphs were so very proud.
Trespass remains a sore point between recognized
Jefferson descendants who claimed the right
of burial in the Monticello graveyard and
any Hemings descendants who seek accest to that graveyard.
In 2002 the Monticello Association roundly voted down a proposal to admit Hemings descendants to the graveyard. A dozen years later,
when Jefferson descendant, Tess Taylor, a white woman arranged to meet slave descendant Gayle Jessup White at Monticello, they walked to the graveyard together.
"I unlocked the gate," Taylor recounted simply,
" apparently unconscious of the fullness of that moment,
sitting atop two centuries of family history,
the white person in possession of the key,
while the other remains locked out."
But what we need to see and that I hope my
book shows, is that the legal and social barriers
that has seperated us by race and gender are
as much the work of human hands as the fence
that surrounds that Monticello graveyard,
that I didn't find Harriet Hemings, spoiler
alert, only proves the point that we are all
connected.
We need to acknowledge the artificiality of
the systems that separate us so we can begin
the collective effort to dismantle them and
embrace our common humanity.
And as we confront a revived movement to redefine
citizenship as white and Christian only, this
from Charlottesville last year, and as black
Americans today, still strive to convince
white Americans that Black Lives Matter, I
think this is as opportune a time as any to
think about Harriet Hemings' story.
Thank you for your attention.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
So, I understand many of you are veterans of
this wonderful lunch series, so you know question,
there are microphones on the stairs, and happy
to take questions, comments.
Yes?
>> Thank you for your talk.
I have two question.
First, I know you didn't find Harriet Hemings
>> Right.
>> But can you speculate as to whether her
husband would have known of her slavery origins
and of her parentage, and also can you talk
a little about Martha's years as first lady?
>> Okay.
All right.
So, with respect to ‑‑ would Harriet's
immediate family have known?
And you're right, to use the word speculation,
because that's what I would have to do.
And that was constantly a question I was asking
myself as I'm trying to conjure up myself
various scenarios which will then give me
ideas of ways to look for her.
No one has claimed decent from either Beverly
or Harriet.
And that leads me to believe that at the very
least, if her husband knew, and if her children
knew, that that information stopped with them.
The reason that the Scottish immigrant, interested
me so much, was, because, A, as a Scottish
immigrant he had no investment in slavery.
Census record showed he never owned slaves.
He was a carpenter.
Beverly and his brother were trained as carpenters.
The Scottish immigrant was a carpenter, so
I thought oh, that's how they met.
So, I really have no way of knowing.
What is interesting is that, a Hemings descendant,
not from Sally, but a descendant as late as
World War II here in Washington, said the
family of the daughter of Thomas Jefferson
and Sally Hemings still live in Washington
and are doing very well.
So, clearly, in free black Washington, there
was knowledge of who she married.
Madison made a point in telling his story,
that ‑‑ to say, I could name her husband,
but I will not.
1873, as we all know, the Civil War didn't
change ideas about race.
So, he was ‑‑ he wasn't going to reveal
her secret.
But thinking ‑‑ that's a really important
question, because, again, it gets to this
point of the pain of passing.
And did she keep this secret to herself.
Did she confide to her husband, if he was
a Scottish immigrant, didn't care.
So ‑‑ so, I really don't know.
But the ‑‑ utter silence that accompanies
this, suggests that the secret was held early
on, rather than later, on the white side of
the family.
With respect to Martha Jefferson Randolph,
as first lady, I know ‑‑ I'm not particularly
comfortable with that designation, because
Martha visited her father twice when he was
president, and was certainly a very congenial,
intelligent conversationalist, and certainly
an adornment to her father's dinner table
when he had ‑‑ when he had visitors.
But neither she nor Mariah, who accompanied
her on one of those trips were really interested
in sort of the hostessing duties.
They were there, because Jefferson wanted
them there.
I mean, it was a pretty grueling three‑day
trip, and Martha was pregnant for one of those,
her own son, James Madison, was born at the
White House.
So, I would say, it's less the hostessing
duties of the first lady and more the love
of a daughter who wanted to please her father.
Thank you.
Yes, hello.
>> Hello, Catherine, how are you?
>> Wonderful.
Thank you.
>> Wonderful presentation, I really appreciate
it. I don't have so much a question as a comment.
You mentioned Tess Taylor and woman with Tess
Taylor.
Gail Jessup White.
I was with Tess Taylor.
I work at Monticello now.
I wasn't longing to get into that grave site
as I was longing to find my family's history.
>> Right.
>> And I would like to say, on behalf of myself
and on behalf of Monticello, that we are fully
committed to telling the complete story of
all of the people who lived there.
Not just Martha's children, who was my ancestor
as well, four times great grandmother, not
just Thomas Jefferson but of the 607 men women and children people that Thomas Jefferson owned throughout his life.
We would love to find Harriet.
But please don't give up your search.
She wasn't the only one.
It's important we all acknowledge that and
recognize that.
Every individual at Monticello matter, everyone.
>> So, please always remember that.
And thank you for mentioning me.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you very often.
As a genealogy researcher myself ‑‑
>> I'm sorry
>> Thank you, I'm here.
As a researcher myself, I think your presentation
was absolutely upstanding.
Your book is interesting.
However, I have two coments.
Pardon my voice.
One is, I prefer, personally, the use of the
word enslaved, as opposed to slaves, because
slaves aren't born
>> Right.
>> The second comment I'd like to make, is
the mixture of race and passing, is also an
insult, because passing means that you did
something because you wanted to show your
self as something else.
I think the idea, coming from a family of
a lot of mixture, I think the idea of survival,
as well as freedom
>> Uh‑huh.
>> So, people who want to ‑‑ who wants
to be an enslaved person when we were treated
so very poorly.
So, I think the choice was, the guilt was
that you had to do it.
The choice was that you did it for survival.
>> Right.
>> So ‑‑ but I think your book is bringing
out a lot of very, very interesting facts
about the Jeffersons and that's all I have
to say
>> Well, thank you.
So, I agree entirely.
I ‑‑ with your point about ‑‑ talking
about enslaved persons.
And using "enslaved" as an adjective.
And on ‑‑ passing as you know, is a very
fraught topic, and I would absolutely recommend
a terrific book by Alison Hobbs who also did
a presentation here called "The Chosen Exile"
she historisized passing.
During the history of slavery, for people
who passed, that was ‑‑ that there was ‑‑
it was not pain‑free, as I was trying to
get us to think about.
But, it was a way of dealing with an atrocious,
oppressive system that, and I guess what I
was ‑‑ what I was trying to do, in my
book, and even a little bit in my talk today,
was just to kind of problematize the very
words we're using.
White and black.
They have no biological meaning.
There is no basis for race in science, right?
But they carry enormous political, social,
economic, legal weight, right?
So, there's a way in my book, and I'm glad
you brought this out, in which I'm trying
to let people see me stumble over these terms
because none of them, really work, right?
And to see the artificiality of the meanings
that they do, continue to are bear.
So, that's what I'm trying to do.
And even if ‑‑ if it gets people to think
about this, and if they wind up as befuddled ‑‑
well, that, to me, that is progress, right?
If people start questioning these categories,
and then, okay, well, maybe then maybe if
these terms don't have any basis in biology,
or truth, or reality, then maybe we need to
start undoing these different ways in which
we've institutionalized them.
So, thank you.
Yes?
Do we have time for one more?
Okay.
Good.
Thank you
>> Hi.
I'm not going to ask a question.
I'm just going to make a comment.
As a South African‑born American.
Hearing about passing, and hearing about your
book and the experience that it appears that
Harriet went through as well as the other
slaves in this country ‑‑
>> Right.
>> ‑‑ if brought to mind what I experienced
growing up in Johannesburg.
And I actually hadn't thought about passing
for a very long time, because a dear friend
of mine, who has since passed away, passed.
And so, I know a little bit about what it
meant to pass as white in such ‑‑ in
such a kind of difficult experience.
>> Right.
And I think, in the ‑‑ in the American
experience, in the 20th century, was when
passing becomes more problematic than it was
during the periods of slavery, which is to
say, the ways in which ‑‑ and you had
mentioned guilt, right?
So the ways in which it might have been perceived
as part of a betrayal of working for the cause
of equality for people of color in the United
States, but, as ‑‑ the last comment I
mentioned, I think what we need, especially
white people, really need to be conscious
of the ways in which these oppression, these
things that we don't even think about, are
institutionalized, right?
And so, whether that was in South Africa or
here.
I'm from Australia originally.
We have, as you well know, problem was the
ways in which English settlers treated, and
continue ‑‑ their descendants continue
to treat the indigenous population.
So, thank you very much for that.
Thank you.
Thank you for being here today.
[ Applause ]
>> Thank you.
