>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Robert Saladini: Well good
afternoon everyone and welcome.
My name is Robert Saladini and it
my pleasure to welcome to talk today
by Annette Gordon-Reed who
is discussing her latest book
"The Hemingses of Montcicello an
American Family:" The relationship
between Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings has been the subject
of speculation for centuries.
Even more so in the past
decade, perhaps as a result
of today's speaker's 1997 book
the carefully evaluated claims
and counterclaims about the
Jefferson-Hemings relationship
and when DNA testing
increased evidence
of a sexual liaison between them.
In her latest book,
Annette Gordon-Reed chronicles the
Hemings family from the mid1700s
when an English sea
captain fathered a child
by an enslaved woman
living near Williamsburg,
Virginia to the early 19th
century story of Sally Hemings.
Marie Morgan and Edmond
Morgan writing
in the most recent New York review
of books calls this book brilliant.
I should also pause here and state
that Annette's earlier book
was also described as brilliant
by the New Yorker and
they continue to say
that if marks Annette Gordon-Reed as
one of the most astute, insightful
and forthright historians
of this generation.
This sentiment is echoed
by the winner
of the 2006 John W. Kluge Prize for
Lifetime Achievement in the study
of humanity and a great friend
of ours here at the Library
of Congress, Dr. John Hope Franklin
author of "From Slavery to Freedom"
who said that "This is not only a
riveting history of a slave family
on a grand scale, it is also a
rarely seen portrait of the family
in the big house with a remarkable
account of the relationship
of white and black families.
This work catapults Gordon-Reed
into the very first rank
of historians of slavery."
If Dr. Franklin says
this it's got to be true.
A native of Texas and the
Gordon-Reed is a professor
of law at New York Law School.
In addition to her 1997 book
titled, "Thomas Jefferson
and Sally Hemings an
American Controversy",
she's written several other books
with Vernon Jordan she
wrote "Vernon Can Read!"
a memoir back in 2001 and
in 2002 "Race on Trial:
Law and Justice in
American History."
In this book she edits
12 original essays
that illustrate how race often
determined the outcome of trials
and how trials that confront issues
of racism provide a unique lens
on American cultural history.
We're in for a very
special treat today.
So I hope you join me in welcoming
our speaker, Annette Gordon-Reed.
[ Applause ]
>> Annette Gordon-Reed:
Thank you very much
for that very generous introduction.
I'm very happy to here.
This is sort of a return
visit for me.
A few years back I was
on the Advisory Committee
commemorating the anniversary
of the Library of Congress,
the birth of it
with Jefferson selling
his books to the library
after the British had
destroyed the capitol
and destroyed Washington during the
war of 1812, so it's always nice
to be back here and see
sort of familiar faces
and familiar haunts
in this building.
I thought I would talk a
little bit about the book.
This is the occasion
for us getting together
to explain a little bit how I
came to this point and what it is
that I'm trying to
accomplish in the book.
Robert mentioned my first
book "Thomas Jefferson
and Sally Hemings an American
Controversy" that came out in 1997.
I was shooting as hard as I could
for sort of a 10 year anniversary,
but you know, books
don't always work
out exactly the way you want them
to when you're working on them,
so I was a year late with it.
I guess I could make it the
anniversary of the paperback
of Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings and sort
of satisfy myself this way, but for
people who know anything about me
and know anything about my work know
that Jefferson has been a
longstanding interest for me.
I started writing the book,
well actually I started thinking
about Jefferson when I was a
child reading a biography of him
as a third grader;
sort of a biography
that was geared to people my age.
Nothing about the Hemings's
is in that story.
Basically, the kind of
thing that you would expect
that would teach young people
about the great people who existed
in their country, Jefferson,
Madison, Booker T. Washington,
George Washington, Carver
there was Dolly Madison,
but Jefferson's biography
interested me the most
because I identified
with his love of books.
There were other things
about him obviously
that were quite different than me.
I'm male, I mean he's
male, I'm female.
He's white and I'm black,
but this love of books,
this love of learning was
something that I keyed in on
when I was reading this
biography and I continued
to be interested in
him over the years.
I didn't find out about
Sally Hemings and her family
until I was a teenager and read
a copy of my parent's book "White
over Black" that was written by
Winthrop Jordan and he has a chapter
in there when that's called
"Thomas Jefferson's Self in Society"
and that's the first time
I read anything at all
about the Hemings's family.
Then the next experience that
I had with it was writing
or actually reading Fawn
Brodie's biography of Jefferson,
very controversial biography that
came out in 1974 in which she wrote
about Jefferson's life and included
the Hemings's family as sort
of the Hemings story, the story that
Jefferson had a long-term liaison
with a slave woman sort of included
it as part of Jefferson's biography
and that caused a firestorm
of controversy obviously
if people remember that and she
was a somewhat embattled figure,
but what really interested me
about that book was at the back
of it there were two
recollections of enslaved people.
Madison Hemings who said that he
was the son of Thomas Jefferson
and Sally Hemings and a man named
Israel Jefferson whose real last
name was Gillette.
In my book he appears
as Israel Gillette
because that was his
true family name.
Jefferson was sort of appended
onto his name and he is known
as Israel Jefferson but
instead of his real name
and Israel Gillette talked
about Monticello and also talked
about a relationship between
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
and I found it fascinating to
think about the possibility
or the prospect of being
owned by your father.
Now, I grew up as Robert mentioned,
I grew up in Texas and Texas was,
people don't think of Texas as
the South but it is the South
and East Texas is the South, any
place I say where they grew cotton
and had slaves, is
part of the South.
So that kind of thing I knew even
as a young age was not a farfetched
story, it wasn't that I believed it
or disbelieved it, but I never
encountered it or perceived it
as something crazy, because I knew
that this kind of thing happened.
If you go to a family reunion,
a black family reunion,
the people in the family there
will be all different colors
of the rainbow and typically
it's not uncommon at all
for the older people to be more
fair-skinned than the younger people
because people back off in those
little towns and those places back
in those time periods mixed.
So as a southerner viewing this,
it never struck me as an odd story.
I knew it was odd to people
because of Jefferson's prominence,
what he meant to people, but that
has nothing to do with evidence.
I mean it's sort of like thinking
that you're birthday matters
to the lottery; the
numbers in the lottery.
It means something to you,
but it doesn't mean anything
to the way the numbers fall,
so you feel about Jefferson
or how people felt about
Jefferson even, you know,
doesn't really determine what
actually happened in the past.
So, I kept interested
in this subject,
decided to go to law school
instead of becoming a historian
because I thought or
was told at the time
that there were too many historians.
What they didn't tell me,
that they're not many
black historians, PhDs.
And people have been happy for
me to not go to law school and go
into history, but a lack and
a lass I went to law school
and you know, I'm not regretting it.
It was a good choice for me
and I said, well I can continue
to indulge my love of history.
If you love books, that's
the great thing about books,
you could always have books, you
know, you don't have to be part
of any formal program or anything
like that to love and to read books
and to learn from them, so I
started, I kept reading history
and as some point started to think,
yes but I also like to write as well
and that's kind of hard to do if
you're an associate in a law firm.
You're supposed to writing
what people tell you
to write, not your own stuff.
And I became much more frustrated
with just reading history
and not doing the kind of thing
that I thought I was
really supposed to do.
And one day in 1995 or actually
one month, I began to see articles
about a movie that
was going to be made,
a movie called "Jefferson in Paris."
If people have seen it, it's not
a very good movie I don't think,
we could talk about that later,
but and I started seeing articles
about people being outraged at the
possibility that they were going
to treat this story as true.
You know the story that
Jefferson had this liaison
and people were saying things like
"Jefferson wouldn't be involved
with a slave girl: or
"there's no evidence
that Jefferson was involved
with Sally Hemings."
Well, a slave girl that kind of
ticked me off because it sort
of implies that every
African-American woman from 1619
to 1865 was the same
woman, a slave girl
and you know exactly what she was
like and what she was supposed to be
and this sort of dismissal of the
idea that there were different types
of people, there's many
different personalities,
there's many different kinds of
sort of perspectives and experiences
that I know existed in slavery, that
was sort of shunted to the side.
I was also concerned about the
idea that there was no evidence.
Now evidence is not
the same thing a proof.
But I knew that Madison
Hemings's recollections
and Israel Gillette's recollections
and the oral history of the family.
Madison Hemings is not properly seen
as oral history because he lived
at the time; oral history
usually refers to things further
down the line, but those two
things to me the oral history
and this primary history that
Madison Hemings gives about his life
at Monticello, I knew
that that was evidence.
People may not be convinced
about it,
but to say that there
was no evidence
to me was like say he never spoke.
And I found that quite offensive.
If you think about someone
who lived as a slave,
if you think about people, any
group of people who are living
under a system of oppression whether
they're behind the Iron Curtain,
on the Gulag or Nazi
Germany or anything,
the idea that somebody could
come out that system and say,
"Here's what happened to me"
and people would treat it
as if it were meaningless.
Struck me as not only intellectually
unsound, but it was immoral
in a way, there was a moral aspect
to this that really sort of fired me
up and I sat down to write an op-ed
piece that got longer and longer
and longer and turned
into my first book.
And as I was writing the
book, I thought at this point,
I didn't tell anybody I was
writing a book, a law professor.
I'm actually a professor of
history now too at Rutgers,
but law professors are supposed
to be writing law review articles,
so I didn't tell anybody
I was writing a book.
I wrote the book and as I did so,
I thought you know I could do what
I've really always wanted to do
and that is write a
biography of Jefferson
and that is the next big thing
on the table right now for me,
but I also thought, you know,
there are lots of records
about the Hemings's here.
Jefferson as many of the
people in this room know,
was an inveterate record keeper.
Not only in terms of writing things
down in letters, but
in the "Farm Book."
His Memorandum Books that
were edited by James Bear
and "Cinder" Stanton, Lucia
Stanton at Monticello.
I think the greatest work of
Jefferson's Scholarship in decades.
It's the most useful thing
that has come down the pike.
Those kinds of records say
a lot about the Hemings's.
In this book, at one point I'm
write about Jefferson in New York
with James and Robert Hemings
and Jefferson in Philadelphia
with James Hemings and you can
pretty much track what James Hemings
and Robert are doing every day
from Jefferson's Memorandum Books;
gave this amount of money to Robert
to go do this and that
and the other.
And from the letters and
the "Memorandum Book",
you could piece together
a picture of a life
of individual enslaved people in
ways that you just can't otherwise.
I mean this is, we know more
about this family than you know
about not just other enslaved
people, but white people who lived
in the 18th and 19th century,
so as I was writing the first book I
thought, well here's an opportunity
to write about slave, enslaved
people in a different sort of way.
One of the things I
say in the book is
that for African-Americans
social history trumps biography.
People see blacks and
enslaved people
and I really do think the way
people see blacks today is very much
influenced by slavery, how
they were viewed in slavery
and it's sort of a group identity.
You determine what is going on in
a black person's life by looking
at what's happening to the
majority of black people.
We don't really do
that with white people,
certainly biographers don't do that.
You may get the context,
the larger context
that the person is living in, but
you sort of write from the inside
out as much as you possibly can.
Rather than saying,
okay what's happening
to this group of black people?
This is likely what's happening
to that one and what I wanted
to do here was to use the
information from Jefferson's records
from the oral history
of the Hemings's family.
Some of the written record
of the Hemings's family,
some of the members of the
family were literate to try
to piece together, to try to
do for them what is often done
for other whites in history and that
is to give them an individual story.
I think dealing with people,
dealing with abstractions is tough
for people, it's tough to relate
to a concept enslaved black person,
enslaved black woman but if
you write about Sally Hemings
or Elizabeth Hemings or James
Hemings and you see James Hemings
who starts out in the
book as a young boy
who is capturing mocking
birds for Jefferson
when Jefferson is courting his wife.
He mentions in his "Memorandum Book,
I gave Jamie this amount of money
for capturing a mocking
bird for me."
Then you see James go to become
a teenager who is in Richmond
when Jefferson decides that
he's going to go to Paris
and Jefferson doesn't really
know where he is so he writes
to William Short and say
"if you can find James,
tell him to meet me in Philadelphia.
We're going to France."
Jefferson has the idea that he's
going to turn him into a chef
which he actually does, so we
see a young boy and you see him
as a teenager, you see him in France
as a young man learning a skill,
becoming a professional chef.
It's not an insignificant
thing to have happened.
I mean, how many people in
America, how many Virginians white
or black went overseas and
lived in a francophone country
for over five years who
learned a trade in that,
a profession in that place who
worked with other French people
to sort of bring that out?
So you see him sort of progress
through life to the point
where he's back in America with
Jefferson, then becomes a free man,
travels around in the United
States, travels back overseas
and unfortunately ends, his life
ends tragically as a suicide.
There's a person here, there's not
a concept of enslaved black man
that is sort of a distancing thing,
a thing that you can make
someone an object of pity,
but what I want these
people to be are sort of,
are the kind of people
that you empathize with.
Empathy requires some degree
of connection to the person
and pity you can sort of
put the person over there
and it's not really like you.
Empathizing with enslaved people,
I think it's just another, again,
it's not the only way to do things.
I never understood people who
think that it's either this
or it's either that, you're writing
the social history and only that
or you're writing the biography.
It's all kinds of things.
If we're really going to get a
handle on this part of our history,
you have to look at all different
facets and use all different types
of methodology and what
I'm trying to do here is
to personalize the story of slavery
so that people can
get at it that way.
This was driven home
to me very forcefully,
a couple of summers ago I was
sitting there a Sunday afternoon,
this is so pathetic, typing away on
this book and coming to a section
about Mary Hemings who was
Sally Hemings's oldest sister
who when Jefferson goes to Paris is
leased out to man named Thomas Bell
and they began a relationship.
They have two children.
When Jefferson comes
back, she asks Jefferson
to sell her to Thomas Bell.
This is, I mean this is
slavery and property,
think of someone being leased, the
idea of leasing a person to someone.
He comes back.
She asks him to sell her to Thomas
Bell which Jefferson agrees to do,
but he agrees to, but he apparently
is only amendable selling her two
youngest children; the two
children that she's had
with Thomas Bell, not
her older children.
And so I'm sort of
writing there and I said,
well you know the older ones,
two of her children had already
been given away as wedding presents
and the next two were living with
her at Monticello before she moves
in with Bell and their names
are Joseph Fossett and,
Joseph and Betsy.
And I say, well you know these
two young children were left
at Monticello.
They were probably looked after
by their aunts and uncles,
their extended family and I
said but Betsy wasn't very old.
You know, she was nine and all
of a sudden I'm sitting there
being this very detached scholar
and I started to cry, not like
tears rolling down your cheek sort
of silent crying, I
mean like really crying
because there are moment
when it hits you.
I have two children and
I've had nine-year-olds
and I know what it would be like for
them if they were separated from me,
now Mary Hemings lived
not far from Monticello.
She lived in Charlottesville and
so there was a lot of traffic
between Charlottesville
and the mountain,
but lots of other people were not
so even that fortunate, you know,
they never saw their parents
again when they were sold
and so there are these moments
like that when you think
of these people not just in terms
of, you know, as lives in the past
or as a I said, a generic
enslaved person.
You know their names and
you know their relationships
and you know their
connections to people
and what they mean to one another.
The book, at the beginning
of the book I have,
it's a very big family so, the
first part of the family tree is
in the front of the book and the
next part of it is in the back
of the book and you can
see the naming patterns.
They're naming each
other after one another.
How do people who don't have the
legal ability to form a family,
how do they keep that together?
And one of the ways they kept it
together was by naming one another
after their siblings, after their
mothers, there are many Sarah's;
Sally Hemings's name was Sarah.
There are many Sarah's in that
group; Mary's; Elizabeth's;
Martin's; James's all
the different generations
and that's how people kept
things together and I felt
as I was writing my first book
and as I said, looking at all
of this information that I could
try to aluminate another aspect
of slavery by coming at
it from a different way,
not just the group identity
but the individual identity.
So, I sat down and started to write.
I mean I typically, I mean
some people sort of jump back
and forth I've heard in the types in
their writing the different periods
of time, I generally start; the
first thing that I start writing is,
and I just kind of go through
to the end, I don't really skip
in chronology or anything,
so I sat down and started
with the preface talking
about my looking at the,
looking at the "Farm Book",
the original "Farm Book"
at the Massachusetts Historical
Society and I go from there.
The first section of the
book, it's very long book,
but people have told
me it's readable,
a long book divided
into three parts.
The first part is called "Origins"
and that really sets
up the Hemings family.
We start with Elizabeth Hemings, the
matriarch of the clan who is born
in 1735 to an English ship
captain and an African woman.
She is owned by a prominent family
in Virginia called the Eppes's,
Francis Eppes is your owner and
Francis Eppes has a daughter,
a legal daughter Martha who grows
up to marry a man named John Whales
who is Jefferson's, who will
become Jefferson's father-in-law.
John Whales marries, as I
said, marries Martha Eppes,
has his own daughter Martha.
Then has two other wives, and as
was often the case in those days,
buried two more wives,
he had three wives.
After the third time I guess
he decided he did not want
to get married again and he took
Elizabeth Hemings as a concubine,
Sally Hemings's mother and
had six children with her.
The youngest of whom was Sally
born in 1773 the year he died.
John Whales, a fascinating figure.
I include in the Hemings family
the white men who had children
with Hemings women, so I did a
lot of research on John Whales.
It gave me the excuse to go to
England and go to Lancashire
and actually work with a genealogist
to trace his family line down.
A fascinating story about him.
In my first book I describe him
as a lawyer trained in England
because relying on Tyler's Quarterly
or one of those old magazines,
that's what they said, you
know, right so he was a lawyer.
It sounded plausible to me.
He actually was a servant
boy who was brought
over by a man named Phillip
Ludwell in the late 1730s who
and this man helped
raise him up, you know,
gave him money, helped educate him.
He was evidently a very, very smart
and creative man and I thought
that was fascinating because
it's sort of; the difference
between being for Martha
Jefferson, Jefferson's wife,
the daughter of a man who was
trained as a lawyer in England
which would point to at least a
middle or an upper class background.
I mean there were some
farmers sons who did become,
who did go to the law, didn't
typically become you know barristers
or the sort of the people who
argued in court, but the difference
between that and being a former
servant boy, I think was,
is quite a bit there and it makes a
lot of the things about Jefferson;
in Jefferson's biography he
has this very famous quote,
where he sort of disparages
people who say
that they can trace their
ancestry back, far back in England
and Scotland and let anybody
make of that what they will
which was basically saying
I don't make anything of it.
People typically say, well that
is really a slap at his mother
because his mother was a
member of the Randolph family
that was more prominent
than the Jefferson's
and maybe this is some sort of
tension between him and his mother.
But if you know that his
father-in-law was a servant boy,
he knows that his children are
one generation from a servant.
So, you know, John Whales is sort
of a, I looked as much as I could
through the family records to
try to figure out who he was
but he really is pretty much
John Whales, born in Lancashire;
the day that he was born
and that's pretty much it.
No tracing back his
ancestry back into England.
So the first part of the book start
with Elizabeth Hemings, John Whales,
introduce Thomas Jefferson,
talk a little bit about blacks
and the Revolution and the
Hemings's experiences there,
some of them were captured and
taken to Yorktown with a number
of other people, enslaved people
who decided to go on their own
to join the British forces.
Martin Hemings who has an encounter
with the British at Monticello
after Jefferson has left Monticello
when Tarleton's troops
coming to capture him.
And go from there to talk about
life at Monticello and then ends,
the first section ends with
the death of Martha Jefferson
which was a, yeah, it
was a cataclysmic event
for Thomas Jefferson and really
begins the sort of change
in the Hemings family's life
because he decides at that point
that he's going to accept the
commission to go to France
which he had rejected a
couple of times before
because Martha was too ill and he
goes to Paris, takes James Hemings
with him and leaves the rest,
obviously the other
Hemings stay behind.
Martin and Robert sort of go off
and hire themselves
out and work for wages.
Some of the Hemings women are
rented out as housekeepers,
most of them stay at Monticello.
So this is the beginning
of a change for the family.
Jefferson, we think of Jefferson
at Monticello all the time
but Jefferson after his
wife's death between 1783
and until the time he comes
back and retirement in 1794,
he's really not there and then he's
in retirement for a couple of years
and then goes back into public life.
He's really not a permanent
fixture at Monticello
until his retirement years.
So this is the beginning of that
process and it changes the nature
of life for Hemings and so we
end that section and I take them
to France and most of that
section is about James Hemings
and Sally Hemings in Paris.
Finding about their lives there,
they were on what would
technically be considered free soil.
There was supposed to
be no slavery in France.
The French didn't mind slavery so
long as it was in the colonies.
They just did not want
it on French soil proper
and so they would have had to
file a petition but hundreds
of people filed petitions in
the 18th century for freedom
and every one of them was
granted and there was a big,
there was a greater
number too of people,
of masters who just freed
their slaves on their own
because they knew what would
happen if they actually went
to the Admiralty Court and asked
for their freedom, so James
and Sally Hemings could
have remained in France.
They were, James Hemings was
trained as a chef as I said before.
He was drawing a decent salary and
Sally Hemings was as well wages,
wages above the norm
for French servants
and Jefferson paid
everybody once a month
which they didn't do in France.
In France you got pain once
a year if you were a servant
and it was you got paid at the
time you left your service,
you did a year as a
contractor, six month contract
and then you got paid and, you know,
payment in a year is
hypothetical payment, right?
I mean, you would get paid or not
and a lot of times people weren't.
He followed the American rule of
paying them every single month.
So here are two young people who are
enslaved in Virginia who get used
to getting wages and managing
money and having something
that was their own and getting
paid, as I said, above the norm
for people who, for French servants.
They're in Paris for these years.
Sally Hemings at the; Madison
Hemigns recollections are,
in his recollections say that there
was a conflict about coming home
that Sally Hemings didn't want
to come home and I don't want
to be sexist about this, but
I find it very hard to believe
that this was just her doing.
Her brother is 24.
He near the end of his stay,
hired a tutor to teach
him proper French grammar
which I don't think he would have
done, I mean, this seems to be
in preparation for staying there.
Jefferson persuades them
to come home which they do
and the scene shifts then to the
third section which is called
"On the Mountain" and then I sort
of, which is technically not right
because as I said Jefferson's
not there very much,
but it's about the life of
James Hemings in Philadelphia
with Jefferson and some of his
travels and so forth and then pick
up Sally Hemings and her
children and other members
of the Hemings family
who become a focus.
John Hemings who was the
master artist in there.
If you go to Monticello now you
can still see some of his work,
furniture and floors
he laid and so forth;
Joseph Fossett who was a blacksmith.
And I followed them through
to the cataclysm at the end
when Jefferson dies 107,000
dollars in debt; 107,000 dollars
in 1826 is a lot of money,
millions of dollars and all
of the people except
for the Hemings's he frees
five people in his will.
He frees people his family,
freed people informally as well.
The rest of the Hemings as the
Hemings; Sally Hemings's sisters
and brothers end up as free people.
We don't know how.
There's no formal emancipation
of these people
but the Hemings-Whales children
is what I call them in the book,
Thenia dies in 1795, but
all the rest of them end
up as free people somehow
appearing in the census
in the 1830 census as free people.
Sally Hemings appears in
a special census in 1833
as a free mulatto woman who
has lived in Charlottesville
since 1826 the year Jefferson died
and it was a special census done
to go around and ask black people
if they wanted to go back to Africa.
Sally Hemings who's like a quarter
black, it even made more sense
to send her back to Surrey, England
to say, you know, do want to go back
to Africa and she says, "No, I
don't want to back to Africa."
And I follow and so
that's her story.
I go along with her line, but
also the book ends with the story
of Joseph Fossett who was a grandson
of Elizabeth Hemings, as I said,
who was an artist and who was
the blacksmith at Monticello
who was freed in Jefferson's
will but his wife
and his children were not.
And so he spent the next decades
trying to buy them all back.
What he did was he asked whites in
the community to buy his children
with the promise that he would
buy them when he got the money
and he did that in a number of
occasions, but there was one man
who would not sell his
eleven-year-old son back
to him even though he had
the money to purchase him.
He just refused to do it and
he hung on as long as he could
and finally they went
to Ohio in the 1840s
because Virginia was getting too
hard for blacks after Nat Turner
who was a real crackdown on enslaved
people there and blacks in general.
It has something of a
happy ending because later
in the other decades
Peter makes it to freedom,
makes it off to Cincinnati and
joins his father and mother
and siblings as an adult.
They become very active in
the Underground Railroad
and Peter becomes a
caterer and a minister
and when he dies there are big
obituaries of him in Cincinnati
so it's this horrible story
of a family dispersed.
I mean, you know, people talk
about Sally Hemings and they think
about oh, you know, is this the
story of the terrible thing happened
to this woman you know being raped
for all these years by Thomas,
I mean, you know, however
people construct this,
but the real tragedy there are
really serious, serious stories that
and things that happened to other
members of the Hemings family
that I really think ought to
be; and the Fossett story is one
in particular that ought to be
told and to get people to focus
on in addition to talking
about Tom and Sally.
So that is the book in a nutshell.
I really have been heartened
by the reception so far.
We'll see what happens as
we go along down the road,
but my main point as always as I
said before was to try to get people
to think about these people to
think about these people who think
about them in a different way.
We are who we are today
in large measure
by what happened during these
times and I really do think
if you can be honest and
forthright about that and readable,
you stand a chance of maybe
not solving all the problems,
but at least having some
understanding of how we got
to be where we are today.
The good things and the bad things
by the way are contained in all
of this, so that's the
book and I would be happy
to answer any questions you
have about my work, this book
or Mr. Jordan or anything
else that you come up with.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
I think you've got a microphone.
[ Applause ]
He has a microphone I think he's
going to dart around the room.
Is that the idea?
Did I, did this go off?
Can people hear me?
Okay great I seem to be
going in and out, sorry.
>> Hello. Thank you for your talk.
My name is Louis Clavell
[assumed spelling] and I work here
at the Library of Congress.
I'm really interested in the
subtitles for your works,
An American Family, in
American Controversy it seems
like a great opportunity
to define American;
as an African-American I read in a
paper about maybe seven years ago
that the first African-American
had gone.
Well, the first African
had traveled to outer space
and this person was
a white South African
and when white South Africans come
to America they are
African-Americans.
So when we really think about the
American experience, this experience
with the Hemings and what has
happened through our experience
as captive Africans in a peculiar
and extreme form of capitalism
that we easily call slavery
somehow we need to define it
in a more particular way so that
we can see that these connections
with Native Americans,
with Europeans
and Africans has really created
an African family, I mean,
or an American family or an
American grouping of people
that by historical experience
defines us in a unique way
and through this unique historical
and migratory experience we
are actually a little more
than black Americans
or African-Americans
but almost the definition of
American and I just wanted
to have your thoughts on that.
>> Annette Gordon-Reed:
Well it's just sort
of interesting you would say that.
James Baldwin had an
interesting quote.
He said that if black Americans,
"if blacks aren't Americans
there are no Americans"
and that's sorely what you
sort of are driving at there.
The beginning of the
book I didn't talk
as much about Elizabeth Hemings.
Starts with Virginia in
the 1730s and one of the,
if you to Colonial Williamsburg
and you walk around, I mean,
it's very hard to recreate what
it was actually like because
for obvious reasons black people
have no interest in dressing
up as slaves and walking
around Williamsburg to try
to give people the authentic
experience, you know,
I mean there's only so far
people are willing to go,
but Williamsburg the area
where Elizabeth Hemings
was born was a place
of English people and
African people.
I mean with the smattering of other
ethnic, European ethnic groups
in there but we're talking
almost half and half
and the 1730s more
Africans were brought
into Virginia during the 1730s
than in any other part
in American history.
So and more Africans came to America
before the 1800s than whites,
brought over obviously as enslaved
people, so this notion of American
and whiteness, whiteness is the
sort of elemental definition
of American can't really hold just
by the numbers they don't hold.
The Native Americans I
don't really get as much
into the Native American situation
in the first part of the book
as I do black and white because
I'm focusing in on this family,
but that's really an
essential thing to understand
and it's very hard to conceptualize.
I mean if you go to Williamsburg
and you see that film that they have
"Running in a Loop" I think it
was made in the 50s or something
like that and it's a white place,
but Williamsburg was
not just a white place.
It was a white place and a
black place and red place,
and fortunately not
much of a red place
because they were sort
of gone by then.
I mean more to, you know, they
were more in the western part;
a number of them died off and
run off their land, but this is,
we think of America as
a global society now
but slavery made the world
global at that time period
so there is this interesting
mixture,
this way of defining America that
is it has to be broadened much more
so than, you know, just the first
English settlers in the country
and you don't say that
these people don't count
because they were enslaved people,
because they influenced
the language, the culture.
I mean Europeans always say white
Americans walk like black people.
Carl Jung said, "White
Americans walk like Negros."
That was his, I mean, from a
European perspective we have been,
we've become something
and certainly Africans,
people form the African
continent don't look
at African-Americans
as being first place.
There's Africa is so diverse,
so how could you possibly represent
all the diversity of that country.
Europeans and Africans know that we
are something different than they
and we have made something different
here through a lot of, you know,
tragedy and struggle and turmoil.
But you're right, it's
a, there's a uniqueness
about the American experience
that isn't encapsulated
in just one ethnic group.
>> Hi. My name is Coreen
Mahurt [assumed spelling].
I work at the United
States [inaudible].
I have a two part question.
I would like to know
if any of the people
on Sally Hemings's
father side, the Whales,
am I pronouncing the
last name correctly?
If they acknowledge your or
accept any of the Hemings and want
to be a part of her heritage in
connection with the president?
And secondly, the property of
Monticello, do they invite you
to spread this information
about the Hemings in detail,
are they more willing
in accepting nowadays?
Thank you.
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Well I'll
go chronologically as you asked it.
I don't know about the Whales.
It will be interesting because, you
know, Lancashire is pretty far away
and I think, I don't know that
they know anything about them.
I'm actually going to be doing,
I'm going to be Oxford in February
and I'm going to be
doing some events.
Norton there will be
setting up events,
probably some events in Lancashire.
It will be interesting to see
if anybody comes out, right.
Because it will be, you know, hey
we didn't know anything about this,
but it's fascinating because John
Whales is clearly reproducing the
names of his family from
Lancashire in his family here.
So it will interesting
to see what turns up.
I go to Monticello all the time.
I'm on the Advisory group
of the International Center
of Jefferson Studies and also the
African-American Advisory Group
there, so I have these two
organizations that require me
to be there for their meetings
periodically during the year
and I go there for research.
We have technically, now you
guys are a launch as well,
but technically the book launch is
supposed to be Friday at Monticello
so I will be speaking there
and Monticello, I mean,
the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is
separate from the Family Association
which you may have read something
about in terms of the controversy
about whether or not the Hemings's
could be buried in the cemetery
which no Hemings as
far as I know wants to.
This is a controversy
between the family, the legal,
Jefferson's legal white family.
So the foundation is very,
very separate from it
and they're doing an amazing
job not just in terms of talking
about the Hemings story,
but talking about slavery
because it's a plantation.
It's easy to forget
that when you go there.
It's so beautiful, right.
It's like a, I could
do this, you know.
No. You know easily.
It's a gorgeous place but a place
that he never saw it
look like, right.
They keep that place, you know,
right up to snuff with everything,
but they are very committed to
the idea of talking about slavery.
Not, you know, not Tom and Sally
but slavery, the this is a,
this was a working plantation and
here are the people who worked there
and here's the family
that owned people,
so they're melding the story there
so there hasn't been any problem
at all with me being there
and talking about this
and arguing about this or whatever.
You can come down, well
he's going this way.
>> I'm curious, you mentioned that
the movie "Jefferson in Paris"
and my recollection
is the implication is
that the spark occurred in Paris
with a fourteen-year-old
is that right?
Something like that?
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Sixteen.
>> Sixteen.
So you mentioned you did a lot of
reading of these meticulous records
and also the distinction
between evidence and proof.
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Ah hum.
>> Did you find evidence
if not proof
or did you develop any theories
about when this relationship might
have started timewise and where?
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Actually it
is my belief Madison Hemings said
the part that I left out
in the chronology here,
is that his mother was pregnant
when she came back from Paris
and that was one of the
things that concerned her is
that she didn't want to have a child
who would be an enslaved person
and he says that Jefferson promised
her that her children would be free.
I talk about this in a book, in
the book, in a chapter called
"Equilibrium" and I
talk about indications
that Sally Hemings had a
baby in 1790 from letters
between Martha Jefferson
and Betsy Eppes, Hemings's,
would have been Hemings's
half-sister.
So it's really form working from
what happened in 1790 the letters
in which he writes when Martha
says, you know "I need a new maid
and what happened to Sally?"
And Jefferson says, "Well,
I will give you a maid
and he gives her Mary Hemings's
daughter Molly at this point.
So then you think well
what happened to,
Sally was your maid two months
ago what the heck happened now?
They don't really talk about it.
That letter is no longer
extant by the way.
There's, Jefferson makes
reference to it in his letter,
the actual letter that Martha writes
to him is, as with of his letters,
I mean you know, it's amazing that
we have as many of them as we do.
So there's a whole chapter
though I go through and talk
about the correspondence
between them that indicates
that something happened
that she sort of disappears
from this family after 1790.
You write about, people
write about her sisters,
they write about her brothers,
but here was a person who was
at the heart of this family
that just sort disappears
of the radar screen after 1790.
So there is a chapter and I layout
all of this information about 1790
and what happens with Sally
Hemings when she comes back.
You know, I did a talk for the, for
my children's school, middle school
and they were, well they were
sixth graders and I was thinking,
you know, how am I
going to talk about this
to sixth graders, right you know?
So I get there and I sit
down and they're like,
I don't know how anybody
calls this an affair.
An affair is when you're married
to somebody and you're having sex
with somebody, I mean they
started saying all this stuff
and I was like, I was trying to be
circumspect and they were, you know,
just sort of running
along with this.
And I said, well okay and they said
well what's the problem with this?
I said, well you know, she was
an African-American person.
She's black and he's white and
they didn't really get that.
And I said, well you
know, he's a slave master.
He has power over this
person, you know,
how can you know, that's
an issue here.
How do you have consent
if this person has power?
And they said, well
but if you own somebody
if you can make them work why, I
mean so that really didn't get them
and then they asked me the
said well how old was she?
And I said she about sixteen
and then they went oh.
Because they could, you could
see them totaling up the years.
Well I'm in middle school that
would mean that blah, blah, blah,
blah and that was the one
that gave them real pause.
And I talk in the book about,
I mean, sixteen is young
but there is a whole section in the
book and I talk about James Madison
who fall in love with a girl
whose named Kathryn Floyd
when she's fifteen and he wants to
marry here and Jefferson is sort
of like the matchmaker, you
know, Madison is thirty-three,
this girl is fifteen years old.
He met her when she was twelve.
The lived in the same rooming house
and I say, you know, out of respect
for Madison we could never know
when he first became interested
in her and, you know, just know
that by the time she's
fifteen he wants to marry her.
I mean, there's the age
of consent in Virginia
in the 18th century was ten.
It was raised to twelve in 1824 and
they were being progressive, right?
There is a different
understanding about age.
You know, women postpone marriage
now because they go to college,
they do all these kinds of things
but if you, women, what did women do
in those days according to men?
What were they supposed
to do but have babies?
Get married and have babies.
And you don't wait to do that.
So, no but that's a real issue for
people, the age here the question
of Jefferson being involved with
somebody who's sixteen but I sort
of go through the list of people in
his life who were married to his,
one of his childhood
friends Thomas Mann Randolph
at fifty marries a girl
named Gabriella Harvey
when she's seventeen and, you know,
it's this is a different world.
So I do, I discuss that issue and I
talk about 1790 when they come back
and all of the kinds of indications
that Sally Hemings's life
changes pretty drastically
that year from what it has been.
Where did the mic go?
Oh there you are, you're
stealthy I didn't even see you.
Sure go ahead.
>> Thank you.
I wonder as you've progressed in
your research if you'd comment
on the traditional Jefferson
Scholarship and the ways
in which the issues that
have, that you've attended
to have not come forth in the past
and I guess I particularly ask
about any reflections you have
on the work of Dumas Malone?
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Well, this
was a difficult issue, you know.
Dumas Malone's work, I mean
if you're going to write
about Jefferson you have to go
to him because it's all there.
Not, well not everything is there,
but I don't even mean
it in terms of this.
I mean, there's just, the thing
about Jefferson people who work;
there are people here who
work with the papers I'm sure.
There is so much material.
He had so many varied interests.
He had his hand in all
these different things.
You could write a twenty-three
volume biography
of Jefferson that's why everybody
says, you know, Jefferson
and slavery; Jefferson and
agriculture; Jefferson and, I mean,
you could do that with all, I
mean, Malone said he was six
or seven men rolled up into one
and you could have all these kinds
of biographies, so there are
lots of things that are missing
from Malone not because he didn't,
not because he's not a good effort
and it's not a good book, it's
just that the man and his interests
and talents was so immense
and so many different
ways to write about him.
So I use Malone quite a bit.
In my first book I use him, in
this book when you're not arguing
with people, just because
you disagree; I mean,
because you disagree with
someone I would never say
that someone's work is
worthless because you disagree
with them about something.
There are some points that are very,
very good and there's some points
where I think they are not so good.
You have to think that Malone
came up at a particular time.
We tend to think that because
Malone chronologically was closer
to Jefferson that that
meant that that generation
of people understood
that time better.
I don't think that's right.
I think the Civil War
and reconstruction galvanized the
white south in a particular way.
It made them, they were
not like they were before.
I mean the Thomas Bell
story that I'm telling you
about with Mary Hemings, this
man is living on Main Street
with an African-American woman
and having children with her.
He's made a Justice of the
Peace, they have a committee
to decide whether or not they
should bring public education
to Charlottesville, he's on that.
He's a respected figure.
I don't believe that a white man
could live with a black woman
on Main Street in Charlottesville
in the early, in the 20th century,
in the 1920s and hold
those positions.
I mean, the Civil War changed people
because they were out of control.
You know, in Jefferson's time it
was no question who was in control
of society and when you were
in control you could afford
to be magnanimous, right?
You could afford, you
get this vigilantly stuff
when people are insecure
not when people are secure.
So Malone grew up in Georgia.
I had, when I was working on the
book with Mr. Jordan I went down,
I interviewed lots of people who
knew him and I went down to talk
to Griffin Bell who was an attorney
general under Jimmy Carter I believe
and he had said, "Oh I can't wait.
You know, I've read your book.
I've written this article
about Jefferson
and Hemings would you look at it?"
And so, I looked at
it and it was great,
but what he said he said you know,
"I grew up not far from Malone
and I don't understand
why he thought this was
such a weird thing."
He said, "Because we
all knew that this kind
of stuff happened back
in that time period."
So I think that it was just a, we I
mean, we think as I said it's wrong
to think that because he's
nearer to Jefferson's time
that he would be better
suited to do this.
I think that generation of people
were probably the exactly wrong
group of people because he grew up
at a time; this was against the law.
It was against the law for white
people and black people to marry
in Virginia until 1967 and
they just had the anniversary
of "Loving v. Virginia"
last year obviously.
So, I think that he was obviously
he was a good scholar but I think
that this was an issue that
was very, very hard for him
and his generation to
handle and it meant,
well attaching too much
significance to it, because to me,
the thing that I've always wondered
and no one has really given me
a satisfactory answer to this,
is when I see stories about
like the Fossett's what happened
to the Fossett's?
There is Jefferson in
1813 negotiating the sale
of a three-year-old girl.
He doesn't go through with it,
but that could have been sort
of in his, a three-year-old, right?
I mean, the things that we accept
as normal in slavery and the things
that we; my mother used to
have this expression, you know,
gagging at a gnat and
swallowing flies, you know you,
this is something that bothers
people but all these other things
that are just really endemic to
that system that were really,
really horrible in comparison
that we just kind of accept it.
The other thing for Malone I will
say, is that scholars are helped
by the works of others and
there has been a revolution
in slavery historiography
in the past forty years.
It is the crown jewel
of American history,
really I mean the names Edmund
Morgan, Winthrop Jordan,
John Hope Franklin, C. Vann
Woodward all these names,
David Brion Davis we have learned
so much more about the institution
of slavery than Malone
would have learned
in his years as a graduate student.
So, Phil Morgan the wonderful
book "Slave Counterpoint"
about the development of slavery
and the Chesapeake, you know,
I really mind that book
just great sources.
So you're enriched by the work of
other people and as we go along
and people do more scholarship
those kinds of things are available.
The Civil Rights Movement
certainly changed attitudes
about the way you write
about black people.
Black people are human
beings in scholarship now
and they really weren't full
human beings in the past.
They were just sort of like
the flora and fauna here
and I think there was
some embarrassment
about Jefferson's ownership
of slaves.
I mean, Malone was what would
call in his own way sort
of like a southern liberal, right?
And I think that there was
discomfort with writing
about Jefferson in this
part of Jefferson's life
that was less admirable than all the
other things, but we understand now,
I hope we understand now,
that you can you know,
that you can celebrate
Jefferson's accomplishments,
undoubted accomplishments.
They had this television program
that was, we were supposed
to pick the greatest American, you
know, and it was one of those things
that I shouldn't have
said yes that I would do,
but unfortunately Jefferson
didn't make the cut.
I think Elvis and some
other people were in there.
I think Reagan won out, but I
was on the team to go and argue
for Jefferson as the greatest
American and if I could do
that understanding the flaws
but understanding the importance
in the other ways; I didn't
get a chance to make my pitch,
but I think we are at a time, we are
more tolerant of this time period
of people who have flaws and
understanding that flaws don't mean
that the person is worthless.
Like I said before about
scholarship, just because I disagree
with someone's scholarship
doesn't mean that I say okay now
down read Malone, or don't
read Merrill Peterson
or don't read those people.
There's valuable, "The
Jefferson Image
in the American Mind"
is a great book.
I just didn't like what he said
about the way he treated
the Madison Hemings story.
But it's something
that's useful otherwise,
so that's my view on scholarship.
People do the best that
they can with what they have
and history is the best of available
information you have at the moment
and that is, you keep that in mind
and things keep getting rewritten
and I understand that definitely,
so that's how I feel about it.
>> Did you ever find out
what happened to Martin?
>> Annette Gordon-Hemings: Hemings.
No, you know, that is something
that is puzzling to me.
Martin Hemings was Sally Hemings's,
well Elizabeth Hemings's oldest son
and he was the butler at
Monticello for a number of years.
He's the one I said who faced
down the British when they were
at Monticello and he quarrels
with Jefferson and demands
that Jefferson sell
him and Jefferson says,
okay I'll sell him
to whomever he wants.
Let him find somebody.
I'll take whatever
price, just you know.
And then he just sort of
disappears of the rolls
and I don't know whether it's that
he died or Jefferson just let him go
because he did that with a young man
Jamie Hemings who was beaten once
and he ran away to Richmond
and Jefferson writes to the guy
who found him and says, have
James come back and James says,
I'm not coming back unless you
agree to me, agree that I don't have
to be put under this guy
again, the guy who beat him.
So Jefferson says, okay.
Just come back.
And so James says, okay I will come
back but I want to go visit my uncle
who also lived in Richmond and
he goes and they never, you know,
the next time they see him he's on
a boat going up the James River.
And Jefferson basically
takes him of the roll.
He comes back to Monticello
so I'm wondering if that,
something like that might
not have happened to Martin.
If he died, you'd think that there
would be some reference to that?
I think he may have
just been let go.
[ Inaudible Question ]
Burls [assumed spelling].
[ Inaudible Question ]
>> And with James's cousin
you talk about be tragic.
Do you know the tragic
story about her
and how she never inherited property
from her aunt Kretta
[assumed spelling]?
>> Annette Gordon-Reed:
Aunt Kretta yeah.
>> Is that, that's
an interesting story.
Did you talk about that in the book?
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Oh, what
I neglected to say or I said
in passing, is that this book
ends on 1831 and I'm going to pick
up with the second volume
because this got to be too long
and Norton said we cannot
have a thousand page book
and I didn't want a
thousand page book.
So I'm going to pick them up in
1831 and go forward from there.
>> And you emailed me some years ago
when you started writing this book.
My name is Calvin Jefferson, I'm
one of the decedents of Betty Graham
and I had some information that
I really wanted to share with you
after this session on
the Colbert family.
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Okay,
I would be, well definitely be
in touch with me because I'm going,
as I said I've already started
right now but I really want
to follow this thing
through and then get to,
well I'm actually working
on the Jefferson biography
at the same time, but
definitely contact me.
[ Inaudible Question ]
The only thing, I mean he ends up
the story as the family tradition is
that he promised Sally Hemings
that her children would be free.
If you think about it, it's
really interesting to think
about the difference for
slavery for women and for men.
I mean even during that time women
had expect, women were expected
to care for family and so forth and
I would think it would be very hard
to think of for a woman to
think of leaving your mother
and your siblings and
your sisters behind.
I mean, the story is that
he promised that, you know,
she would have a good life and
her children would be free.
He later on agrees with James,
he gets James to teach his
brother Peter to be a chef
and then he frees James and so.
[ Inaudible Question ]
Well James thought.
[ Inaudible Question ]
I know. Well if for James the
complicating thing about James is
that Jefferson was supposed
to come back to France.
Jefferson came home
on a leave of absence
and so there was every expectation
that James was going to come back
to France again with Jefferson.
For Sally Hemings, it's much more
stark because Jefferson wanted
to get is daughters out of France.
I mean he really thought, you know,
their growing up not
being an American,
so for Sally Hemings coming back
home was a much more drastic thing
than for James who could
have expected to come back.
Jefferson is asked to be Secretary
of State and so then they had
to come to some sort of reckoning
at that point, but for her,
I think it would be you
know they're family.
I mean, she could have made,
people ask could she have made
a life for herself in France?
People did.
I mean, the enslaved people who took
their freedom, they became majors
of hotel, actually French
people preferred African,
well slaves of African descent.
She would have been, she and her
brother would have been much sought
after as employees, but you
know, to think of staying away
from your family may have been too
much for her or maybe she thought,
you know, the truth is I sort of
think of if not Thomas Jefferson
who would Sally Hemings
have ended up with?
Looking at her sister's
life and her mother's life,
the odds were always great that she
would have ended up with a white guy
and as white men went he might
have been as good as any other.
And so, I mean that no seriously.
I mean if you think about
the choices women had
at that time period.
I mean women at that moment
they depended upon men
for their livelihood and
if he made a good case
and if you're sixteen years old
and if it's a charming person
and he's rich and other people
like him, it might be easy
to convince a sixteen year
old to do something like that.
I mean we sit here and
think, heck I'm not,
I mean you know I would
stay where I was.
I think what, people ask me
well what should have happened?
I think the best thing that
could have happened if, you know,
the best thing none of these
people would have known each other
because we wouldn't have had
slavery, but as a better matter,
I would have said if
Jefferson had said,
look this is a better
society for you.
You two stay here and work with
Mr. Short who was his secretary
who remained in France,
work with Mr. Short.
If you want to come
to see your family,
I will let you come
to see your family.
In my sort of fantasy world,
that's what I wish had happened,
but it didn't, so the thought
of, this was always a problem
for enslaved people;
do you run away?
Do you stay and face whatever you're
going to face with your family?
And some people ran away and
some people thought about it
and just couldn't do it, so
there are lots of things.
I mean I talk about this.
I have a whole chapter where I
discuss this to try to figure
out what is going on here with this
person, with these people who decide
that they will take their
chances instead of, you know,
staying someplace where they could
have made a life for themselves.
[ Inaudible Question ]
>> Do they have an oral
history about what happened?
>> Annette Gordon-Reed: Their oral
history is that Jefferson loved her
and told her that and that's
why she, she believed that
and that's why she; that's
their oral family history.
They do have reunions.
I went to, I don't
get as much involved
with the contemporary people.
I pretty much live in the
18th and the 19th century.
They're interesting and fine people
but that's not really my focus,
but that's the oral history
of what this was about.
This was, I mean, you know that
that's what he conveyed to her
and that's what she believed, so.
Get this one behind right there.
[ Inaudible Question ]
>> Virginia history.
My sense of it is that just like
we have a contemporary example
of Essie Mae Washington and Strom
Thurmond that the family is sort
of really did know that
there was a relationship
and there was the paternity issue
there because to me the fact
that the story endured,
the oral history endured
and the Hemings themselves,
I've met some of the decedents.
Visually you know that they
are a definitely mixed race,
had they been of a darker hue
at the time and Sally had been,
if the children had been
of a different hue one would
question whether Jefferson could
have been the, you know, the father
of the kids and they look very much
like him and from some
accounts that I've read.
