Mongrel Nation

The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Clarence E. Walker

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780813927770
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813929859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question of "Did they or didn't they?" But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize. Mongrel Nation seeks to uncover this complexity, as well as the reasons it is so often obscured.

Clarence Walker contends that the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings must be seen not in isolation but in the broader context of interracial affairs within the plantation complex. Viewed from this perspective, the relationship was not unusual or aberrant but was fairly typical. For many, this is a disturbing realization, because it forces us to abandon the idea of American exceptionalism and re-examine slavery in America as part of a long, global history of slaveholders frequently crossing the color line.

More than many other societies--and despite our obvious mixed-race population--our nation has displayed particular reluctance to acknowledge this dynamic. In a country where, as early as 1662, interracial sex was already punishable by law, an understanding of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship has consistently met with resistance. From Jefferson's time to our own, the general public denied--or remained oblivious to--the possibility of the affair. Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. It took the DNA findings of 1998 to persuade many (although, to this day, doubters remain).

The refusal to admit the likelihood of this union between master and slave stems, of course, from Jefferson's symbolic significance as a Founding Father. The president's apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs--and the often alarming demands of those beliefs--than it does about the interaction between slave owners and slaves. Much more than a search for the facts about two individuals, the debate over Jefferson and Hemings is emblematic of tensions in our society between competing conceptions of race and of our nation.

Notes

Introduction

1. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004), 529. See also Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA, 1997).

2. In the twentieth century, the most forceful defenders of Jefferson's reputation have been historians and Jeffersonophiles. See, e.g., Douglass Adair, “The Jefferson Scandals,” in Fame and the Founding Fathers, ed. Trevor Colbourn (Indianapolis, 1974), excerpted at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1960scandal.html; Virginius Dabney, The Jefferson Scandals (New York, 1981); Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vols. 1, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston, 1948), and 4, Jefferson the President, First Term, 1801–1805 (Boston, 1970); Alf J. Mapp Jr., Thomas Jefferson, Passionate Pilgrim (Lanham, MD, 1991); John Chester Miller, The Wolf by the Ears (New York, 1977); Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (New York, 1962); and Willard Sterne Randall, Thomas Jefferson, A Life (New York, 1993).

3. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), 466.

4. Two books that chart the joys and pitfalls of interracial sex in the 1960s are Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York, 1990); and Mark D. Naison, White Boy: AMemoir (Philadelphia, 2002). See also Anatole Broyard's memoir, Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (New York, 1993); this book, which deals with Bohemian life and interracial sex in Greenwich Village in the 1940s, indicates that what became public in the 1960s was developing in the 1940s.

5. For these changes, see John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York, 1998).

6. Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York, 1974); Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings (New York, 1979). A masterful and insightful essay about the reaction to these two women's works and what historians and others have said about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is Scot A. French and Edward Ayers, “The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory 1943–1993,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), 418–57. Another thoughtful analysis of the historical debate about Jefferson and Hemings is Francis D. Cogliano, Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville, VA, 2006), chap. 6.

7. French and Ayers, “Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson,” 440.

8. See Brodie, Thomas Jefferson, 296; and Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 195–96.

9. French and Ayers, “Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson,” 427.

10. Ibid.

11. Garry Wills, “Uncle Thomas's Cabin,” New York Review of Books, 18 April 1974, 26–28.

12. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), 1. For the DNA evidence, see Eugene A. Foster, M. A. Jobling, P. G. Taylor, P. Donnelly, P. deKnijff, Rene Mierement, and C. Tyler-Smith, “Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child,” Nature 196 (5 November 1998): 27–28. See also Eric S. Lander and Joseph J. Ellis, “Founding Father,” ibid., 13–14.

13. See Andrew Burstein, Jefferson's Secrets (New York, 2005); Lewis and Onuf, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson; Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, VA, 2000); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003); and John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, 2003).

14. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990), ix.

15. Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery (New York, 1997), 309.

16. Ibid.

17. Joel Williamson, New People (New York, 1980), xiii.

18. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), introduction.

19. Winthrop D. Jordan, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definitions of Mulattoes in the British Colonies,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (April 1962): 183–200.

20. Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York, 1973), 115.

21. “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: Discovering and Dealing with the Truth,” A Richmond Quest 2000 Symposium, Richmond, VA, 18 April 2000.

22. For the debate about Malinche and Cortés, see Frances Karttunen, “Rethinking Malinche,” in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood, and Robert Haskett (Norman, OK, 1997), 291–311.

23. Marilyn Grace Miller, Rise and Fall of the Cosmic Race (Austin, 2004), 23.

24. See Sylvia Fry, Water from the Rock (Princeton, NJ, 1991); François Furstenberg, In the Name of the Father: Washington's Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (New York, 2006); Gary B. Nash, The For gotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2006); David Waldstreicher, Runaway America (New York, 2004); and Henry Wieneck's superb An Imperfect God: George Washington and the Creation of America (New York, 2003).

One | Sexuality

1. Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990), ix.

2. For the distinction between “societies with slaves” and “slave societies,” see M. L. Bush, Servitude in Modern Times (Cambridge, 2007), 16–17. See also Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge, 1994), 12–14.

3. Jeffrey Weeks, Making Sexual History (Cambridge, 2000), 7.

4. See, e.g., Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA, 1998), chap. 1; C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (Oxford, 1963); Trevor Burnard, “The Sexual Life of an Eighteenth-Century Jamaican Slave Overseer,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York, 1998), 171–72; John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York, 2006), chap. 2; Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture over Seas (Amsterdam, 1991), 163; Ramon A. Gutierrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, CA, 1991), 51; Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington, I...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One - Sexuality
• Two - Character and History, or “Chloroform in Print”
• Notes
• Index