Photo by Anna Kane ’20
Annette Gordon-Reed discusses the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings during her lecture, “The Hemings Family - Life After Monticello.”
BY ANNA KANE ’20
“I originally thought of myself as a writer. But history gripped me,” said speaker Annette Gordon-Reed, a Charles Warren professor of American legal history at Harvard Law School and professor of history in the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University. She was addressing the crowd gathered in Gamble Auditorium on Oct. 31.
“I had great social studies and history teachers. I had an experience of integrating my school district when I was six. This was long after [Brown v. Board of Education], but my district had been resisting it,” she said. “At a young age, I could make a connection to things that were happening to me and the point we had gotten to. My life, in some ways, was part of a history, so that and my great teachers are the reason I became a historian.”
According to the College’s website, after Professor John Lax’s death in the 1970s, his parents — who were both math professors at New York University — created the Endowed John Lax Memorial Lecture in 1982. The Lax Lecture is given annually by a historian of high distinction who makes the latest advances of history accessible to the public.
Gordon-Reed presented her work as part of the Mount Holyoke’s 2019 John Lax Memorial Lecture. During the presentation, she spoke about her research on the Hemings family and Thomas Jefferson in a lecture titled, “The Hemings Family — Life after Monticello.”
Her first book, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” brought validity to decades worth of rumors that founding father Thomas Jefferson had fathered several children by his slave, Sally Hemings. The following year, DNA tests of known descendants of both Jefferson and Hemings corroborated Gordon-Reed’s findings. Gordon-Reed’s work indirectly led to an exhibit at Monticello dedicated to Sally Hemings, which opened in 2018.
The half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife Martha, Hemings was a slave who arrived at Monticello as a toddler. She shared the same father as Martha, John Wayles, but her mother was a slave.
In 1787 at the age of 14, Hemings accompanied Jefferson and his daughter Martha to Paris, where Hemings was free. She refused to return to Virginia with Jefferson until he promised her “extraordinary privileges,” including freeing any children they had together when they reached the age of 21.
When the pair returned to the States in 1789, Hemings was pregnant. The nature of the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings is largely unknown, but as an enslaved woman, Hemings had no legal right to consent.
Hemings is believed to have had at least six children by Jefferson, four of whom — Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston — survived to adulthood. Each child was enslaved at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home, until they were freed by Jefferson at the age of 21.
According to the Monticello website, Jefferson owned as many as 607 slaves in his lifetime and only freed seven. All were members of the extended Hemings family, including his four children. Sally Hemings was never legally freed.
According to Gordon-Reed, after Jefferson’s death in 1826, the Hemings children moved away from Monticello. Harriet and Beverly lived as wealthy white people, but were forced to conceal their heritage and cut ties with their mother and siblings in order to do so. Their ties to Jefferson were largely forgotten about until the 1970s. At that time, Jefferson’s paternity was denounced by scholars, despite the fact that masters having children with their slaves was not uncommon.
“What kind of freedom do you have if you have to reject your mother?” Gordon-Reed said. “It’s a legacy of slavery and you can see it based on the different tracks [the family took] and what they want[ed] to call themselves.”
Eston and Madison remained in the black community and moved to Chillicothe, Ohio with other mixed-race people who were freed from slavery by their white fathers. They shared their family history with their children. “This is a mixed up family, a mixed up situation. What I think is fascinating to me is that they’re not the only people doing this,” Gordon-Reed said. “People are creating their own identities and crafting their own stories for themselves.”
Gordon-Reed’s forthcoming project, “A Jefferson Reader On Race,” seeks to determine how Harriet, Beverly and their descendants were accepted as white and the reasons behind why they didn’t speak of their connection to their mother.
“These are the connections I want to parse out, because it’s about a family, but it’s also about America. Are we any better than we were in the 19th century? I’d like to think [so] but I’m not sure we are,” Gordon-Reed said.
The two lines of the Hemings family provides an example of the benefits of whiteness. While the Madison line did well for themselves, it was not able to do as well as the lines that descended from Harriet and Beverly.
“It reiterates something that we know: this has always been a mixed country,” said Gordon-Reed. “It’s always been a country where it’s easier to be white than black.”
Olivia Zhou ’22 was struck by the fact that members of the Hemings family had to choose which relatives to stay in contact with in order to successfully “pass” as white.
“It brings home the personal costs that this country’s history of racism has imposed on African Americans and minorities in general,” said Zhou. “[Gordon-Reed’s] talk also illuminated how complex and constructed racial identities in America are.”
Jefferson never publicly acknowledged his paternity of the Hemings children.
According to Gordon-Reed, Jefferson’s decision not to publicly claim his children with Hemings showed that the pair and their children had a clear understanding of both slavery and freedom, as well as what each meant and their real-life implications. Had Jefferson publicly acknowledged the children he had with Hemings, Harriet and Beverly would not have had the opportunity to live as white people.
Maggie Murphy ’21 found Gordon-Reed’s talk interesting in its examination of the dangers that come with applying modern-day morals to historical figures, as there are “expectations people put on Thomas Jefferson that he should have openly claimed the Hemings children as his own, put into contrast with the actual consequences that those actions would have taken,” according to Murphy.
Izzy Baird ’20 said, “[Gordon-Reed] said that it’s not necessarily useful to write about whether or not people did the things you want them to do, but rather how they crafted ideas and lives regardless of [modern-day] opinions.”
“The Hemings family is a very relevant example of how important interracial relations and interactions have been in the formation and development of this country,” Zhou said. “By focusing on this mixed-race family and its deep, complicated connections to Jefferson, Gordon-Reed’s research underscores the need to undo the extensive whitewashing that America’s perception of history often undergoes.”
“I’m ultimately accused of trying to destroy [Thomas Jefferson] and trying to protect him,” Gordon-Reed said. “People are unsure what my agenda is. It’s neither to destroy nor prop him up.”