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The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Report of the Scholars Commission
turner 00 fmt auto cx 3 3/17/11 10:54 AM Page iii The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Report of the Scholars Commission Edited by Robert F. Turner Carolina Academic Press Durham, North Carolina turner 00 fmt auto cx 3 4/15/11 5:36 AM Page iv Copyright © 2001, 2011 Robert F. Turner All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter. The Jefferson-Hemings controversy : report of the Scholars Commission / edited by Robert F. Turner. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-89089-085-1 (alk. paper) 1. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826--Relations with women. 2. Hemings, Sally. 3. Jef- ferson, Thomas, 1743–1826--Relations with slaves. 4. Jefferson, Thomas, 1743–1826-- Family. I. Turner, Robert F. II. Title. E332.2.S35 2010 973.4'6092--dc22 2010031551 Carolina Academic Press 700 Kent Street Durham, NC 27701 Telephone (919) 489-7486 Fax (919) 493-5668 www.cap-press.com Printed in the United States of America turner 00 fmt auto cx 3 3/17/11 10:54 AM Page v This book is dedicated to the memory of our beloved colleagues Professor Lance Banning Hallam Professor of History University of Kentucky (January 24, 1942–January 31, 2006) and Professor Alf J. Mapp, Jr. Eminent Scholar, Emeritus and Louis I. Jaffe Professor of History, Emeritus Old Dominion University (February 17, 1925–January 23, 2011) turner 00 fmt auto cx 3 3/17/11 10:54 AM Page vii Contents Preface xiii Acknowledgments xv Members of the Scholars Commission xvii Scholars Commission on The Jefferson-Hemings Matter, Report 12 April 2001 3 Summary -
Yes, Jefferson Owned Slaves
Yes, Jefferson Owned Slaves. When he inherited slaves upon the deaths of his father and father-in-law, it was illegal to free them. In 1769 Jefferson wrote the statute that when later enacted permitted the manumission of Virginia slaves. He later authored the law that prohibited the importation of new slaves into Virginia; and his 1776 draft Virginia constitution provided: “No person hereafter coming into this country shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever.”1 In his draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson charged King George III had “waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”2 Sadly the language was deleted when South Carolina and Georgia threatened to walk out of the convention.3 Writing for a British abolitionist newspaper in 1843, former President John Quincy Adams praised Jefferson’s struggle against slavery, contending that his draft Declaration stood as “an unanswerable testimonial to posterity, that on the roll of American abolitionists, first and foremost after the name of George Washington, is that of Thomas Jefferson.4 More than a century later, Philip Foner, editor of The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, argued that the frequent characterization of Paine as “the first American abolitionist” was inaccurate because of Jefferson’s 1769 effort to legalize -
The Legend of Sally Hemings
Acad. Quest. (2012) 25:218–227 DOI 10.1007/s12129-012-9287-6 SPECIAL SECTION: FRAUDS, FALLACIES, FADS, AND FICTIONS The Legend of Sally Hemings Herman Belz Published online: 5 May 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 The part played by Sally Hemings in the life of Thomas Jefferson has been regarded as provocatively dubious since political enemy James Callender claimed in 1802 that Jefferson was the father of several of Hemings’s children. Historian Merrill Peterson, observing that paternity is hard to prove, wrote in 1960 that no concrete evidence was ever produced to support the accusation. Peterson also noted that Jefferson never issued a public denial of the charge. The legend of Sally Hemings has invited endless speculation while remaining apparently impervious to disproof. Perhaps most notably, the story has been periodically recycled to illustrate Jefferson’s moral hypocrisy and white society’s oppression of blacks. In recent years Annette Gordon-Reed’s 1997 study, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, stands out as the most vigorous and determined effort to defend the legend.1 Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, argued that historians treated the story as “too impossible to believe,” on the assumption that Jefferson was “so high as to have been something more than human” and Hemings “so low as to have been something less than human.”2 Gordon- Reed wrote, “It is not my goal to prove that the story is true or that it is false. I suspect that if that is ever done, it will be the result of miracles of 1Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1997). -
Thomas Jefferson: Early Life Thomas Jefferson Was Born at Shadwell in What Is Now Albemarle County, Virginia on April 13Th 1743
Thomas Jefferson: Early Life Thomas Jefferson was born at Shadwell in what is now Albemarle County, Virginia on April 13th 1743. His mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was one of Virginia’s first families. His father, Peter Jefferson, was a well to do landowner and slave holders although not in the class of wealthiest planters. Jefferson was the third of ten children and he often had intellectual debates with his older sisters. He attended the College of William and Mary in 1760 and studied law with George Wythe. In 1762, Jefferson’s sister Jane died and he fell into a period of deep depression. Several historians believe that his grief during this time led to a reclusive lifestyle as an adult. In 1769 Jefferson began six years of service with the Virginia House of Burgesses. The following years he began building Monticello on land he inherited from his father. The mansion, which he designed in every detail, took years to complete but part of it was ready for occupancy when he married Martha Wayles Skelton on January 1, 1772. They had six children, two of whom survived into adulthood: Martha Washington Jefferson and Mary Jefferson. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, just hours before his close friend John Adams, on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. He was eighty-three years old, the holder of large debts, but according to all evidence a very optimistic man. It was Jefferson's wish that his tomb stone reflect the things that he had given the people, not the things that the people had given to him. -
Sally Hemings, and Was Sired on Her by Thomas Jefferson, but There Is an Absence of DNA Evidence to Demonstrate Either That He Was Or That He Wasn’T
“DASHING SALLY” AND THE “PHILOSOPHIC COCK” THOMAS JEFFERSON Thomas Woodson’s descendents claim he was a son of Sally Hemings, and was sired on her by Thomas Jefferson, but there is an absence of DNA evidence to demonstrate either that he was or that he wasn’t. Absence of evidence is not evidence of anything, but not only are there no plantation records suggesting that Hemings was Woodson’s mother but also the oral testimony of Woodson’s descendents is directly contradicted by the oral testimony of Sally’s son Madison Hemings.1 DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. 1. Gordon-Reed, Annette. THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS. Pages 67-75 HDT WHAT? INDEX MONTICELLO SALLY HEMINGS 1647 Just when and how the economic logic of slave ownership took shape is a fascinating question. One wonders what analogies slave owners used as they considered the implications of owning female slaves AND the offspring of these females. Clearly, this logic was different from that entailed by servitude, for in general the masters of servants in early America struggled not to get them to reproduce themselves but instead to prevent them from engaging in any sexual relations (with each other, at least). In general they did not want their female servants either to marry or to get pregnant, because either of these would of course diminish the amount of labor the master could extract from the distracted servant. The most obvious analogy is between the ownership of black slaves and the ownership of ordinary livestock. As early as the 1640s, Virginia planters were selling and bequeathing female “Negroes” using language that resembled the wording of similar deeds for the transfer of livestock. -
The Myth of Tom and Sally by Kathryn Moore and D
The Washington Times, January 8, 1999, A19 The Myth of Tom and Sally by Kathryn Moore and D. M. Giangreco Genetic scientists recently concluded that Thomas Jefferson likely fathered the last child of Sally Hemings, one of his slaves. Because of their findings, some now say that he should be removed from Mount Rushmore; others demand a revision of Jefferson’s place in history. What textbooks say about the life of Jefferson may, however, be little affected by the genetic research because of a wider range of facts that figure into the story. Sally Hemings was a slave in the household of Thomas Jefferson. His wife, upon her father’s death, inherited Sally, her mother and siblings. They were members of the Jefferson slave household by 1774. Madison Hemings, Sally’s son told a reporter in 1873 that her mother Elizabeth was a slave concubine of John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law and stated that Elizabeth was the daughter of a slave and a slave ship captain. Sally was actually a year younger than Jefferson’s eldest daughter Martha and thirty years younger than Jefferson. In 1787, fourteen year-old Sally served as a last-minute replacement as the personal servant of nine-year-old Mary Jefferson when she traveled from Virginia to France to be reunited with her father and elder sister Martha. She stayed with the family in Paris then returned with them to Virginia two years later. From 1795 to 1808, Sally Hemings bore five children who were accounted for at Monticello. She continued to live and work there as a household slave until Jefferson’s death. -
NEW ORLEANS NOSTALGIA Remembering New Orleans History, Culture and Traditions
NEW ORLEANS NOSTALGIA Remembering New Orleans History, Culture and Traditions By Ned Hémard Independence Day, 1826 In 1826, our nation was celebrating its fiftieth birthday. New Orleans was a mere 108 years old, only twenty-three years of which were as a part of the United States. Louisiana had become a state only 14 years earlier, and New Orleans earned the honor and respect of the nation in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815. View of the Faubourg Ste. Marie in 1820s New Orleans But back when the Declaration of Independence was being written in 1776, New Orleans was a Spanish colonial possession of New Spain, and Luis de Unzaga y Amezaga (1721 – 1790) was governor. The Spanish Crown, later that year, issued a royal order on September 19, 1776, instructing Bernardo de Gálvez (1746 – 1786) to replace Unzaga. Then only thirty-one years of age, Gálvez officially assumed the governorship on January 1, 1777, and played a vital part in aiding the United States during the American Revolutionary War. Gálvez assisted the American Thirteen Colonies in their desire for independence by leading Spanish forces against Britain and defeating them at the Siege of Pensacola (1781) and conquering West Florida. Also, Gálvez worked with American patriot Oliver Pollock, to ship supplies, such as uniforms, gunpowder, muskets and medicine to the American insurgents. Jefferson, Founding Father, President and a Louisiana Parish Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence (complete with changes made by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, as well as Jefferson’s notes of changes made by Congress) is preserved today at the Library of Congress. -
The Sally Hemings Story
Such Is the Story That Comes Down to Me My Hemings Family My Oral History Lesson I can remember intently listening to the story of my maternal ancestors as told by my grandmother, great-aunt, and mother. In hushed tones they told my sister and I of our very special five-times great-grandmother. Her name was Sarah "Sally" Hemings. She had a secret relationship with a very prominent gentlemen named TJ. They had four children who survived their childhood, becoming thriving adults. I didn't realize until the third grade just how prominent TJ was. Imagine when I realized our TJ was the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The story did not dwell on the fact that Sally and her children were enslaved, but instead focused on their talents and skills that helped them survive. My task was to keep the story alive, to pass it on, to be proud of my roots, to make my ancestors proud. Great-great-grandmother Emma Jane Byrd Great-grandmother Ella Mae Young Grandmother Emma Lee Cooper Mother Emma Jane Dalton My sister, brother and I are keepers of the story. We are passing it on to my nephew. Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy April 13, 1743 - July 4, 1826 United States statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. • Author of the Declaration of Independence • Author of the Statute of Virginia Religious Freedom • Second Governor of Virginia • Minister to France • First Secretary of State • Second Vice President • Founder of the University of Virginia Thomas -
The Master and the Mistress by ERIC FONER October 5, 2008
BOOK REVIEW The Master and the Mistress By ERIC FONER October 5, 2008 Sometime around 1800, an anonymous American artist produced an arresting painting entitled “Virginian Luxuries.” It depicts a slave owner exercising two kinds of power over his human property. On the right, a white man raises his arm to whip a black man’s bare back. On the left, he lasciviously caresses a black woman. The artist’s identification of these “luxuries” with the state that produced four of our first five presidents underscores the contradiction between -ideals and reality in the early Republic. No one embodied this contradiction more strikingly than Thomas Jefferson. In 1776, when he wrote of mankind’s inalienable right to liberty, Jefferson owned more than 100 slaves. He hated slavery but thought blacks inferior in “body and mind” to whites. If freed, he believed, they should be sent to Africa; otherwise, abolition would result in racial warfare or, even worse, racial “mixture.” Yet in his own lifetime, reports circulated that Jefferson practiced such mixture with his slave -Sally Hemings. In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed, who teaches at New York Law School and in the history department of Rutgers University, published “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.” Reviewing the evidence, she concluded it was likely that Jefferson had fathered Hemings’s children. But her main argument was that generations of Jefferson scholars had misused historical sources to defend the great man’s reputation. For example, they had dismissed as worthless the recollections of Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son, who described his mother’s relationship with Jefferson to a journalist in 1873, while accepting at face value the denials of Jefferson’s white descendants that such a relationship existed. -
A General Theory of Cultural Diversity Steven A
Loyola University Chicago, School of Law LAW eCommons Faculty Publications & Other Works 2001 A General Theory of Cultural Diversity Steven A. Ramirez Loyola University Chicago, School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://lawecommons.luc.edu/facpubs Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons Recommended Citation Ramirez, Steven, A General Theory of Cultural Diversity, 7 Mich. J. Race & L. 33 (2001) This Article is brought to you for free and open access by LAW eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications & Other Works by an authorized administrator of LAW eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A GENERAL THEORY OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY Steven A. Ramirez* IN TRO D U CTIO N ........................................................................ 33 I. THE SCIENCE, PSEUDO-SCIENCE AND SOCIAL SCIENCE OF RACE ......... 40 II. THEVALUE OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY ................................................. 51 III. EQUAL PROTECTION AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY ................................ 67 CONCLUSION:A MODEL OF CULTURAL DISCRIMINATION ................... 77 INTRODUCTION Recent affirmative action litigation involving the University of 2 of Michigan 3 Texas,' the University of Washington, and the University has once again ushered the diversity rationale for affirmative action onto center stage. This Article focuses on a different aspect of diversity that en- tails culture-conscious decision-making that seeks to exploit meritorious cultural insights, experiences, and facilities offered by persons of tradition- ally-excluded backgrounds. It does not appear that this approach to * Professor of Law Washburn University School of Law. Of Counsel, Polsinelli, Shal- ton & Welte, Kansas City, Missouri. I wish to thank Associate Professor Alex Glashausser for contributing many helpful suggestions and valuable insights to this Article. -
Chronology from Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Edited by Merrill D
Thomas Jefferson: Chronology From Thomas Jefferson: Writings, edited by Merrill D. Peterson. The Library of America, 1984. Revised November 2011. Copyright © 2011 Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc. Chronology 1743 Born April 13 (April 2, Old Style) at Shadwell, Goochland (now Albemarle) County, Virginia, fi rst son (third of ten children) of Peter Jeff erson, surveyor, landowner, mapmaker, and magistrate, and Jane Randolph, a member of the most prominent land-owning and offi ce-holding family of colo- nial Virginia. 1745 Death of William Randolph (Jane Randolph Jeff erson’s cousin) leaves three orphaned children, among them Thom- as Mann Randolph. Peter Jeff erson, fulfi lling the request made in Randolph’s will, becomes their guardian, occupies the family mansion, and manages the plantation at Tuckahoe on the James River above Richmond. Thomas spends six years there, and with his sisters and cousins attends the one- room plantation schoolhouse, where he is tutored privately. 1752 Returns with family to Shadwell, and enters a Latin school conducted by the Reverend William Douglas, of Scot- land. 1757 Father dies. 1758–60 Attends school of the Reverend James Maury, “a correct classical scholar,” and boards with Maury’s family in Freder- icksville; rides twelve miles home each weekend. 1760–62 Attends College of William and Mary, at Williamsburg, study- ing particularly with the professor of mathematics, William Small of Scotland, the only layman on a faculty of Anglican clerics; Small’s teaching is rational and scientifi c, and his infl u- ence, Jeff erson later wrote, “probably fixed the destinies of my life.” 1762–67 Studies law under the direction of George Wythe, a man of considerable learning, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence, fi rst professor of law at William and Mary, and Chancellor of Virginia. -
Sally Hemings, an Enslaved House Servant
Sally Hemings, an enslaved house servant Reading Level: Middle School Sally Hemings was born in 1773 to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, a slave. Laws at the time made Sally a slave since she was born to an enslaved mother. However, Sally was described as “mighty near white and very handsome, long straight hair down her back”. In 1774, Betty Hemings was given to Martha, Thomas Jefferson’s wife. Sally and her ten brothers and sisters came to Monticello with their mother. How did Sally feel about being a slave at Monticello? Since she left no letters or journals, we don’t know her thoughts and feelings. Details of her life come from others’ letters and from Monticello’s records. In 1873, Madison Hemings, her son, was interviewed for a newspaper article. From his interview, historians also learned about Sally’s life at Monticello and with Thomas Jefferson. When Sally was fourteen, she “crossed the ocean alone” aboard the Arundel with Mary, Thomas Jefferson’s youngest daughter. They traveled to France to meet Jefferson, who was in Paris to negotiate treaties of trade and friendship. In Paris, Sally was dressed in “calico and Irish linen.” She learned to dress hair and stitch needlework and to become a ladies’ maid to Jefferson’s daughters. She explored the city with Mary and her older sister, Martha. She was even paid wages, about $2.50 a month. Sally hoped to stay in France where French laws granted her freedom. But after two years in Paris, she returned to Monticello. There she took care of Jefferson’s chamber (his bedroom) and his wardrobe (his clothes).