“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. In a document dating to this year in the county court records of Northampton County VA, a slavemaster, Stephen Charlton, gave to one of his daughters some livestock and “a Negro girle named Sisley aged about foure or five yeares, to injoye them and their increase both male & female for ever.” The word “them” in this document clearly referred not only to the bequested livestock but also to the bequested “Negro girle.” His daughter was to “injoye” not only the “Negro girle” Sisley but also Sisley’s “increase both male & female for ever.” This of course is fifteen years before a statute, in 1662, would direct that the status of the child followed that of the mother — Virginia planter slavemasters already had were acting as if there were no question whatsoever about this. The handling of human slaves clearly was quite a bit more delicate than the handling of livestock. One should resist any temptation to equate slave reproduction with the breeding of farm animals. Discussion of the “breeding” issue tends sometimes to be one-dimensional. What is missing is the slaves’ perspective, or more precisely their actions and choices with respect to reproduction. If they had children, and they did, surely it was not solely because owners wished to produce new laborers. Female and male slaves, like other humans, desired to have sexual relations, desired to have children, desired to form families, and they did so, albeit within a system that imposed constraints that were often horrific. For instance, who among us is going to fault Sally Hemings for forming the ignoble alliance which she formed with a well endowed white man? She was bred, but not exactly like a farm animal. Perhaps she would have preferred to marry someone, had more alternatives been available to her. Perhaps she would have appreciated it if Jefferson had at some point after fucking her, after producing children in her, set her free, something which he never would get around to doing, even at his death. We can trust, however, that this breeding relationship was something more complicated than a white rape of a black woman. “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Monticello HDT WHAT? INDEX SALLY HEMINGS MONTICELLO 1773 In Virginia, a close-to-white child was born in this year, and was given the name Sally Hemings. This close- to-white child with straight hair was “dashing” but she had been gotten upon the slave Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings (1735-1807) by her owner John Wayles (1715-1773) and was therefore of course herself a slave. The mother Betty herself had been the daughter of a Captain Hemings upon an African-born woman, and Wayles would get upon her two other slave daughters and three slave sons (in addition this half-white slave Betty would bear eight other children sired by three other men, for a grand total of four white masters siring upon her fourteen near-white but enslaved offspring). When her white, free half-sister Martha Wayles would get married with Thomas Jefferson, Sally would constitute a part of her white, free half-sister’s wedding dowry, what fun! I wonder where Betty is buried. I wonder where Dashing Sally is buried. There is nothing like this in the Jefferson graveyard at Monticello, anywhere in the vicinity of Jefferson’s lamented good ’ol HDT WHAT? INDEX MONTICELLO SALLY HEMINGS buddy Dabney Carr’s gravestone. BOUGHT AND PAID FOR The Monticello graveyard was laid out in this year by Jefferson (since it has continued to be reserved as the family burial ground for his descendants, supposedly now it would be available for the burial of descendants of color! – what a shame that it is not. :-). He first would inter his close friend Dabney Carr there, in fulfillment of a pledge that whichever of them died first would be buried by the other under their favorite oak tree. Tom was such a romantic — it is indeed a pity that he didn’t have any romanticism left over, that would have HDT WHAT? INDEX SALLY HEMINGS MONTICELLO generated enough personal energy for him to have taught his mulatto slave offspring to read and write! “The United States of America had human slavery for almost one hundred years before that custom was recognized as a social disease and people began to fight it. Imagine that. Wasn’t that a match for Auschwitz? What a beacon of liberty we were to the rest of the world when it was perfectly acceptable here to own other human beings and treat them as we treated cattle. Who told you we were a beacon of liberty from the very beginning? Why would they lie like that? Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and not many people found that odd. It was as though he had an infected growth on the end of his nose the size of a walnut, and everybody thought that was perfectly OK.” – Kurt Vonnegut, FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, page 84 THOMAS JEFFERSON CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Monticello “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX MONTICELLO SALLY HEMINGS 1774 New Hampshire made itself the 1st state to declare itself independent from England. The ladies of Edenton, North Carolina, led by Mistress Penelope Barker, confronted British rule by putting away their teapots — this would become known as the “Edenton Tea Party.” “Thanks, but no thanks.” During this year one of the Virginia slaveholders, Thomas Jefferson, was preparing an anonymous tract SUMMARY VIEW OF THE RIGHTS OF BRITISH AMERICA, by which of course he meant the rights of white men of property and of proper English culture in the British colonies of North America. All and only white. All and only men. All and only propertied. All and only of proper English culture. –No others need apply. Jefferson had not been asked to draft these instructions — he had a way of producing documents in the hope they might be adopted, which in this case did not happen. His friends nevertheless published his text. A list of some of the slaves that our hero-of-freedom TJ was holding on his plantation Monticello is shown on the following screen, as a way graphically to illustrate the sad fact that indeed he did mean, and only mean, the rights of white men of property and of proper English culture in the British colonies of North America. All HDT WHAT? INDEX SALLY HEMINGS MONTICELLO and only white. All and only men. All and only propertied. All and only of proper English culture. –No others need apply. (You will search in vain on this list for the name of dashing Sally Hemings, although she had been born a slave in the previous year.2) We say that in this year Jefferson unsuccessfully planted olive cuttings at Monticello — we do not mean to imply by that, however, that he ever had or ever would hold a spade or hoe in his own hand. (Unaware that the Padres who had established missions along the coast of California were already cultivating olives there by 1769, in 1791 he would have several hundred cuttings sent from France to South Carolina, only to be disappointed when they wouldn’t bring in a lot of money.) PLANTS Word that he was the author of such a treatise would be spread by the Virginia legislature, and the reputation which he would achieve in this manner would help him, in a few years, gain appointment to the drafting committee of the Continental Congress for the writing of a Declaration of Independence. Samuel Ward, representative from Rhode Island to the convention, would describe Jefferson, on the basis of this pamphlet, as “a very sensible spirited fine Fellow,” and one may suppose that indeed he was a very sensible spirited fine Fellow —he certainly did possess the ability and energy to beget slave children, offspring with whom he then was too busy about our nation’s business to spend very much of his quality time with.