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Reviews of Books
| The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. 798 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
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Reviewed by Edward Countryman, Southern Methodist University
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Lengthy, humane, thoughtful, gripping in its prose, compelling in its rich, sensitive argument, Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello is garnering praise and honor as I write. I make it a rule to avoid other reviews until I have written my own, but before the William and Mary Quarterly invited me to do this one I did read Edmund S. Morgan and Marie Morgan's account in the New York Review of Books and, of course, I know about the author's National Book Award. I saw, but did not read, Jill Lepore's discussion in the New Yorker with its title "President Tom's Cabin."1 Whatever Lepore wrote, that gets the book exactly wrong. This book is not about anybody's cabin. It is about a complex family's Monticello. |
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Gordon-Reed's title says it all. Thomas Jefferson figures very large in this book; it may well be the Jefferson book for the Obama era. More than any other writer, Gordon-Reed has convinced me here to take Jefferson seriously and even sympathetically, as a complex human being, rather than to let his mastery of Monticello and Poplar Forest overwhelm his stirring language of human equality and liberty. To avoid Jefferson without blotting him out seems akin to the task of imaging an extrasolar planet; the glare of the neighboring star is overwhelming. Yet in the same manner of recent astronomers, Gordon-Reed shifts attention and perspective away from him. This book is more centrally about Betty Hemings and her children, particularly Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Sally, and their kin, including not only Jefferson but also his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and their daughters Martha and Maria. The book is about the malign absurdities of slavery, about one most unusual plantation complex, and about sex, naïveté, opportunity, choices, and limits in the founding era of the United States. |
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Gordon-Reed wastes no time at all on whether Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children. I have not doubted it since Winthrop D. Jordan noted that Jefferson was near her nine months before each of her childbirths. A decade ago Gordon-Reed herself disposed of the whole controversy with a judicious and rigorous reading of the many arguments pro and con and of the evidence supporting them.2 Freed from addressing that question, she turns to the lives that the Hemingses forged at Monticello and beyond. She does so despite her sources being either thin or opaque. We do not know what the members of the Hemings family looked like. We can just barely get access to their words, through Jefferson or other sources, and we cannot do that often. But that is the regular problem facing anybody who proposes to write history "from the bottom up" or about people who used to be called "the inarticulate." |
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Gordon-Reed realizes that to understand this American family we must understand American slavery. But she also realizes (and argues powerfully) that we do the Hemingses a huge injustice if we reduce them to mere exemplars of some supposedly general pattern. Her book centers on a long-term, fertile sexual relationship between two very unequal people, but Gordon-Reed refuses to reduce that relationship to any archetype, be that archetype rape or romance. Instead of resorting to glib generalizations, she takes us into the choices that her subjects made as they sought to deal with the very difficult situations of their lives. |
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