Book Review

Canada and the United States

I have long wondered about the vehement denials of Thomas Jefferson's alleged sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, when the scant evidence suggested that an agnostic rather than a partisan stance was more appropriate. Neither Jefferson nor Hemings left any direct written evidence of their relationship. The descendants of both parties ( already related to each other owing to a long-term sexual relationship between Jefferson's father-in-law and Hemings's mother), moreover, had irreconcilable views. When asked by students about the matter, I represented myself as being more inclined to belief than disbelief based on my knowledge of numerous other Virginia planters' sexual relationships with enslaved women.	1
Annette Gordon-Reed's persuasive critique of the consensus view among Jefferson scholars that there was no sexual relationship has strengthened my inclination toward belief. Through careful research and meticulous reasoning, the virtuosity of which cannot be fairly represented in a short review, she argues that the evidence dismissed as insufficient by dozens of historians amounts to a strong circumstantial case. Although she stops short of claiming that the testimony from Hemings's son Madison and the record of Jefferson's unusual treatment of four of the Hemings children proves that the sexual affair occurred, she insists that the array of evidence makes that relationship a strong probability. The case being tried by Gordon-Reed is concerned less with Jefferson's sexual behavior, however, than with the intellectual integrity of a group of prominent Jefferson scholars, including Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson, who she claims have systematically employed a double standard in assessing the evidence. By failing to probe the sources that denied Jefferson's involvement in a sexual relationship with Hemings or to question their own dismissals of evidence corroborating the affair, historians have impeded the public's ability to judge for itself whether the author of the Declaration of Independence fathered children with an enslaved woman living in his household.	2
Gordon-Reed's book is organized around the five sources most relevant to the investigation of the alleged relationship: Madison Hemings; James Callendar, one of Jefferson's fiercest political enemies; the Randolphs and the Carrs, both white relatives of Jefferson; and Jefferson and Hemings. In each case, Gordon-Reed provides convincing evidence that Jefferson scholars allowed preconceptions about the former president to cloud their judgments. Upon reviewing the brief statement by Madison Hemings, printed in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, and the allegations by James Callendar, Gordon-Reed finds significant corroboration for their accounts and plausible explanations for their discrepancies. Previous historians have been too eager to dismiss them, she argues, substituting stereotypical judgements—that the former was the fanciful tale of an ex-slave and the latter a fabrication by an embittered political enemy—for a thorough investigation of content.	. . .