Reviews of Books

The Promise of Equality

Reviewed by Joseph J. Ellis, Amherst, Massachusetts

Jefferson's Pillow is a highly personal and deeply poignant meditation on America's founding generation by a respected leader in the modern Civil Rights movement. The title derives from Thomas Jefferson's recollection of his first conscious memory, being carried on a pillow from his family's Shadwell plantation by a black slave. The pillow motif could be pushed even further, since one of Jefferson's last conscious utterances—a mumbled request to adjust his pillow the day before he died—was also answered by a slave, his trusted servant Burwell. The imagery of both scenes makes the point that Roger Wilkins wants to contemplate, namely, that there is an intimate connection between the most revered founders of the American republic and the most despicable institution in American history.	1
This is hardly news to most readers of this journal, who know that the work of David Brion Davis, Winthrop Jordan, and Edmund Morgan has made slavery and racism a centerpiece in the story of the American Revolution and that the more recent work of Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan has transformed our understanding of slavery in its formative eighteenth-century context. Nor will specialists on the political culture of the revolutionary generation find much new in Wilkins's treatment of Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, James Madison, and George Washington, as they danced their collective minuet with liberty on one arm and chattel slavery on the other. Nevertheless, Jefferson's Pillow is an important book, deserving of scholarly notice and robust professional discussion, in part because of Wilkins's fiercely independent conclusions and in part because of what they tell us about the current state of thinking about the Founding Fathers in that expansive region beyond the groves of academe.	2
The autobiographical sections of Jefferson's Pillow actually frame the pointed questions that Wilkins-as-historian wants to answer: "Can I embrace founders who may have 'owned' some of my ancestors? Can I try to see them in their complexity and understand them—even identify with them?" (p. 7). The answer Wilkins eventually reaches is unequivocally, even lyrically, affirmative: "The founding slave owners were more than good men, they were great men" (pp. 138–39). The journey toward that somewhat surprising answer is in part a personal odyssey that takes Wilkins to the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, where his African ancestors were imprisoned before the Middle Passage, to the graveyard in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where his enslaved ancestors are buried in unmarked graves, and to an anti-apartheid demonstration in the streets of Washington, D. C.	3
Wilkins begins his voyage by mentioning the famous passage that W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the start of the twentieth century: "One ever feels his twoness–an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings" (p. 5). Du Bois's own long odyssey eventually ended in Ghana, where he lived out his last years convinced that the reconciliation of his African origins and his American citizenship was impossible. Wilkins reaches the opposite conclusion, so that Jefferson's Pillow can be read as an early twenty-first-century response to Du Bois by a black liberal who sees himself as an American patriot in the tradition of Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. This means that American history is not a story about "them" but a story about "us," which in turn means that the legacy of the founding generation, in both its noble and its ignoble dimensions, has made Wilkins who he is.	. . .