What do you know? Sally Hemings is, at last, about to be formally recognized by Monticello as the mother of six of Thomas Jefferson’s children.
The room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom.
The floor tiles and bathroom stalls covered over the story of the enslaved woman, who was owned by Jefferson and had a long-term relationship with him. Their involvement was a scandal during his life and was denied for decades by his descendants. But many historians now believe the third president of the United States was the father of her six children.
I think this is a healthy development. History should not be whitewashed in order to maintain sentimental and misleading fictions.
DNA tests performed in 1998 showed a strong likelihood that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ children, though diehards hold out for the possibility that the actual father was the brother of Jefferson’s dead wife, of Virginia’s Randolph family. In order for that to be true, however, one would have to believe that, years after his wife had died, Jefferson …
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Allowed his former brother-in-law to regularly entertain himself with one of his slaves …
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Just a few steps from his bedroom, which …
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Caused Hemings to bear multiple children with red hair and a striking resemblance to the ex-president, whom …
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Jefferson gladly supported, and …
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Made provisions for in his will.
Not. They were Jefferson’s children.
In recognizing that, and restoring Hemings’ room and providing a more accurate picture of Jefferson’s life, we should not transform his relationship with Hemings into a Forbidden Grand Passion. Hemings was a slave, Jeffferson’s property, and his sexual relationship with her probably began when Hemings was in her mid-teens — possibly as young as 14-years old, and almost certainly by the time she was 16-years old. She was certainly not his intellectual peer or presentable as a companion in that time and place. Though it may be the case that a bond of affection formed over the years, it’s difficult to imagine how that affection could have overcome the bald fact that he owned her and could visit her for sexual release whenever it suited him; the close proximity to his bedroom was probably no more than a device for assuring his exclusive and convenient access.
Even after blithe hand-waving about Jefferson being a man of his time, when misuse of slaves for sex was relatively common if little-discussed, it isn’t believable that the author of the Declaration of Independence didn’t recognize the hypocrisy and squalor of it. Though it isn’t possible to know what was in either Hemings’ or Jefferson’s head, it isn’t crazy to contemplate the irony that Hemings may have counted herself lucky for capturing the Master’s eye, and that Jefferson despised himself for it.
In a closely related vein, Yale University has announced that it will rename Calhoun College after Grace Hopper, the admiral and early computer sorceress. They are not, however, going to attempt to expunge the name Calhoun from memory.
More important than the individual decision, though, are the broader principles Yale employed to reach it. By focusing on understanding how a figure fits into his era, our own and the years in between, these principles rely on a respect for history rather than a compulsion to erase it. Future petitions for name changes, Yale says, will rest on arguments grounded in archival research. And in the case of Calhoun, Yale has chosen to contextualize symbols of the college’s former namesake where they still appear — adding, for example, plaques that explain his place in the country’s past and in Yale’s — rather than remove them.
Yale is doing the right thing. When we look at our own domestic turmoils today, we see egregious misapprehensions about American history and, from appearances, comprehensive ignorance of the 20th-century — a time when beleaguered peoples imagined that benevolent strongmen would restore a fictional, sentimentalized past. Good for Monticello and Yale, then, for understanding that we can learn from history only when we see it clearly.