The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (109 page)

22.
Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks
, 235–36.

23.
Stanton and Wright, "Bonds of Memory," 178.

24.
Stevenson,
Life in Black and White
, 222. Although Stevenson’s book centers on slavery in one county in Virginia, it can be seen as a corrective to the notion that a female-headed household is necessarily a dysfunctional one. Because the legacies of slavery are still with us, there has been much discussion about whether current-day dissolution of black family life can be attributed to blacks’ experiences during slavery. The famous Moynihan report fingered the black "matriarchy," with its purported roots in slavery, as the source of problems in the black community. Herbert Gutman’s important work
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925
(New York, 1976), a direct response to the Moynihan report, suggested that enslaved people more often lived in nuclear families than was thought. Subsequent work, including Stevenson’s, suggests that perhaps Gutman went too far in the opposite direction from Moynihan and understated the effect that the sales of slaves had on the lives of enslaved families.

25.
See, e.g.,
Farm Book
, 28.

26.
TJ to Jared Sparks, Feb. 4, 1824, in
Writings
, 1486–87.

27.
None of this is unique to our age. Throughout his life, Jefferson, with the utmost sincerity (who knew more than he about the perils of debt), advised against spending more money than one had. Yet he did that to the very end of his days. The last letter he ever wrote was not the one famously thought to be his final one—the very eloquent and stirring missive to Roger C. Weightman in which he had to decline, owing to his poor health, an invitation to participate in the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His last letter was an inquiry about a shipment of expensive wine that he had ordered, even as he faced financial ruin and the loss of his beloved Monticello. He was absolutely right to have ordered the wine, since he was not going to save Monticello by doing without it. There was no point in suffering more than he already was, the time to have listened to himself having long since passed. If he had lived the preceding forty years not spending money that he did not have, or lending money to others that he did not have, the troubles of his old age would have been greatly lessened. TJ to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826, in
Writings
, 1516–17; J. Jefferson Looney, "Thomas Jefferson’s Last Letter,"
VMHB
112 (2004): 178.

28.
TJ to John Banister Jr., Oct. 15, 1785,
Papers
, 8:636.

29.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 252.

30.
White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
, 40–43.

31.
C. Vann Woodward, ed.,
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War
(New Haven, 1981), quoted ibid., 40–41.

32.
Lucia Stanton, "The Other End of the Telescope: Jefferson through the Eyes of His Slaves,"
WMQ
3d ser., 57 (2000): 146.

33.
See above, chap. 12.

34.
Peabody,
"There Are No Slaves,"
101–3.
Howell v. Netherland
, 1770 Va. Lexis 1; Jeff. 90 (April 1770). See also Annette Gordon-Reed, "Logic and Experience: Slavery, Race and Thomas Jefferson’s Life in the Law," in
Slavery and the American South: Essays and Commentaries
, ed. Winthrop Jordan (Jackson, Miss., 2003).

35.
There is, of course, extensive literature on enslaved people who succeeded in liberating themselves from their enslavement, or attempted to do so. That literature makes clear that these individuals ran whether there was a chance, let alone a guarantee, that life outside of slavery was going to be a certain way. See, e.g.,
Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790
, ed. Lathan A. Windley, 4 vols. (Westport, Conn., 1993); Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 696; Peter H. Wood,
Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
(New York, 1974), 239. Washington University in St. Louis maintains an online database of hundreds of freedom suits through the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project at http://stlcourtrecords.wustl.edu.

36.
James Hemings’s inventory, see photograph in the first insert.

37.
Pierre Boulle, "Les Gens de couleur à Paris à la veille de la Révolution," 1:160–61.

38.
Jennifer Heuer, "The One Drop Rule in Reverse?: Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France," forthcoming article.

39.
One of the more popular novels of early nineteenth-century France was
Ourika
, based on the true story of a young woman from Senegal who is taken in by a French family. Ourika seeks to move above her station, and the novel recounts her struggle in Paris. Claire de Duras,
Ourika: An English Translation
, trans. John Fowles (New York, 1994).

40.
Wister and Irwin,
Worthy Women of Our First Century
, 20–22.

41.
Robert Darnton, "What Was Revolutionary about French Revolution?," quoted in David Brion Davis, "American Equality and Foreign Revolutions,"
Journal of American History
76 (Dec. 1989): 735.

1.
For the past decade, I have traveled the country, speaking about Hemings and Jefferson. I do not recall a setting where this question was not asked explicitly or implicitly.

2.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 246.

3.
The question whether historians should focus on the hegemony of the slaveholding class—the power they exercised over slaves and the larger society—or examples of the agency that enslaved people exhibited in the face of that attempted hegemony is part of a continuing conversation among those who write about slavery. See Ariela Gross, "Beyond Black and White," 664, referring to the "circularity of the ‘hegemony v. resistance’ debates that have sometimes dominated slavery studies."

4.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 166–69, discussing "Mammy love."

5.
W. Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England
, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1765), chap. 15.

6.
Hendrik Hartog,
Man and Wife in America: A History
(Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 2–3, 23–24, on law’s shaping of the meaning of marriage.

7.
See above, chap. 3, on the marriage settlement of John Wayles and Martha Eppes. See also "Marriage Settlement for Martha Jefferson,"
Papers
, 16:189.

8.
See Hodding Carter, "Mrs. Means Married Women," from
Where Main Street Meets the River
(1953), reprinted in
Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism, 1941–1973
(New York, 2003), 134–40. Carter describes a meeting with a "Negro woman" who came into his office to complain because the
Democrat-Times
refused to refer to married black women as "Mrs.," "instead giving their unadorned names, as Lucy Jones and Mary Smith" and "listing only the initials of their husbands as if their first names could not be learned." Carter wrote, "I might have brushed her aside with the usual comment that this was the established policy of the paper and of most Southern papers from time immemorial. Or I might have evaded the issue by saying that I would like time to think about it since if I complied, I would be violating one of the longest lasting of deep Southern taboos."

9.
From Mrs. Drummond, March 12, 1771,
Papers
, 1:65–66; TJ to T. Adams, June 1, 1771, ibid., 71–72.

10.
Sarah N. Randolph,
The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson
, 25–26; Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 245.

11.
For a discussion of the implications of the Married Women’s Property Acts, see Norma Basch,
In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1982). Basch and other historians have emphasized the limited nature of the reforms—they were not meant to completely overthrow traditional notions about marriage and the relationship between husbands and wives. Though a given law may have limited application, it may also carry a powerful symbolic message that shapes the attitudes of the public. See also Lawrence Friedman,
A History of American Law
(New York, 1985), 209–11, 295–96.

12.
Sloan,
Principle and Interest
, 15–16;
Papers
, 1:100, 103.

13.
See Gross, "Beyond Black and White," 649.

14.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 246.

15.
White,
Ar’n’t I a Woman?
, 7–8, 76–77; Stevenson,
Life in Black and White
, 236–37.

16.
Sharon Block,
Rape and Sexual Power in Early America
(Chapel Hill, 2006), 67–74.

17.
TJ to Maria Jefferson, May 25, 1797,
Papers
, 29:399.

18.
TJ to William Evans, Feb. 22, 1801,
Papers
, 33:38.

19.
Morgan,
Slave Counterpoint
, 548–49.

20.
Francis Say to TJ, Feb. 23, 1801,
Papers
, 33:53.

21.
Rhys Isaac, "Monticello Stories," 119.

22.
John Quincy Adams, "The Character of Desdemona," in Hackett,
Notes and Comments upon Certain Plays and Actors of Shakespeare
, 235.

23.
Ibid., 237, 247–48. It is not uncommon today to hear interracial couples described, jokingly some might say, as having a malady: "jungle fever." But, of course, humor is often used as a soft way to communicate a hard message. Americans clearly prefer to characterize the attraction between black and white couples, as opposed to the attraction between intraracial couples, as an inherently more degraded—or less serious—form of love.

24.
Ibid., 247.

25.
TJ to Jean Nicholas Demeunier, June 26, 1786,
Papers
, 10:63.

26.
Holly Brewer,
By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority
(Chapel Hill, 2005), 325–26.

27.
Clare A. Lyons,
Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830
(Chapel Hill, 2006), 353.

28.
Hamilton W. Pierson,
In the Brush; or, Old-Time Social, Political, and Religious Life in the Southwest
(New York, 1881).

29.
See Bernie D. Jones, "‘Righteous Fathers,’ ‘Vulnerable Old Men,’ and ‘Degraded Creatures’: Southern Justices on Miscegenation in the Antebellum Will Contest," 40
Tulsa Law Review
40 (2005): 699–750; Adrienne D. Davis, "The Private Law of Race and Sex: An Antebellum Perspective,"
Stanford Law Review
51 (Jan. 1999): 221–88.

30.
Randolph,
Domestic Life
, 25–26. See, generally, Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, "DNA: The Author’s Response."

31.
Fawn Brodie, "Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren," 176.

32.
Gordon-Reed,
TJ and SH
, 196–201.