President Tom and "Dashing Sally"

A few years ago, while we were watching a humdrum programme on TV (I would guess, from the context, that it was "Who Do You Think You Are?") that my mother pointed out to me an obvious yet seldom-acknowledged fact. The subject of the documentary, a black Brit with roots in the Caribbean, was distressed to learn that he or she (I can't for the life of me remember who it was!) was descended not only from slaves - a fact which, after all, they must always have know - but also from slave owners. Mum, in her blunt, observant way, pointed out that anyone with eyes could see that this had been the norm throughout the Americas, as most African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans look distinctly different from the modern-day inhabitants of West Africa - and, one must presume, from their own ancestors who were shipped to American plantation during the days of the slave trade. She was, of course, completely right. In the United States, miscegenation (described by Barack Obama as an "ugly, humpbacked word", and at the time of slavery usually denoting the result of a white man taking advantage of an enslaved woman) seems to have been something of a Southern tradition. The most infamous example, of course, is the alleged liaison between President Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, which is thought to have resulted in four surviving children (three of whom, interestingly, ultimately made the decision to "pass for white" and move into the white community).

For anyone who wants to know the whole story, Annette Gordon-Reed's "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" summarises all the known evidence for and against Jefferson's paternity. (Let me say in passing that despite being written before a DNA test proved that at least one of Sally Hemings' children was fathered by a male from the Jefferson line, the evidence for the prosecution is pretty compelling. All of Sally's children were conceived when Jefferson was home at Monticello -a remarkable coincidence given that he was a national political figure who spent ten to eleven months of the year away from home. The boys bore a striking resemblance to the former President, in one case so striking that visitors to Monticello were frequently visibly startled. All four children were freed at the age of twenty-one or thereabouts - and were among a handful of slaves to be set free during Jefferson's lifetime). In short, while it is hard to see how the charge can ever be proved irrefutably, given the evidence, it takes quite an imaginative leap not to come to the conclusion that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children.

However, Gordon-Reed, a law professor whose clear, logical style of exposition clearly owes much to her profession, goes further than that. First of all, I was impressed by her objective, non-judgemental tone througout. As a black woman whose ancestors presumably suffered the same injustices as Sally and her family, one might expect her to be angry - heck, I was angry - at the abuses that happened under the system of slavery. However, none of that comes across in her writing. She even addresses the thorny question of why Sally might have believed such a liaison to be in her best interests and why an affair with her master might well have been - well, "a good career option" isn't quite the phrase, but a good opportunity nonetheless. In short, she does well to avoid presentism and instead displays a remarkable ability to comprehend the very different mindset that held sway during the period she is writing about.

If Gordon-Reed's primary objective was to provide a clear-headed examination of the evidence for and against Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings' children, then her secondary objective was equally important; what is more, since I was already acquainted with the Jefferson/Hemings story, this was the real revelation for me. Gordon-Reed demonstrates that historians, from the 19th century to our own time, have sought to exonerate Jefferson from the charges laid against him - and, in doing so, have demonstrated clear bias in terms of the sources and information they deem relevant to the understanding of their subject. Above all, they have routinely discounted sources based on the oral testimonies of blacks (former slaves at Monticello, for example, as well as Madison Hemings, the alleged second son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings) on the grounds that oral sources and family tradition are hopelessly unreliable in terms of providing accurate historical information. At the same time, however, they have been perfectly happy to accept similar reports from white sources (for example, rumours that did the rounds in the vicinity of Monticello, the oral testimony of Jefferson's former overseer - who was not even present at Monticello until after the birth of Hemings' last child - and the family tradition recounted by Jefferson's grandchildren.) "An American Controversy", then, is not merely a clear-headed reexamination of what was arguably America's first presidential sex scandal, but also an exposition of the source-related bias inherent in so much of what is written about the antebellum South.