Annette Gordon-Reed on the Jefferson-Hemmings Relationship | Big Think

Annette Gordon-Reed on the Jefferson-Hemmings Relationship

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Though Jefferson was by any objective standard a racist, Annette Gordon-Reed discovered his relationship with Sally Hemmings was immensely progressive.

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Annette Gordon-Reed:

Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers. She earned a place in history with her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which had an acclaimed but stormy reception when published in 1997, and which The New Yorker described as “brilliant.” She is recognized as one of our country’s most distinguished presidential scholars.Gordon-Reed spent her early career as an associate at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, and as Counsel to the New York City Board of Corrections. She speaks or moderates at numerous conferences across the country on history and law-related topics. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Law Review. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, daughter, and son.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Did Jefferson see his relationship as sinful?

Gordon-Reed: You know, sex outside of marriage is a sin that would not have been his formulation of this or sex with a person of a different race is a sin. That’s not… that wouldn’t be his formulation of this at all. People were concerned about fornication and that would be sort of sex outside of marriage because of the children that would be produced and the sort of disorder in society it would have, not like I’m going to hell. I mean, he would not think, I don’t think he believed in hell, I’m pretty certain he didn’t believe in hell. So, he wouldn’t be, not some sort of evangelical notion that this is some great sin for me that he’s going to, you know, suffer in hell forever because of. So, he was much more a rationalist, a materialist, and I mean, Andy Bernstein who has written a lot about Jefferson and his attitudes about love and marriage and so forth. But his view is that Jefferson viewed sex as a healthy thing and that it was unhealthy, I mean, it’s not like, you know, today people view, you know, celibacy almost as providing strength to people, somehow you’re pure. That’s not his idea. That was not the 18th century idea. People were supposed to have sex in that view and sex was seen as a healthy and a natural thing. So he would not have been guilty about the sex per se. He would be concerned, I mean, his primary concern I would imagine or seems to have been about getting the children out of slavery and into freedom which he does when they’re adults. But not in a sort of evangelical sort of modern notion of, you know, I’m engaging in this sinful activity. That would not have been on his radar screen.

Question: Was their relationship intimate?

Gordon-Reed: Gee, I don’t know. I don’t know what the intimate moments were like, you know, it’s hard to think of intimacy in 18th century because these people appear so formal. And even when I try to think about intimate relation with his wife, they call each other Mr. Jefferson and Mrs. Jefferson and, you know, I mean, obviously to them, well, I know that they didn’t, but certainly in their letters and in the way they… We don’t have any of Jefferson’s wife’s letters so we don’t know… We don’t have her descriptions of him. It all seems so very, very formal, but I can imagine, it’s very tough for me to… it’s impossible for me to say what they were very much like, but these are people who knew each other. I mean, very often you get the idea that Sally Hemings is living on some other plantation and the Hemingses are all separate, but it would be the familiarity of someone who had known a person from the time they were a child. Her brothers, her older brothers were his, you know, menservant, they travel with him. Robert Hemings, her oldest brother. Hemings-[IB] brother, a full brother was Jefferson’s manservant from the time he was 12. So it’s like you know anybody. You know a person through other people. They didn’t know each other just one on one. They knew each other through lots of other folks.

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