Early American Musings

One issue that was clearly very predominant at both Williamsburg and Monticello was how to interpret the stories of enslaved people and how to depict the relationship between the Founding Fathers and slavery. I thought the presentation at Williamsburg, which is the story of all the people who lived here, not just the famous ones, worked very well.

The problem at Monticello is that the people who lived on the mountain top would have been overwhelmingly enslaved. Jefferson helped write the words ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ How then could he possibly justify enslaving hundreds of people, and not just people but his children.

A few years ago, I read Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello, which is the definitive study on Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings and her family.  It is one of my favourite books and really helps to uncover Jefferson’s relationship with his enslaved family, about which there is virtually no written evidence. This is why for almost 200 years, people dismissed reports that Jefferson fathered enslaved children as mere political gossip and slander, but in the twenty-first century, the DNA evidence is incontrovertible.

I can (sort of) understand Jefferson’s relationship. His wife died when he was still a comparatively young man, just 39 years old. There is a probably apocryphal story that on her deathbed, she made Jefferson promise that he would not remarry, as she had had a stepmother who mistreated her and she did not want that for her children.  Jefferson did have a dalliance with the English artist Maria Cosway, whom he met in Paris in 1786, but she was married, although probably it was a marriage of convenience, and her husband was a known libertine and unfaithful to her. However, her marriage meant that Jefferson could never have a respectable relationship with her.  However, to have an enslaved African American woman accompany you all the time, and be beside you almost twenty-four hours a day, was not at all unusual. For Jefferson, this was a perfect solution.

It is difficult to think about what this meant for Sally, as she was only 16 when the relationship probably started.  I think the relationship must have been largely consensual because she and her brother James could easily have just disappeared into Paris. They both had money and skills and could both speak French. They could probably have passed for someone from the Mediterranean basin. (Probably three of Sally’s four grandparents were white, and her father was the father of Jefferson’s wife and the enslaver of her mother.) It is true that they had families in Virginia to return to, but not spouses and children.  But this is still an awkward story. How could the wonderful Thomas Jefferson have an almost forty-year relationship with someone whom he kept enslaved? What was his relationship like with her family? How far did he use his position and power to coerce a sixteen-year-old girl? These are all troubling questions.

I suspect that this becomes even more problematic for some people due to the way the Founding Fathers are often viewed in the United States and how they have been perceived throughout history. They have been deified as perfect exemplars for future generations. (I don’t know that other nations do that, I’m thinking here of the British relationship with Churchill’s mixed legacy.) But the Founding Fathers were not demi-gods; they were just regular men. Well, they were not ordinary; they were an extraordinary collection, but they all had their own failings. That is what is so interesting: they were far from perfect, but they also brought a unique collection of talents with them, which enabled the United States to succeed. The fact that they were not perfect demi-gods makes the American Revolution all the more exciting and helps you understand that these men brought an amazing array of skills with them.

Washington also owned enslaved people, but he freed them all on his death in 1799. Jefferson died 27 years later, but by that time, Virginia had passed laws making it more difficult to emancipate the enslaved. But that does not excuse Jefferson. I do find his relationship with his enslaved family very troubling and problematic. It is one of the big contradictions of his life.

I can understand why some people don’t want this ‘in their face’ so much. It is awkward and uncomfortable. However, history is often awkward, uncomfortable, and full of contradictions, and American history is no exception.  Indeed, what makes American history so interesting to me and many of my students in Scotland is these contradictions. It was the American Revolution, not the French Revolution, that brought modern concepts of liberal democracy to the world. The lesson of the French Revolution was that democracy could not work, it led to bloodshed and dictatorship, just as classical writers predicted. Americans made the system work. People in the nineteenth century talked about the ‘republican experiment’ and that was why so many European reformers, men and women from de Tocqueville to Dickens to Frances Trollope, wanted to visit America. But they were also struck by this contradiction in proclaiming liberty while enslaving millions of other people.

I thought Monticello did an excellent job addressing this issue. You could not escape the fact that Monticello was full of hundreds of people who Jefferson had enslaved. Yet it didn’t feel at all forced or added as an afterthought, and it didn’t feel awkward.