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1) I gather some see my thread about some members of the Hemings family as an attempt to absolve TJ of having enslaved people, as if giving “preferences” to a handful of people could ever do that.
2) My goal is to understand and illuminate the life of some members of this family. For many years, people (myself included) have acted as if we know nothing of Sally Hemings’s vision of her life.
3) I don’t think that is exactly true. We can glean some understanding of what she thought of her life through the words of the son who told her story. Only two people could have known the details of what happened in Paris: SH and TJ.
4) Madison Hemings talked to his father. But it seems more likely this story came from his mother. The story gives a picture of SH that conveys what was important to her; what she wanted her children and their children to know about her.
5) The posture of “she was enslaved, so none of what she thought matters” will not do for any serious engagement with her life. Nor will it do to see everything through the prism of what we would like historical actors to have done.
6) There were many times writing my book when I would get exasperated: “John Hemings! Why are you writing to Jefferson to tell him that your fellow enslaved man is taking more vegetables from the garden at Poplar Forest than he should be?” I asked.
7) “I know the garden was supposed to be used by everyone, and the person taking the vegetables was depriving John —and, by the way, also TJ sons who there with John— of vegetables.But why not work this out amongst yourselves?”
8) John Hemings’s views about this were very different from mine, but I was not enslaved at Poplar Forest in the early decades of the 19th century. I have a modern sense of racial solidarity that JH, who was 1/4 black, likely did not have.
9) Writing about enslaved people as a group isn’t the same as writing about enslaved people as individuals. The institution’s aspects will be in the lives of individuals, but they play themselves out in different ways.The differences can’t change the evil nature of slavery.
10) I understand people’s concerns. Bad faith on the question of slavery abounds. Apologists for slavery look for any opening to argue that the institution was not evil. It was. And we should write confident in the knowledge that it was.
