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The Daily Dose/March 12, 2010
By Gaylon Kent
The Writer's Shack
Notes from around the Human Experience...
HALFWAY POINT: One of the bellwether components of The Daily Dose are the popular Capsule Book Reviews. We are regular readers here at the Writer's Shack and we're usually good for producing them on a regular basis.
We haven't produced one for awhile though because for most of this year we've been reading The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed. It is a very large book and we are just now passing the halfway mark.
In-Game Stat Update: While we are not prepared to issue a final rating until we've finished the book, if we had to rate it right now we'd give it our highest rating. The research is as impressive as it is enormous. It is a scholarly work that demands a lot of its readers, but like all good things that demand a lot of you, it provides rewards.
FYI: The Hemingses were a slave family in Virginia. They were owned by a couple of families, including that of the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson who acquired them when he got married.
Dry, Technical Matter: The reason a slave family at Jefferson's estate is significant is because Sally Hemings bore several children and it is thought that Jefferson was the father.
A complete review of the evidence regarding Jefferson fathering Sally Hemings' children is beyond the scope of this column. But while it is not certain he fathered them, it is not unreasonable to draw that conclusion either. It is also not completely unreasonable to conclude that Jefferson's wife Martha and Sally were half-sisters, meaning Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, was not completely averse to the occasional romp through the slave quarters.
Heading Up The Backstretch: We are at the point in the book and Jefferson has returned home from Paris, where he had been the American Minister to France. Ostensibly he is on a leave of absence, though shortly after returning home in December of 1789 he will accept an appointment from President George Washington to be the first United States Secretary of State. He would never return to Paris.
Lineup Card: With him in Paris were two members of the Hemings family: James, who had been with Jefferson from the start of the trip and had spent a good deal of time learning how to become a master chef, and Sally, who spent the final 21 months in France with Jefferson after coming over with his daughter. She too, learned a variety of skills that would be useful for a servant to have. Sally was 15 or 16 at the time (30 years Jefferson's junior, hubba-hubba) while James was a man of 24.
Oh Yeah: As Jefferson and his entourage prepare to return home, Sally Hemings is pregnant and you do not have to be Inspector Clouseau to deduce that Mr. Jefferson is the prime candidate to be the daddy.
To Review: In Virginia James and Sally were slaves. They were owned by Jefferson, just like a horse or a plow was owned by Jefferson and could be sold or leased accordingly because under Virginia law the only status blacks had was that of property.
Let Freedom Ring: The Hemingses were not slaves in France. As soon as they sat foot in France they assumed the same status, though certainly not the same station, that Jefferson enjoyed: that of a free person. All they had to do to claim that freedom was present themselves to the proper authorities.
WTF? Neither of them did. Why is not entirely certain, though James had every reason to believe he would be returning to Paris when Jefferson resumed his duties as minister. We know precious little about Sally as Jefferson chose not to mention Sally in any substantive form in his extensive personal correspondence and we are left to using the circumstances of the time to form conjectures.
For Americans who take freedom for granted, it is difficult to believe why anyone would choose to return to slavery rather than remain free. But that is the exact choice Sally Hemings was in a position to make and she chose slavery.
The situations and factors at play here are enormous and Gordon-Reed does a brilliant job of chronicling them. But one thing that struck us was that you cannot dismiss the possibility that either Hemings or Jefferson, or both them, knew what they were doing when Hemings got pregnant.
Hey Baby: Jefferson had been a widow for several years and had made a deathbed promise to his wife not to remarry, a promise he may have been of a mind to keep. He well knew Sally could choose to remain a free person in France and there was nothing he could do about it. Not only that, like a lot of men his age, Jefferson probably found he had the hots for a young, teenaged girl and decided the best way to ensure Sally's company at Monticello forever and ever was to knock her up. He could have promised her and her family a relatively easy life and Jefferson, who desired nothing more than a quiet life at Monticello, may have thought Sally Hemings a pleasant companion for this.
And In This Corner: Hemings, for her part, may not have been completely thrilled with her prospects as a black, single mom in France no matter how free she was. She and James, as well as Jefferson, had a front row seat to the beginnings of the French Revolution and Sally and James may well have decided that it was not entirely clear the upper classes they were trained to serve would still be alive to hire them. It is not a complete stretch that she thought that heading back to Virginia bearing Jefferson's child, especially when she started making noises about staying in France - put her in a better position to negotiate as good a life as she and her children could expect.
In Summation: The choice between freedom and slavery is a decision that few humans throughout history have had to make and it is unlikely a large percentage of those faced with that choice chose slavery. Reading a chronicle of someone who faced and made that choice, and chose slavery, makes for compelling reading.
TOKEN ON THIS DATE ACTION: Eight years after debuting as a soda fountain drink (for five cents a glass, about $1.18 today) Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time on this date in 1894 in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
Thought For The Day: The faculties of the mind, like the members of the body, are strengthened by exercise. - Thomas Jefferson
Answer To The Last Trivia Question: Tennessee (6), Louisiana Tech, Stanford and Southern Cal (two each) are the other schools who have won multiple NCAA women's Division I basketball championships.
Today's Stumper: In addition to Monticello, Jefferson also owned a retreat in Virginia. What was the name of this retreat? - Answer next time!
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