Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in,
and historical scholarship about, American slavery. Both
in the academy and outside of it, Americans have come
to realize that part of our national consciousness was
shaped between 1619 and 1865, when racially based slavery
flourished in North America. Historians have always written
about slavery, of course, even when the institution was
in place. But with the exception of the works of black
scholars like W.E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson, most
historical writing about slavery in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries was produced by white Southerners,
who focused on slavery from the perspective of the slave-owning
class rather than the enslaved.
This focus on slavery from the slave owners’
perspective no longer dominates the field. Beginning
with Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution,
scholars have produced works that strive to examine
slavery from the perspective of those who suffered under
it and to reconstruct their lives, their values, their
customs – and, above all, the role they played
in shaping the world in which they lived. Yet it is
important to realize that in reconstructing that past,
scholars face multiple challenges, among them evaluating
two quite different forms of evidence: document-based
evidence and the evidence based on oral traditions.
Equally important and challenging is the need to subject
claims made by masters and those made by slaves or the
children of slaves to the same rigorous standards of
proof. For, as the history of the debate over the relationship
between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings demonstrates,
scholars may still be inclined to give more weight to
the records and accounts of the powerful, the famous,
and the educated, and to their descendants, rather than
to the stories told by those such as slaves, women,
and the poor who stand outside the circles of power
and authority.
No better example of this pattern can be found than
the long and highly contested debate over the relationship
between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, who was
one of Jefferson’s slaves. Although eighteenth-century
gossip and newspaper stories suggested that Jefferson
was the father of Madison, Eston, and the other Hemings
offspring, twentieth-century historians proved reluctant
to credit these stories. Two written documents —
a letter and a memoir created by grandchildren of Thomas
Jefferson — seemed to provide adequate proof that
the claims of Jefferson’s paternity were false.
One of these grandchildren stated that Jefferson’s
nephew, Samuel Carr, fathered all of Hemings’s
children; the other insisted that Samuel’s brother,
Peter Carr, was their father.
But a third account also existed. This came from Madison
Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son. Madison Hemings
provided his version of the relationship between Jefferson
and his mother in an interview with an Ohio newspaperman
in 1873. It was his claim that his mother, Sally, was
Jefferson’s longstanding mistress and the father
of all of her children.
Clearly, the written “evidence” on the
relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
was contradictory. The reliability of all three accounts
required investigation. For, as scholars know, the written
word is not necessarily inherently truthful; people
can make things up and put them in family letters, declare
them in written speeches, record them in diaries, or
provide them in newspaper interviews. Putting a story
on paper does not turn falsehoods into truth. Regardless
of the author’s social status, his education level,
or the passion of his conviction, the historian must
examine the author’s motives, consider how the
author acquired the information contained in the document
-- and then must search for corroborating evidence before
what is written is accepted as what is true.
Yet a bias led historians to give more weight to the
grandchildren’s accounts than to the account of
Madison Hemings, despite the fact that the grandchildren’s
accounts were themselves contradictory. No doubt the
high esteem in which Thomas Jefferson was held by the
public and by the historians contributed to the acceptance
of the grandchildren’s claim that Jefferson did
not father the Hemings children. But no doubt racism
-- sometimes conscious and sometimes unconscious --
played a role in privileging the grandchildren’s
claims over the claims of Madison Hemings. A further
complication comes from the fact that the type of corroborating
evidence historians are accustomed to look for -- other
written documents -- was rarely produced by enslaved
African Americans. The vast majority of enslaved people
were illiterate, and even those who were literate rarely
contributed to the creation of official records that
often give historians information about past lives.
Slave marriages were not recognized in law, and slaves
did not write wills or deeds — although they appeared
in them as items of property. Most of the personal experiences
of enslavement live on in a very different form: in
the stories passed from one generation of African Americans
to the next through an oral history tradition.
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