99-03-12: HISTORIANS AND SCHOLARS GATHER IN CHARLOTTESVILLE TO FURTHER EXAMINE JEFFERSON-HEMINGS AFFAIR By Dan Heuchert and Carol Wood Jefferson-Hemings debate rages on -- Taking new measurements for Jefferson¹s pedestal -- Scholars accept DNA tests: Jefferson-Hemings story echoes in race relations today Last weekend's headlines captured the essence of a historic two-day meeting of scholars and historians who gathered at the sites of Thomas Jefferson's home and university to discuss and debate issues surrounding his relationship with Sally Hemings. The debate itself was not new. It is one that began almost 200 years ago when Jefferson was first accused of having children with Hemings, one of his slaves. Some historians continue to struggle with the question of the relationship, but most are willing to bring it out into the public eye, to scrutinize it in the light of modern times. Nothing helped clear the way for this open evaluation more than last fall's DNA study by retired U.Va. Pathology professor Dr. Eugene Foster, indicating that Jefferson could have been the father of at least one child with Hemings. Two years before, the publication of Annette Gordon-Reed's book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, started renewed discussions of the Jefferson affair. Gordon-Reed, a New York law professor, argued that most white historians had not taken a balanced look at other evidence suggesting the intimate relationship between Jefferson and his house slave. She went on to assert that people had relied too heavily on the authority of previous scholars, accepting their word as gospel. When 14 prominent scholars -- including three Pulitzer-Prize winners -- gathered in Cabell Hall March 6, they sounded ready to rewrite, at least in part, the book on Thomas Jefferson. The session began with participants reading from their papers commissioned by Peter Onuf, a conference organizer and the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at U.Va. Their reports and later comments were sprinkled with what many in the audience were prepared to hear: -- "It's been coming for a long time," said Gordon S. Wood of Brown University, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution. "Public culture is demanding this change. ... We should accept it and even celebrate it." -- "Life will never be the same at Monticello," said Lucia Stanton, a senior research historian at Monticello. "It was a liberating experience. Suddenly there was a lot of open talk," she said, among the Hemings' descendants she interviewed as part of an oral history project. -- "It was the secret marriage of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. ... It had to be known in the little world of Monticello," said Rhys Isaac, of the College of William and Mary and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Transformation of Virginia. "The strong system of race and class thwarted a real marriage. DNA tests outed this secret family ..." And, finally, -- "I am impressed by how little we know about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. In all of Jefferson's correspondence, he mentions her only once," said Philip Morgan, an expert on slavery at William and Mary and author of Slave Counterpoint. Oral tradition, though, tells a different story. Hemings' descendants say the story handed down to them was that the relationship was one of affection and respect, a notion some scholars warned could overly romanticize and misrepresent the truth. Could Jefferson have been little more than a rapist? a possibility suggested by Gertrude Fraser, a U.Va. associate professor of anthropology. Or was it the best-kept secret affair of all time? Most of the other panelists declined to commit to one or the other extreme, although both Morgan and Joshua Rothman, a doctoral candidate at U.Va. writing his dissertation on race relations in colonial Virginia, cautioned against projecting notions of romantic love upon such an unequal power relationship. Dianne Swann-Wright, director of special programs at Monticello, said her goal is to "keep Sally Hemings as black," fearing that a majority of the public would be more comfortable with a romantic fable that portrayed Hemings' status as somehow different from those of other slaves at Monticello, thus denying the reality of slave life. In another sense, though, the scholarly acceptance of the Hemings-Jefferson affair does not much change the historical view of Jefferson, or 18th-century Virginia, some panelists said. It was not unusual for masters to have sex with their slaves, Morgan said; it was seen as a prerogative of ownership that some slave-owners indulged in more than others. And Jefferson's views on race have long been deemed as puzzling. In some writings, he condemned slavery, and his words about equality in the Declaration of Independence have stood as a beacon of democratic ideals across the centuries. Yet Jefferson owned slaves, chose not to free them upon his death -- save for the children of Sally Hemings -- and never pushed for the abolition of slavery. "The basic problem remains the same," said Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Original Meanings, who characterized it as "Jefferson the optimist vs. Jefferson the moral failure." He cautioned against projecting contemporary values onto those who lived in Jefferson's era, a view with which Wood concurred. Jefferson "is a man of the 18th century, but the public will not let us historians get away with that kind of contextual placing," Wood said. Gordon-Reed said she didn't mind leaving Jefferson in the 18th century, but added that there are still lessons to be learned by contemporary Americans. "The story is about us and our response to Jefferson," she said, noting that some of the reaction seemed to suggest that his stature was somehow lessened. "If he slept with a black woman, all of a sudden he was defiled in a way that he could not recover from." She argued that the truth about Jefferson should not detract from his legacy, and saw hopeful signs that the black oral tradition would now gain credibility and provide a fuller picture of all aspects of history. PHOTO CAPTION: Clockwise from lower left: panelists Gertrude Fraser, U.Va., Jack N. Rakove, Stanford; Dr. Eugene Foster, retired from U.Va., Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School; Winthrop Jordan, University of Mississippi; Rhys Isaac, William & Mary Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory and Civic Culture The University Press of Virginia will launch a new book series on Jeffersonian America, publishing conference papers in the first book this fall. The Press published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed in 1997.