Today is President’s Day, honoring those who have have filled the role of president throughout American history. I’ve been fascinated by a few of them. But the president who has taken up more space in my consciousness than any other is Thomas Jefferson.
I had been to Monticello with my parents when I was a child, but as I prepared to write “Healing the Soul of America” I went back for a solo visit. I wanted to experience again the house where Jefferson had lived, to walk the grounds, to see his personal items, to feel the energy.
I lingered for a bit with other tourists being shown the property, but broke away from the group in order to walk around by myself. Pretty much every aspect of the house and its environs are incredible, both in richness, beauty, and the demonstration of historical evil. Similar to places like George Washington’s Mt. Vernon, it shows the extraordinary difference between the life of the slaveowner and the life of the slave.
Jefferson’s relationship to slavery could not have been more dichotomous, the author of the Declaration of Independence and its remarkable words — “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” — famously at odds with his ownership of some 600 slaves over the course of his life. While he consistently claimed to oppose slavery, calling it a “moral depravity” and a “hideous blot”; while he believed that slavery presented the greatest threat to the survival of the United States and outlawed the international slave trade during his presidency; and while he said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever” — the fact remains that he owned slaves.
And Jefferson didn’t just own slaves; there is one whom they say that he loved.
Jefferson’s most significant relationship with an enslaved person was a deeply personal one: his 38 year affair with a woman named Sally Hemings. Sally was Jefferson’s deceased wife’s half-sister, present at Martha Jefferson’s deathbed and later caretaker to Martha’s daughter when Jefferson went on his diplomatic jaunt in France. Once she set foot on French soil, Sally had the ability to apply for her freedom. All Sally had to do in order to remain a free woman forever was to refuse to go back with Jefferson when he returned to the United States.
Yet she did not. In one of the greatest relationship mysteries in history, Sally chose to return to Virginia with Jefferson, bearing six of his children and remaining with him for the rest of his life.
Questions about Jefferson and Hemings have intrigued generations of Americans, yet it wasn’t until 1999 that their sexual relationship - the source of gossip for over two hundred years - was proved through DNA analysis. The proof was established through archeological research revealed by historian Annette Gordon-Reed, and her work forever changed the narrative on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
On Presidents Day, I think not about cardboard caricatures but about living, breathing human beings. I think of Lincoln, upon hearing new reports of multiple deaths in Civil War battles, rocking back and forth cradling his head and moaning, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it!” I think of Franklin Roosevelt at Warm Springs, Georgia, helped by people who had no idea what it meant to be a Roosevelt and simply saw him as another polio sufferer - how that opened his eyes and opened his heart to the reality of the average American.
Seeing our presidents as real people does not diminish them, but it deepens us. We live within the legacy of Jefferson’s genius as well as his transgressions, and anything that helps us understand him better helps us understand ourselves. Gordon-Reed has done the country a service by lifting his relationship with Sally Hemings from the mists of false memory. It has helped to open a larger dialogue about race in America as it applies to both our present and our past.
Gordon-Reed today is now a professor at Harvard. She received the National Book Award in 2008 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, as well as the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009. In 2010, she received the National Humanities Medal. Her most recent book is On Juneteenth.
Annette Gordon-Reed has been a personal hero of mine, and having the chance to speak to her was a great honor. A biographer of her stature goes way beyond the revelation of facts regarding the lives of her subjects. I had been asking the esteemed historian a certain question in my head for years, and of course when I did, she said, “Everybody asks that!”
I’m sure it’s the question that you’re asking too. Here’s our interview. You’re about to find out…
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