The Sally Hemings Story: History as a Reconstruction
The Sally Hemings/Thomas Jefferson story illustrates the principle that history is an attempt to reconstruct a story from the evidence available. The evidence is never complete, and rarely presented without bias of some sort. Before the DNA evidence made some theories less likely and others more so, most historians based their conclusions about Thomas Jefferson's relationship to Sally Hemings on their judgments about his character.
From the time in 1802 James Thomson Callendar made the scandal public, many people who disliked or mistrusted Jefferson were willing to believe "the worst" of Jefferson. In the context of the sexual and racial attitudes of the time, "the worst" was that he'd had intimate relations with a black slave woman.
Other historians who judged Jefferson to be an honorable and good man, and who believed that a relationship between a white man and a black slave was wrong, found ways to explain the paternity of the Hemings children which absolves Jefferson.
Those historians -- especially in more recent years when more women began to write about this history -- who accepted that leaders need not be all-good or all-bad, and who also accepted that a slave woman might be more than a sex object to be used or ignored by her master, judged the same evidence and concluded that Jefferson was probably good, honorable, and the father in question.
One's preconceptions often influence one's conclusions; that's notably true when one examines the conclusions historians have drawn in the Hemings/Jefferson controversy. Those who disagree with a particular conclusion are quick to label it as biased; of course, those same critics usually believe their own conclusions are based only on objective logic and evidence. Women's history holds as a central principle that acknowledging and examining one's biases are important steps in the task of "doing history."
The Power of the Powerless
The idea that Sally Hemings could be, despite her slave status, a person with some influence over what happened to her, does not seem to occur to some historians. "Women's history" as a discipline and approach to history has helped in understanding the dynamics of history more clearly, as women historians have paid attention to how women have exerted influence, even without having public power. Those who seem to be powerless -- whose power must be exercised without support of law and custom -- often have real influence, and the story of history isn't complete without looking at those dynamics carefully.
Whom Do You Believe?
Stories passed along through oral tradition -- including those of Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph and of Madison Hemings -- provide a good deal of the evidence in this controversy. But all these stories have some self-contradictions and also contradict each other in important points. For instance, Thomas Jefferson Randolph pointedly draws attention to the remarkable resemblance of the Hemings children to Thomas Jefferson but explains this resemblance by pointing to Jefferson's nephews as likely fathers.
Madison Hemings' report of his family history has been discounted by many historians who accept the Randolph account -- in part because Madison Hemings' less-educated background and his status as an ex-slave are assumed to make him less reliable.
The Hemings side of the story has sometimes been discounted because some historians have assumed that the Hemings have too much selfish interest in selling themselves as Jefferson descendents. But those same historians overlook the selfish interest on the part of the legitimate Jefferson grandchildren in denying the story: in a racially-segregated society in the latter 19th century, and in a society in which extramarital relations are not accepted, this story would (excuse the expression) "blacken" the Jefferson family name. One kind of bias is acknowledged, the other is not.
