Word: jefferson
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Their strength lay in the stories, passed from generation to generation. And so when descendants of Thomas Woodson rolled up their sleeves to give blood for DNA testing, they saw it as a chance to affirm their faith--that Thomas was, in fact, a child of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. "We knew it like religion," says Robert Golden, Thomas' great-great-great- grandson. The results, however, came as a shock: Jefferson was not Thomas Woodson's father...
Similar DNA tests, as the world now knows, established that the youngest of Hemings' sons, Eston, was Jefferson's child. Yet amid the intense debate about Jefferson that this discovery has caused, more interesting may be its impact on the Hemings clan itself. The descendants of the two Hemings sons whose link to Jefferson could not be established--Thomas and Madison--regard themselves as black but have long assumed that Jefferson is their ancestor. Yet the descendants of Eston, the son proved almost conclusively to be a child of Jefferson and Hemings, see themselves as white and for generations...
...romanticizing Jefferson's relationship completely underemphasizes the power imbalance between slave and master. While Wilentz does note that "It was not remotely a relationship of equals," he argues that Jefferson's attraction to Hemings was not merely physical: "It is said that Hemings spoke French and, it seems, could interest her lover from the neck...
...power that allowed Jefferson to compel Hemings into his bed. It was power which allowed the affair to go on for so many years. It was power which left Hemings' manumission uncertain. Hemings could have had absolutely no agency in such an arrangement, as no slave in a situation with a white master ever had. Numerous masters engaged in sexual activity with their slaves, threatening that they would be sold or worse if they did not comply. Why do we assume Jefferson should have been any different...
Perhaps individuals like Wilentz simply refuse to see Jefferson as capable of sexual misconduct. Perhaps because it is too difficult to see "the greatest hero of the eighteenth century" as a hypocrite. But by validating the union of Jefferson and Hemings as one of love, we dismiss the tragic legacy of slavery and the complex and perverted relationship between slave and master...