NP - The Hemingses of Monticello

[David Morris]

http://www.slate.com/id/2200594

Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello

Jefferson's Other Family
His concubine was also his wife's half-sister.

When DNA evidence corroborated the long-standing rumor of a
relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, the
news made headlines around the world. It should not have. Though
usually kept hidden, few things were more common in plantation
societies than sexual encounters between white slave owners and female
slaves. What makes the Jefferson-Hemings story noteworthy is the
family connection they shared. Sally was not just an enslaved woman;
she was the half-sister of Jefferson's dead wife. And in Virginia,
observes Annette Gordon-Reed, a historian and law professor at New
York University, "a man who married his deceased wife's sister was
engaging in incest."

This "Gordian knot of family relationships" serves as the ligature
holding together a remarkable new book, The Hemingses of Monticello.
Gordon-Reed, author of a previous work on the Jefferson-Hemings
relationship, is just the person to cut through the tangle. The story
begins with Elizabeth Hemings, born in 1735 of a white father and an
enslaved African woman, who became the property of John Wayles, an
English immigrant to Virginia. Wayles married three white women and
buried them all before he and Elizabeth Hemings became involved.
Hemings went on to have eight children with Wayles, including Sally,
the descendant of two generations of white man/slave woman
relationships.

The Hemings-Jefferson family connection began in 1772, when Wayles'
daughter Martha, born to one of his white wives, married Jefferson.
The Hemingses, of course, knew of their blood ties to Martha; what
Martha knew remains shrouded. The ability of whites to deny reality
was legendary: "Every lady tells you who is the father of all the
mulatto children in everybody's household," Civil War diarist Mary
Boykin Chesnut famously observed, "but those in her own she seems to
think drop from the clouds." By all indications, Martha Jefferson bore
few illusions, however, and it is unlikely she harbored any resentment
about her father's liaison, since in 1774 Elizabeth Hemings and her
children moved to Monticello, where they were immediately "singled
out" for special roles.