The Jefferson Affair

Sixteen years ago Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controuersy Would have been a Senior paper for history major Annette Gordon-Reed '81 Instead, infused with the perspective of time and molded by the principles of legal debate, Gordon-Reed has crafted a formidable, 288-page case complete with footnotes, appendices, and bibliography supporting a long-term affair between the author of the Declaration of Independence and his slave. The book, "published by the University Press of Virginia, was a main selection of the History Book Club this winter.

Today Gordon-Reed is thankful that her thesis adviser, though "progressive and enlightened," had nonetheless "bought into this view that this was an abolitionist tale" and dissuaded her from pursuing the topic in college. Otherwise she might have quelled some of the passion that drove her through eight months of 16-hour days teaching by day at New York I .aw School and writing by night. I he benefit of time and maturity also allowed Gordon-Reed to take a more sophisticated stance on the issue. Rather than attempting to prove the affair unequivocably, she attacks the controversy as an exercise in problem-solving.

Applying techniques learned at Harvard Law School, Gordon-Reed weighs all the facts of the story available today, stripping from them any smear leveled by historians on either side of the issue, and then reexamines each piece afresh. In doing this, she also reveals the biases of well-respected historians who, she said, had approached the affair as something that was impossible and that therefore had to be disproved. "Part of my motivation was to show people's stereotypes about slaves," says Gordon-Reed. About the most important piece of evidence emancipated slave Madison Hemings's story to an Ohio newspaper in Is""; declaring the former President his father Gordon-Reed asks: "What if we didn't simply assume that just because the,person was, a former slave he had a reason to lie?"

Gordon Reedweighs theJeffersonHemingscase.