Until very recently, American historians were no more receptive to arguments about a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings than The Da Vinci Code's Catholic Church was to a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The goal of the historians was to protect their hero from charges of hypocrisy. Dumas Malone, the greatest in a long line of Jefferson hagiographers, established the common wisdom when he wrote that an interracial sexual affair was “distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson's moral standards and habitual conduct.”Footnote ¹ Virginius Dabney concluded that given Jefferson's documented horror of miscegenation, “It would indeed have been the height of hypocrisy for a man who entertained such views and expressed them over most of his adult life to have sired mulatto children.” Case closed. In a review of Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974), which was the first scholarly work to credit the Jefferson-Hemings liaison, Garry Wills accepted the possibility of Jefferson having “sired” Sally Hemings's seven children and saved his scorn for Brodie's contention that Jefferson and Hemings forged a deep emotional bond during an intimate relationship that lasted nearly forty years. Sputtering that there was “no scrap of evidence” of Jefferson's passion for Sally, “except perhaps the fact that he retained Sally at Monticello after stories about her had been widely circulated,” Wills declared her the slave equivalent of “a healthy and obliging prostitute” and postulated confidently that Jefferson kept her around because “there was less risk in continuing to enjoy her services than in experimenting around with others.”

From the very beginning, the Jefferson/Hemings relationship has been held to unusual, if not unmatched, standards of evidence. Since DNA testing in 1998 established Jefferson's paternity for Sally's youngest child, Eston Hemings, the terms of debate have shifted from the possibility of a sexual relationship between Sally and Tom to its quality. Pace Dumas Malone, Jefferson's behavior is not all that difficult to understand. His friends, his family—including his father-in-law, who was also Sally's father—did much as he did. The real difficulty lies in interpreting Sally Hemings's behavior. Hemings and her older brother James accompanied Jefferson and his daughter Polly to Paris in 1787. Each took on the attributes of free people while there—James became a chef and Sally earned wages for keeping Jefferson's rooms in order. Either or both could have petitioned for their freedom in a French court and remained in Paris. Neither did. In 1789, pregnant for the first time, Sally returned to Virginia a slave and the mistress of Thomas Jefferson. We know from her son Madison Hemings and Annette Gordon-Reed's painstaking (and breathtaking) research in The Hemingses of Monticello that Sally's return was an object of intense negotiation. In order to convince Sally to remain with him, Jefferson agreed to grant her extraordinary privileges and to free all her children at age twenty-one (326). In choosing to return to slavery under these conditions, Hemings cemented her life, and those of her children and her extended family at Monticello, to Jefferson.

Given the legal constraints on free married women at the time, the choice to become the enslaved lover of a man of property and power predisposed to treat one well and free one's children might not have been as agonizing as it appears today, and Gordon-Reed makes a sensitive case for its rationality. More difficult to determine, and a source of enduring scholarly consternation, has been the question of emotional connection. Where did desire and affection figure in Sally's decision? Common sense tells us we have to confront this question, yet the ethical position many historians ascribe to themselves has made it almost impossible to ask: Can the subaltern love?

The question of how to think about desire (whether interracial or not) from a position of relative powerlessness is central to the Jefferson-Hemings historical debate. Gordon-Reed criticizes historians of slavery who, with a certainty worthy of Dumas Malone, rule out the possibility of an affective relationship between Jefferson and Hemings because of the prevalence of rape in the slave quarters. Complaining that “social history trumps biography” through formulas such as a no-possible-consent rule for sex between unfree women and free men, Gordon-Reed chafes against the modern commonplace that love cannot cross great boundaries of hierarchy and power, and critiques the tendency to apply bourgeois standards of love to a social system not yet fully bourgeois. For most of human history most human relationships were conceived in a setting of great disparities of power. To insist that love cannot cross such hierarchies is therefore akin to answering—in the negative—the question of whether love between man and woman was possible before bourgeois modernity.

This question is related to another: How loud does the historical record have to be to offer a convincing argument for love across the master-slave continuum? Those who deny the possibility of affection between Jefferson and Hemings rely, in the first instance, on the lack of letters or diaries detailing the precise nature of their relationship: an evidentiary standard that would rule out speculation about nearly all nonelite relationships throughout history and one that was abandoned thirty years ago by social historians of slavery and the working class. To argue that two people who lived together for thirty-eight years and produced seven children left no historical evidence about their relationship because they failed to put their feelings in writing is to shut down debate about the nature of that relationship.Footnote ²

The naysayers have one other argument at their disposal, however, and it is a strong one if not necessarily trumps. This is the law. It is undeniable that, whatever his feelings for Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson owned her. She was his property, and he had the right to sell her and her—and his—children should he choose to do so. He did not have the legal right to marry her, whether he owned her or not. This harsh reality, though, does not preclude commitment and affection: After 1806, emancipated slaves were required to leave Virginia unless granted permission to remain by the legislature. Historians do not interpret the failure of free blacks to emancipate members of their family whom they purchased as evidence of callousness or exploitation. The law of slavery, which was designed to annul family ties, is a poor guide to sentiment.

Gordon-Reed recognizes this. Whereas she never sets the law aside, she does, quietly, suggest that because it was through law that the social fabric of slavery was woven, reflexive deference to it limits our capacity to fully contextualize historical actors and perpetuates a white supremacist vision of the past. “It is only through piercing the veil of southern society's laws, including its fictions about family,” she argues, “that we can take the first step toward getting at the reality of black and white lives under slavery” (85).

One goal of Gordon-Reed is to undermine the confidence historians have about the meaning of marriage, about our ability to extrapolate feeling from legal status. The “treaty” Sally made with Jefferson in Paris was necessary because of her inability to marry him—she had to negotiate those things that any bride takes on trust. “Is social legitimacy the sine qua non of an authentic connection between two people?” she asks. And, “That Hemings and Jefferson were not merely an unmarried couple but were, under American law, in a specific kind of legal relationship—master and slave—complicates the equation further and raises other questions. Do people always see themselves as the law says they should? Could a man and a woman, in their situation, have an ‘outlawed’ personal human bond that was worthy of any degree of respect or understanding? (280)”

The relationship of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was a limit case, and, like most limit cases, the importance of this story lies in its ability to reveal broad truths about a society through its anomalous nature. One of those truths was the ease with which those propertied white men who wrote their society's laws circumnavigated them. Another was the space that sometimes existed for the most powerless people in this society to negotiate a better future for themselves and their children. As to the exact nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, if she cannot establish, definitively, “love,” Gordon-Reed makes a very strong case for mutual trust and respect. But those who reject this interpretation, particularly where Sally is concerned, are not, as Gordon-Reed charges, refusing to recognize Hemings as a human being (375). They are unwilling to extrapolate Sally's feelings from the material reality of her life; they weight the evidence differently than Gordon-Reed does to stress another facet of this complex relationship. This tension about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship and its socioeconomic context, this question of the capacity of love to transcend hierarchy in two directions or only one, informs even popular culture representations of the story. A 2002 sketch on Saturday Night Live about the initial encounter between Jefferson and Hemings (in which a flirting Jefferson asks Sally when she gets off work and Sally replies, “Umm, never”) ends succinctly: Jefferson says, “I think I could love you, Sally Hemings.” And she replies, “You're the boss.”