Love or Domination?

Once again, race has consumed the nation's attention. The news that scientists have shown through DNA testing that Thomas Jefferson had at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings has been the subject of discussion, debate and numerous opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines.

Yet none is more interesting, and more implausible, than a piece in the November 30 issue of The New Republic. Writer and historian Sean Wilentz claims that "It is impossible to imagine that the relationship of Tom and Sally was an inhumane one. The conditions were ugly, but the affair was not." He goes on to compare the relationship of Jefferson and Hemings to that of another Presidential pair: "The story of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky is about lust consensually expressed, and about loneliness and arrogance, and about stupidity and an astounding lack of judgment. The story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is about none of these things."

But 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 up, too."

It is impossible to view the assertion that love can occur between a master and a slave without a bit of sarcasm. Love occurs between two people who view each other on equal terms, never between one person who owns and has nearly absolute power over the other. Hemings might have been able to speak French, Italian and Spanish like a native, but enslaved, she remained nothing more than chattel. Regardless of the many years these two might have spent together, their "long emotional and sexual engagement," as Wilentz puts it, can only be reduced to a master forcing a slave to do what she knew she must do to survive for 30 years.

It was 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.