Reconsidering the Jefferson–Hemings Relationship

Abstract

This essay examines how two Jefferson biographies represented the Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings relationship in the post–civil rights movement era: Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson (1974), a controversial publication that claimed that Hemings and Jefferson loved each other, and Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx (1996), one of the last mainstream biographies to deny that they had any children together. The story in both cases serves as an allegory of founding authority and national membership. The author finds that Ellis and Brodie characterize Jefferson as a fallible founder to affirm that founding ideals can accommodate and overcome racial differences and injustices.