The "No-Possible-Consent Rule"

Dear Annette Gordon-Reed,

As I recently re-read The Hemingses of Monticello (I had previously read portions of it for Professor Freedman’s course “The History of Sexuality in the United States), I couldn’t help but question whether you are cutting Thomas Jefferson a little too much slack.  From the beginning, you acknowledge the “nearly total silence” surrounding the relationship between Jefferson and illiterate Sally Hemings as a result of the institutional force of slavery (243). Consequently, you construct a narrative based off the historical context of eighteenth century Virginia and documents written by Jefferson himself, descendants, family members and acquaintances who interacted with both.  You admit, “With Sally Hemings, one is constantly forced to try to decipher what is happening with her” (247). 

While you openly describe the mystery surrounding their relationship due to the lack of documents directly discussing or addressing Hemings, you sometimes mislead the reader to take the assumptions you slyly make as fact.  I often had to ask if you were over-romanticizing their relationship.  Describing Jefferson’s stay in Paris, you state that after spending a day with Maria Cosway and other “city girls,” you exclaim, “What a contrast Sally Hemings must have presented!...there he would find his wife’s half sister, the extremely attractive, sweet-natured, sewing, Virginia farm girl.  She was the very opposite of frightening” (278).  You additionally portray Jefferson’s motivations in pursuing sexual relations with Hemings as “serious about creating a long-term bond with her from the beginning” (302).  You make a number of assumptions about their interaction based on circumstantial evidence and recorded individual interactions with other people.  At times, you turn a relationship of unequal sexual power and privilege between a manipulative white master and his slave woman into a love story of equals.

While I do believe you over-romanticize their relationship, I am hesitant to easily jump to the conclusion that all of their sexual interactions consisted of rape. In the chapter “Teenagers and the Woman,” you describe the “no-possible consent rule,” which referred to all sexual relations white men had with women, especially enslaved black women.  However, you do convincingly note it is problematic to automatically generalize about individual stories and assume that rape is solely defined by the “race of the partners” (314).  While Hemings lacked consent in sexual acts with Jefferson, you describe a number of ways in which she exercised a sexual agency that many women, black or white, lacked in the eighteenth century. Maybe Hemings did truly love Jefferson as a partner and vice versa? Despite their social status, black women held individual sexual desires. You raised an important point that all too often historians analyze black people as representations of their race rather than as “individual human beings” (290). While I agree that it is extremely important to individualize the enslaved experience for black women, I think you sometimes lose sight of the sexual privileges Jefferson held and the limited sexual agency of Hemings.

Sincerely,

a more realistic reader