“I wanted to go beyond Sally Hemings,” she said, adding that recollections from Madison Hemings played an important role in her research.Īt one point, Professor Gordon-Reed shared a revealing story about young Sally Hemings and the time she and her brother, James, spent in Paris, where Jefferson was serving on a diplomatic mission. She also noted that Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, which may have contributed to Jefferson’s preferential treatment of her.Īlong with Sally Hemings, the book includes significant sections about her mother, Elizabeth Hemings, her siblings, and four of her children with Jefferson who lived (two died in infancy): sons Beverly, Madison, and Eston, and daughter Harriet. “I could follow their lives unlike families separated by sale,” she said. Professor Gordon-Reed’s sweeping, 800-page book, which she characterized as “a generational saga of an enslaved family,” also benefited from the fact that the Hemingses lived at Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, for more than half a century. By examining Jefferson’s copious archives – he was “an inveterate record keeper” – the speaker described how she was able to piece together a timeline that traced the Hemings family from the 1700s in Virginia to the years following Thomas Jefferson’s death in 1826. Through her groundbreaking and painstaking research, Professor Gordon-Reed sheds new light on this long-simmering historical debate, helping to restore the Hemingses rightful place in the American narrative. Although most modern historians believe the relationship indeed existed, it wasn’t until 1998 that DNA testing proved Jefferson’s paternity. For 150 years, historians denied that Jefferson had had an intimate relationship with his slave and fathered her six children, despite compelling evidence supporting this claim. The “dismissal” Professor Gordon-Reed was referring to was the systematic removal of Sally Hemings and her family from historical records. “I was dissatisfied with the dismissal of the Hemings family in connection to Jefferson, so I asked myself, ‘What can I do?’” “This book means so much to me,” exclaimed Professor Gordon-Reed after Head of School Suzanne Fogarty’s warm welcome and an introduction from James Basker, the president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute. The author of numerous volumes, she was a lawyer before pivoting to a career in writing and academia. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for History, Professor Gordon-Reed has received a multitude of honors including a National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur “genius” grant.
#Sally hemings professional#
Students in Classes 7 and 11 logged into the virtual webinar, along with current and past parents, professional community members, alums, grandparents and friends. Inaugurated in 2006, Chapin’s annual lecture is the result of the School’s wonderful partnership with The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which promotes the understanding of U.S. As the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Institute Lecturer, she centered her captivating talk around her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family” (2008), a follow up to her previous work, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” (1997). On January 26, the Chapin community had the distinct privilege of spending a virtual evening with this noted scholar.
Hemings’ remarkable story, focusing not only on her decades-long relationship with Jefferson but on who she was as a complex woman shaped by race, gender, status and circumstance.
Loeb University Professor at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History at Harvard University – has devoted much of her transformative scholarship to telling Ms. Throughout her celebrated career, Professor Gordon-Reed – the Carl M. However, it wasn’t Jefferson himself who most ignited her imagination but his longtime slave, Sally Hemings (1773-1835). Her fascination with this former president continued through her adolescence and adulthood, inspiring her to eventually become a distinguished historian and writer. As a third grader, Annette Gordon-Reed remembers reading her first biography of Thomas Jefferson.
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