Jefferson's Daughters
Page 52
As one novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud, The President’s Daughter (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1994), 243.
that southerners borrowed C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955; repr., New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
“The dangers of blackness” Sara Clarke Kaplan, “Our Founding (M)other: Erotic Love and Social Death in Sally Hemings and The President’s Daughter,” Callalo 32 (Summer 2009): 783.
Black activists had made See for example, Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1977); Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
“no trace of other blood” Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line, 12.
dropped the mixed-race Hobbs, Chosen Exile, 23, 128–29. Not until the 2000 census were Americans allowed the option to “mark one or more.” Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012), 47.
more “coloured girls” Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; repr., Rutgers University Press, 1986), 157–58.
“She was transgressing” Cheryl A. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1710.
“In creating property ‘rights’ ” Ibid., 1730.
Property rights allow Ibid., 1714, 1736.
To call a white person “black” Ibid., 1730, citing J. H. Crabb, Annotation, Libel and Slander: Statements Respecting Race, Color, or Nationality as Actionable, 46 A.L.R. 2d 1287, 1289 (1956).
“most seemed to feel” Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992), 32, cited in Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1759.
called “the differences of color, hair, and bone” W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” quoted in Stuart Hall, “Race: The Floating Signifier” (1997), 6, mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf, accessed 23 April 2015.
no reason to isolate Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 48–70. Physical anthropologists have also been at the forefront of rejecting bio-race as a useless concept, as a survey of 365 showed. Matt Cartmill, “The Status of the Race Concept in Physical Anthroplogy,” American Anthropologist 100 (September 1998): 651–60. Cited in Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line, 67–68.
“The biological, physiological” Hall, “Race: The Floating Signifier,” 7.
“But once invoked” Fields and Fields, Racecraft, 52–53.
almost a third Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line, 154, 28. Italics mine.
Marriage practices Ibid., 35. An endogamous group is one from which a person is considered a suitable marriage partner.
“a natural son of President” “A Sprig of Jefferson Was Eston Hemings,” Daily Scioto Gazette (Chillicothe, Ohio), 1 August 1902.
“death deserves more” A. J. Munson, “Letter to the Editor,” Tribune (Milwaukee), 12 November 1908.
however, that flexibility Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line, 155–57.
between thirty-five thousand Sweet, Legal History of the Color Line, 73.
“specious but utterly real” Hobbs, Chosen Exile, 8.
White Americans face Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), especially Part III.
“a certain economic logic” Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1713.
incarcerated in epic proportions David Crary, “Record Number of Americans in Prison,” New York Times, 28 Feburary 2008. “While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars,” the Pew Center on the States reported in 2008, “for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine.” For women, the differences were equally stark: “One of every 355 white women aged 35 to 39 is behind bars, compared with one of every 100 black women in that age group,” the report revealed.
she was black “The term ‘black,’ ” the sociologist Stuart Hall says, “is referring to this long history of political and historical oppression….It’s not referring to biology.” Hall, “Race: The Floating Signifier,” 4–5.
A rapprochement may have Leef Smith, “Jeffersons Split over Hemings Descendants,” Washington Post, 17 May 1999.
“I unlocked the gate” Tess Taylor, “Cousins Across the Color Line,” New York Times, 26 January 2014.
“deep affections, her high principles” EWRC Diary, 11 January 1839, Birle and Francavilla, eds., Thomas Jefferson’s Granddaughter, 160.
eighteen thousand of his letters Peter S. Onuf, “The Scholars’ Jefferson,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (October 1993): 692.
1.South pavilion and wing of Monticello. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
2.Francis Hopkinson home. Author photo.
3.Rue de Grenelle. Public domain.
4.Thomas Jefferson by Mather Brown. Oil on canvas, 1786. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; bequest of Charles Francis Adams.
5.Panthemont, courtyard view. Author photo.
6.Marie de Botidoux portrait. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
7.Panthemont chapel dome. Author photo.
8.The Morning Post, 1788. Public domain.
9.Vue de Nouveau Palais Royal, by F. M. Mayeur, c. 1788. Courtesy of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
10.Eppington. Author photo.
11.Abigail Adams. Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York. Bequest from the Estate of Frances J. Eggleston, Oswego, New York. NO150.1955. Photograph by Richard Walker.
12.Portrait of William Short. Oil on canvas, 1806. Muscarelle Museum of Art at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Gift of Mary Churchill Short, Fanny Short Butler, and William Short. 1938.004.
13.Hôtel de Langeac. Library of Congress.
14.Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr. (copy, c. 1919). © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Loaned by University of Virginia, Alderman Library.
15.William Bingham home, Philadelphia. Public domain.
16.The Residence of Thomas Jefferson, David J. Kennedy watercolors collection [V61], Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
17.John “Jack” Wayles Eppes. Library of Congress.
18.View of Monticello from Edgehill. Author photo.
19.Francis Wayles Eppes, miniature portrait, c. 1805. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
20.Farm Book 1774–1824, page 128. Coolidge Collection of Thomas Jefferson Manuscripts. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
21.Isaac Granger Jefferson. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.
22.Kitchen at Monticello. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
23.Jefferson’s cabinet. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Photo by Robert Lautman.
24.South Square Room. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
25.Staircase at Monticello. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Photo by Robert Lautman.
26.Ellen Wayles Randolph portrait by Francis Alexander, c. 1836. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Gift of Ellen Eddy Thorndike.
27.Exterior view, Poplar Forest. Courtesy of Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest.
28.Parlor, Poplar Forest. Courtesy of Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest.
29.Textile workshop, Monticello. Courtesy of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Photo by Catherine Kerrison.
30.Hargreaves spinning jenny. Public domain.
31.Indian Queen Hotel. Library of Congress.
32.Early view of the Capitol. Library of Congress.
33.Slave coffle. Library of Congress.
34.Martha Jefferson Randolph portrait by Thomas Sully, c. 1836. © Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello. Gift of Burton H. R. Randall.
35.William Beverley Frederick Jefferson and hi
s sons. Courtesy of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello.
36.John W. Jefferson by Alexander Marquis. Oil on canvas, 1874, Museum of Wisconsin Art Collection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CATHERINE KERRISON is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in colonial and Revolutionary America and women’s and gender history. She holds a Ph.D. in American history from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South, won the Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society. Kerrison lives in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.
Twitter: @CKerrisonPhD
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