Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy is a 1998 book written by African American historian and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed. The book can be considered as a non-fictional history-based treatise. The basis for this classification lies in the fact that the people referred to in the book are actual historical figures one of whom is a former US president and a major factor in the formation of the United States of America. Most of the events mentioned in the book also align with openly known historical events. However, the book also ventures into events about the life of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings that is so private it would be hard for them to be confirmed from a scholarly perspective. It is on this basis that
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It is an open secret in America that most of the Fathers of the Union were also slave owners. Among the assumed rights of a slave owner was having sex with their slaves anytime they wanted as the slaves did not have the right to decline. Thomas Jefferson owned Sally Hemings who was a slave inherited by his wife and also a half-sister to the said wife. Sally Hemings was colored as she had African roots. The controversy relating to the instant subject stems from the question of whether Sally was capable of being Jefferson’s mistress and/or lover, seeing that she was also his legal property as a slave. Whereas slavery itself had ended in the USA over a century before the book was written, slavery mentality still sought to reduce Sally into a mere property such as a horse or a piece of equipment that could and was treated as its owner desired. Gordon-Reed writes the book to give humanity to Sally and argues that slave or not, she was a human being capable of forging her destiny to some extent. She seeks to fight off the notion that Jefferson was too superior for Sally thus her relationship was just happenstance. Instead, the book seeks to present Sally as a fellow human being who chose to be in a relationship with Jefferson; a relationship was mutually
It is an open secret in America that most of the Fathers of the Union were also slave owners. Among the assumed rights of a slave owner was having sex with their slaves anytime they wanted as the slaves did not have the right to decline. Thomas Jefferson owned Sally Hemings who was a slave inherited by his wife and also a half-sister to the said wife. Sally Hemings was colored as she had African roots. The controversy relating to the instant subject stems from the question of whether Sally was capable of being Jefferson’s mistress and/or lover, seeing that she was also his legal property as a slave. Whereas slavery itself had ended in the USA over a century before the book was written, slavery mentality still sought to reduce Sally into a mere property such as a horse or a piece of equipment that could and was treated as its owner desired. Gordon-Reed writes the book to give humanity to Sally and argues that slave or not, she was a human being capable of forging her destiny to some extent. She seeks to fight off the notion that Jefferson was too superior for Sally thus her relationship was just happenstance. Instead, the book seeks to present Sally as a fellow human being who chose to be in a relationship with Jefferson; a relationship was mutually