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Annette Gordon-Read: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
Aka the proper review, now I've finished the book. As the author writes at the start: The Hemings family of Monticello escaped the enforced anonmity of slavery for a number of reasons: first, because multiple generations of this large clan were owned by one of history's most well-known figures, Thomas Jefferson, an inveterate record keeper and writer of letters. One of the many things I appreciate about this book as a work of history is that she's great with the source annotation, i.e. when she quotes something or paraphrases, we always get a footnote as to where this quote or paraphrase hails from. As someone very familiar with biographies, I have to say this should be self-evident but sadly isn't. Then, she's also great with providing context for everyone, from the start.
The story of the Hemings family starts, as so many mixed race stories do, with one African woman kidnapped from her country and a white man (whom the family took their last name from, a Captain Hemings), but something else that would determine the family's fate happened in the colony of Virginia at the time: the Virginia colonists' decision to abandon the English tradition that determined a person's status by the status of the father. In England you 'were' what your father 'was'. A person could be born free or as a member of a group of 'unfree' people who existed during various points in English history - for example, a villein (serf) attached to the land of a lord or to the lord himself. Inventing the rules of slavery in 1662, Virginians decided to adopt the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, which says that you were what your mother was. The speculation that this decision was at the very least influenced by the increasing number of mixed race children like Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings doesn't strike me as far fatched. Betty was owned first by Francis Eppes and then by John Wayles (himself an example of how the colonies were the land of opportunity for white people - he went from English servant to rich plantation owner colonist) who took her as his concubine after this third wife had died. At this point, she already had a dozen children by a fellow slave, and would have five more by Wayles, plus two after his death (at a point where she already had grandchildren). She became the Hemings family matriarch and, most unusual, was able to live with most, though not all, of her children (fourteen all in all) and grandchildren for her life, which lasted into her 70s, long for black and white alike in her time. This wasn't thanks to Wayles, but due to the fact that Betty and several of her children ended up as part of his daughter Martha's dowery when she married Thomas Jefferson. Betty shows up in Jefferson's correspondance before the presumable start of his affair with her daughter (for example, he asks a correspondant to give her news of her son who was with him at the time, or a correspondant mentions Betty asked for the news of the death of her youngest daughter being given to Jefferson), indicating the prefered servants status of the Hemings chez Jefferson from the get go. Of course, had they been white, they would have been his in-laws. As it was, they were his possession, and what the book provides in fascinating detail is how he related to a lot of them, not just Sally but her mother, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. It's never just one thing or the other. On the one hand, you have her sister Mary, who asked Jefferson to be sold to one William Bell, the father of her younger children who while not officially freeing her lived with her openly and registered their children as free, and Jefferson agreed. On the other hand, he also made it clear he'd sell Mary and "those of her younger children she wishes", i.e. the children by Bell, but not Mary's two older children by a fellow slave, whom he kept. And then there are the brothers. Both Robert and James wanted to be freed, and were, but in both cases Jefferson reacted with basically "but how can you possibly want to leave me?" attitude. Never mind that the whole wanting to be free desire should have been self evident, no matter how comparatively lenient the circumstances of the enslavement. (Comparatively lenient meaning in the case of the Hemings brothers that when Jefferson didn't need them to attend to him they were more or less free to come and go as they pleased without having to say where they were going, provided they were there immediately when summoned.) Gordon-Read quotes a passage from a letter by his daughter to Jefferson regarding the freed Robert "Bob" Hemings: I saw Bob frequently while in Richmond he expressed great uneasiness at having quitted you in the manner he did and repeatedly declared that he would never have left you to live with any person but his wife. The amazing aspect isn't so much that Jefferson was so married to the idea of himself as a beloved patriarch/owner (I dare say this was true for a great many slave owners) that any evidence that this just didn't make up for the lack of freedom was seen as an emotional blow, but that the Hemings' brothers feelings towards him appear to have been complex enough to actually include some genuine affection. Both Robert and James visited him repeatedly once they were free men (and not just in Monticello, where their primary goal would have been their family, but in Philadelphia, where no other Hemings was at hand and the only point in seeing Jefferson would have been to see Jefferson. James in particular has probably the most detailed and documented story of the Hemings clan.
He was one of Betty's sons by Wayles, went with Jefferson to Paris, was trained as a chef de cuisine there and ambitious enough to demand additional tutelage in French grammar (and hot tempered enough to beat up his white tutor when they quarelled), and like his sister Sally only returned to Virginia with Jefferson in exchange of a promise. In James' case, the promise of freedom for himself once he had trained a successor as a chef (this turned out to be his youngest brother Peter). Jefferson continued to pay him a salary post-France (which he didn't with Sally) until James became free. He was a passionate traveller (there's a remark in one of Jefferson's letters after a visit by a free James' that James' next destination was probably the moon), and once Jefferson became president elect, an emotional showdown/power play unfolded, which we can follow via letters, that showcases the whole messy situation. Wrote Jefferson to a shared aquaintance in Baltimore where James then lived: You mentioned to me in conversation here that you sometimes saw my former servant James, & that he made his engagements such as to keep himself always free to come to me. Could I get the favor of you to send for him & to tell him I shall be glad to receive him as soon as he can come to me?
But James didn't want that type of indirect summons, he wanted a personal letter/job offer, as Jefferson would have written to a white man: I sent for him a second time, the answer he returned to me, was, that he would not go until you should write to him himself wrote the Baltimore aquaintance. This Jefferson refused to do. And James refused to come without a letter. The end result was no White House job for James and Jefferson cattily including hin his letter to Evans that the man he hired as a replacement was just as good a chef, but then hiring James anyway (for twenty dollars a month, twice the salary James usually got) for Monticello, never mind he already had an unpaid cook there, James' brother. You could call it a comedy (and showcasing Jefferson's unrelenting need to be loved, because why else offering James this alternate job after their showdown) if not for what happened not a year afterwards, which was James stunning everyone by committing suicide. James Hemings's, writes Annette Gordon-Read, was a singular life: an eighteenth-century Afro-Virginian who lived abroad in France, who was passionate and intellectually curious enough to hire a tutor to teach him to speak and think in a different language, who was literate, who became a chef de cuisine, who negotiated his freedom, and who continued to journey far and wide after he became a free man. Surely it broke his family's heart to lose him.
This was a bad year for the family anyway, because in the same year the papers went public with the Jefferson/Sally Hemings story, and while this was meant as an attack on Jefferson, what was written about Sally in order to harm him was infinitely worse. In addition to being called Jefferson's concubine she was called a whore with "up to thirty gallants of all colors". (And it wasn't just journalists who indulged in the sport. John Quincy Adams wrote verses about "dusky Sally" as well even while showing up at Jefferson's dinner table. Granted, he could have felt entitled for payback for his father after Jefferson had countenanced attacks on John Adams by his journalistic friends years earlier, but in time honored tradition, the younger Adams cared nothing about making the woman - who'd never done anything to him or his family - his target in order to hurt the man.) The most depressing aspect is perhaps that the way scandal works in politics sounds eerily familiar even after centuries of supposed progress.
But in the interlude after his re-election and before the embargo, attacks on Jefferson for his alleged atheism and his relationship with Sally Hemings were the only weapons at the Federalist's disposal. As often happens when no life-defining policy matters are at stake in the country, or when the party out of power feels particularly impotent, the political discourse turned to an obsessive investigation of and focus upon the supposed 'character' of the chief executive. And because character in the United States is almost always measured by sexual behavior and religious beliefs, Jefferson, who later declared, 'I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know,' when pressed to declare his religious views, and who had a still growing number of children with Hemings, was a prime target for a character-based assault.
Indeed. That what scandalized people at the time wasn't the complete inequality of power between a slavewoman and her owner but the "mixing of the races" (and that this was a long term relationship, with Sally's last two children by Jefferson born after the scandal broke loose and her still present at his side when he died decades later) is another depressing if unsurprising aspect of the whole tale. Complete with sexual hystery. Rages Henry Lee in a private letter: Among the shady sides of Monticello his (TJ's) offspring wander with skins as tawny as their soil & eyes bright wiht hereditary lust. And it wasn't just Southerners like Lee, but also Northerners with staunch anti-slavery views like the Adams'. Gordon-Read quotes Abigail on seeing a performance of Othello in 1786, a year before she met Sally Hemings (who arrived in Europe as the nurse/companion of little Polly Jefferson; they stopped in London before travelling to France to their final destination): Adams wrote of her 'horror and disgust' every time the 'sooty' actor touched the 'gentle' actress who played Desdemona, even though she knew they were just actors on a stage. (...) Her son John Quincy, who would later write a number of satirical poems about Sally Hemings, saw Othello thirty years after his mother. (..) Adams wrote: Who can sympathize with the love of Desdemona? The great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that the black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws. The character takes from us so much of the sympathetic interest in her sufferings, that when Othello smothers her in bed, the terror and the pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her just deserts.
In such a climate, the fervent insistance of Jefferson's white descendants that he couldn't have possibly had the decades long relationship and other family he did isn't surprising, either. I was surprised, though, to learn that Jefferson as a young man, before he ever married into the Wayles clan, let alone lost his wife and took up with her mixed race half sister, served pro bono as lawyer for a mixed-race man, Samuel Howell, who brought suit to be freed from indentured servitude. (The case is interesting beyond the Jefferson connection because the man in question was the result of a white woman/black man liason, not black woman/white man.) He lost the case, but gave Howell the money to ran away. That Jefferson later in his life never freed any slave not belonging to the Hemings family (and of only Sally's children and two of her brothers, Sally herself being freed after his death by his daughter), despite acknowledging in theory that slavery was completely wrong is something Gordon-Read explains from his personality (in addition to the increasing debts that accumulated throughout his life):
The problem for Jefferson was that giving any of these people freedom would have created the possibility that they could leave him, just as Robert and James Hemings had done in the 1790s. (...) A freed Sally Hemings would most likely have had to leave the plantation and be out of the constellation of Monticello, if not Virginia. The only way for a man to control a free woman was to marry her, which he could not do. (...) There is often great power in simplicity, and the simple, terrible fact is that the law vested Jefferson, and other slave owners, with the powers of a tyrant, as he said himself. This domestic tyrant tried to mitigate the meaning of that reality by being as benign as he could. That made it easier for him to see himself as a good man as he indulged his impulses and met his needs - economic, social and affective - through his control of these family members, to whom he was tied by years of intimate acquaintance, experiences, and blood. He created his own version of slavery that he could live in comfortably with the Hemingses. It suited him. There was never any serious chance that he would have given this up.
Ultimately, the non-Sally-born Hemingses ended up on the auction block along with all the other slaves after Jefferson's death, which makes for the tragic end of the story. I'd also advise to read the footnotes afterwards, which are extensive and sometimes contain priceless additional info, as Henry Lee's letter about Jefferson and his children, or even more background on servant life in Paris or where Gordon-Reed got her numbers for the size of the gens du colour community there from (about a thousand, and the area where Jefferson lived as ambassador actually hat the highest concentration of them, as many were in service). She also clarifies that as opposed to the often quoted cliché that blacks were automatically free in prerevolutionary France, this was not the case, but as every petition by a black person to get their freedom was granted by court and the owner had to bear the costs of the trial, by the time Jefferson and his servants arrived hardly anyone bothered to go to court anymore - too expensive - and just granted the freedom in question. Jefferson did not register James and Sally Hemings as slaves, and he paid both of them above avarage wages while they were in France, but if they had insisted on staying once he left, his legal situation would in fact have been extremely bad. To go to trial about his ownership would not only have carried a huge risk of losing but also have destroyed his image and self image in France, where he was seen as one of the foremost American champions of liberty. So both Sally and James had a leverage for negotiating with him they wouldn't have had in Virginia. Of course, once they were back with him in the US he could have broken his promises - i.e. freedom for his and Sally's children once they were 21, and life long security for Sally herself, and freedom for James, but again, this would have gone against his need for affection and to see himself as a man of his word. Conversely, if Jefferson had treated them badly before James and Sally would have no reason to trust him at all and would have remained in France - by the time of Jefferson's departure, they were both fluent in the language, and Gordon-Read makes a plausible case that they would have had ample job opportunities. Not so much once the Terreur phase of the French Revolution started and the kind of household James had trained to become a chef in, and Sally a chamber maid, did not exist anymore for a while, but they couldn't have known that. So they really gave something up in trusting Jefferson to keep his word, and perversely if he'd been a worse man they'd have been free far sooner. It makes for the compelling circle of a tragedy. And yet: those of Sally's children who survived did become free, and as Gordon-Read points out, she might have seen her long life as her choice and a success, not a tragedy, despite all, even if several of her siblings could not claim the same.
The story of the Hemings family starts, as so many mixed race stories do, with one African woman kidnapped from her country and a white man (whom the family took their last name from, a Captain Hemings), but something else that would determine the family's fate happened in the colony of Virginia at the time: the Virginia colonists' decision to abandon the English tradition that determined a person's status by the status of the father. In England you 'were' what your father 'was'. A person could be born free or as a member of a group of 'unfree' people who existed during various points in English history - for example, a villein (serf) attached to the land of a lord or to the lord himself. Inventing the rules of slavery in 1662, Virginians decided to adopt the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, which says that you were what your mother was. The speculation that this decision was at the very least influenced by the increasing number of mixed race children like Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings doesn't strike me as far fatched. Betty was owned first by Francis Eppes and then by John Wayles (himself an example of how the colonies were the land of opportunity for white people - he went from English servant to rich plantation owner colonist) who took her as his concubine after this third wife had died. At this point, she already had a dozen children by a fellow slave, and would have five more by Wayles, plus two after his death (at a point where she already had grandchildren). She became the Hemings family matriarch and, most unusual, was able to live with most, though not all, of her children (fourteen all in all) and grandchildren for her life, which lasted into her 70s, long for black and white alike in her time. This wasn't thanks to Wayles, but due to the fact that Betty and several of her children ended up as part of his daughter Martha's dowery when she married Thomas Jefferson. Betty shows up in Jefferson's correspondance before the presumable start of his affair with her daughter (for example, he asks a correspondant to give her news of her son who was with him at the time, or a correspondant mentions Betty asked for the news of the death of her youngest daughter being given to Jefferson), indicating the prefered servants status of the Hemings chez Jefferson from the get go. Of course, had they been white, they would have been his in-laws. As it was, they were his possession, and what the book provides in fascinating detail is how he related to a lot of them, not just Sally but her mother, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. It's never just one thing or the other. On the one hand, you have her sister Mary, who asked Jefferson to be sold to one William Bell, the father of her younger children who while not officially freeing her lived with her openly and registered their children as free, and Jefferson agreed. On the other hand, he also made it clear he'd sell Mary and "those of her younger children she wishes", i.e. the children by Bell, but not Mary's two older children by a fellow slave, whom he kept. And then there are the brothers. Both Robert and James wanted to be freed, and were, but in both cases Jefferson reacted with basically "but how can you possibly want to leave me?" attitude. Never mind that the whole wanting to be free desire should have been self evident, no matter how comparatively lenient the circumstances of the enslavement. (Comparatively lenient meaning in the case of the Hemings brothers that when Jefferson didn't need them to attend to him they were more or less free to come and go as they pleased without having to say where they were going, provided they were there immediately when summoned.) Gordon-Read quotes a passage from a letter by his daughter to Jefferson regarding the freed Robert "Bob" Hemings: I saw Bob frequently while in Richmond he expressed great uneasiness at having quitted you in the manner he did and repeatedly declared that he would never have left you to live with any person but his wife. The amazing aspect isn't so much that Jefferson was so married to the idea of himself as a beloved patriarch/owner (I dare say this was true for a great many slave owners) that any evidence that this just didn't make up for the lack of freedom was seen as an emotional blow, but that the Hemings' brothers feelings towards him appear to have been complex enough to actually include some genuine affection. Both Robert and James visited him repeatedly once they were free men (and not just in Monticello, where their primary goal would have been their family, but in Philadelphia, where no other Hemings was at hand and the only point in seeing Jefferson would have been to see Jefferson. James in particular has probably the most detailed and documented story of the Hemings clan.
He was one of Betty's sons by Wayles, went with Jefferson to Paris, was trained as a chef de cuisine there and ambitious enough to demand additional tutelage in French grammar (and hot tempered enough to beat up his white tutor when they quarelled), and like his sister Sally only returned to Virginia with Jefferson in exchange of a promise. In James' case, the promise of freedom for himself once he had trained a successor as a chef (this turned out to be his youngest brother Peter). Jefferson continued to pay him a salary post-France (which he didn't with Sally) until James became free. He was a passionate traveller (there's a remark in one of Jefferson's letters after a visit by a free James' that James' next destination was probably the moon), and once Jefferson became president elect, an emotional showdown/power play unfolded, which we can follow via letters, that showcases the whole messy situation. Wrote Jefferson to a shared aquaintance in Baltimore where James then lived: You mentioned to me in conversation here that you sometimes saw my former servant James, & that he made his engagements such as to keep himself always free to come to me. Could I get the favor of you to send for him & to tell him I shall be glad to receive him as soon as he can come to me?
But James didn't want that type of indirect summons, he wanted a personal letter/job offer, as Jefferson would have written to a white man: I sent for him a second time, the answer he returned to me, was, that he would not go until you should write to him himself wrote the Baltimore aquaintance. This Jefferson refused to do. And James refused to come without a letter. The end result was no White House job for James and Jefferson cattily including hin his letter to Evans that the man he hired as a replacement was just as good a chef, but then hiring James anyway (for twenty dollars a month, twice the salary James usually got) for Monticello, never mind he already had an unpaid cook there, James' brother. You could call it a comedy (and showcasing Jefferson's unrelenting need to be loved, because why else offering James this alternate job after their showdown) if not for what happened not a year afterwards, which was James stunning everyone by committing suicide. James Hemings's, writes Annette Gordon-Read, was a singular life: an eighteenth-century Afro-Virginian who lived abroad in France, who was passionate and intellectually curious enough to hire a tutor to teach him to speak and think in a different language, who was literate, who became a chef de cuisine, who negotiated his freedom, and who continued to journey far and wide after he became a free man. Surely it broke his family's heart to lose him.
This was a bad year for the family anyway, because in the same year the papers went public with the Jefferson/Sally Hemings story, and while this was meant as an attack on Jefferson, what was written about Sally in order to harm him was infinitely worse. In addition to being called Jefferson's concubine she was called a whore with "up to thirty gallants of all colors". (And it wasn't just journalists who indulged in the sport. John Quincy Adams wrote verses about "dusky Sally" as well even while showing up at Jefferson's dinner table. Granted, he could have felt entitled for payback for his father after Jefferson had countenanced attacks on John Adams by his journalistic friends years earlier, but in time honored tradition, the younger Adams cared nothing about making the woman - who'd never done anything to him or his family - his target in order to hurt the man.) The most depressing aspect is perhaps that the way scandal works in politics sounds eerily familiar even after centuries of supposed progress.
But in the interlude after his re-election and before the embargo, attacks on Jefferson for his alleged atheism and his relationship with Sally Hemings were the only weapons at the Federalist's disposal. As often happens when no life-defining policy matters are at stake in the country, or when the party out of power feels particularly impotent, the political discourse turned to an obsessive investigation of and focus upon the supposed 'character' of the chief executive. And because character in the United States is almost always measured by sexual behavior and religious beliefs, Jefferson, who later declared, 'I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know,' when pressed to declare his religious views, and who had a still growing number of children with Hemings, was a prime target for a character-based assault.
Indeed. That what scandalized people at the time wasn't the complete inequality of power between a slavewoman and her owner but the "mixing of the races" (and that this was a long term relationship, with Sally's last two children by Jefferson born after the scandal broke loose and her still present at his side when he died decades later) is another depressing if unsurprising aspect of the whole tale. Complete with sexual hystery. Rages Henry Lee in a private letter: Among the shady sides of Monticello his (TJ's) offspring wander with skins as tawny as their soil & eyes bright wiht hereditary lust. And it wasn't just Southerners like Lee, but also Northerners with staunch anti-slavery views like the Adams'. Gordon-Read quotes Abigail on seeing a performance of Othello in 1786, a year before she met Sally Hemings (who arrived in Europe as the nurse/companion of little Polly Jefferson; they stopped in London before travelling to France to their final destination): Adams wrote of her 'horror and disgust' every time the 'sooty' actor touched the 'gentle' actress who played Desdemona, even though she knew they were just actors on a stage. (...) Her son John Quincy, who would later write a number of satirical poems about Sally Hemings, saw Othello thirty years after his mother. (..) Adams wrote: Who can sympathize with the love of Desdemona? The great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is, that the black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws. The character takes from us so much of the sympathetic interest in her sufferings, that when Othello smothers her in bed, the terror and the pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her just deserts.
In such a climate, the fervent insistance of Jefferson's white descendants that he couldn't have possibly had the decades long relationship and other family he did isn't surprising, either. I was surprised, though, to learn that Jefferson as a young man, before he ever married into the Wayles clan, let alone lost his wife and took up with her mixed race half sister, served pro bono as lawyer for a mixed-race man, Samuel Howell, who brought suit to be freed from indentured servitude. (The case is interesting beyond the Jefferson connection because the man in question was the result of a white woman/black man liason, not black woman/white man.) He lost the case, but gave Howell the money to ran away. That Jefferson later in his life never freed any slave not belonging to the Hemings family (and of only Sally's children and two of her brothers, Sally herself being freed after his death by his daughter), despite acknowledging in theory that slavery was completely wrong is something Gordon-Read explains from his personality (in addition to the increasing debts that accumulated throughout his life):
The problem for Jefferson was that giving any of these people freedom would have created the possibility that they could leave him, just as Robert and James Hemings had done in the 1790s. (...) A freed Sally Hemings would most likely have had to leave the plantation and be out of the constellation of Monticello, if not Virginia. The only way for a man to control a free woman was to marry her, which he could not do. (...) There is often great power in simplicity, and the simple, terrible fact is that the law vested Jefferson, and other slave owners, with the powers of a tyrant, as he said himself. This domestic tyrant tried to mitigate the meaning of that reality by being as benign as he could. That made it easier for him to see himself as a good man as he indulged his impulses and met his needs - economic, social and affective - through his control of these family members, to whom he was tied by years of intimate acquaintance, experiences, and blood. He created his own version of slavery that he could live in comfortably with the Hemingses. It suited him. There was never any serious chance that he would have given this up.
Ultimately, the non-Sally-born Hemingses ended up on the auction block along with all the other slaves after Jefferson's death, which makes for the tragic end of the story. I'd also advise to read the footnotes afterwards, which are extensive and sometimes contain priceless additional info, as Henry Lee's letter about Jefferson and his children, or even more background on servant life in Paris or where Gordon-Reed got her numbers for the size of the gens du colour community there from (about a thousand, and the area where Jefferson lived as ambassador actually hat the highest concentration of them, as many were in service). She also clarifies that as opposed to the often quoted cliché that blacks were automatically free in prerevolutionary France, this was not the case, but as every petition by a black person to get their freedom was granted by court and the owner had to bear the costs of the trial, by the time Jefferson and his servants arrived hardly anyone bothered to go to court anymore - too expensive - and just granted the freedom in question. Jefferson did not register James and Sally Hemings as slaves, and he paid both of them above avarage wages while they were in France, but if they had insisted on staying once he left, his legal situation would in fact have been extremely bad. To go to trial about his ownership would not only have carried a huge risk of losing but also have destroyed his image and self image in France, where he was seen as one of the foremost American champions of liberty. So both Sally and James had a leverage for negotiating with him they wouldn't have had in Virginia. Of course, once they were back with him in the US he could have broken his promises - i.e. freedom for his and Sally's children once they were 21, and life long security for Sally herself, and freedom for James, but again, this would have gone against his need for affection and to see himself as a man of his word. Conversely, if Jefferson had treated them badly before James and Sally would have no reason to trust him at all and would have remained in France - by the time of Jefferson's departure, they were both fluent in the language, and Gordon-Read makes a plausible case that they would have had ample job opportunities. Not so much once the Terreur phase of the French Revolution started and the kind of household James had trained to become a chef in, and Sally a chamber maid, did not exist anymore for a while, but they couldn't have known that. So they really gave something up in trusting Jefferson to keep his word, and perversely if he'd been a worse man they'd have been free far sooner. It makes for the compelling circle of a tragedy. And yet: those of Sally's children who survived did become free, and as Gordon-Read points out, she might have seen her long life as her choice and a success, not a tragedy, despite all, even if several of her siblings could not claim the same.
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Re: Character attacks in the United States, how true. We're in a funny old time of it at the moment, with things looking up in terms of Obama's leadership on the economy, and since the Republicans can't attack his moral character without resorting to dog-whistle racism (as there doesn't seem to be anything to attack: one suspects that Obama may be the one politician presenting himself as a family man who actually is going home to wife and kids at night) they've kind of collapsed into this melange of social conservative bullshit from the 80s regarding gays and abortion rights.
Except. Cue the bafflement: it doesn't seem to be working.
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(Btw, presumably an open agnostic like Jefferson wouldn't make it to office today for that reason alone, never mind the others?)
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Until the Supreme Court nullified them in 2003, straight people could be charged with sodomy as well, which was legally understood to be anything that wasn't penis-in-vagina intercourse.