“Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed?”

Until I read this week’s New York Times article on Henry Wiencek’s Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, I didn’t realize how that book treats the work of Annette Gordon-Reed.

As I wrote yesterday, Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy sparked the recent boom in books about the third President’s conflicted attitudes toward slavery. Her The Hemingses of Monticello, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009, is a major study of American slavery, not just slavery at Monticello.

So how does Wiencek discuss Gordon-Reed’s work? Master of the Mountain mentions her books only three times. Two endnotes mention (but don’t quote) transcription errors in the first edition of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Those are undoubtedly sensitive spots for Gordon-Reed since a Jefferson descendant who disliked that book tried to use those errors to have her fired from New York University in July 2001. The Times reports:

David Waldstreicher, a historian at Temple University and the author of several books about slavery and the founders, called those footnotes (which do not identify the errors or acknowledge that Ms. Gordon-Reed corrected one of the transcriptions a decade ago in a reissue of her 1997 book) “fighting words” and “about as nasty as it gets.” A professional historian, he continued, “would publish this in a scholarly journal and make it very clear how it makes a difference, instead of using it to say, ‘I am the last word.’”

Wiencek told the newspaper “that the transcription errors were minor,” but his endnotes don’t leave that impression.

The third reference to Gordon-Reed’s work is this passage:

Many writers on slavery today have emphasized the “agency” of the enslaved people, insisting that we pay heed to the efforts of the slaves to resist their condition and assert their humanity under a dehumanizing system. But as slaves gain “agency” in historical analyses, the masters seem to lose it. As the slaves become heroic figures, triumphing over their condition, slave owners recede as historical actors and are replaced by a faceless system of “context” and “forces.” So we end up with slavery somehow afloat in a world in which nobody is responsible.

One historian writes about Monticello’s slaves as if they had no master: “There is every indication that they grasped the baleful situation they had been born into, and knew that forces were actively working to keep them down.”

And there’s an endnote pointing to page 405 of Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello. That sentence comes from a paragraph about how Sally Hemings’s son Madison learned to read. The same paragraph refers to Jefferson by name and calls his grandchildren Madison’s “white nieces and nephews, who were his age and going to a school that he knew he could never attend, but wanted to.” That’s not a picture of a “faceless system”—it puts specific faces on the system and tells us exactly who was “responsible” for Madison Hemings’s oppression and who benefited from it.

That’s why Prof. Jan Lewis of Rutgers told the Times, “There are historians who in their eagerness to discover the slave perspective have averted our attention from the ways in which slavery really was a horrible, unjust institution, but he doesn’t cite them. Instead, he cites Annette Gordon-Reed? You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I suspect that treatment was a big reason why Gordon-Reed and Lewis published their critical assessments of Master of the Mountain so quickly after its publication, and in online venues (Slate and The Daily Beast) where those reviews could run immediately. Ordinarily the wheels of scholarship grind slow. But this was personal.*

Reading Wiencek’s response to those critical reviews on the Smithsonian website, I think he further mischaracterized Gordon-Reed’s work:

I am not surprised that Gordon-Reed disliked my book so much, given that it systematically demolishes her portrayal of Jefferson as a kindly master of black slaves. In The Hemingses of Monticello, she described with approval Jefferson’s “plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory.”

If Master of the Mountain had “systematically” addressed Gordon-Reed’s portrayal of Jefferson, it really should have cited her work more than three times. And this is the actual passage from The Hemingses of Monticello that Wiencek partially quoted in his riposte:

Building the nation was Jefferson’s true obsession [as President], not the end of slavery and definitely not the racial question.

As he retreated from the antislavery rhetoric of his youth, and grew comfortable in his role as the champion of the common man (the common white man), Jefferson, like others of his type, began to accommodate himself to the institution of slavery. As was discussed earlier, Lucia Stanton has detailed his plans for his version of a kinder, gentler slavery at Monticello with his experiments with the nail factory. He also brought in overseers who eschewed violence in favor of incentives as a way of motivating enslaved worked; for unexplained reasons, however, the men did not remain in his service. Jefferson was again, in all of this, ahead of his time—on the leading edge of adopting the sort of paternalism that would in the coming decades turn his white grandchildren’s generation into full-throated apologists for the peculiar institution.

Gordon-Reed published that book in 2008, during the sunset of George W. Bush’s Presidency. How can anyone think that she used the phrase “kinder, gentler” without irony? Wiencek appears to have missed not only that sentence’s tone but also how it expresses Jefferson’s perception, not Gordon-Reed’s: “his plans for his version…”

Where is the “approval” that Wiencek perceives from Gordon-Reed? Where is her portrayal of Jefferson as a “kindly master”? The only time The Hemingses of Monticello uses the word “kindly” for Jefferson is in describing how his acknowledged grandchildren perceived him. And that paragraph ends, “Kindly, doting grandfathers can be sexual beings, too…” Gordon-Reed assesses the master of Monticello like this:

It may be difficult from our vantage point to believe that Jefferson had an internal sense of justice and fairness, depending as he did on a labor system that was constitutively unjust and unfair. By holding upward of two hundred “souls,” as he called them, in bondage, he worked injustice and unfairness in their lives every single day. . . . But Jefferson did have his own sense of fairness within the confines of his inhumane way of life…

It appears that Wiencek perceives any attempt to understand Jefferson’s thinking instead of simply calling him monstrous as “approval.” For fifteen years Gordon-Reed has been attacked by reactionary critics who felt she was out to denigrate Jefferson when she studied his contradictions. Now Wiencek brands that same work as the most prominent attempt to gloss over Jefferson’s racism.

* Speaking of personal, I should say that I’ve chatted with Gordon-Reed after a couple of her talks over the past decade and exchanged a few emails with Wiencek years back, but I’m not a friend or colleague of either.