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When the Past Speaks to the Present: A Cautionary Tale about
Evidence
by Annette Gordon-Reed
Professor of Law, New York Law
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This tradition differs from modern-day
forms of oral history interviews in which scholars pose
questions and record the answers of eyewitnesses to historical
events or collect autobiographical materials from those
being formally interviewed. It is through this oral history
tradition that stories are passed privately and informally
from one generation to another. Scholars have been slow
to accept oral tradition as historical evidence, for they
are aware that stories can be changed or embellished as
they pass from one generation to another. This concern
that a story told to many people across decades may produce
error cannot be lightly dismissed.
Whatever the reasons, this much is clear: Most scholars
did not pursue the evidence about the paternity of the
Hemings children thoroughly enough. Instead, the grandchildren’s
claim that one of the Carr brothers fathered Sally Hemings’s
children was accepted. But in 1998, a new, remarkably
modern form of evidence corroborated Madison Hemings’s
account. In that year, DNA testing on Jefferson, Hemings,
and Carr descendants disproved any connection between
the Carrs and the Hemingses, and confirmed a connection
between the Jeffersons and the Hemingses. The results
of the DNA tests, combined with other historical analysis
of evidence, demonstrated that the Jefferson family documents
were insupportable.
The unraveling of the Jefferson family’s written
explanations about who fathered the Hemings children provides
a cautionary tale for those who accept at face value written
accounts of events. Yet evidence drawn from oral tradition
must be scrutinized just as carefully. For example, the
descendants of a man named Thomas Woodson also claimed
descent from Jefferson and Hemings. No corroborating statement
comparable to Madison Hemings’s narrative has been
found, however. What we know of the Woodson link to Jefferson
and Hemings comes exclusively from generations of Woodsons,
who passionately asserted the truth of their oral family
tradition. Their claims could not be dismissed out of
hand, however, for different branches of the family, who
had no contact with one another, had preserved the same
account of Woodson’s paternity. Once again, DNA
testing was determinate: The DNA results that bolstered
the Hemings family tradition totally discounted the Woodsons’
claim.
There are three lessons to be learned from this story.
First, we owe it to ourselves and to history not to privilege
the masters’ documents over the documents produced
by slaves or the descendants of slaves, not to let a bias
toward prestige or social standing prevent the thorough
investigation of claims. Second, we must not privilege
one form of evidence over another. Especially in reconstructing
the story of slavery we must remember that slave owners
controlled the production of documents and prevented those
whom they enslaved from producing their own records of
their experiences during slavery. Certainly there was
much about their relationships with slaves that masters
simply did not want outsiders to know. Finally, we must
view both orally transmitted history and document-based
history with a trained, critical eye, remembering that
both are created by human beings and both are therefore
fallible.
| For more information
about Jefferson and Hemings, as well as information
about the oral history tradition, visit our
Additional
Resources Page. |
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