Jefferson Estate Tour Adds Slaves’ Story

Like a welcoming guide, Sally Hemings’ ghost beckons African American tourists to share the legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s historic home.

Revelations about Hemings--she was Jefferson’s slave, and recent DNA testing suggests she also was most likely the mother of one of his sons--are attracting an increasing number of black Americans to Monticello.

Eager to capitalize on blacks’ burgeoning interest in their own history, officials here have rewritten the story line relayed by docents at the Jefferson estate, which attracts half a million visitors a year. They continue to show Jefferson and his achievements in the foreground, but the backdrop is being filled in with new and dramatic accounts of the slaves who surrounded him.

“Monticello was an African village, and Thomas Jefferson grew up in an environment that was essentially an African community,” said James O. Horton, professor of American history at George Washington University in Washington and a member of a historical advisory board at Monticello. “There were six white people on the plantation and 200 African slaves. You can’t tell me those six whites affected the hundreds of slaves and weren’t affected themselves by the slaves.”

During a recent winter afternoon, fewer than two dozen visitors--nearly all of them white--walked through the mansion as tour guides explained how slaves built furniture and cooked meals for Jefferson and his guests at Monticello. Surveys commissioned by the estate show that African Americans account for less than 3% of all visitors.

Small as that number might be, it’s at least double the number who would have been at Monticello before officials began including slaves in their presentations, said Dianne Swann-Wright, who directs the estate’s oral history project.

“Many of us [African Americans] don’t want to talk about slavery because we see it as such a painful event,” she said, adding that tours conducted as recently as 1980 ignored slavery at Monticello. “We’re doing a disservice to our history and our ancestors when we refuse to look at how they lived every day.”

The work at Monticello is similar to efforts underway at other historic landmarks and tourist attractions. In most cases, curators say they want to present a more complete picture of history and use what they are learning about slavery to help black and white Americans see themselves as players in the nation’s story.

In recent years, officials at Colonial Williamsburg hired actors to reenact a slave auction, complete with black families being split and sold at market. Curators of the Library of Congress staged an exhibition of rare photographs of Southern plantation life with slaves working under the gun of a white overseer. Often, just discussion of these presentations draws fire from blacks. But officials say they will continue to press on because they know more about the history of slavery.

“Our problem is not how much information we have,” said James Rees, executive director of Historic Mount Vernon, the home and museum of George Washington. “It’s more of a challenge to get the information across to people.”

Rees said Mount Vernon, located in suburban Virginia about 20 miles from downtown Washington, attracts more than 1 million tourists a year. He estimates that African Americans are a small, growing tourist presence.

“We can now talk very openly . . . about slave life at Mount Vernon,” Rees said. “There’s no question that we are reaching out to blacks and other groups by talking more about it.”

Dan Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial at Monticello, which owns and operates Jefferson’s home as a museum and research center, said the changes are not intended to belittle Jefferson or his accomplishments. Rather, he said, the foundation hopes to more closely re-create the place as it would have appeared to anyone there 200 years ago.

Jordan said such work may seem targeted to appeal only to black tourists, but is just as vital for whites to appreciate as well.

“It’s impossible to come here and not understand that . . . slavery was the backbone of the system at Monticello,” he said. “Maybe we should have been a little more aggressive in getting that out in the past. But now we are concentrating on getting history correct and telling it right.”

Monticello’s work on slavery began in 1979 with archeological digs along Mulberry Row, where slaves lived and worked at the estate. By the mid-1980s, Jordan said, the excavations revealed enough data to persuade curators to “tell the slaves’ story” along with that of Jefferson’s life.

For example, researchers found pottery and tools used by slaves that suggested they kept personal vegetable and flower gardens, which hints at how they might have spent time when they were not working on the plantation. Historians also began interviewing slave descendants who told stories of life at Monticello that had been passed down in their families.

The most profound revelations stem from a genetic study released in November that suggests Jefferson probably fathered a child with Hemings. Jordan and others say the DNA tests are “as convincing as anything can get in history” and have been included in the docents’ lectures.

Not everyone agrees. Herbert Barger, whose wife is Jefferson’s sixth-generation cousin, said his genealogical studies over the last 25 years offer no proof that Jefferson had a slave mistress. “That DNA information is false. The people at Monticello were so easy to accept this false information that the media came up with.”

Nevertheless, Barger supports including the story of slaves in the discussions of Jefferson’s life. “I think that it’s good that they are including the slaves who helped build Monticello, and I think the Hemings story deserves to be told. But let’s try to be correct about it.”