Scholars recreate landscape of slavery at Monticello

For most Americans, Monticello is the home of Thomas Jefferson, an icon of American architectural expression, a treasured National Historic Landmark and the only American residence on UNESCO’s prestigious World Heritage List. But it’s also the best documented and best preserved early American plantation, and for that reason, a window into the obscure institution of slavery.

Wait now, haven’t we had that conversation before? Thomas Jefferson and slavery. Yes, we have, around a DNA test in 1998 and long before that. Really, since a political journalist named James Callender accused Jefferson in 1803 of keeping a slave named Sally as a “concubine.” These days most scholars of American history believe that Jefferson fathered at least one child, Eston Hemings, and probably all six of the known children of Sally Hemings, a household slave and the daughter of the matriarch Elizabeth Hemings....

After the DNA test, the entire world’s attention focused on Monticello for a moment, mostly to consider what, if any, effect the revelation would have on Jefferson’s consequential legacy as a principal proponent of human liberty. Senior historian Lucia (Cinder) Stanton, who had tracked the Hemings family through Jefferson’s writing and oral history, found herself at the center of a fury. The controversy arrived in the midst of her most compelling work on “Getting Word: Oral History Project,” which was initiated in 1993 to search for the narratives passed from one generation to the next from descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families. Prior to the “Getting Word” project, begun by Stanton and carried out with Project Historian Dianne Swann-Wright and consultant Beverly Gray, the knowledge of slave life at Monticello, although abundant, was limited to the written historical record—such as notes in Jefferson’s Farm Book, his memorandum or account books, and correspondence. These historical records revealed too little of the experience of slavery from the perspective of the enslaved people.

“It took a year out of my working life,” Stanton remembered. “Trying to explain the whole Sally Hemings/Jefferson thing to reporter after reporter starting from square one a hundred times. We sort of thought of life before DNA and after DNA.”...