And americans family. She is professor of law of the new York Law School and professor of history at rutgers university. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson sally henning, which remains most influential study of the subject. She has written numerous articles on jefferson and edited forthcoming reader on jefferson and rates which will be published by Princeton University press. She also had had time to complete a short biography of Andrew Johnson which will be published in the fall of 2009. Please join me in welcoming a net cord in reeves. [applause] thank you, very much for that introduction i love how he says that. [laughter] say it again. Say it again. It is great to be here among some many people that i know. Such a familiar place to me i came back to monticello and many times and it is always good to be here ive never been here when is raining. So, this is an interesting thing for me. A day that began at 4 00 a. M. This morning trying to get there quickly and taking off at 1 00 so i am just here and i am very happy to be here with you. I thought that i would talk a little bit about how i came to write this book. What the book is about an what it means to me. People who are familiar with my other work understand that my first interest in monticello was not really the hemming it was really jefferson. And, thinking about jefferson antislavery after having read a child biography when i was in the third grade about jefferson that was my introduction to history and it was when i first began to let history as a topic and began to think and note that this is something that i always wanted to do. I will not go through all of my life story and my connections or feeling of connection to this place. But to tell you that i came to write my first book about Thomas Jefferson and sally kennings because i was concerned about the way black people were portrayed in jefferson scholarship. The particular story about chip Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemingses was interesting to me the more interesting to me was how people weighed evidence and how people treated the lights and the voices of black people when they said things that some people found discomfiting. That book was an analysis of the historiography about jefferson and hemingses and it was largely an analysis of the story. I thought i would put that aside as some point when it was over and i would get to what i really wanted to do which was a biography of jefferson which i still intend to do. But as i was working on the hemingses and is thinking of the subject of the way that people are portrayed in history it occurred to me that it might be an interesting thing to do in preparation for writing about jefferson to kill two birds with one stone in preparation for writing about jefferson deal with this other question and that is black voices and the black portrayal in the writing of history. Now, i should say this slavery history over the past 50 years has undergone a revolution. I often say that slavery studies is really the crown jewel of american history. It really great historians have put their minds to the task of figuring out what happened or telling the story of what happened in americas past, one of the most tragic aspects of but i felt that this was something that should be brought to bear in jefferson scholarship in particular because he is such a focus of interest of so many people. And this would be a good place to actually, and a good time to actually do that. So when i was writing about the the xerography, i realized all come at jefferson was a Record Keeper there is lots of material about slavery at monticello him and certainly stanton and of dirt others have pioneered the study of writing about enslaved people. On the plantation. But i wanted to do more to take it a bit further because i knew there were lots of things in lots of areas that have not really been explored in as great of a debt as i thought they should be explored. So why i felt this was in borden and contribution that would be made to it typically, i have often said that for black people, inslee people and black people today, social history really waitrons biography. You think about slaves in sort of an abstract way. Or blacks in an abstract way. Blacks are sort of monolithic. Whites can be individuals. And i understand why that is true obviously slavery was a great overlay. And of course, you want to focus in on that system. But there were individuals within that system who reacted to that world in different ways. It doesnt mean it to say that the system itself was not bad for everybody. Slavery was no picnic for anybody, obviously. But the inability or the reluctance or the difficulty of is seen people as individuals a struck me as a problem and i think it is a legacy of slavery that carries over to the way people see blacks as today. The last time i was here talking about my children commenting upon television and popular portrayals of black people and saying that basically, it is constant. I mean outcross shows, across time. They are all the same type of character. This is not to say what whites arent stereotype in television to but to say there are 27 types of white people in 24 of black the same thing over and over again. And because, you dont see or you dont have the sense that there are different black people with different ways of going through the world. And, so what i thought i might try to do with this story, was to help solve what i saw was a basic problem when i was writing Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemingses is you can say things about people you dont know. In order to have empathy with people, instead of pity. Pity is putting somebody over there. Empathy is establishing a connection that allows you to think of that person as Something Like yourself. She and once you do that, it is difficult to treat that person and ways that it would not like to be treated. Sally who, for example was the insect but people dont know about her and think of her as primarily a problem and controversy and i try not in my book with a person. She was a daughter. She was someone sister. She was someones mother and a friend. And without thinking of her in those sorts of way, putting her in the light was easy to say anything you wccant to say about cccheard in this sense. Cccheard in this sense. C based on nothing because you do not know her, there is no sense of a connection with her as a person. There is no care with of life. And what i thought i would try to do with this book was not talk just about her, but to talk about her entire family, to put all of them in a context that would make it easier for people to see them as human beings and not as slaves, not as part of a particular problem. So, i sat down to write the book, this book was under contract it has been under contract for a very long time. Things intervene. I wrote a book with jordan, my editor i edited a volume of essays the world trade tower fell into my apartment. And we have to start our whole life over again. So those kinds of things delayed the appearance of this book. So, i started to write and do research. And quickly found that there was a lot of material. Things that i would laugh wrap this up in 200 pages in my editor was happy about that but then get longer and longer and longer. And i realized that it was going to be 1,000 pages which we cannot do, it would scare people away. So i decided to break it up into two books and this is the first book of what will be to blocks of the hemings family and it and after a 31 after monticello is told and the family is pretty much disperse because i found that there were too many interesting things to say about the 19th century to just wrap it up in one stale swoop. So, the book is long, as you will see. By publishers have done a very, very good job of making a book that, what do i want to say . I dont know how long it will be but a long book look not so long. And i am very grateful to them for that. So people will not be frightened about it. But the book has three parts the first call that part is called origin and in that, i introduced the matriarch of the hemings family elizabeth who is born in 85 we of fragmentary information about her. When she was born, about where she is born, that she was owned by the deaths family. The chapter is called young elizabeths world and what i tried to do is invoked that time and place. The area of around williamsburg in the 17 thirties which was, well if you go to williamsburg today, it would not look like, obviously, for obvious reasons, like the democrats would not look like the williamsburg of that time. For very obvious reasons africanamericans today dont have much interest in dressing up like slaves and walking around. Williamsburg to try to show the demographics of it. It is interesting to do reenactments and things like that, but that is not, that is difficult to reproduce a world that was english and african. A large number of africans in the 17 thirties, more africans were brought into va than any other time or decade in the history. It is a place of it, english people, africans, not one kind of african. Africans are not monolithic different people speaking different languages. We think of todays world as a multicultural world that term that has both positive and negative connotations but this is multicultural and multilingual world at the time that she would have been, that she was born in to begin so ii tried to evoke that time to give them a sense of the country at its beginning. And the slave system. Sort of maturing at that point. And, the world that she would have encountered during that time period. And then i introduced john who would become elizabeth him mingst levin owner and father of six of her children and i got to go to england and lancaster and work with a genealogist that to try to bear it out. About his life and background as fascinating man who comes to the colony, and makes his living, a man of a a very poor background. Who is raised up about a man named motherwell and becomes a what lawyer and becomes very wealthy i introduced john wales and talk about jefferson, and john wells daughter, martha, whom he married. And bring the family to monticello. And talk about the revolution and as some of the hemings family interaction and what happened during this time was great turmoil everywhere but certain the Africanamerican Community many of whom wanted to join the loyalists and the british comic who had promised them freedom to the rebels on the slaves of a rebel who would join the army. So this is a very volatile time free soil in france. There was a phrase that there are no slaves in france, that wasnt exactly true. But, there were slaves, people that were enslaved in france. But it was a place where people could file petitions for freedom. In the 18th century, hundreds of people filed petitions for freedom in france and every single one of them was granted. So this was a pro forma thing. For enslaved people. If the one in their freedom that could take it and at some point it became so clear that the out that the court would grant them freedom that some slave owners just freed the slaves on their own rather than fight them in court because the other thing they had was called the shifting. The losing parties had to pay for the case. So, you could see what happened if you knew the slate would be freed no matter what and you lose any pay the cost. They took them down to the court, and free them on their own. One of the things i wanted to try to do in this sense of invoking a different world or to try and bring in tinsley person like james into the world and have people see him not as i said a symbol or someone who is an abstract concept is to talk about the black community in paris and very often people talk about james and sally in paris and they tell me about that they couldnt have done this or that. But they dont know anything about the society during that time. You never sent jefferson to france and not do an investigation of what france was actually like during the time he was there. There was the black community in france. Not a very large community. There were about 5,000 people in france in a country of about 20 Million People so we are talking about a tiny group of folks as a little over 1,000 of them were situated in paris. The interesting thing about it is that most of them where in two or three neighborhoods. So there is a small number of people but they are concentrated in a relatively small area. And it concentrated in a small area because they are, for the most part many of them are the servants of french colonials who have come to paris on business and so forth. And they stay in the best neighborhoods. So it makes sense for the blacks to be in the best neighborhood because they were there with the richest people. And it doesnt do any good to have servants if they live across thought across town in someplace. So, though the neighborhood that jefferson late lived in have the highest concentration of blacks of any neighborhood in the city. So, if you would have seen people around, people of color who are around. And when you are a minority in a place, you noticed people who are lucky. So, it doesnt do any good, it doesnt do good to think of him is operating by himself. There is a black community there. A number of people who love and work on blacks and pairs during this time noted that this was a community that help one another. Ms. Support one another and they talked about freedom. They pooled their resources for brent and suggested, you know, people for jobs and things of that nature. So, there was a community for him there, that was different, very different from the kind of community that he would have encountered in virginia necessarily because come most, i should say most of the people there, people of color were not slaves. The slightly more free people there. So there was a community for yen. And once i found that, the notion that he and Sally Hemings wanted to stay looks different now than when we talk about this story of ed Salley Hemings not wanting to come back to america they are skeptical and they say where to go how cheap shot the chief function but people their function. The other thing about this we know how they function because, blacks had to be registered in paris. And in france and a list of their occupation. So we know what people do for free, we know what they did for a living. And, they were in the hotels and. Some of them were innkeepers, seamstresses, there was a wide variety of occupations that these people held. That james and the selling 214 could have held certainly james who was trained as a chef in the grid is kitchens and france could have been able to find a job. So, michael understanding of their life there began to change change when come as a price, surprise when you do research instead of just, like common sense tells me that. No. There is that to be known about them. And if, as i said treat them as people, and you do the kinds of research and ask of the kent the questions that you would ask about jefferson in paris, patty and pulley in paris with a like for a young girl . Those things if you ask those questions about genes and sally you get a different picture than just simply relying on what you may or may not think constitutes common sense. So, i have a couple chapters of bob james in paris and some of the is exploit when Sally Hemings comes to paris with jeffersons daughter after the death of the youngest daughter, in the dark about her life there, one of the chapters that is my personal favorite which is called dr. Seven. Eight a chapter about Sally Hemings e inoculation when she is in paris. Inoculation was if anybody saw the miniseries of john adams. The very harrowing scene, someone interesting scenes i shall say with Abigail Adams being inoculated for small pox and becoming a nurse tour children but that is another story. Inoculation was very, very difficult and arduous process. Sue is inoculated by a man named roger sutton who was part of a family that was among the most Famous Family inoculated at the time. They were the doctors to the stars. In fact, if he was brought in to try to state save king louis the 15th he died of smallpox there was no cure for it but Robert Sutton was held in such high regard they were doing whatever they could and they brought him in an 1774 and try to save king louis the 15th. He inoculated c17 and inoculation and required isolation, obviously that is why people were against it and religious reasons. They thought that god intended for you not to have smallpox. That he would have given it to you. People did not like inoculation for that reason but that also didnt like it because sometimes is started a epidemic is so it was great fun to try and fair out that whole process and find out what what happened tour and where she went. And i found out where the inoculation house was and she was sent away 40 days and she was sent away to undergo this procedure. One thing i want them you create that and the and i tried to do it in the book and think about being 40 or the teen years old and going to a foreign country and being sent away to the countryside in isolation with a group of people who talk the language you dont know how to. And be given smallpox. A mild version of smallpox and being ill away from home. That is a tough thing. One of the most gratifying things that i had a person who came up to me who had seen me talk about this and read about this and said, it made me think of my grandmother. His grandmother. He said i think of my grandmother coming to ellis island and she was 15 years old and didnt talk the language and didnt know anybody. And what it must have been like. So certainly a 15 yearold in slave girl is not the same thing as an immigrant girl coming to ellis island. But there are points of humanity that you could hook onto their. Knowing what it means to be young. Knowing what it means to be by yourself and be killed. And so telling that story, i thought in that chapter was gratifying because i do you think that it highlights the humanity of someone whom i said before, as people think of primarily just in terms of a problem or a controversy. I talk about james and the Sally Hemings in paris. The tour who asked of them this seed may be in a bad ways and james beat the heck out of him. And, you know, put him back in his place. And i talk about the whole issue of the beginning of a relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. And here i go into what might have editor called the analytical chapters. [laug