Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed joins host Alex Lovit to discuss Juneteenth’s history and the transformative potential of reckoning with our country’s complex past. Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, where she teaches both history and law. She’s the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family and On Juneteenth.
Annette Gordon-Reed: The story of how America ended slavery is an inspirational story. We did something really good. It's about progress, and that's what America has been. One of the things that people have said about teaching history in school now is that they don't want to make White children uncomfortable. The goal of it is just to say what happened 300 years ago. History allows us to look back and say, "We don't want to go over that again."
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Alex Lovit: One hundred and sixty years ago, General Gordon Granger sailed into Galveston, Texas with the Union Army, and he announced that slavery was officially over. We now celebrate that day as Juneteenth, but how should we understand that day's significance: as a reminder of the horrific parts of America's past or our country's capacity to evolve?
You're listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit.
My guest today is Annette Gordon-Reed. If you know the name "Sally Hemings," Annette is a big part of the reason why. Her work showed that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Hemings, a woman he held in slavery. Annette won a Pulitzer Prize for her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Annette teaches history and law at Harvard. Her most recent book is called On Juneteenth. It's both a history of Juneteenth and a personal narrative of what the holiday has meant to her family for generations.
Today on the show, Annette is going to talk about why it's been so important to her to chronicle complicated chapters in American history, chapters that a growing number of Americans are actively working to erase. Annette Gordon-Reed, welcome to The Context.
A. Gordon-Reed: Glad to be here.
Alex Lovit: So you've written a couple of books about Thomas Jefferson's relationship with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, and his relationship with the broader Hemings family. People argued for a couple of centuries about whether Jefferson and Hemings had a sexual relationship until DNA tests proved that Jefferson was the father of Hemings's children. But when you were first writing about this, you didn't yet know about that DNA evidence. It didn't exist yet. You were drawing from documentary evidence, like every historian --
A. Gordon-Reed: Mm-hmm.
Alex Lovit: -- letters, diaries, that kind of thing. Why do you think a lot of historians were so slow to accept this? Why did it take a DNA test when that documentary evidence was staring them in the face?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, I think it came from their tendency to put a thumb on the scale for the people who were saying that it didn't happen -- namely, Jefferson's legal White family. And there's a tendency to sort of credit people who are upper class, people who are white, people who are powerful over the words of people who are less favored.
And I thought that that process was playing itself out in the historical presentations that I was looking at in my first book. And so I thought if I just went back and looked at the evidence in a [more] balanced way, and if I told readers the things that people who were arguing on the other side were leaving out, that it would become apparent that there was more evidence for this than they were saying.
Now, that convinced a number of people. The book came out in 1997. But in 1998, they did the DNA testing on descendants of Jeffersons and Hemingses and so forth, and it corroborated what I had to say about all of this.
Alex Lovit: Yeah. Well, [as you know], it's pretty rare for historians to get that kind of . . .
A. Gordon-Reed: No, it is. It is. Science doesn't usually weigh in on these questions, but I was really lucky. And it was lucky that it came out the following year -- the year after my book came out.
Gene Foster -- the person who did the testing -- said that he'd read my book, and he thought that we had gone as far as we could go on the documentary evidence. And so that spurred him to want to put together the DNA testing.
Alex Lovit: The value of your work is not just establishing the fact of Jefferson's relationship with Hemings. So you've also really tried to understand Hemings's and her family's experience and their perspective, their life stories. And then once you've chosen to do that, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do because when you're studying Jefferson . . . A lot of records got preserved by Thomas Jefferson.
A. Gordon-Reed: Mm-hmm.
Alex Lovit: Not so many records got preserved about Sally Hemings.
A. Gordon-Reed: Yeah.
Alex Lovit: How do you think about that challenge: of trying to read against the grain, fill in the gaps in the historical record?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, that's part of the fun of it. Part of being a historian is there's detective work in it. And if you like that kind of thing, then it's stimulating and it's fun to see: What can I find out about her? There's, for example, an entry in Jefferson's memorandum books, where he keeps a record of all of the money that he spends, and he says, "paid so much money to inoculate Sally."
That's just a bare statement, but I thought, "Well, what can I do with that?" Well, first you find out: Well, what was inoculation like during this time period? Why did it cost so much? Who did this, paid Dr. Sutton?
And I was able to find out who Dr. Sutton was. He was -- you know, a family of famous inoculators during this time period. It was expensive because inoculation wasn't just giving somebody a shot; it was a whole thing where you were sent away for 40 days and quarantined. I found one of -- I think there were 10 documents in the world that explain Sutton's method, what he did, and there was a diary of what the person ate every day and so forth. I was able to pull out a lot of stuff just from that one thing, [and it is] how you approach it. It's: What can I learn from just this bare statement?
So that kind of thing happens. It looks like there's not a lot there, but very often you can tease out information that's important and illuminating. It's not Sally Hemings saying these things, but it's about her. It allowed me to tell the readers about something that happened to her, this process that she went through.
So to my mind, it's a needle in the haystack -- some people don't like needles in haystacks, but I do -- and that's part of the fun of the process. I love to write, but I also love research. And giving these hidden storiesdoesn't mean you have to have the complete thing; but anything that you can find out about that person, readers have told me, and the way they've responded to it, [that] they consider it to be valuable.
But it's very hard -- reconstituting the lives of enslaved people -- because most of them did not leave records; and if there are records, they are created by people who are enslaving them. So you have to look at some of this with a grain of salt, obviously. But that's the challenge of it.
And even if you have lots of records. Jefferson remains mysterious to people even though there are thousands of records of his. You have a lot of stuff, and little stuff, and . . . [Usually it's] very difficult to know any person, really.
Alex Lovit: Yeah. Well, as one of your readers, I certainly find your work valuable. And I think it is very important to understand American history from all perspectives, and your work really helps to do that.
I'd like to read you a quote from your own writing. You wrote, "I often encounter great hesitancy about and impatience with discussing race when talking about the American past. The obvious difficulty with those kinds of complaints is that people in the past talked a lot about and did a lot about race. It isn't some newly discovered fad topic. Race is right there in the documents. It would take a concerted effort not to consider and analyze the subject." Why do you think so many people want to make that concerted effort to leave race out of the story?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, because I think on the part of some people there is a fear of conflict, the possibility of creating conflict. There is a sense of -- "guilt" is not the word, but a sense that people will judge. And I'm saying, in many instances for Whites who don't want to talk about it, it could be a fear that there will be judgment.
One of the things that people have said about teaching history in school now is that they don't want to make White children uncomfortable, as if people are going to hold White kids today responsible for things that happened 300 years ago. The goal of it is just to say what happened 300 years ago.
So I think it's a personal response to it as a person who's talking about this: Are they making a judgment about me? Are they saying that I'm guilty?
For African-American people who don't want to talk about it, it's like people saying, "Well, that's in the past, and we want to move forward." There's shame, I think. There's a degree of that. Feeling uncomfortable about the idea that ancestors had been enslaved and had been in a position of subordination.
There's a lot of emotion that's tied up in all of this, which kind of tells you how important it is: the fact that it's something to be avoided. It means that it's touching something somewhere in Whites and Blacks that, for some people, makes them uncomfortable.
Alex Lovit: So if guilt and shame are unproductive responses or insufficient responses to history, how should we emotionally respond to history, to the difficult elements of our past?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, I think [it's] as a challenge -- you know, to say the cliché, and it's, "Those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it," or whatever. We're probably going to repeat it, anyway, whether we remember it or not.
But the idea is that we might learn something from it. We're going through a moment right now where you could say, "Wait a minute. Has there been anything like this ever in the past?"
There are some things that we might want to avoid, and I think that that's what history allows us to do is to look back and say, "We don't want to go over that again. We've been through that terrain. We see what the signs are that suggest that we're not going down a good path"; or on the other side you say, "Yes, this is where we've had some successes," because we did have successes, "and this is how people persevered." It can be inspirational. So I think it's about education. It's about learning to figure out how you're going to go through the world.
Alex Lovit: I want to ask a couple questions about how history or historical understanding kind of informs our politics, our culture today. We've been talking about this argument -- you know, we need to avoid certain topics because it's just going to make people feel guilty. One person who's made that argument is Donald Trump.
He says historians are painting a picture of the United States as inherently racist, and that creates social divisions. So he's making an argument there that thinking about the history of race and racism in the United States has negative effects on our politics today. Do you think that it can have positive effects?
A. Gordon-Reed: Oh, definitely, for the reasons I was suggesting before, is that . . . I think it could have a positive effect because it gives you the tools to think about things differently, and you can see that we're not held hostage to what people did in the past. That's the thing: thinking that because you are of a particular race, religion or whatever, that you have to do what people who were that same race or religion in the past, you have to do exactly what they did. You can think about the world in a different way.
So it's possible -- and I've said this -- to not talk about the fact that there has been progress, to make it all bad, to think that it was just a hopeless situation. But it wasn't. It obviously wasn't. America has changed a great deal in the past 50 years, 60 years, and that came from people who didn't feel that they were being held hostage to the way things were before.
So the story of how America ended slavery -- the efforts that were made to bring Blacks into citizenship, required a second American Revolution in the 1950s and the 1960s -- it's an inspirational story. We did something really good with that, and I think that story has to be told along with the story of the problems.
And so it becomes a richer tapestry of American history, and it gives you something to look forward to as we go to the future: that there are ways to overcome past difficulties, to overcome old hatreds, and so forth. It doesn't have to be just a negative story and suggesting that mentioning things negative means that you're stuck there. It's about progress, and that's what America has been.
Alex Lovit: Well, so that's an argument for how history can help to reinforce a progressive, inclusive version of American democracy, and we can look to our past for inspiration for that.
Donald Trump has kind of a different understanding of what history is for. He's saying it's to tell a heroic story of American greatness -- you know, we need to recapture that, Make America Great Again. How do you think about the role of history in Trump's political movement?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, I think that there is, obviously, a group of people who resisted the things that I'm portraying as inspirational stories. I think what we're seeing now are the people who didn't think it was a good idea to bring Blacks into equal citizenship or who do have problems, necessarily, with gender equality or equality for gay people or whatever group that had been disfavored. That's always been a tension in society. Everybody wasn't always on board with that.
And so we see now people who feel that Make America Great Again is to go back to the days when there was a clear racial hierarchy or a gender hierarchy. So there's never unanimity on what I might consider to be progress. I'm telling a story but from my perspective.
But I think what we have is that people who are on the other side are now in ascendancy, or trying to become in ascendancy again, to take us back to a past that they feel was better for the country. But you can't do that. The demographics will not allow that to be in the same position. There are expectations that have been created over the past 50 or 60 years about equality and notions of America-ness that I don't think people are going to go back on easily.
Alex Lovit: You've written about history as a kind of how historical understanding can constitute a present identity. So for example, you've talked about how the mythic figure of the cowboy in Texas history contributed to this White male version of what it meant to be a Texan when, in fact, the state always had a much more diverse population. So how does history inform the image we have in our heads of what an American looks like?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, because we're a country that . . . We're not supposed to have a national race. We're not supposed to have a national religion or anything like that. I think that [there's] taking sort of a short cut. The idea is to have a symbol of something. We think about things in a symbolic way.
And I think it was probably easier to come up with the idea that the majority population in some ways symbolizes the entire country, even though [they've] always suggested -- certainly in Texas, and I'd suggest it -- always a big representation of other types of people there.
But I think it's an easier way to just go with the idea of Texas as a White person or a White man. And when women and Black people and Hispanic people didn't have as much power to make their feelings, make their stories known, it was easier to go with that.
And what we're fighting over now is that all of us think that we're Americans and that we have a right to have our stories told, as well. And so I think some people see that as an attack and as a zero-sum game. If you're talking about all these other people, then you're not talking about us all the time. I think we're going to have to learn to share. We've never carried this story out just as one race; it's been done in concert with one another in various ways, and that's what history is about.
The history of race, for example, is about how that played itself out. How did race affect development of Texas? How did the different races work together, work against each other, fight, cooperate? How did that story go rather than just the story of one person? It'd be like Rashomon, the famous Japanese movie, if you just [have] one . . . You miss the whole point of the film if you just have one perspective. It has to be all of it so that you get a richer picture of what happened.
Alex Lovit: Yeah, and I think history can sort of uniquely give us a sense of identity because it is about the past. It's about how America has always been a diverse country, including those diverse voices throughout our story.
A. Gordon-Reed: Mm-hmm.
Alex Lovit: Let's talk a little bit about the subject of your most recent book, which is about Juneteenth. So to start off, can you just give a brief description of the historical event that Juneteenth is celebrating?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, Juneteenth celebrates June 19th, 1865, which was the day that General Gordon Granger of the United States Army came to Galveston and announced the end of slavery in Texas. Very often there's a mistaken statement that this ended slavery in the United States. It did not. That's with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December of 1865.
But this was the last . . . I think it's significant because it's sort of the final defeat of the military effort to maintain slavery. Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That had been a couple of years before then: 1863. And the war really was over when Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April, but the Confederate Army kept fighting until June. And that, I think, is what makes Juneteenth significant because, as I said, the last sustained effort to maintain the system of slavery was defeated.
So General Gordon Granger goes with Black troops. They come into Galveston, and they go around the town and explain that slavery is over. It's a source of great jubilation on the part of African-American people, but there was also violence unleashed against people who celebrated.
So that day was celebrated in 1865, and I think it's the oldest . . . We've continued to celebrate . . . Texans continued to celebrate it up until this day. And so it's a story about Texas; but it's a bigger story, and it's come to represent the importance of the end of slavery overall.
Alex Lovit: As you were saying, Juneteenth has been celebrated for quite some time -- for centuries in Texas. It became a national holiday in 2021. So for a lot of Americans, it's a fairly new idea. So can you talk a little bit about -- well, who are the communities that have been celebrating, have been keeping the memory of Juneteenth alive all these years?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, it's Texans, mainly, and when Texans go off into the diaspora. Most of the people in other parts of the country who have celebrated Juneteenth or even knew about Juneteenth knew about it because Texans moved there, moved out to California . . .
I was talking to someone the other day in Buffalo, New York who said that they had celebrated it. She knew about it as a child, but that's because there were people from Texas who had come up, and they told people about it. So it has spread from Texans who said, "Well, this is what we celebrated. And so we might as well celebrate it here, too."
So it's a Texas holiday that spread with the spread of Texans across the country. And it becomes a national holiday, I think, because as the internet and social media made it even more well known, and then after the murder of George Floyd, there was an interest in slavery, people asking, "How did we get here?"
And the interest in slavery grew. And from that, Floyd is in May. And then June comes along, and there was a spike in a lot of social media traffic about Juneteenth all across the country. So the burgeoning interest in it came about as people focused a lot on the issue of slavery after the George Floyd murder.
Alex Lovit: Slavery is undeniably an important part of American history, and abolition was such a major step forward in this country. I think it's a good idea to have a holiday to commemorate and celebrate that. In fact, it's kind of strange we didn't have a national holiday to do that before now. So if we're going to have one day a year when Americans think about slavery and abolition, what should we be thinking about? What role should this play in our culture?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, I think it should play a role in family life. People ask me how we should celebrate this, what I would like to see come out of this. I would like to see a moment when young people in a family perhaps interview older members of their family to take family histories. I think doing the book and thinking about how I celebrated Juneteenth as a child growing up, it was always a family and a community kind of thing.
And so I think it's an important way of showing how family history is history. I use the book to tell the history of Texas, but I do it through my family history. And anybody could do that. We could all tell the history of our state, of our city, or whatever through the things that were happening to our grandparents, great-grandparents and ancestors.
So I'd like for it to be an emphasis on family and community and the connection to the past. It's a way for everybody . . . Everybody their own historian, in a way.
Alex Lovit: So we've been talking, in this conversation, about the meanings that people make out of history, including about Juneteenth. Historians can analyze a document as a historical text. So you can look at the Declaration of Independence and say when and why it was written and what impacts it had both immediately and over time.
But the Declaration isn't just history. So: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." So those words aren't just history; they're a meaningful expression of values that are important to me, that I want to hold fellow Americans to account for. So is that something historians can help with, or is that kind of outside the ambit of history?
A. Gordon-Reed: It's funny you should say that because I find myself at odds very often with some of my dear friends, historians who, "You must historicize the Declaration." And I have to say, "The Declaration does not just belong to historians." Historians are constantly saying, "Well, he didn't mean this," and, "You're putting meanings on it that weren't there at the time."
I know that you should keep things in history, but it is a document that formed the United States of America. So it's not a legal document. It's not like the Constitution, but it is foundational because it establishes the break with a past. But it's a living document. People call it "America's creed." It means something to you. It means something to me.
I've gone to lots of events over the years, and particularly events with African-American people, and it's not uncommon for the words of the Declaration to be stated at some point. They're not historical conferences, nothing like that. It's just that it's a part of people's understanding of how we established ourselves as American. And so it has a role that is outsized, is bigger than what Jefferson meant at the time.
I'm writing something now [that] talks about how people of that moment, of that era, particularly African-American people, took it beyond just "I'm breaking from Great Britain" -- that universal statement, the statement that you just read there -- that this had meaning for them at the time, which suggested that slavery should have been abolished and that black people deserved equal rights.
So people have always made it something bigger than just a document that says we're breaking from Great Britain. You get a document that says something espousing universal truths. It's bigger than just the moment that it existed in at that time.
Alex Lovit: So the guy who wrote those words -- it was Thomas Jefferson -- he's an imperfect man. You understand better than about anyone in the world --
A. Gordon-Reed: Yeah.
Alex Lovit: -- how imperfect Jefferson was, and also, I think, have a lot of respect for him in certain ways. And hell, even the words are imperfect -- you know, "all men are created equal."
A. Gordon-Reed: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Alex Lovit: Does knowing about those flaws influence how we should think about those words and their meaning?
A. Gordon-Reed: No. It may inform the way people think about him -- you know, how did he exist in a world where he said this but lived in a different kind of way? And we can make arguments about that, but I believe that the words are true. And I actually think that he thought that they were true in the sense that human beings had basic equal rights. The fact that he could not give those rights to other people, that's a flaw. That is a weakness in his character.
But the words themselves, it's like a poem. When a person writes a poem, they may have an idea about what it means to them. But if it's a really good one -- can be a work of genius -- it means something different to people. Or a song that you hear. You know a songwriter had something in mind, but you take those words and use them for something else. They have a different meaning to you. And I think that's what the Declaration is like. I don't think you have to repudiate the Declaration because of Jefferson's flaws.
Alex Lovit: Earlier you talked about the potential uses of history to kind of analyze the current moment, that people are asking, "What in history is analogous to now?" Every moment that passes becomes part of history. Sometimes they're better remembered than others. Sometimes they're more tumultuous or more impactful than others.
Many people seem to think that our current moment is going to leave a more lasting imprint on American history than others. Is that something we can know ahead of time? Is there a way that history can be helpful to understand what we're living through right now?
A. Gordon-Reed: Oh, yes. I think that there's a way that history can be impactful in figuring out what's going on right now, but it depends on what happens. If we actually lose the Republic and we go into an era like the Soviet Union, where history is written in a particular kind of way . . .
It depends on who wins. If we recover and we avoid going into a full-fledged dictatorship, it will inform us. We'll say, "This was a bullet dodged." But if we don't dodge it, then there will be historians who describe it as a great moment of liberation or whatever. A lesson will be learned. The content of the message I can't say because I don't know what's going to happen, and we don't know what's going to happen.
Alex Lovit: So if we're trying to dodge that bullet of potential authoritarianism, is there a way that thinking about history, talking about history, can help us push towards that more positive version of our potential future?
A. Gordon-Reed: Well, yeah. You look back at other moments in history. People have talked about what happened in Germany in the '30s, or Rome. You could go back pretty far. It's a way of thinking about how do people act in these moments when there is a struggle over power. So there are always examples that you could look to to say, "This is how authoritarianism works itself out. This is how it establishes itself."
So history provides, I think, an example for people. It's not going to be on all fours because the context will be different, the people are different. But there are some recurring themes in human life: ambition, overreaching, apathy on the part of the people who are part of a republic. You look at republics that have died before, what it demands for people to maintain a republic: the active participation of citizens who are going to be vigilant about things.
And so it can give us lessons. But as I said, until it has happened, we're not going to be able to figure out what lessons will be imparted because the people who are responsible for telling those lessons will either see it as a triumph or they will see it as having been a disaster.
Alex Lovit: Well, Annette Gordon-Reed, thank you for all your work telling a fuller version of American history, and thank you for joining me here on The Context.
A. Gordon-Reed: Thank you for inviting me.
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Alex Lovit: The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake, Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.
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