Historians James and Lois Horton tell a Brown University audience that even President Thomas Jefferson felt conflicted about the subject.

01:00 AM EST on Tuesday, March 1, 2005

BY JENNIFER D. JORDAN
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- It's little wonder that Americans today find it hard to talk honestly and deeply about slavery -- and the legacy of racism the "peculiar institution" has left behind.

Even the man who equated the idea of America with freedom -- Thomas Jefferson -- felt conflicted about the gap between his own principles and practice, say two prominent historians who spoke at Brown University last night.

For when Jefferson, chief author of the Declaration of Independence and third U.S. president, extolled the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and wrote ". . . that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," he himself owned 150 slaves.

Jefferson personifies the conflict many Americans feel about the nation's history of slavery and what it means, said James O. Horton, the Benjamin Banneker professor of American studies and history at George Washington University. Horton, together with his wife, Lois E. Horton, a sociology and history professor at George Mason University, wrote the book: Slavery and the Making of America, the companion book to the PBS series that aired last month.

Last night the pair spoke at Brown as part of the university's Slavery and Justice series.

"Jefferson recognized that slavery was an injustice," Lois Horton told an 80-person audience. "But he also feared retribution by slaves."

Jefferson's conflict was brought into sharp relief a decade ago, when DNA testing revealed it was a near certainty that he had fathered children with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings -- a charge long denied by leading historians and white Jefferson descendants.

Just as many Americans feel uncomfortable talking about slavery, the revelations about Jefferson's relationship with Hemings caused national discomfort, James Horton said.

"There are many people in this country who have yet to come to terms with the contradiction between American slavery and American freedom," he said. "There's a real difference between American history as it is taught in classrooms today and American heritage, which is the way many Americans connect to their past."

The two don't square, James Horton said.

Lois Horton and four graduate students conducted a survey of visitors to Jefferson's home, Monticello, a few years ago, to gauge their reactions to Jefferson's ties to slavery and Hemings.

The results were surprising, and showed how much the 79 respondents struggled to reconcile the conflicting information about one of the most admired and beloved figures in American history, Lois Horton said.

"There were many theories -- that they were consenting adults, even though Hemings was only 14 when they were in Paris together -- that they were star-crossed lovers, that Jefferson was lonely," she said. "People went to great lengths to maintain Jefferson as enlightened and progressive in light of the DNA evidence."

Similar discomfort spills over onto debates in the South about how to study the Confederate past, for example, James Horton said. In fact, the history of slavery was included in tours at Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg as late as the 1980s.

It is the job of historians -- particularly public historians who run museums, historic houses and national parks -- to weave the story of slavery and its social, racial and economic consequences into the American story, James Horton said.

Public historians today are trying to encourage Americans to discuss parts of American history that are difficult to acknowledge, let alone talk about, James Horton said.

"President Clinton asked the country to begin a conversation about race in the 1990s," he said. "What we found out was we don't know enough to have a real conversation about race."

For more information on coming events sponsored by the Slavery and Justice Committee, visit: www.brown.edu/slaveryjustice

For more about Rhode Island's ties to the slave trade, read the recent Journal series, "Priscilla, a slave story," at:

http://projo.com/sharedcontent/east/priscilla/