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Have been reading John Chester Miller& #39;s 1977 book on Jefferson and slavery and it is _fascinating_ to think about Miller& #39;s liberal anxieties and red-lines through the prism of the current & #39;cancel culture& #39; panic (let alone today’s unhinged Kamala Harris discourse) 
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Miller’s book is a critical assessment of Jefferson& #39;s lifelong entanglement with slavery. Here& #39;s the first paragraph of the first chapter, with underlining supplied by whoever used to own the book. (Hey kids, don& #39;t underline in pen OK?)
The chapters are a bit mechanical but Miller tries to make good on his promise to reveal slavery as a "main pillar" of Jefferson’s world.
Miller& #39;s conclusion: Jefferson didn& #39;t live up to his ideals on the question of slavery, but if he HAD lived up to them he couldn& #39;t have become president. Back to the comforting idea that the first US politician who could realistically attack slavery - Lincoln - promptly did so.
(Imagine a time when you could get away with using the ‘Book of Fate’ as an interpretive feint, those were the days)
Let& #39;s set aside Miller’s generous exculpation of TJ, which grossly over-simplifies both Jefferson and the fast-moving debates over slavery and antislavery across his long lifetime. The thing that really struck me about Miller& #39;s book is his caustic chapter on Sally Hemings.
Most people in their forties and younger may not realise just how intensely hostile (and racist) many liberal white historians were towards the notion that TJ could have had a sexual relationship with SH. Miller was part of that.
The evidence for Miller& #39;s refutation of their relationship was circumstantial and often unpleasant: here’s his rationale for why Madison Hemings must have been lying when he claimed in 1873 that he was Jefferson’s son. (Merrill Peterson said something nearly identical.)
There are even worse things in the book in the same vein; but here& #39;s the section in which Miller argues that, if the Hemings story were true, Jefferson would effectively be no better than Richard Nixon and his reputation would be ruined. This is the passage that blew my mind.
(There’s a great article by @agordonreed in the WMQ which links Hemings denialism among white historians to the erasure of any Black connection to the Founding; again, well worth reading again in the current moment.) http://www.studythepast.com/his597/engaging_jefferson.pdf">https://www.studythepast.com/his597/en...
I think it’s fascinating to consider Miller’s nightmare of a publicly-acknowledged TJ-SH relationship against what actually happened when, thanks to Prof Gordon-Reed et al., the truth about Jefferson and Hemings finally emerged in 1998.
Jefferson wasn’t cancelled; the lives of the Hemingses and other enslaved people became harder to ignore at Monticello, giving new life to the institution; & historians engaged head-on with what Miller had presented as reputational suicide on TJ’s part. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/sally-hemings-exhibit-monticello.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/1...
I’m struck by the way in which Jefferson’s timidity on emancipation — inc. his infamous claim that Black people had to be removed from the US because of their “ten thousand recollections of the injuries they have received” - was mirrored in Miller’s handling of Hemings.
I think we see echoes of Miller& #39;s anxiety in the debates over ‘cancel culture’, 1619, BLM, the SHEAR-Andrew Jackson contretemps, and the other controversies of our moment.
Conservatives and some white liberals reveal their own frailty — or perhaps their tacit recognition of the collective guilt of white people — when they push back against ‘revisionist’ history which tries to recover difficult truths about the past.
But there’s very little evidence that even the murkiest figures in American history have been ‘cancelled’ - especially by historians. Revelations about “adaptive” or “amoral” behaviour force historians to think harder about the moral contexts in which this behaviour took place.
And then there’s the fact that liberal narratives in American history die hard. There’s something Sisyphean about revisionism in American history: you keep pushing the critical narrative up the hill & the liberal narrative is always waiting at the top to boot you down again.
Reading Miller reminds me that one of the many challenges in writing and teaching a more inclusive American history is the guilt/paranoia of those white historians who insist that a full reckoning with the American past is actually a form of interpretive nihilism.
This may be a sincerely held view on their part; but it often operates as an obstacle to understanding complexity and nuance, and stops students/readers from understanding how American society came to look the way it does.
Though on that point, I found a little easter egg in my copy of Miller: a book report from the student (presumably) who originally owned it. This person weighed up Miller’s defence of TJ, stared coldly into the Book of Fate, and wasn& #39;t buying it./
