Talk:John Wayles/Archive 1

Untitled
The novel "Clotel" was not based on the story of Harriet Hemings. It was inspired by an item, very likely fictitious, in the abolitionist newspaper "Liberator" about the supposed auction of Thomas Jefferson's daughter in the slave market in New Orleans. Jefferson appears briefly in the first edition of Clotel, but in later editions the slave owner is a senator. Virginia Historian (talk) 11:26, 19 August 2010 (UTC)

Marriage and Family
At the end of the first ¶ here's an attempted reference entry that really needs to be cleaned up by someone more knowledgeable in the ways of Wikipedia than I: Dick Kimball (talk) 13:30, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

"Nonconsensual concubine" and rape.
Hi everyone.

So looking at the history for the page it looks like "concubine" was changed to "nonconsensual concubine" with rape language being added. anonymous edit was flagged as a "fixed typo" so I'm going to assume the author was acting in bad faith remove that language.

None of this was sourced, so I did some digging and it appears that the original "concubine" language came from an oral history of Madison Heming (one of Jefferson's presumed daughters). I'm going to source her in the article and provide the reference.

I don't feel this is whitewashing the issue; being "made a concubine" does not infer choice or happiness with the arrangement. But saying that she was repeatedly raped is on its face overly speculative. Let the sources speak and the reader infer.

Thank you. Reve (talk) 00:36, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Edit:

Actually, upon reflection I just scrapped the whole paragraph in the leader dealing with rape. The first sentence summarizes his importance as per Wikipedia standards, and all the sex stuff is pretty well covered later in the family section. Reve (talk) 01:03, 5 October 2017 (UTC)