ABSTRACT
The 1990s was the watershed decade for representations of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in visual culture. The year 1993 saw the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth and debates about the ‘cult of Jefferson’, his ‘character’ and legacy were textured by academic tussles over how the nation had dealt with its history amid the ‘hot’ culture wars. The decade saw savage criticism of Jefferson’s slaveholding, with one historian going so far as to state that Jefferson was ‘the foremost racist of his era in America’ and another that he was the ‘intellectual godfather of the racist pseudo-science of the American school of anthropology’. He was even compared to Pol Pot and Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. 1 Jefferson’s character, or the ‘inner Jefferson’ as one 1995 book was entitled, proved as controversial at the end of the twentieth century as during 1802–1804, the period in which controversy over his relationship with Sally Hemings began.
