J. W. Jefferson

This chapter demonstrates how John Wayles Hemings, born an African American man in Virginia, later became a white person known as J. W. Jefferson in Wisconsin and Tennessee. For Jefferson, the best means of strengthening a credible identity as a white person and U.S. citizen was through the creation of a public personal history. As a major and then lieutenant colonel in the Union Army during the Civil War, Jefferson undertook a conscious—and risky—self-fashioning project intended to underscore his visibility as a white man. As a war correspondent, Jefferson hoped that newspaper readers would not question the racial identity of a Union officer wounded in action in the war’s western theater or doubt the credibility of a man who ascended through the army’s ranks. “Manly” wartime service combined with a highly visible personal history would erase any doubts that Jefferson was a white American citizen.