Rumors of an affair between Jefferson and a slave woman began to circulate during his successful 1800 campaign for the presidency. Two years later, the story appeared in print for the first time when James Callender, an embittered scandalmonger, wrote in a Richmond paper that it was “well known” that Jefferson had “for many years kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally.” She was, he claimed, the mother of five children by Jefferson; some of them bore a striking resemblance to the president.
The charge created a brief sensation at the time, and it resurfaced periodically over the next 170 years. Abolitionists, eager to use the indisputable fact of widespread miscegenation in the South to expose the hypocrisy of slavery, seized on the Jefferson-Hemings story to support their case. “The best blood of Virginia” ran in the veins of slaves, the South Carolina-born antislavery crusader Angelina Grimke liked to claim, “even the blood of Jefferson.” Some black communities kept the story alive in their oral traditions, and many African-Americans (including those who believed themselves to be Jefferson’s descendants) displayed considerable pride in the telling. The Hemings story finally entered the mainstream of scholarly and popular debate over Jefferson with the publication in 1974 of Fawn M. Brodie’s highly controversial “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History.” Brodie combined circumstantial evidence with psychoanalytic insights and concluded that the story was true. But she insisted that the affair was not an indictment of Jefferson, as many of his defenders believed. It was evidence both of his capacity for “warmth and passion” and of his ability to overcome racial stereotypes to love a “forbidden woman.”
Even before Brodie’s book appeared, most major Jefferson scholars had denied the story. Dumas Malone, author of a magisterial six-volume biography, described the tale as “distinctly out of character, being virtually unthinkable in a man of Jefferson’s moral standards and habitual conduct.” Merrill Peterson, Virginius Dabney, Willard Sterne Randall and other members of what is sometimes disparagingly called the “Jefferson establishment” have issued similarly strenuous rebuttals. But the story has survived, and spread, despite them. At a 1992 conference on Jefferson at the University of Virginia, several black participants insisted that everyone they knew accepted the story as fact; and Jesse Jackson once called the efforts of scholars to deny it “an attempt to pour sand over history.” Novelists have used the affair as the basis for their work: Barbara Chase-Riboud, in “Sally Hemings” (1979), and Steve Erickson in “Arc d’X,” published last year. And now, of course, the Hemings affair (like the idea of a Kennedy assassination conspiracy) has been enshrined in a major film.
On several factual points, almost all parties to the controversy are in agreement. In 1784, Jefferson-by then a widowersailed to Paris, where he soon became the American minister. Three years later, his young daughter Polly came from Virginia to join him accompanied by Sally Hemings, who was then about 14 years old. Hemings became part of Jefferson’s Paris household and returned with him to America in 1789, by which time she was pregnant with her first child. From then on, she lived at Monticello as a household servant and bore several more children, some of whom were (like Hemings herself) very light skinned. There are reports of some visitors to Jefferson’s home remarking on the resemblance of young household servants to their master, and a son of Hemings’s later claimed that Jefferson was his father. The debt-burdened Jefferson never freed more than a handful of his slaves, but among those he did release were some of Hemings’s children (although never Hemings herself). On the other hand, there is also the claim of one of Jefferson’s grandsons that a nephew of the president had carried on a long affair with Hemings and fathered some of her children. And there is Jefferson’s own documented abhorrence of miscegenation and the absence of any hint in his letters and papers of an intimate relationship with Hemings. There is, in short, nothing conclusive in the factual record.
The Hemings controversy has endured nevertheless, in part because it has intersected with a much larger and more important dispute: how do we reconcile our image of Jefferson as the father of American liberty with the reality of his life as an owner of slaves? Jefferson claimed to abhor slavery, and there is no reason to doubt that he meant it. But he owned slaves all his life and, unlike George Washington, freed few of them. He could not imagine black men and women living on terms of social equality with whites, and he talked at times of the desirability of resettling all African-Americans in some distant land.
“We have the wolf by the ear,” Jefferson once wrote of slavery. “We can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” Jefferson, like most of his white contemporaries, apparently preferred “self-preservation.” In attempting to assess his moral stature from the perspective of a very different time, establishing the truth or falsehood of the Sally Hemings story seems inconsequential compared with coming to terms with that fateful choice.
