Sexual Predator?
Another of Jefferson's supposedly high-minded principles was his rejection of miscegenation, sexual relations between blacks and whites. For generations, Jefferson's defenders have insisted that he lived nearly a chaste life after his wife died in 1782 and that he abhorred the notion of blacks and whites copulating.
But modern scholarship is now in near consensus that Jefferson seduced Sally Hemings, a teen-age slave girl who was a companion to one of his daughters during Jefferson's years in Paris, and that he kept Hemings as his concubine for the rest of his life. After many decades in denial, even some Jefferson acolytes, like Meacham, accept this troubling relationship as historical reality.
The old version of the story was to portray Hemings as a promiscuous slave vixen and insist that the Great Man would never have brought a mulatto girl like Hemings into his bed. Despite the curious coincidence that Hemings tended to give birth nine months after one of Jefferson's visits to Monticello -- and the discovery of male Jefferson DNA in Hemings's descendants -- the argument went that Hemings must have been sleeping around with Jefferson's nephews.
When confronted with the fact that one of Hemings's sons, Madison Hemings, said his mother -- late in life -- recounted to him how Jefferson had imposed himself on her in Paris and continued to have sex with her during her years at Monticello, Jefferson's defenders suggested that Sally Hemings was not only a slut but a liar who was trying to enhance her standing and that of her offspring by claiming Jefferson as the father.
Now, however, with most scholars agreeing that Jefferson did have a sexual relationship with Hemings -- who was a daughter of his slave-owning father-in-law and thus his wife's half-sister -- the new defense of Jefferson was that the relationship was a true love affair, with Hemings portrayed as a kind of modern-day independent woman making choices about her lovers.
But the reality was that Hemings was only 14 when she moved into Jefferson's residence in Paris in 1787 and was thus more likely the victim of a sexual predator. He was in his mid-40s.
According to Madison Hemings's account, his mother "became Mr. Jefferson's concubine [in Paris]. And when he was called back home she was enciente [pregnant] by him." Jefferson was insistent that Sally Hemings return with him, but her awareness of the absence of slavery in France gave her the leverage to insist on a transactional trade-off; she would continue to provide sex to Jefferson in exchange for his promise of good treatment and the freedom of her children when they turned 21, Madison Hemings said.
Jefferson's Doubles
Some scholars, including Wiencek, also now give credence to the contemporaneous accounts of Jefferson having sex with one or more other female slaves and thus having a direct role in populating Monticello with his own dark-skinned lookalikes.
"In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas Jefferson," wrote Wiencek...
"We know this not from what Jefferson's detractors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman as well 'had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.'"Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr. Jefferson's blood was Jeff's blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to these people of a parallel world. Jeff said the resemblance of one Hemings to Thomas Jefferson was 'so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.' This is so specific, so vivid -- 'at some distance or in the dusk' -- that Jeff had to be relating a likeness he had seen many times and could not shake the memory."
During a dinner at Monticello, Jeff Randolph recounted a scene in which a Thomas Jefferson lookalike was a servant tending to the table where Thomas Jefferson was seated. Randolph recalled the reaction of one guest: "In one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all."
In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph told a visiting author that his grandfather did not hide the slaves who bore these close resemblances, since Sally Hemings "was a house servant and her children were brought up house servants -- so that the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who visited this political Mecca" -- and indeed a number of visitors did make note of this reality.
Even Jefferson admirer Meacham acknowledged this fact, including in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, a quote by Elijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont:
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
