When I was back in tenth grade I did this term paper on Thomas Jefferson and I seem to remember coming by something that said he’d had a dozen or so children by one of his slaves, who was named Sally or something like that. What’s the straight dope on this, Cecil? Is this a major coverup conspiracy? –Kool Moe Steve, Washington, D.C.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
If TJ’s sex life was the subject of a coverup, Kool Moe, it was an amazingly inept one, considering that even tenth-graders seem to know all the details. Truth is, Jefferson’s alleged liaison with the mulatto slave Sally Hemings has received enormous and continuing publicity, starting with scandal-sheet broadsides by Jefferson’s enemies in 1802, during his first term as president. The matter was given its fullest treatment in the late Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Biography (1974), which says the relationship lasted 38 years. The most lurid stories have a daughter of Jefferson and Hemings being sold into prostitution in a New Orleans slave market for $1,000, a tale that made the rounds in abolitionist circles for many years.
Then in 1873 an Ohio newspaper published an interview with a former slave named Madison Hemings, who claimed to be one of Jefferson’s five children by Sally Hemings. Another former Monticello slave backed up Madison’s story but admitted he did not “positively know” Jefferson was the father. As a rival newspaper editor dryly noted, “[Madison] was no doubt present at the time of accouchement [birth], but his extreme youth would prevent him from knowing all the facts connected with that important event.” The editor also noted that it was common for slave mothers to claim illustrious fathers for their children.
