Everyone with an ounce of sense knows that karma is a bitch. Certainly, that is what President Thomas Jefferson discovered in 1802. Five years earlier, he had employed the scandal-rag journalist James Callender to trumpet Alexander Hamilton’s adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds. Now Jefferson found himself hoist with his own petard when his hired gun, feeling under-rewarded for his efforts, turned on Jefferson, exposing in his trademark shrill, nasty prose a scandalous amour of the president’s own.
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On June 26, 1787, Abigail Adams, wife of John Adams, the first American ambassador to Great Britain, greeted a special visitor in London: Thomas Jefferson’s younger daughter, just arrived on the Robert, commanded by Captain Ramsey. Nine-year-old Polly hadn’t seen her father since 1784 when he went to France to conduct commercial negotiations, leaving Polly in the care of her aunt. Now she would recuperate with the Adamses from the five-week trip across the Atlantic, and then journey on to her father in Paris. Little Polly did not arrive in England unaccompanied, of course. She had a traveling companion to look after her.
Jefferson had hoped to find a “careful English woman” traveling on the Robert who would agree to look after Polly. Unable to do so, he wanted one of his mature enslaved women to undertake the task, but that woman was recuperating from childbirth. Polly’s companion ended up being another of Jefferson’s slaves: fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his deceased wife, Martha. (Sally’s enslaved mother, Elizabeth Hemings, daughter of an African woman and a white man, had had six children with John Wayles, Martha’s father.) The result of what developed in Paris—and what would continue for many decades afterward—would shake the 1804 presidential election, cause Jefferson’s family to craft a carefully purged history, and tear apart families until the present day.
Immediately after retrieving Polly, Abigail wrote Jefferson, “The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her . . .” But within twenty-four hours of observing Sally, Abigail seemed to have had a frisson of foreboding. Perhaps it would be better to send Sally back to Virginia immediately. “The Girl who is with her is quite a child,” she wrote, “and Captain Ramsey is of the opinion will be of so little service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge.” On July 6, Abigail wrote even more disparagingly, “The Girl she has with her wants more care than the child, and is wholly incapable of looking properly after her, without some superior to direct her.” The Girl, evidently, didn’t even warrant the use of her name.
It is hard to imagine why Abigail ridiculed Sally for irresponsibility. At the time, a fourteen-year-old enslaved individual stood at the cusp of adulthood and would have been accustomed to working long hours quite efficiently. The Hemingses’ light skin—Sally was three-quarters white—and their family relationship with Jefferson gave them privileged status among his slaves. Instead of breaking their backs in the fields, the boys were taught trades, and the girls worked in the house. It is likely that Sally had looked after other enslaved children at Monticello, sewed, and worked in the kitchen and laundry. How then could she have been “wholly incapable” of looking after Polly?
Could it be that the prudish Abigail disliked Sally because she showed too much spunk and not enough deference? Perhaps Sally had a confidence the prim northerner did not like in a servant. Was Sally too familiar with little Polly who was, in fact, her niece? Was she just bubbling over with excitement to leave the plantation for the first time in her life, cross the Atlantic Ocean, and arrive in sprawling, bustling London?
Or had Abigail Adams heard rumors that Jefferson had an eye for young mulatto girls, as mixed-raced people were called at the time? Puritanical in outlook and scrupulously faithful to each other, Abigail and John Adams enjoyed sneering at the immoral sexual behavior of others. It may be significant that Abigail thought that Sally was older than she was—fifteen or sixteen—indicating she was well developed for her age. Additionally, Sally was reported to be “very handsome,” according to her son with Jefferson, Madison. Jefferson’s white grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, described Sally as “light colored and decidedly good looking.” According to Isaac Jefferson, an enslaved man who became overseer of Monticello in 1797, Sally was “mighty near white” with “straight hair down her back.” In his 1781 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote that white skin was more aesthetically pleasing than black because it enabled whites to blush, displaying their emotions and “the expression of every passion,” which he found quite charming. He added that “flowing hair” was a particularly important attribute of Caucasian beauty, and that mulattoes had “superior intellect” to those of fully African descent.
The Adamses had spent a great deal of time with Jefferson while he and John negotiated the commercial treaties in Paris two years earlier. They must have seen that Jefferson, in his forties, still radiated virility, turning the ladies’ heads. His astonishing height alone—he was almost six foot three in an age when the average man was five foot seven—would have made him stand out in a crowd. In addition, he was trim and handsome, with hazel eyes, reddish hair, a sensuous mouth, and a strong jaw. Perhaps, too, Abigail noticed that Sally resembled Jefferson’s beloved late wife, Martha, since they had the same father. If that were the case, Sally might prove an irresistible temptation to the lusty bachelor who owned her.
Lusty though he was, Thomas Jefferson would never truly get over his wife’s untimely death. Indeed, the life path he had carefully designed in his youth had taken surprising turns both tragic and fortuitous. Born in rural Virginia in 1743, the son of a well-to-do planter, he had received a sterling education, entering the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg at sixteen and two years later commencing his studies in law. Blessed with an omnivorous appetite for learning, he studied Latin, Greek, French, philosophy, mathematics, history, ethics, politics, and agriculture. He was fascinated by the world around him and, over the years, collected mastodon bones, studied the stars, cultivated 330 types of vegetables and 170 kinds of fruit, designed buildings, tinkered with inventions, and analyzed the Bible and wrote his own version, which he thought made a lot more sense than the original. His ravenous curiosity compelled him to collect thousands of books.
Admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767, Jefferson practiced law and served as a delegate to the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1775. In 1772, the twenty-nine-year-old married Martha Wayles Skelton, a twenty-three-year-old widow, with whom he was deeply in love. Like Jefferson, Martha was an avid reader. She played the piano beautifully, often accompanied by Jefferson on the violin. She kept his house and entertained his friends and birthed his babies. In addition to his law practice and political responsibilities, Jefferson ran his five-thousand-acre plantation and built his new house on a hill, which he called Monticello, “little mountain” in Italian. It was, for a short time, the life he had dreamed of. Farming. Raising a family with a beloved wife. Dabbling in local politics while working as a country lawyer.
And then, in 1775, the course of this calm, predictable life was swept up into the whirlwind of the Revolution. That year, aged thirty-two, he was one of the youngest delegates to the Continental Congress. There he became friends with John Adams, a delegate from Massachusetts. As Adams soon learned, while Jefferson could be witty and warm with friends, revealing the treasures of his encyclopedic knowledge, he shrank from strangers, often avoiding eye contact. Sitting amid the nation’s most powerful, argumentative men in the Continental Congress, he was positively tongue-tied. Adams said, “I never heard him utter three sentences together” and compared him to “the great rivers, whose bottoms we cannot see and make no noise.”
Perhaps because of his height, Jefferson slouched when standing up and when seated rolled onto one hip. Seeing himself as a farmer-spokesman for the common folk, he usually dressed casually, sometimes even sloppily. It was easy for the older, more experienced men at the Continental Congress to ignore him as a rather stupid country bumpkin. But Adams, aware of Jefferson’s vast knowledge and abilities, especially his powerful writing style, pushed to have him write the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence. Though Congress made changes to his document, it is Jefferson’s words that ring throughout history: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
After an unsuccessful stint as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, Jefferson felt he was poorly suited to public service and just wanted to return home, continue building his house, and spend time with his family. His wife, Martha, was sickly. She had given birth to six children during their decade-long marriage—though only two would live more than a few years—and she seemed to become sicker with each pregnancy. She never recovered from the birth of her last child in 1782. A few months later, on her deathbed, Martha made Jefferson swear he would never remarry. Jefferson’s overseer, Edmund Bacon, later recalled, “Holding her hand, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again.”
When Martha died, Jefferson fainted. For weeks, he was inconsolable, his grief frightening those around him. He stayed in his room, walking “incessantly night and day only lying down occasionally when nature was completely exhausted,” according to an early biographer who interviewed members of Jefferson’s immediate family. He must have been suffering from clinical depression, yet he managed to rouse himself enough to serve in Congress in 1783 to 1784.
Still, his friends believed he needed a change of scene. In the summer of 1784, he was sent to Paris to join John Adams and Benjamin Franklin to negotiate commercial treaties with several countries. He brought with him his twelve-year-old daughter, Martha, called Patsy as a child; and James Hemings, Sally’s nineteen-year-old brother, with the object of training him as a French cook.
Upon landing, Jefferson cast his comfortable sloppiness immediately aside. Here in France he would be representing his country and meeting King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and other power brokers. He powdered his hair and dressed in pastel brocades with diamond buttons, embroidered waistcoats, silk stockings, and frothy lace cravats and cuffs. For formal events he buckled on a jeweled sword. He sent Patsy to board during the week at the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, the most exclusive convent school in Paris, though she returned home on weekends.
In 1785, the commercial treaties ratified, Franklin returned to Philadelphia, Jefferson replaced him in Paris, and Adams took up the position as U.S. ambassador in London. Jefferson rented the opulent Hôtel de Langeac—a sprawling, gated estate abutting the Champs-Élysées with a courtyard, gardens, and outbuildings. Here he entertained in the grand style, often inviting thirty people to dinner at a time, and far outspending his government allowance. But one of Jefferson’s weaknesses—and one which would have horrific consequences for his enslaved people at Monticello—was his need to play the role of Lord Bountiful, the world’s most generous and elegant host, regardless of whether he could afford it or whom it might hurt.
Perhaps because of the constant round of entertaining, Jefferson didn’t follow Abigail’s advice and send Sally back to Virginia. Another pair of young, well-trained hands would come in handy. Moreover, Jefferson had known Sally from the time she was a small child, arriving with her family at Monticello as part of his wife’s inheritance from her father. When Jefferson had left Virginia in 1784, Sally was eleven. Perhaps he remembered her as an industrious worker, helping around the house. He sent a servant to London to escort his daughter and Sally to the Hôtel de Langeac. And on July 15, Sally Hemings arrived in Paris, no longer a flat-chested child, but a nubile girl budding into womanhood.
Though it is not known exactly what work Sally did for Jefferson, we can assume that during the week she ran errands, sewed, and helped her brother prepare meals. Perhaps she took care of Jefferson’s linen and clothing and bustled around his bedroom dusting and tidying. She must have looked after his daughters when they returned home on the weekends. She would have helped them dress, curl their hair, and keep their clothing clean and pressed. At fifteen, Patsy attended various social events. Sally would have stood back against the wall watching her mistress dance and play cards, brought her a cup of punch or plate of food, or assisted her on the chamber pot.
As the personal maid of the American ambassador’s daughter, Sally, too, was expected to look fashionable, attired in silk and satin, though with less decoration than her niece. Jefferson’s records show that he spent a good amount on her clothing, taking her around personally to milliners, apparently without Patsy in tow. It is curious that a man in his august position would have accompanied his slave to dress fittings, when his housekeeper would have been a more appropriate choice.
Sally might have loved not only the gorgeous French fashions, but the entire Paris experience. She had been used to the slow plantation rhythm of a few hundred people methodically feeding animals, pulling plows, and weeding tobacco. Now she was in a metropolis of seven hundred thousand people, the largest city in Europe. Right outside her door, princely carriages rattled past. Prostitutes and street vendors flaunted their wares. Actors set up impromptu street theaters. Beggars displayed maimed limbs and suppurating sores. For the first time in her life, Sally had her own money. Jefferson paid her sporadic wages, as he did her brother James and had done for her relatives back at Monticello. She could march into an upscale store and buy herself something lovely. Perhaps she and her brother visited museums or the theater, or sipped coffee at a café.
But for Sally and James Hemings, the most exciting thing about Paris could have been the Freedom Principle, which stated that enslaved individuals could claim their freedom at the Admiralty Court. It seems that James Hemings was intending to stay in Paris after Jefferson departed. He paid for French lessons with a tutor to perfect his knowledge of the French language. As a master chef in a noble household—an enviable and highly respected position—he could have commanded a high salary.
Meanwhile, in France the popular disgust with government mismanagement and overspending rose to a boil. Hail, floods, and drought destroyed crops, resulting in starvation across France even as the government raised taxes. On July 14, 1789, thousands of citizens unleashed their rage in Paris, storming the Bastille prison, that symbol of royal suppression. Jefferson was thrilled that France was following in America’s footsteps. “My fortune has been singular to see in the course of fourteen years two such revolutions as were never seen before,” he wrote.
Excited as he was by political events in France, Jefferson was itching to take his daughters back home and return a few months later without them. Enjoying her stay in the convent, Patsy told her Protestant father she wanted to become a nun. Jefferson, who had great difficulty telling anyone flat-out no, took her into society more, sometimes to as many as three balls a week, where she was such a success that he feared she would fall in love with a Frenchman and beg to marry him. In that case, Jefferson might never see her again. He was terribly afraid of losing those he loved—his father had died when Jefferson was thirteen, and he had lost not only his wife but four of their six children. “I am born to lose everything I love,” he lamented to a friend in 1787.
Moreover, Jefferson was not entirely comfortable with the education his daughters were receiving. As America’s ambassador, he had done what was expected by sending them to their prestigious convent school where they learned music, dancing, art, and languages. That was fine, in its way. Back in Virginia they would attend a dance now and then and amuse themselves at home playing the piano, painting, or reading a book in French. But, as he complained to his sister-in-law, nothing the girls learned there would make them particularly “useful in [their] own country.” Better, Jefferson believed, that they know how to make a pudding and mend a shirt.
Jefferson found French women—with their sharp wit, fierce self-confidence, and devastating attractions—a bit frightening, perhaps even emasculating. These Gallic Amazons wore powdered hair a foot high, with ostrich feathers waving another two feet above that. They had white lead–painted faces with black beauty spots and bright red cheeks, and rustled in poofed satin gowns, trailing clouds of heady perfume in their wake.
It’s not that he wasn’t attracted to these bold women. In August 1786, Jefferson had had an intense affair with twenty-seven-year-old Maria Cosway, a talented portrait painter resident in London, who was visiting Paris with her husband, Richard, also an artist. She had a full face, wide blue eyes under dark brows, a straight little nose, and pouting lips. Her golden hair was piled high and tumbling down to her shoulders in the popular 1780s coiffeur of a whirlwind destroying a wig store. For a month, while Richard Cosway painted portraits, Jefferson and Maria visited châteaux, strolled in gardens, and took carriage rides in the countryside. They had fallen deeply in love. Jefferson wrote of being smitten with “a generous spasm of the heart,” and we can imagine he experienced other generous spasms as well. He was overcome with grief when her husband took her away a month later, though he soon got over it.
In the winter of late 1787 and early 1788, the dazzling Angelica Church, who had been living in London with her husband, visited Paris. The sister-in-law of Alexander Hamilton—with whom he was presumed to have had an affair—captivated Jefferson as much as she had his political enemy. Theirs was, most likely, a gallant flirtation; effusive demonstrations of affection were fashionable at the time. But as far as a long-term relationship was concerned, Jefferson yearned for a more comfortable type of woman like his late wife, one who loved nothing so much as sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, knitting.
Someone, in fact, like Sally Hemings. By the time Jefferson prepared to return to Virginia, the lovely girl was sixteen. Here was a young woman who could never have emasculated him, never could have threatened him. Never could have left him. She could not demand marriage and try to make him break his promise to his late wife. A man could not marry his slave. Legally, she was required to do his bidding as long as she lived. Sally, for Jefferson, was the perfect solution.
And what about Sally? How did she feel about him? We know frustratingly little about her as a person, her thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams and disappointments, and barely anything about her relationship with Jefferson. As an enslaved woman, she leaves us no portraits, no letters or diaries. We do not know if she was literate, though her brother James was. And we have no idea when the affair began. Did he set out immediately to seduce the pretty fourteen-year-old? Or did the daily contact over two years gradually result in feelings on both sides?
Our only source of information was her son with Jefferson, Madison Hemings, who, in 1873 at the age of sixty-eight, spoke with a journalist from an Ohio newspaper. Regarding Sally’s tenure in Paris, Madison said, “During that time, my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine . . . When he was called back home she was enceinte [pregnant] by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him, but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him.” It was, for a time at least, Sally Hemings’s own declaration of independence.
Again, Jefferson was in danger of losing someone he cared for, as well as his unborn child. In France, he could not force Sally to return with him. “To induce her to do so,” Madison continued, “he promised her extraordinary privileges and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. She trusted Jefferson over French law, with her life and the lives of her children.” Madison described their pact as a “treaty,” a bargain on both their parts.
Did Sally Hemings love Thomas Jefferson more than freedom? Or did she merely tolerate him but longed to see her mother, brothers, and sisters in Virginia again? Did she believe that her relationship with the plantation master would raise her family’s status even higher, obtaining greater comforts and privileges for them all? Was she afraid of remaining in Paris, pregnant and alone?
And why didn’t her brother James, a master chef, fluent in French, stay and claim his freedom? It is likely that he planned to return to France with Jefferson in early 1790 and wanted to spend some time visiting his family at Monticello whom he hadn’t seen in five years. Whatever the reason behind their extraordinary decisions to return to slavery, on October 22, 1789, Sally and James Hemings set sail for Virginia, looking back at France, as the freedom they could have had dwindled on the horizon and disappeared.
Just four months later, James’s plan to return to France and freedom were ruined when President George Washington appointed Jefferson the first U.S. secretary of state. Jefferson—and James—would not be returning to Paris. They would be going to the interim U.S. capital, New York. James was stuck in slavery, though Jefferson would free him in 1796 once James had trained his brother Robert as a master chef to replace him.
After Jefferson’s daughter Patsy married in February 1790, he gave her several slaves, but not Sally, who had been her lady’s maid for two years in France and would have, under other circumstances, been the logical choice. Yet Jefferson ended up sending Sally’s fourteen-year-old niece.
It is intriguing how every household slave at Monticello is mentioned in family correspondence except Sally Hemings, and her absence from the letters is a clue in itself. After Jefferson’s death, Patsy sifted through his documents to prepare them for publication. Numerous letters that did not reflect well on Jefferson were not published. Let us imagine that Patsy found the following note she had written her father decades earlier: “Dear Father, I am in sore need of a lady’s maid. It’s a pity Sally can’t be the new maid, but I understand she is big with child. Please send me someone else.” Surely, she would have consigned such a missive to the flames, along with anything else mentioning Sally.
Jefferson’s daughters must have understood the nature of his relationship with Sally Hemings, especially when she gave birth to several light-skinned children, at least some of whom resembled him. As awkward as the relationship must have been for his daughters, they likely appreciated the fact that Jefferson did not remarry and sire legitimate children who could draw off their expected inheritance. This kind of family upheaval happened quite frequently in an era when so many young women died in childbirth. Sally’s children could never inherit for two reasons: they were illegitimate, and they were slaves. But Sally’s baby, born most likely in the spring of 1790, seems to have died in infancy; Madison’s mention of this pregnancy more than eighty years later is the only extant reference to it.
As secretary of state, Jefferson found himself increasingly at odds with Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury. The vastly differing views that had first become apparent while negotiating the Constitution continued to inflame their hatred for each other as the nation fell into two political parties. Jefferson found himself, along with James Madison, the leader of the Republican Party, Hamilton in charge of the Federalists. Jefferson rejected national debt, banks, and vibrant commerce. He believed the most virtuous life was farming, pulling your plow—or better yet, watching your slaves pull your plow—over the rich earth to bring forth food.
While Hamilton enjoyed fierce vocal debate, Jefferson could not bear to argue with anyone and disliked those who did. He saw disagreement as bad manners. In a letter to John Adams he wrote, “I do not love difficulties. I am fond of quiet, willing to do my duty, but made irritable by slander and apt to be forced by it to abandon my post.” If Hamilton poked holes in his proposals, Jefferson, clearly passive-aggressive, would not jump up and respond angrily. He would sit quietly, plotting revenge in the form of nasty newspaper columns, using aliases.
At the end of 1793, Jefferson resigned from his position as secretary of state, feeling snubbed by President Washington, who mostly sided with Hamilton, and returned to Monticello. He ran for president in 1796 and came in second after John Adams, which, according to the electoral system of the time, meant the nation had a Federalist president, John Adams, and a Republican vice president, Jefferson, who labored to undermine everything the president did. He secretly worked with the French to thwart Adams’s policies and wrote nasty anonymous newspaper articles about the irascible chief executive tearing off his wig and kicking it across the room in rage. Picture Hillary Clinton as Donald Trump’s vice president, or vice versa, and you will understand the strange and horrible politics of the late 1790s.
When Jefferson won the presidential election of 1800, he sought to portray himself as a man of the people. For two weeks after his inauguration, he stayed at his boardinghouse near the Capitol and dined at the common table. Once ensconced in the White House, Jefferson often answered the door himself wearing an old robe and bedroom slippers. When William Plumer, a Federalist from New Hampshire, arrived at the White House and saw the slouching, slovenly Jefferson open the door, he naturally assumed he was a servant, and a poorly dressed one at that.
In one case, Jefferson’s dress resulted in a diplomatic furor. On November 29, 1803, Anthony Merry, the new British ambassador to the U.S., arrived at the White House to present his credentials in a blue dress coat with gold braid, white breeches, white silk stockings, a feathered hat, and a dress sword. Jefferson ambled into the room wearing slippers “down at the heels,” as a furious Merry wrote his superiors in London, woolen stockings, and old clothing of “utter slovenliness.” Not only did Merry feel that he had been personally insulted, but he viewed Jefferson’s appearance as an insult to King George III, whom he represented. And it probably was, when we consider how Jefferson had powdered and curled his hair and sported brocade suits with diamond buttons while serving in France. To make matters worse, while Jefferson and Merry were speaking, the president of the United States of America repeatedly kicked his rotten old slipper up in the air and caught it on his toe. Soon after, when Merry and his wife arrived for a White House dinner, they found that the traditional system of ranked seating had gone out the window, replaced by a kind of unseemly musical chairs as guests fought over the most honorable seats. The ambassador boycotted official functions.
And now, as president, Jefferson’s bad karma came back to haunt him. James Callender, the hack journalist he had hired to publicize Alexander Hamilton’s tawdry love affair with Maria Reynolds, became furious that Jefferson, as president, wasn’t doing enough to reward him. He demanded that Jefferson appoint him postmaster of Richmond as payment for services rendered, a demand Jefferson refused. Callender decided to poke around Charlottesville and Richmond to see what dirt he could dig up on his former employer. And it wasn’t very hard to learn of Sally Hemings. It seemed that her thirteen-year relationship with the president was the best-known secret in the commonwealth of Virginia.
A vicious racist, Callender was disgusted by the news. Jefferson, a man Callender had worked with and looked up to for several years, was a traitor to the white race. Callender would humiliate him publicly, as well as Sally Hemings and their children. “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves,” Callender wrote in the September 1, 1802, issue of the Richmond Recorder. “Her name is SALLY.” It was just the first salvo in a cruel attack. The September 14, 1802, issue of another Richmond newspaper, the Virginia Federalist, reported that, according to multiple sources, “Mr. J,” a man in a position of great power, had “a number of yellow children and that he is addicted to golden affections.”
Though Callender was correct that Sally had given birth to five children by then, three of them had died. Either he didn’t know that, or he didn’t want to portray Sally as a figure worthy of sympathy. It served Callender’s purpose to present Jefferson as populating the world with countless mixed-race bastards. He reported that Sally’s oldest child, the one born soon after she returned from France, was still living and called “President Tom,” bore “a striking resemblance to the President,” and was “putting on airs.”
Callender called Sally “the African Venus,” “Dusky Sally,” “Yellow Sally,” and “Black Sal,” and indicated she lived in the pigsty at Monticello. “A slut as common as the pavement,” she had sex with thirty men of all colors. Learning that three teenaged enslaved girls worked in the White House kitchen, Callender crowed that Jefferson kept a “stable of mulatto girls” there for his sexual pleasure. Sally was caricatured in newspaper cartoons and ridiculed in ribald ballads. Newspapers in Europe commented on her.
Jefferson maintained a dignified silence about the accusations, which was easier to do in a time when there was no threat of a microphone being stuck in your face. Moreover, unlike Hamilton, he had not been falsely accused of financial crimes that he would have felt obligated to deny. There is no record in his family papers—of course not—about the reactions of Jefferson, his family, and Sally herself to Callender’s vitriol. The one thing Sally had possessed was her privacy, her dignity. Now the entire world knew her name, her shame, her love—if love it was—and her bargain. Now millions of people saw her as the Black Whore of Babylon. We can assume her large, supportive family buoyed her up, as did Jefferson himself. Perhaps he sent her encouraging letters from Washington, which the family later burned.
Callender’s last months were difficult ones. Though readers loved his florid, nasty prose, some of those who knew him personally were heartily sick of him. In December 1802, one of his former defense attorneys beat him on the head with his walking stick. In March 1803, a group of Republicans attacked his newspaper office. Another former friend in an open letter in the Richmond Examiner suggested that Callender, once he stopped drinking whiskey, should swallow a dose of James River water. A few months later, Callender did just that. He was found drowned in the James River in three feet of water, reportedly too drunk to stumble to shore. Either that, or one of his literary victims had murdered him.
While Callender had hoped his disreputable revelations would prevent Jefferson from enjoying a second term, his plan did not work. In November 1804, Jefferson won 162 out of 176 electoral votes, winning on a strong economy, low taxes, and the triumph of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, he had bought some 828,000 square miles of territory from France for $15 million (some $340 million in today’s money), doubling the size of the United States with a pen stroke. Perhaps his best-known accomplishment in his second term was the return in 1806 of the two-year expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the new territory and beyond, all the way to the Pacific, mapping the land, initiating diplomatic relations with native peoples, and bringing back plants, seeds, and minerals.
In 1809, Jefferson left office and returned to Monticello to play the role of virtuous resplendent farmer. Soon after, his daughter Patsy—now going by her legal name of Martha—separated from her abusive, alcoholic husband and moved back to Monticello with her eight children. It must have been awkward having her father’s enslaved mistress at the house, along with all those nearly white enslaved children who looked just like the author of the Declaration of Independence. Martha demanded that Jefferson send them all away to one of his other plantations, but he refused.
Jefferson, who always loved to entertain, providing countless guests with the finest food and wines, now reveled in hospitality so extreme it was almost pathological. Any stranger could knock on his front door and stay as an honored guest in Hotel Monticello, where no one ever paid a cent. Entire ravenous families arrived with their hungry servants and famished horses, sometimes staying weeks at a time. Jefferson, whose finances had always been precarious, had left the White House poorer than he had arrived because of his lavish entertaining. Now he was racking up more debts, and completely unconcerned by the work he was giving his enslaved people—changing bed linens, doing laundry, cooking, cleaning hearths, and emptying chamber pots. But there would be far worse consequences.
Sally Hemings kept out of the way of Monticello visitors, quietly going about her business. “It was her duty, all her life which I can remember, up to the time of father’s death, to take care of his chamber and wardrobe, look after us children and do such light work as sewing,” her son Madison recalled. Jefferson made sure that his private quarters were strictly off limits to the countless visitors wandering through the house. During his presidency, he had had “porticles” built, structures attached to the exterior of his private living area, with louvered blinds, which prevented people from peering into his bedchamber.
It was a good idea, because many of the visitors to Monticello had read about the African Venus and were keeping an eye out for her. In 1811, one visitor, Elijah Fletcher of Vermont, reported after his visit, “The story of black Sal is no farce. That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children as slaves, an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts.”
Of the seven children Sally had with Jefferson, only four survived to adulthood. The boys—Beverly, born in 1798, Madison in 1805, and Eston in 1808, when Jefferson was an impressive sixty-five—learned the craft of fine furniture making in the Monticello carpentry shop. His daughter Harriet, born in 1801, learned to weave and spin. Back in Paris in 1789, Jefferson had promised Sally that he would free their children when they turned twenty-one, a promise he did not fulfill. It is likely that he was afraid they would leave him if freed and, as we know, he had a deep-seated fear of losing those he loved.
In 1822, when Beverly was twenty-four, he was fed up enough to simply walk away from Monticello, and Jefferson did not pursue him. Soon after, twenty-one-year-old Harriet decided to leave, too. The Monticello overseer, Edmund Bacon, reported that he gave her $50 (more than $1,000 today) and put her on a stagecoach north, probably to join Beverly. Bacon described Harriet as “nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful.” Both Beverly and Harriet lived as white people in Washington, D.C., and married well-to-do whites. After several years, they changed their names so no one could trace them back to their black family and stopped writing home.
In a spectacular coincidence, eighty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United States, as did the only other signer to become president, John Adams. The two had started off as friends, became rabid enemies, and finally reconciled in their final years. Indeed, Adams’s last words were, “Jefferson lives,” but Jefferson had died a few hours before.
Jefferson’s death had horrific consequences for his slaves. Six months after his death, his surviving daughter, who inherited his staggering debts, advertised “130 Valuable Negroes” to be auctioned off. How tragically ironic that Thomas Jefferson—who penned the most powerful words of liberty and equality in human history—ended up sending these people to the auction block, to have their lives uprooted, their families separated, to work for new and perhaps cruel masters. The laws for freeing slaves were complex and designed to make it difficult. Many whites feared that freed slaves would wreak revenge for their heinous treatment. They wanted them either to remain enslaved or go back to Africa. Yet Jefferson could have freed a good portion during his lifetime, and freed them all in his will, as George Washington had done in his. But doing so would have deprived his white family of valuable property at a time when they would be dealing with his massive debts.
Jefferson officially freed only two slaves during his lifetime, Sally Hemings’s two brothers, James and Robert, in the 1790s, though they had to work for it. He had allowed two of his children with Sally to head north. In his will, he freed two more sons with Sally, twenty-one-year-old Madison and eighteen-year-old Eston, whom he called his “apprentices.” His will did not free Sally; wills were recorded in the county courthouse where any nosy person could read them. Jefferson’s daughter Martha informally gave Sally—who was her aunt—“her time,” allowing her to live as a free person.
Sally moved into a rented house on Main Street in Charlottesville and later moved into her son Madison’s house. Before she died in 1835 at the age of sixty-two, Sally gave her sons precious, carefully harbored mementos of Jefferson: a pair of eyeglasses, shoe buckles, and an inkwell, apparently all that she had left of him. Perhaps she had truly loved him after all.
In 2017, archeologists tore out a tourists’ bathroom in Monticello’s basement under the South Terrace and, based on the description of Sally’s room by Jefferson’s grandson, declared it to be Sally’s. It is being restored and furnished, a tribute to the nation’s most famous unknown African American woman.
Over the years, Thomas Jefferson’s white descendants have not only bent over backward to deny his relationship with Sally Hemings but twisted themselves into pretzels. Not only were any references to Sally destroyed soon after his death, but in the 1850s, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Martha’s son, bruited it about that the late Peter Carr, one of Jefferson’s nephews by his sister Martha, had fathered Sally’s children. The story was published and generally accepted. The oral history of the Hemings family was ridiculed as a pack of lies, uppity black people desperately trying to latch on to the saintly Thomas Jefferson.
A 1998 DNA test on Jefferson’s white descendants and a descendant of Eston Hemings, however, upset the applecart. It showed that Peter Carr could not have been the father. There were seven other male Jeffersons who could have been, including his younger brother Randolph. Although Randolph had never been mentioned as a possibility before the test, his name was put forward by people desperately grasping at DNA straws. Moreover, Randolph, though he lived only twenty miles from Monticello, had visited only four times as documented in Jefferson’s obsessive-compulsive recordkeeping—in September 1802, September 1805, May 1808, and sometime in 1814—none of which coincided with the conception of Sally Hemings’s children. Nor was he in Paris when Sally conceived her first child. However, since Madison Hemings’s recollections of his mother’s tales are the only indication of this child, some historians believe there is insufficient proof of its brief existence.
The fact is that during a period of nineteen years from her arrival home from Paris in 1789 until the birth of her seventh child in 1808, Sally Hemings never conceived when Jefferson was away from Monticello. This indicates she may never have had another sexual partner. One compelling detail is that on July 11, 1797, Jefferson arrived at Monticello after a long stay in Philadelphia, and thirty-eight weeks later Sally had a baby. Another is that Jefferson noted the fathers of all his female slaves’ children in his farm book except for the children of Sally Hemings. He never listed their father. Nor were there any rumors in that gossipmongering era of Jefferson having any other lover. It seems the two of them stayed faithful to each other until death.