A Racist Who Spent His Life With His Enslaved Black Lover

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Digging up politicians’ scandals—especially sex scandals—has a long pedigree. In the United States, the first high-profile instance dates to 1802, when Thomas Jefferson was president. As everyone knows, George Washington was the nation’s revered first president. In 1796, when Washington declined a third term, Federalist John Adams and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson faced off; Adams won. In 1800 they ran again, and this time Jefferson prevailed. During Jefferson’s presidency a rumor began to circulate that he had fathered several children with his enslaved Black lover, Sally Hemings. Jefferson never commented, and the story didn’t really catch fire. In 1804 he won reelection. Over the next two hundred years, Jefferson’s descendants continued to deny the allegation, and mainstream historians largely accepted their line. Even so, the rumor never disappeared. From the mid-twentieth century on, scholars reopened the question and treated it as a serious historical issue, asking—on the basis of evidence—whether the story was baseless or true. Among the most influential works is Harvard professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.

Gordon-Reed argues that in contested histories, scholars have tended to privilege white testimony and dismiss Black testimony—a bias in itself. Jefferson’s descendants denied the reports about Sally Hemings, while Hemings’s descendants and many people enslaved on Jefferson’s estate said he was indeed the father of her children. Those voices, she insisted, deserve equal weight. Gordon-Reed combed through letters and interviews with the two families, along with Jefferson’s own writings and journals, cross-checking them. Her conclusion: Jefferson and Hemings did have a sexual relationship, and Jefferson was the father of her children. One telling detail is the timing of Hemings’s pregnancies. Jefferson often traveled or lived away from home (for example, in Washington, D.C.), yet every time Hemings became pregnant he happened to be at home; she never conceived while he was away. In addition, all of Hemings’s children were freed by Jefferson upon reaching adulthood—making them among the very few of the hundreds of people he enslaved who were ever manumitted. Hemings’s son Madison recalled that Jefferson promised his mother he would free all of their children. The historical record fits that account.

With events two centuries in the past, airtight proof is hard to come by; most of what historians can assemble is circumstantial. Even so, the research by Gordon-Reed and others is compelling. After their work appeared, it became much harder for the historical profession to wave away the Hemings story. Broad consensus finally emerged in 1998, when scientists compared Y-chromosome DNA from Hemings descendants and Jefferson descendants and found that a male in the Jefferson line was indeed an ancestor of Hemings’s lineage. Some sticklers still argue that this doesn’t prove Thomas Jefferson himself was the father. But for most people—including me—it looks like a smoking-gun piece of evidence.

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Sally Hemings was one of more than a hundred enslaved people Jefferson inherited when his father-in-law died. Her mother, Betty, was the daughter of an African woman held in bondage and a white European officer. Under Virginia law at the time, a child’s status followed the mother—not the father—so Betty was born enslaved.

After a series of sales and transfers, Betty came into the household of Jefferson’s father-in-law and had six children by him. Those children were three-quarters white and one-quarter Black, yet the law fixed their status through their mother: they, too, were enslaved. Perhaps because the Hemingses were light-skinned, and perhaps because some of Betty’s children were half-siblings of Jefferson’s wife, the family was treated more favorably than most people Jefferson enslaved. They were spared field labor and worked in the house—some as housekeepers, some as valets—and several were trained as skilled artisans. Jefferson supervised them loosely and dealt with them in a friendlier manner than was typical. Sally’s brother Robert, for instance, served as Jefferson’s personal attendant, but when he wasn’t needed he could come and go, hire himself out for wages, and keep the money. When Jefferson required his services, he simply sent word and Robert returned.

Sally was Betty’s youngest daughter. In 1784—two years after Jefferson’s wife died—he sailed to France as the American minister. He initially brought his eldest daughter and a few enslaved servants, among them Sally’s brother James. When one of the two younger daughters who had remained in America died, Jefferson arranged for the surviving child to be sent to him in France. The little girl needed a companion for the Atlantic crossing, so Sally came to Paris in 1787. She was fourteen; Jefferson was forty-four. Historians generally believe their intimate relationship began there. By the time Jefferson and his household returned to the United States in 1789, Sally was pregnant.

While Jefferson was serving in France, slavery was effectively prohibited on French soil; anyone enslaved who set foot there could petition a court for freedom. Even if Sally hadn’t known that, her older brother—who had arrived earlier—likely did. Yet neither sibling went to court. Instead, they returned to America with Jefferson and remained enslaved, a decision that has long puzzled observers. Family ties may explain part of it: their relatives were in the United States, and going back meant going home.

According to Madison Hemings, the couple’s second son, Sally set terms before returning: Jefferson would free their children when each reached the age of twenty-one. Jefferson agreed—and later did exactly that. He also freed James a few years after they were back in America. For James and Sally, staking their futures on one man’s promise was a tremendous gamble. Fortunately for them, Jefferson proved a man of his word.

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Jefferson is a man of riddling contradictions. The Declaration of Independence he drafted rests on the idea of “natural rights”—that all people are created equal and are endowed with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But the “people” he had in mind were white. Others, in his view, did not share those rights. In some of his writings he spoke of Black people with open disdain, judging them intellectually inferior, unfit to live as equals alongside whites, and even suggesting that racial mixing “improved” those he called pure Africans. He was, of course, a practical defender of slavery and owned hundreds of human beings.

Views like his were common at the nation’s founding. Take race out of the picture and the Founding Fathers often come across as fierce champions of fairness and justice. Put race back in, and most of them fail the test. Some backed slavery outright; others looked the other way. Add to that the dispossession and killing of Native peoples—another of America’s original sins. This is why I tend to be pessimistic about racism. I think it’s rooted deep in human nature and won’t disappear except over a very long time and through the efforts of many. People of different races have a harder time blending into one community than people of the same background. Groups that live apart rarely develop understanding or empathy. The dominant group often looks down on the weaker; and if today’s weaker group became dominant, there’s no guarantee it would behave better—perhaps worse.

For the same reason, I admire those white liberals who are willing to reckon with America’s racial history and, from a position of advantage, voluntarily give some of that advantage up. Whether their methods are practical, too rushed, or overly simplistic, they show a sliver of goodness in human nature—fragile but precious.

As for Jefferson, while he reads today as a slaveholder and a racist, I don’t feel overwhelming hostility toward him. First, his words and actions did not always align—his political enemies loved to call him a hypocrite. In theory he disparaged Black people as a group; in practice he wasn’t cruel to Black individuals he knew. He remained with Sally Hemings until his death—nearly forty years—which, to me, was a shocking defiance of social norms at the time. Second, historical figures have to be judged in their own era. We can’t expect people two centuries ago to meet today’s standards. I suspect that, placed in our world, Jefferson would count as a white liberal. His sense of justice and habit of self-scrutiny might lead him to see that contempt for Black people is wrong; his powerful mind and wide learning would expose him to modern science showing that skin color does not determine character or intellect. Even if he couldn’t shed his emotional biases overnight, he would likely take care to avoid bias in speech and conduct.

Some people say his statues should come down; some already have, because of his slaveholding and racial views. I disagree with tearing them down. What truly saddens me is that some people today still cling to retrograde racist beliefs without the slightest self-reflection, feeling no shame—as if the last two centuries had brought no progress at all, as if they still lived in a benighted, pre-Enlightenment age.