After I wrote my first book, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," critiquing the way historians had written about the connection between the pair, I decided it was important for readers to understand the world in which Jefferson and Hemings lived; the forces that shaped them; the web of relationships that helped set the terms of their existences.
Hemings and Jefferson, part of a complicated and tragic generational saga, cannot be understood in a vacuum. I had to write about Hemings’s family in its entirety — her mother, Elizabeth Hemings, her father, John Wayles, her five full siblings, and her half-siblings, including Jefferson’s wife Martha Wayles Jefferson. It also meant writing about others enslaved at Monticello, with whom the Hemingses and Jefferson interacted. The unique place — a mansion and the mean cabins of the enslaved situated atop an 850-foot mountain, had to come into considered view as well.
It was my great honor, privilege, and joy to explore this world, and report on what I had found.
Excerpt: "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family"
The Hemings family of Monticello escaped the enforced anonymity of slavery for a number of reasons: first, because multiple generations of this large clan were owned by one of history’s most well-known figures, Thomas Jefferson, an inveterate record keeper and writer of letters. Jefferson’s papers have been grist for the scholarly mill for many years, and members of the Hemings family have long figured in Jefferson scholarship, but only as side characters in the saga of Jefferson and his white family. Only recently have the Hemingses and other members of Monticello’s enslaved community become the focus of scholarly attention. It is a sad paradox, in a story over- run with paradox and irony, that their being the “property” of a famous man ensured that, as the Jefferson scholar James A. Bear has pointed out, more would be known about this family of slaves than is known about the vast majority of freeborn white Virginians of the time.
And then there is the place itself. Monticello, one of the best-known residences in the United States during Jefferson’s time and today, is rich with the history of the Hemings family. Hemingses helped build and maintain the house, crafted furniture for it, and laid its floors. They worked as servants within the household, tended the gardens, and performed other essential tasks throughout the plantation. They lived there as husbands and wives, raising their children in slavery as best they could. Some died and were buried there. It is, quite simply, impossible to tell an adequate history of the mountain without including Hemingses.
Of course, the main reason that people all over the world have known about this particular enslaved family, during and after the era of slavery, is Jefferson’s relationship with Sarah Hemings, known most famously by her nickname Sally. Hemings and Jefferson were talked about in their immediate community during the 1790s, and their story, or a version of it, burst upon the national scene in the early 1800s when Jefferson’s enemies sought to use their relationship as a weapon to destroy his presidency and to prevent his election to a second term. The tactic did not work. Jefferson won in a landslide, bringing to office with him a large Republican majority in Congress. “The people,” whose wisdom Jefferson trusted (sometimes almost too implicitly), either did not believe the Hemings story or thought it trivial when compared with what they felt Jefferson and his administration had to offer them.
These events were not just about the life and fortunes of Thomas Jefferson. Other people were involved. Sally Hemings, her children, her mother, and other members of her family were dragged into the national spotlight in a way unprecedented for individual American slaves. During the early part of the nineteenth century, Sally Hemings appeared in news- papers as “Dusky Sally,” “Yellow Sally,” and even “Mrs. Sarah Jefferson.” She was depicted in cartoons and lampooned in bawdy ballads—all along- side Thomas Jefferson. The story crossed the Atlantic, with foreign commentators weighing in with their own perspectives.
Sally Hemings is often treated as a figure of no historical significance — a mere object of malicious personal gossip. That shouldn’t surprise. Aside from forays into “history from the bottom up” — a perspective that has been given increased emphasis over the past forty years — historical writing tends to favor the lives of individuals who spoke, acted, and had a direct hand in shaping whatever particular “moment” they lived in. Hemings does not t the bill on any of these accounts. She neither spoke publicly about her life nor engaged in any public acts that have been recorded. Others — journalists, Jefferson’s enemies — determined how she entered the spotlight; and they put her there with no real interest in her as a person.
Even though she was not in control of her life, Hemings must be seen as a figure of historical importance for a multiplicity of reasons, not the least of which is that her name and her life entered the public record during the run-up to a presidential election. Much has been written about Jefferson’s daughters and grandchildren, and they are treated as historically important simply because of their legal relationship to him, even though none of them ever figured in the politics and public life of his day. On the other hand, politically ambitious men with power used Hemings and her children as weapons against Jefferson while he was alive and in the decades immediately following his death. Her connection to him inspired the first novel published by an African American. It had resonance within black communities as ministers and black journalists in the early American Republic preached on and referred to Hemings’s family situation, one that would have seemed quite familiar to their predominately mixed-race audiences, most of whom were free precisely because their fathers or immediate forefathers had been white men. Finally, Hemings’s story affected members of Jefferson’s white family, notably his grandchildren who, for the benefit of the historians who they knew would one day come calling, fashioned an image of life at Monticello designed in part to obscure her relevance. Even without direct agency in these matters, Sally Hemings has had an impact on the shaping of history.
More important for our purposes, we must also see the public spectacle surrounding Hemings and Jefferson as a defining episode in the lives of all the Hemingses. No contemporaneous evidence of what members of the family were thinking as the talk of the pair made its way through the country’s newspapers and communities has come to light. They surely knew that people were talking because others at Monticello — members of Jefferson’s white family, his friends, and at least one white Jefferson employee — are on record stating that the relationship was much talked about in Jefferson’s neighborhood. In every community, throughout history, slaves and servants have been privy to the innermost secrets, anxieties, strengths, weaknesses, successes, and failures of the people they served. The Hemingses were no different.
There is much evidence that the Hemings-Jefferson connection meant a great deal to some members of her family. Madison Hemings, who at age sixty-eight spoke of his life as the second son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, told part of his family’s story to an interviewer in 1873, setting down valuable information about the family’s origins, life at Monticello, and the lives of one branch of the family after emancipation. The historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright have noted the other ways in which the Hemings-Jefferson liaison helped keep the Hemingses’ story at Monticello alive for successive generations of the family. Apparently, the relationship and its notoriety were critical reference points, not only for the descendants of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but for collateral branches of the family as well, serving as a guidepost that helped them remember who they were and where their family had been. Even the descendants of slaves at Monticello who were not members of the Hemings family carried the story of Hemings and Jefferson as an important truth about life on the mountain. When other things were forgotten, that understanding remained.
Sally Hemings and her children have overshadowed the lives of other members of her family. How could they not, given their relationship to Thomas Jefferson, who himself looms like a colossus over the lives of all those who will be discussed in these pages. In recognition of the importance of the topic, chapters 14 through 17 veer slightly from the narrative to provide an in-depth analysis of the pair’s beginnings in Paris. There is, however, far more to the Hemingses than “Sally and Tom,” and although that pair must be a critical part of our consideration, this book is not designed to tell just their story. There are many others who complete the picture of the family’s time in slavery and whose lives deserve to be woven into the tapestry of American history.