The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Read Free

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 newspapers as “Dusky Sally,” “Yellow Sally,” and even “Mrs. Sarah Jefferson.” She was depicted in cartoons and lampooned in bawdy ballads—all alongside 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 fit 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