WAS A BLACK WOMAN ONE OF U.S.'S FOUNDING MOTHERS?

From Thomas Jefferson

By Christopher Hitchens
2005 Harpers Collins Perennial

...Before we quit the scene of Paris, the subject of Sally Hemings must be considered. It was in Paris that Jefferson met her, and began an affair that was to continue for many years, produce many children, expose him to considerable scandal – and needlessly baffle generations of American historians.

Sally Hemings was the granddaughter of one white slaveholder and the daughter of another, John Wayles. Mr. Wayles was also the father of Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha, so that the wife and the later mistress were in fact half sisters. To say that there was any taboo on "inter-racial" sex or "miscegenation" at Monticello would therefore be to exaggerate considerably.

And, although she was certainly a slave by virtue of being Jefferson's legal property, Sally – as I shall now call her – had not been subjected to the indignities and humiliations of field work and the lash. She was , from childhood, something more like a privileged housemaid. She had ben in the room when Martha Jefferson dies, and had heard Jefferson promise his dying wife never to marry again.

Evidently she had blossomed in at least two ways since that time, and since Jefferson's departure for France. All reports speak of her as strikingly attractive (how nice it would be to have a portrait), and Jefferson's cousins, Francis and Elizabeth Eppes, thought highly enough of her general moral mental deportment to entrust her with a mission of some responsibility. This mission was to accompany his surviving daughter Mary ("Polly") across the Atlantic in 1787....So it was the 14-year-old Sally to whom the respectable and responsible Eppeses delegated the task. 

The first clue to the relationship may lie in the simple fact that Jefferson, having met Sally and received his daughter from her in good condition, did not send her home again (as he had planned to do the original escort). He did not require an extra servant at the Hotel de Langeac, his well-appointed residence, where Sally's brother James was already on the staff , being trained on the staff, being trained as a French chef. Possibly the latter consideration influenced him, in inviting Sally to stay on. But nor did he exactly need a governess, since both his daughters were destined for boarding school.

Thus the beautiful Sally became a part of the ministerial household, with no specific duties. In 1788, Jefferson began to pay wages to her, and to her brother James, though he had never paid James a regular wage before. Moreover, slavery was not recognized as legal on French soil, a fact of which Jefferson was aware, and one that it would not have taken Sally long to find out.

It is therefore possible to say that, while they did have a common tie of affection and near-kinship in the person of the departed Martha – whom Sally may have resembled – Jefferson and Hemings did not have a "master–slave" relationship in the vile sense that it is normally understood...

It was later in 1788, most probably, that Jefferson began his affair with Sally. From then on, she was paid wages, lodged in a separate boarding-house when he traveled out of Paris, and given some decent things to wear in  a city that valued fashion. (Two hundred francs on "clothes for Sally" are noted in his accounts for April 1789.)

When they left for America, Jefferson insisted that she be berthed next to him on shipboard. All her subsequent children, duly entered in the log of Jefferson's "farm book" at Monticello, were born exactly nine months after one of his much-punctuated sojourns at the house. No other possible father was present at all such times....And all the children were freed....

Sally was a "quadroon," and both she and three of her sons – the only slaves Jefferson ever freed – were able to register as "white in the census of 1830. Most of their descendants continue to live on the "white" side of what is still America's most hazardous frontier, which surely qualifies Sally Hemings ) whose grave now lies somewhere under the parking lot of the Hampton Inn at Charlottesville) as one of our Republic's Founding Mothers.