Early spring at Monticello

Thomas Jefferson is, of course, a towering Founding Father. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, Virginia’s statute of religious freedom and founded the University of Virginia (the three accomplishments he wanted listed on his tombstone). He doubled the size of the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. He read in seven languages. He was Secretary of State, Vice President, and our third president. He wrote 19,000 letters, and made copies of them using a “polygraph” machine. He designed his own lovely home and estate, with technological innovations to drain water off a flat roofs, to store river ice through the summer, and to have an abundance of natural light. He collected one of the best libraries in America and sold 6,487 volumes to the Library of Congress.

But since 1998, when you think of Thomas Jefferson, you think first of his great secret: that he fathered one child, more likely six children, with Sally Hemings, who was enslaved to him. DNA tests in 1998 confirmed that Eston Hemings was fathered by a Jefferson, and not the Jefferson that relatives had long believed was responsible. Add to that the curious omission of the father of Sally Heming’s children from the farm records of Monticello. Jefferson recorded everything about the farm: daily temperature and barometric pressure for 40 years, the weekly food and seasonal clothing allotments granted to every slave, the fathers of all the other children born to all of his slaves. As a friend said, it’s like the 18 minutes missing from the Watergate tapes. And the Thomas Jefferson Foundation believes Jefferson was the father of at least one, and probably all, of Sally Hemings’ children, we were told by two tour guides.

One way we have tried to wrap our modern sensibilities around this is to picture theirs as an early American interracial love story. The facts, however, are difficult to fit into this fantasy:

• Sally Hemings was 30 years younger than Jefferson. Hemings family history says she was pregnant with Jefferson’s child when she was 16 and they returned from Paris, where he was U.S. ambassador and she was caring for his daughter.
• Their last child, Eston Hemings, was born when Jefferson was 65.
• Jefferson did not free Sally in his will. He freed only five men: her brother John, a skilled joiner and cabinetmaker, to be freed a year after Jefferson’s death; her sons Eston and Madison Hemings, who were to work as apprentices to their uncle John for a year and then be granted their freedom; his butler and personal servant, Burwell Colbert, Sally Hemings’ nephew; and blacksmith Joe Fossett, also her nephew.
• About 200 of Jefferson’s slaves were sold in estate sales auctions after his death.

So here we have a picture of a middle-aged man taking advantage, it can only be said, of a teen-aged servant girl.

I picked up a book at the Monticello gift shop, “Jefferson’s Secrets,” by Andrew Burstein (Basic Books, 2005), which imagines Jefferson at the end of his life. Two chapters explored the Hemings relationship, and what responsibilities Jefferson may or may not have felt he owed to Sally Hemings and their children. It concludes, “It is only the imaginations of modern champions of interracial harmony that attribute to Jefferson a progressive ideology and, in turn, his acceptance of Sally Hemings as a putative social equal.”

So there you go: Thomas Jefferson, Founding Father, scholar, bibliophile, brilliant man, but a conflicted slaveholder constricted by 19th century moralities and economies.