Thomas Jefferson spent years raping his slave Sally Hemings. A new novel treats their relationship as a love story.
As a believer in Mr. Jefferson, I think the effort to demonize him, this time coming from the African American community, is understandable but tragic.
Jefferson needs to be seen as OUR Founding Father, and our means all of US.
Like my own real father, Jefferson had faults. He was also an anti-Semite.
But, Jefferson’s insistence of individual freedom is the very basis of the US. I think African Americans need to accept him while criticizing him as one of OUR ancestors who had a major flaw.
The facts are also confusing. Jefferson treated his black field slaves as cattle., He whipped people (or had them whipped) and sold and bought human beings .
He saw the black slaves as animals. He thought they were improved by being bred to white folks.
We do not know when Jefferson and Sally Hemings had sex. We certainly do not know that this was in Paris when the underage Sally chose not to seek her freedom, as was her right in France. Instead she .. along with her older brother, now a Chef trained in Paris, chose to return to the US and to their status as slaves.
Her choice to return my have been because of Jefferson or because of a desire oto be near older brother. It may even have been self interest given her lowly status in re revolutionary France as an underage mulatto. Would she, with no job and limited education, have any good choices in France?
As to what happened back in Virginia, we know little. We do know that she lived with Jefferson for decades and for most for the time Monticello as an isolated rural house with few visitors. We also know that under the law she and Jefferson could not legally wed., It was very common at that time for slave women to live openly as common law wives. None of the correspondence from the era says whether she had that status in the Jefferson house.