What was the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings?

by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed FBA

4 Oct 2024

People often ask me how I ended up writing a book about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Jefferson and Monticello had been a longstanding interest of mine from the time I was in the third grade and read a biography of Jefferson. This was my introduction to the person who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, saying ‘all men are created equal’, but was also the person who owned enslaved people. From a young age, I wondered about that contradiction: all men are created equal and holding people in bondage. Of course, that is the American dilemma that we've dealt with for many, many years now.

Some years ago in 1994, a movie about Jefferson was released: Jefferson in Paris. When the movie came out, there were a number of historians who were saying things like ‘Jefferson would never have had a relationship with an enslaved woman’ or ‘there's no evidence that Jefferson had a relationship with an enslaved woman’, and they were upset about this movie because it was going to treat the story as if it were true.  I knew from my reading that there was in fact evidence that Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings.

A man named Madison Hemings gave his recollections of life at Monticello, growing up there with Jefferson as his father. There was another enslaved person who gave recollections, who talked about Monticello and corroborated what Madison Hemings had to say. I knew that wasn't proof, but it was evidence. I thought it was particularly insulting to suggest that when enslaved people told you about what life was like in slavery, that people went on the attack and accused them of lying. At the same time, Jefferson's legal white family said the reason all of Sally Hemings’s children looked like Thomas Jefferson is that they were the children of his nephews. This was a plausible story in the sense that people could in fact look like their cousins and nephews and uncles and so forth, but there was nothing to back up what these people were saying. However, historians believed them just because it got Jefferson off the hook, so to speak.

As a result, what I wanted to do in my book as a law professor, talking to the reader the way I talk to law students, is to say there are two competing stories. How do we decide who is telling the truth? What is more likely? What is more plausible? As I worked on the book, as I fleshed out these arguments and began to really look at the story, I could see that there was much more evidence supporting what Madison Hemings had to say and no evidence supporting what Jefferson's legal white family had to say about how this story unfolded at Monticello.

Engraving depicts Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, Virginia, nineteeth century.
Engraving depicting Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, Virginia, nineteeth century. Image credit: PhotoQuest via Getty Images.

The book came out in 1997 and it got a lot of attention because Jefferson is a popular figure for biographies – a lot of people wanted to hear what I had to say about it. Things really took off in 1998 when DNA testing was done on the descendants of members of the Hemings family, members of the Jefferson family, and members of the Carr family who were the descendants of the nephews who were supposed to be the fathers of Sally Hemings’s children. The DNA came back and showed that there was a connection between the Hemings and Jefferson. There was no connection to the Carr story. Taking into account what I had written in my book, as well as the information from the DNA testing, there was a sea change in understanding about this story, I should say, among historians. Members of the public didn't seem to have a problem with this. It was mainly historians, white historians, who did not like the idea that Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings.

So on 1 November 1998, this information from the test was announced all over the world. They had actually embargoed the story. All the newspapers around the world agreed to hold off on reporting it until the following Sunday so it could make the Sunday papers. This event changed my life because I had written this book and something had happened that very rarely happens in history: science came in and corroborated what  I had to say.

And as I began to think more about this situation, it occurred to me that one of the reasons that people had been so quick to dismiss what members of the Hemings family had to say, and what other enslaved people had to say about life at Monticello, was that people didn't know them. When you know someone, when you have a connection to a person, you pay attention to them in a different way.

So, I also knew that Jefferson was an inveterate record keeper. He had lots of records about members of the Hemings family. Some members of the family were literate, so we have some of their letters as well. They had a very strong family history about their ancestors and their forebears and what life had been like. What I set out to do was to write a book that made them  live as individuals and to remind people that Sally Hemings was not just enslaved: she was a daughter, she was a sister, she was a mother, she was an aunt, she was people's friends. And if you think of her as a well-rounded person, and if you think of not just her, but think of her in the context of a family, people will be much more careful with their stories and careful with the way they wrote about them.

For me, this was not just about the Hemings –it was about all enslaved people. It always struck me as perverse, I would say, for people to be more concerned about the welfare and the honour and the stories of people who were enslaving other people, than they were about the people who were living under that oppression.

Typically, we reserve our sympathy for the people who are victims. And there's no question that members of the Hemings family and the other hundreds of people who were enslaved at Monticello over the course of Jefferson's life were victims. Jefferson knew that. He wrote some of the most trenchant criticisms of slavery of anyone. He knew that he was victimising people, and we can't take the position of protecting him at the expense of the people whom he knew he was doing harm to.

Painting from circa 1754: Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776': Benjamin Franklin, left, John Adams meeting at Thomas Jefferson's, standing, lodgings in Philadelphia to study a draft of the document
Illustration by JLG Ferris depicting Benjamin Franklin (left), John Adams (centre) and Thomas Jefferson (right, standing) discussing a draft of the Declaration of Independence. Image credit: UniversalImagesGroup via Getty Images.

So the purpose of the book was not just to write about an item of salacious gossip, people sleeping with people and so forth, or rape, or however you want to characterise it. It was to talk about the way historians wrote about Black people, because I think that one of the legacies of slavery is a double standard. Some find it difficult to consider and think about evidence and to take African American people at their word when they say things that make white people feel uncomfortable. Both of my books on this topic were my efforts to try to change the way people write about enslaved people, particularly when enslaved people were involved with members of the founding generation whom Americans revere and don't want to believe bad things about. The truth of the matter is slavery – which people keep calling America's original sin, though that may not be appropriate but is something that was there from the very, very beginning – is something America is still struggling with the legacies of today.

If we get these stories right, I think it's much more likely that we can move towards a future where all people are treated as if they're created equal. We can realise the dream that Jefferson talked about in the American Declaration of Independence, and that African Americans, gay people, women, all people have used the words of the declaration to make a place for themselves in the American nation. Importantly, that contribution has to be seen alongside the fact that Jefferson enslaved people and that is the American dilemma writ large right there on the mountain.

Annette Gordon-Reed FBA is the Carl M Loeb University Professor at Harvard University   

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