Sally Hemings Quotes

We are judged... not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.

People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby’s laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.

In theory, Jefferson could have fathered all of Sally Hemings’s children. Fawn M. Brodie has written, “Jefferson was not only not ‘distant’ from Sally Hemings but in the same house nine months before the births of each of her seven children and she conceived no children when he was not there.”54 Jefferson freed only two slaves in his lifetime and another five in his will, and all belonged to the Hemings family, though he excluded Sally. On her deathbed, Sally Hemings told her son Madison that he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children. In 1998, DNA tests confirmed that Jefferson (or some male in his family) had likely fathered at least one of Sally Hemings’s children, Eston. Reading between the lines of “Phocion,” one surmises that Hamilton knew all about Sally Hemings, quite possibly from Angelica Church.

But nevertheless, it spoke, and I didn’t listen, and now I am damned. . .

accepted without question the account promoted by the two white men while expressing skepticism about the black man’s narrative.

Can we fairly say that the strength of convictions that existed during this time would have been weaker than the zeal and fervor of abolitionists who had won their struggle by the time Madison Hemings was interviewed in 1873?

In the time of slavery, black women were often sexually exploited by white men. (Read up on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.) Now, imagine you were a black man and the woman you’d claimed as your wife (legal marriages between slaves weren’t allowed) was raped by your white master or overseer. Not only was she raped but she was impregnated and gave birth to the master’s child, and there was nothing you could do about it. Try to imagine the kind of hurt and anger you’d feel if this happened to you once, twice; if it happened to your children; if you suspected it had and would go on for generations. On the other hand, imagine that if you so much as looked sideways at a white woman, if you did nothing but were accused of violating her respect and/or chastity, you could be captured, beaten, and lynched by a posse of white men. And when it was all over, that there would be nothing your people could do lest they suffer the same fate as you. And no consequences for the white people who murdered you. If that were your reality, if that were the history of your forebears, how angry would you be?

Time magazine tried to cover up the Founding Fathers’ crime of non-diversity by making them look less WASPy.7 A photo display of eleven descendants of the Founders included Yukiko Irwin, born and raised in Japan,8 and an African American probation officer, Elmer Roberts, allegedly descended from Thomas Jefferson’s nonexistent sexual relationship with slave Sally Hemings. Time wanted to make absolutely clear that the United States was not the product of a bunch of Protestant, Anglo-Saxon men, if that’s what you were thinking. Except, the problem is, it was. And the country remained overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant right up until Teddy Kennedy decided to change it.

On February 14 Jefferson accepted the post. On February 23, 1790, Jefferson’s daughter Martha was married at Monticello to a third cousin, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr. Presumably, on the scene was her youthful aunt the slave Sally Hemings, daughter of Martha’s grandfather, John Wayles. The fact that Jefferson would have six children by Sally (half-sister to his beloved wife, another Martha) has been a source of despair to many old-guard historians, but, unhappily for them, recent DNA testings establish consanguinity between the Hemingses and their master, whose ambivalences about slavery (not venery) are still of central concern to us. If all men are created equal, then, if you are serious, free your slaves, Mr. Jefferson. But they were his capital. He could not and survive, and so he did not. He even transferred six families of slaves to daughter Martha and her husband. It might be useful for some of his overly correct critics to try to put themselves in his place. But neither empathy nor compassion is an American trait. Witness, the centuries of black slavery taken for granted by much of the country.

Until Harriet Hemings left in 1822, Jefferson had never freed a female slave. There may have been several reasons for this, but we know at least one that was probably the most important to him. Two years before Harriet Hemings left Monticello, Jefferson wrote a letter to his former son-in-law John Eppes in which he said that he considered female slaves to be far more valuable than male slaves. Why? Because female slaves had children and, thus, added to capital.43 At the time of Harriet’s departure, Jefferson was in dire financial circumstances. Bad economic times in Virginia, along with Jefferson’s expensive way of life, had set him on

. . . I am trying to tell the truth to its “teeth and forehead,” as Shakespeare says. Yet I am afraid that I am building a big lie out of tiny facts, that everything I say about who I was and how I lived will imply that I could have lived no other life, that I was entirely dispossessed of freedom of will. The simple fact that tortures me to this very instant is that I was never without freedom of will, that at any of countless junctures I could have said, “No,” and I would have lived a different life. Nothing was truly inevitable, and even when I didn’t know I was making a choice, I was—and I must bear the burden of those choices. Most troubling of all, however, are the times when I did know I was making a choice and a voice inside me told me that the choice was wrong but I didn’t listen—because I didn’t believe the voice, or I didn’t want to believe it, or because I couldn’t really hear it among a thousand other voices.

ON JULY 15, 1787, eight-year-old Polly Jefferson and fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings reached Jefferson’s Paris doorstep. Sally Hemings had come to Monticello as an infant in 1773 as part of Martha Jefferson’s inheritance from her father. John Wayles had fathered six children with his biracial captive Elizabeth Hemings. Sally was the youngest. By 1787, she was reportedly “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back,” and she accompanied Polly to Paris instead of an “old nurse.

The American colonies—and soon the new American republic, whose leaders often used the language of the Enlightenment—offered flagrant examples of hypocrisy. The Virginia gentlemen and landowners who advocated American independence were mostly slaveholders. George Washington still owned slaves at Mount Vernon when he died in 1799. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” was a lifelong slave owner. For thirty-eight years, Jefferson lived with his slave Sally Hemings, who bore him seven children. Washington and Jefferson were far from alone in this presidential hypocrisy. Twelve American presidents owned slaves, eight of them while in office.

a Supreme Court which is careless of the law can diminish respect for law. But there are clearly times when what might have been acceptable to Thomas Jefferson becomes unacceptable to us, and whether in 1954 Jefferson might have made Sally Hemings drink at the water fountain marked ‘Coloreds Only’ becomes irrelevant. At best.

Randolph’s postwar statement dovetails with the prewar assessment of his grandfather Thomas Jefferson’s close friend John Hartwell Cocke, who spoke frankly of the ways and preferences of white men in the Old South. Commenting upon Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings in a private diary, Cocke said that Jefferson’s situation was common in Virginia: “bachelor and widowed slave owners” often took a slave woman as a “substitute for a wife.”16 There was no suggestion that unmarried men lost caste for doing this. His was simply a resigned statement about the way men lived in Virginia’s slave society, as they have in every one that has ever existed. John Wayles had done exactly what Cocke described

Despite the strong historical evidence that Jefferson was anti-slavery, probably one of the biggest stumbling blocks to accepting this fact today is the widespread modern belief that Jefferson fathered children with slave Sally Hemings. In November 1998, Nature magazine first announced that DNA evidence proved this, and most are familiar with this finding. However, most don’t know that only eight weeks later, that announcement was recalled, with the admission that the DNA test actually had not proven that Jefferson fathered any children with Hemings. As it turns out, no DNA sample from the Thomas Jefferson family line had been used in the testing. It does seem that if someone wanted to test Jefferson’s paternity, his own DNA should probably be used.

For part of his Parisian stay, Jefferson was joined by his two daughters. The younger one, Polly, arrived in 1787 in the company of his light-skinned fourteen-year-old slave, Sally Hemings, who was called “Dashing Sally” at Monticello and was later described by another slave as “mighty near white” and “very handsome” with “long straight hair down her back.”19 Jefferson had inherited the Hemings family via his wife, and it is now presumed that Sally Hemings was her half sister. We do not know for certain whether Jefferson’s apparent romance with Sally Hemings began at this time or after he returned to America.

Remember Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the illegitimate daughter of Senator Strom Thurmond? She said, “There are many stories like Sally Hemings and mine. [Hemings, a slave, had children fathered by the United States president Thomas Jefferson. See chapter 11.] The unfortunate measure is that not everyone knows about these stories that helped to make America what it is today.” What America is today is a nation where the Supreme Court has ruled that all states must allow same-sex marriage.

We don't say "freshman" or "senior," etc, at UVA because Mr. Jefferson felt that education is a lifelong process. Thomas Jefferson- another gorgeous white boy who would not have been interested in me. This was my problem in a nutshell. To get some play in Charlottesville, you had to be either a Martha Jefferson or a Sally Hemings.

saw you, Sally Hemings is the name of it. It’s in paperback for $3.25. She was Thomas Jefferson’s slave and mistress for twenty-plus years. A really good book with real

Obama vs. American Guilt Obama is compensatory expiation for America's collective guilt for using and abusing the black man since our Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, fucked his first slave, Sally Hemings at age 15 to the the time Rodney King got his teeth kicked in by the racist LAPD pigs. Obama personifies the reparation of this debt of iniquity and inequality ~ not that any assclown who ran against him was worth a rat's ass anyway.

Marshall, gray-haired, storm-browed, is nevertheless a child sitting at a child’s desk. He folds his papers impatiently, stuffs them into a leather satchel and stands. “We are judged,” he says as he moves toward the door, “not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.” He opens the door, then slams it behind him, but its sound is obliterated by my booming laughter.

The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson runs less than one hundred pages and ends when he becomes US secretary of state in 1790. In this work, Jefferson attempted once again to secure his antislavery credentials, after training for a lifetime as a slaveholder: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free,” he wrote. “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” In forty years, nothing had diminished his need to produce racist ideas—not the Black exhibits, uplift suasion, letters from abolitionists, Sally Hemings, or the loyalty or the resistance of enslaved Africans. Jefferson shared the same view in his Autobiography in 1821 that he had in Notes in 1781. He promoted the colonization idea, that freed Blacks be hauled away to Africa in the same manner that enslaved Blacks had been hauled to America.

But the differences between the two races, especially that of colour, led Jefferson to advocate the total removal of the Negroes, after emancipation, "beyond the reach of mixture." My dear Miss Sally Hemings, has the man no shame?

The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la carte. A nation outlives it generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delawre, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying out the pensions. If Thomas Jefferson's genius matters, the so does his taking of Sally Heming's body. If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

She said that between the slavery tour and the new Sally Hemings exhibit, Monticello was pushing its visitors to see the more complex and holistic version of Jefferson. She did say, however, that some visitors thought the museum was trying to be too politically correct and, by portraying Jefferson more holistically, trying to change history. “We’re not changing history,” Theresa said, unfazed. “We’re telling history by telling the full story, more of the story of everyone who lived here, not just certain people who were able to tell their stories.

Mr. Owens told Danita more about Thomas Jefferson. “He was a farmer and a politician and an architect who designed his own home. It was called Monticello, and it had a dome. Look at a nickel, and you can see it.” Several kids pulled out nickels and examined them. “He was an inventor,” Mr. Owens said and described some of Jefferson's inventions. “He also slept with Sally Hemings,” Danita pointed out. “That's right,” said Mr. Owens, “and he fathered many children.

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An almost four decade relationship would have put these two people in something that resembled a form of marriage. It would mean that a slave woman whom historians have spent generations either ignoring or explaining away would have lived in this state with Thomas Jefferson four times as long as he had lived with Martha Wayles Jefferson. If she was his mistress for that many years, Sally Hemmings most likely would have known the real Thomas Jefferson better than anyone, and the one whom she knew would be unrecognizable to the historians who had devoted their lives to knowing him. That just could never be.

It's impossible to know what affections existed between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but sexual relations between an owner and his property cannot reasonably be conceived as anything other than rape.

He has a boiled egg and two glasses of cider at the posthouse while his horses are being changed. The hostler stamps the snow off his boots, scattering white chunks across the gray floorboards. “Everything’s ready, Your Excellency.

He was a democrat in practice as well as theory, was opposed to the slave trade, tried to keep it out of the Territories beyond the Ohio river and was in favor of freeing the slaves in Virginia.

Then, on September 1, 1802, Callender broke a story that he had learned about in jail and that was to reverberate down through American history: Jefferson’s scandalous romance with Sally Hemings: “It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . . By this wench Sally, our President has had several children.

Jackie had encouraged her friend Barbara Chase-Riboud to write her groundbreaking book about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and the mother of at least six of Jefferson’s children—a disturbing part of American history that, at the time, remained little known.