Should Sally Hemings Be Listed as a First Lady?

The trouble with Sally Hemings is that so few of the facts have been preserved. She didn't write a book (although she could have written a lively one). She died before photographs were invented. Nobody even painted her portrait. Was she Black? We don't even know that she was a brunette!

The photo in Benny Johnson's article is, of course, an actress who played Sally Hemings in a fictional movie, almost two hundred years after Hemings' lifetime.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/should-thomas-jeffersons-alleged-slave-mistress-be-included-in-a-list-of-first-ladies-msnbc-host-thinks-so/

"Mistress" is an appropriate title for Hemings--in the sense of "lady in charge of the house and business," and also in the sense of "female teacher." If not an ideal heroine, she was certainly a tough, talented, intelligent, influential, and apparently very attractive woman. Whether the hateful twentieth-century use of "mistress" to mean "homewrecker" applies to Hemings remains unproven. Even if she was Jefferson's, um, "girlfriend," she was a child when his wife died.

However, the closest thing we have to a canonical biography of Sally Hemings is a memoir one of her children published after her death. The text was recently anthologized...I think, without checking the library where I found the anthology, that it was Daryl Cumber Dance's From My People. It states that Hemings had an English family name because most of her ancestors were English. She was believed to be the half sister of Martha Wayles Jefferson, to whom she was given as a slave for a wedding present. We don't really know what Martha looked like, either; her official portrait was said not to be very lifelike, but it does show her red hair. Since the Wayles family were motivated not to claim a slave child as a relative, the resemblance between the child Sally and the debutante Martha must have been strong, whether it included red hair or not.

So, if some of Hemings' children had red hair, that would not prove that they were in any way related to Thomas Jefferson. That was why some of these people's descendants went to the trouble of exhuming one of the long-buried bodies to run a DNA test that confirmed that at least one of Hemings' children probably was a Jefferson. Some people still claim that what the test really proved was that this man was Thomas Jefferson's nephew, not son.

Thomas Jefferson was ill, too, when his wife died. His stated reason for not marrying certain rich ladies who expressed interest in him was that he'd lost all interest in sex and couldn't have children.

Sally Hemings, who had not lost interest in sex, allegedly told her children that she was reasonably sure who their fathers were--and no more than two of them had the same father. She was not a "nice girl." She was an intelligent woman who had been well educated so that she could tutor her half sister's children, then relegated to overseeing the farm, still as a slave, while her charges/nieces and brother-in-law were living glamorously in Washington. Affairs with a wide variety of men were probably her main source of intellectual stimulation, and may also have been a source of unreported income. President Jefferson's brother, and probably some of his cousins, were among her, um, friends. She wasn't legally free to marry anyone, no matter how much "in love" they might have been, and was described as a harsh, embittered "driver" who ordered plenty of whippings.

Whether they slept together or not, Hemings and Jefferson definitely had a close business partnership--that went sour. Jefferson lost a lot of money by trying to help a friend, and died in debt; Hemings was one of several people he owed a great deal of money. It's conceivable that she deliberately told her son that he was Thomas Jefferson's son, rather than nephew, in the hope that this might help him collect some of that debt.

Why rake up all this muck from the long-buried past? Because I think it might help the "controversial" members of the Jefferson clan if they tried a different approach. Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were sensitive, intelligent people; as such they kept the details of their relationship very discreet. There's no need to try to guess more, now that they're dead, than they ever allowed anyone to know while living. We can stick to the known facts. Hemings was not the First Lady; Jefferson never remarried; his daughter and Dolley Madison shared hostess duty at the White House, while Hemings drove the slaves at Monticello. Hemings was an employee, and in-law, to whom Jefferson owed more than he could possibly have paid in money.

Only some of Hemings' descendants are related to Thomas Jefferson, and it remains a matter of dispute whether any of them could be considered a direct descendant of his. Probably all of them are, however, related to Jefferson's daughter and heir, Martha Jefferson Randolph. Certainly all of them are related to the person who did most to salvage Monticello from financial ruin. Can't everyone agree that that's enough to secure their places at family gatherings?