As I understand the DNA evidence, science has confirmed that the father of one of Sally Heming's children was someone descended from Thomas Jefferson's paternal grandfather.  Obviously, that person might be Thomas Jefferson--but it could also be any of several other individuals as well.

We will never know for certain, it seems to me.  For one thing, it seems quite possible that the group of men descended from Thomas Jefferson's grandfather included men who were themselves enslaved.  Given the prevalence of miscegenation in Virginia, how can we rule out the possibility that Jefferson had half-brothers or cousins who were slaves?  It is not much of a stretch at all to imagine that Jefferson's father, uncles, or grandfather had children by enslaved women. As is the case with so many other plantation families in Virginia, our genealogies for the Jeffersons are partial and incomplete, precisely because sex between enslaved women and their owners or overseers was so common.

And that, ultimately, is the point, isn't it?  White men rather routinely had sex with their slaves.  Even if Jefferson himself did not engage in sex with Hemings--a big if--he surely had to know it was happening.  And he did nothing about it.  Jefferson is damned either way. And the larger point is that this is necessarily true, because Jefferson was a slave owner.  Jefferson's moral plight was no different, really, than that of any other slave owner, for reasons that he himself well understood.  Slavery corrupted everyone who came into contact with it.  Jefferson himself knew this, and wrote eloquently about it in NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA.  So on this issue there is no "out" for the man.  Like Patrick Henry, Jefferson saw slavery for what it was, and did nothing, because (as Henry put it), owning slaves was "convenient."  

The dispute over the ancestry of Hemings' children, it seems to me, rather perversely distracts our attention from the deep hypocrisy at Monticello.  Monticello was built on a lie.  As much as Jefferson tried to hide slavery from view, slavery permeated the very bones of the house, as well as the life he crafted for himself there.  If slavery contradicted the high ideals that Jefferson, at his best, so elegantly articulated, we should not forget that it was Jefferson who laid the foundation for the pro-slavery argument of the 1820s and 1830s.  Jefferson pointed the way, in his discussion of the laws of Virginia, to reconcile slavery and Lockean liberalism.  

More charitably, Jefferson illuminates the condition of slaveowners--and by extension all of us--who lived enmeshed in social institutions that enveloped their lives in ways they could not fully grasp.  For all the subtlety and clarity of his thinking, Jefferson never seemed able to internalize his understanding in ways that informed his actual day to day behaviour.  Like almost all of his peers, Jefferson never managed to come to grips with the day to day evil in which he participated.  If the very best men and women that 18th century Virginia produced could not pull off this feat, then perhaps we are asking too much of them?  And if that is true, then what does that have to say about us?  Is it not possible that we, too, live our lives enmeshed in social institutions, and reified power relations, whose evils we dimly perceive, and with which we grapple ineffectually?  
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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