Recently I came upon some new information about Thomas Jefferson and his Black slave mistress, Sally Hemmings. I knew he had fathered children with her at a time when Blacks were considered 3/5 of a human being, and that Jefferson was subjected to a lot of criticism because of his relationship with her.
James Callender, a muckraking journalist, reported in the Richmond Recorder in 1802 that the president had a black slave mistress who had borne him a number of children. “Her name is SALLY,” he wrote. Newspapers from Maine to Georgia reprinted the story, and racist poems were written about Jefferson and ‘Dusky Sally.’ Jefferson’s defenders were more muted, waiting in vain for the denial that never came from the Executive Mansion. The scandal rocked the fledgling nation.” —Smithsonian Magazine, November 2016
This is old news. What’s new comes from the Washington Post, July 2017:
“….the true nature of their relationship, which is believed to have begun when Hemings, then 14 years old, accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to live with Jefferson, then 44, in Paris. She wasn’t Jefferson’s mistress; she was his property. And he raped her.”
And America thought Roy Moore was a degenerate. All he’s accused of is touching a 14-year-old’s bra. Thomas Jefferson did a wee bit more than that with a girl 30 years his junior, and he’s an honored Founding Father with a monument on the Washington Mall.
This is an example of the concept of the SOCIAL CONSTRUCT, i.e., society decides what’s good or bad, moral or immoral. Much older men cohabiting with teen-aged girls was acceptable in those days. An interracial relationship was not.
Jefferson fathered six children with Sally Hemings, and four of them survived to adulthood. It’s possible she had two children with him by the time she was 16. They returned to Virginia from France, and he promised to elevate her standing on the plantation and take care of their children. They were together for 39 years, from 1787 until his death in 1826.
Jefferson never freed Sally from slavery. His daughter did after he died. She went to live with her adult children and died in 1835 at age 62.
Sally Hemings was three-quarters white and one-quarter black. The word used in the past to describe this is “quadroon.” That meant her children with Jefferson were one-eighth black and referred to as “octoroons.” Today we use the general term “mixed-race.”
Three of Sally’s children passed for white and lived in white society as adults.
Once again the answer is the social construct. Race is a social construct. Society decides on what constitutes blackness or whiteness. In America a person who’s half-black, a quarter black, or an eighth black is considered black. The South had a “one-drop rule” which denied voting rights, property rights, and many other privileges to persons who had 1/22nd black blood in their veins.
A person may come here from a South American country where he’s considered white only to find that in the United States he’s definitely black.
You see, the definition of race is confusing for people of color as well.
“Despite fathering Hemings’s children, Jefferson argued against race mixing because black people were “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” Washington Post, July 2017
In his “Notes on the State of Virginia” in 1785 (before his relationship with Ms. Hemings) Jefferson wrote that “black people simply didn’t feel pain the same way white people did. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether Heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their experience appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.”
Donald Trump and his supporters could use Jefferson’s observations as proof that separating immigrant children from their parents at the Mexican border has no negative effect on them and is a good and humane policy.
Some ideas never change.
by 
