Thomas Jefferson’s DNA punctures US’ slavery ‘amnesia’

One of the founding fathers of the US had at least one child with a black woman he held in slavery, and people have trouble acknowledging that

• By Stephen Mihm / Bloomberg Opinion

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New analysis using a strand of hair from former US president Thomas Jefferson has effectively settled a longstanding, acrimonious debate: He almost certainly fathered children with Sally Hemings, a young black woman he enslaved.

The scientific discovery, announced last week, is the result of a collaboration between the Smithsonian and researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Many of Jefferson’s contemporaries were well aware of this relationship, along with the ubiquity of such interracial liaisons. So the fact that generations of historians and Jefferson defenders have struggled to accept this possibility is a testament to the US’ amnesiac relationship with slavery, and, no less important, the peculiar reordering of racial categories that followed its abolition.

Illustration: Mountain People

One cannot simply wish away written records. Consider the account of lawyer Josiah Quincy Jr of Boston. When he visited North and South Carolina in 1773, he came away stunned by what he saw.

Sex between masters and people who were enslaved, he confided to his journal, “is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter. It is far from being uncommon to see a gentleman at dinner, and his reputed offspring a slave to the master of the table... The fathers neither of them blushed or seem[ed] disconcerted. They were called men of worth, politeness and humanity.”

Things began to change after the US broke away from Great Britain, its independence fueled by revolutionary ideas about equality and liberty. These ideals were not very compatible with the institution of slavery, to say nothing of the sexual abuses and coercion associated with it. As a consequence, many defenders of slavery preferred to adopt what historian Joshua Rothman has described as a “cultural code of public silence” on such matters, banning interracial marriage, but silently tolerating sexual relationships between white men and enslaved black women.

That agreed-upon silence made the public airing of Jefferson’s interracial affair so shocking. Accusations came from James Callender, a political pamphleteer who had spent much of the 1790s attacking elite Federalists. By 1802, Callender had fallen out with former allies such as Jefferson, and he turned on the president.

Callender wrote that Jefferson, “whom it delighteth the people to honour, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.” Callender went on to enumerate a now-familiar host of charges, the most notable of which was that Jefferson, the philosopher of equality, had fathered multiple children with Hemings, all of whom remained enslaved.

The charges stuck, and Jefferson’s Federalist opponents ran with the allegation, writing poems mocking the president, while others sketched unsubtle political cartoons that showed Jefferson as a rooster next to his hen, Hemings.

Jefferson’s domestic situation was well known in Virginia; his friend John Hartwell Cocke described the situation as typical, where “bachelor and widowed slave owners” took an enslaved woman as “a substitute for a wife.”

By 1850, the federal census added a new racial category that tacitly acknowledged the growing number of mixed-race people as “mulatto.” In Jefferson’s home state of Virginia, census takers tallied more than 44,000 people in this category, or 10 percent of the enslaved population. The rest of the South was not all that different, even if the numbers tended to be a little lower relative to the population.

The implications of so many enslaved, mixed-race people were obvious to anyone living in the antebellum era. Rebecca Ann Latimer, who was enslaved by a prominent planter family, described how “there were violations of the moral law that made mulattoes as common as blackberries.”

If the people who lived during that time could make such acknowledgments, why have Americans today struggled to accept what was?

One answer lies with how individual states policed racial categories after the Civil War. Some southern states initially repealed many of the laws forbidding sexual or marital relationships between the races, but the move was short-lived. The violent death of Reconstruction, the disenfranchisement of black people, and the rise of the Jim Crow South redrew boundaries.

This inevitably raised questions about the fate of mixed-race people. In Virginia, as in other states in the South, racial categories hardened, and the older system, which tolerated a degree of ambiguity in racial identity, was replaced by the infamous “one-drop” rule that effectively erased the possibility that anyone could be anything other than wholly black or white in the eyes of the law.

Virginia did so in stages, beginning with its “Racial Integrity Act” of 1924, which divided the population into two groups, “white” and “colored.” It was followed six years later by an act that specified: “Every person in whom there is ascertainable any negro blood shall be deemed and taken to be a colored person.” Other states — including those in the North — passed comparable laws, effectively banishing the racial ambiguity that was the legacy of sexual exploitation associated with slavery. The federal government removed the category “mulatto” in 1930.

The past few decades, by contrast, have been spent chipping away at the racial binaries put in place after the Civil War, with mixed-race people formally recognized by the federal census beginning in 2000.

Those resistant to reckoning with these parts of US history do the republic no favors. Conversations about slavery and the people who benefited from or suffered under its power dynamics are not supposed to be easy. They are an opportunity for us to do better in the present, and the threshold could hardly be lower than recognizing the truth of what happened between Jefferson and Sally Hemings — and between the thousands of other masters and the women they enslaved.

Stephen Mihm, associate dean and professor of history at the University of Georgia, is coauthor of “Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance.” This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.