Jefferson's Monticello finally gives Sally Hemings her place in presidential history
Source: The Washington Post
By Philip Kennicott
June 13 at 12:00 PM
You cannot see Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, Monticello, from the small room burrowed into the ground along the south wing of his estate. When the door is closed, you can’t see anything at all, because it is a windowless room, with a low ceiling and damp walls. But this was, very likely, the room inhabited by Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore six of Jefferson’s children, a woman about whom little is known, who lived her life as Jefferson’s property, was considered his concubine, was a source of scandal and a political liability, and yet who might be considered the first lady to the third president of the United States if that didn’t presume her relationship to Jefferson was voluntary.
On Saturday, Monticello will open the room to the public, with a small exhibition devoted to the life of Hemings and the Hemings family. Reclaiming this space, which previously had been used as a public restroom, marks the completion of a five-year plan called the Mountaintop Project, which has seen significant changes to the beloved estate of the founding father. Using archaeology and other evidence, Monticello curators have restored Mulberry Row, where enslaved people lived and labored, and made changes (including to the wallpaper, paint and furnishings) inside the mansion, restored the north and south wings, and opened the upstairs rooms to the public on special tours. But symbolically and emotionally, the restoration of the Hemings room is the heart of the new interpretation of Monticello, and it makes tangible a relationship that has been controversial since rumors of “Dusky Sally” became part of American political invective in the early 19th century.
“Our goal has been to get the stories back and get the landscape back, so people understand the proximity of Jefferson’s house to this community,” says Leslie Greene Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates the historical site. “People used to think, ‘Oh, the slaves were down on the plantation.’ No, they were right here in the middle of it.”
It has been a quarter-century since Monticello began offering tours that focused on Jefferson and slavery, and over the course of that time, the public has largely come to accept what was once routinely discounted by historians: that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’s children. In 2000, Monticello released a research report detailing the evidence, including DNA tests that established a direct genetic connection between descendants of Hemings and Jefferson. The work of historian Annette Gordon-Reed, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 book, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” has helped move the larger public to consensus on the issue, although the Monticello website’s comments page still attracts doubters and trolls.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/jeffersons-monticello-finally-gives-sally-hemings-her-place-in-presidential-history/2018/06/12/55145ac0-6504-11e8-a69c-b944de66d9e7_story.html
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I've heard some of this history before, but it's been awhile. The details were foggy, to say the least!
Fascinating!
The Jeffersons had six children, but only two daughters survived to adulthood, and only one past the age of 25. Weakened by childbirth, Martha Jefferson died several months after the birth of her last child, two decades before her husband became the third President of the United States. Her husband adhered to her request not to remarry, though it is widely held that he had children by a slave, Sally Hemings.
. . . .
Mrs. Jefferson's health worsened and she died on September 6, 1782, four months after the birth of her last child. Jefferson was inconsolable and "was led from the room almost in a state of insensibility by his sister Mrs. Carr, who, with great difficulty, got him into his library where he fainted, and remained so long insensible that they feared he would never revive."[3]
After the funeral, he withdrew to his room for three weeks. Afterward, he spent hours riding horseback alone around Monticello. His daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph wrote, "In those melancholy rambles I was his constant companion, a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief."[3] Not until mid-October did Jefferson begin to resume a normal life when he wrote, "emerging from that stupor of mind which had rendered me as dead to the world as was she whose loss occasioned it."[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Jefferson
Wikipedia says she died weakened by childbirth, but I have also read that she died perhaps of breast cancer.
Sally Hemmings is believed to have been a half-sister of Martha Jefferson.
Sally Hemings came to Jefferson's home as an infant with her siblings and her mixed-race mother, Betty, as part of his wife Martha's inheritance of slaves from her father, John Wayles. Hemings was the youngest of six children Betty Hemings is thought to have had with Wayles. If true, she was three-quarters European and a half-sister of Martha Jefferson.[4] In 1787, Hemings, aged 14,[1] accompanied Jefferson's youngest daughter Mary ("Polly"
to London and then to Paris, where the widowed Jefferson, aged 44 at the time, was serving as the United States Minister to France. Hemings spent two years there. It is believed by most historians[who?] that Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Hemings in France or soon after their return to Monticello.[2] Hemings remained enslaved in Jefferson's house until his death. In 2017, a room identified as her quarters at Monticello, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom, was discovered in an archeological restoration. It will be restored and refurbished.[5][6]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Hemings
Jefferson did not remarry.
In fact, he promised Martha that he would not remarry.
Shortly before her death, Martha made Jefferson promise never to marry again, telling him that she could not bear to have another mother raise her children.[41] Jefferson was grief-stricken by her death, relentlessly pacing back and forth, nearly to the point of exhaustion. He emerged after three weeks, taking long rambling rides on secluded roads with his daughter Martha, by her description "a solitary witness to many a violent burst of grief".[40][42]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson#Monticello,_marriage_and_family
Another bit of history that must be judged by the values and customs of its time and not ours. We find the whole story shocking and horrible, but Jefferson's behavior reflected his time.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, not all that long before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862-1863. 36 or 37 years. That is approximately or nearly the amount of time that has passed since the election of Reagan in 1980: 1980-2018 (just a bit longer.)
From Wikipedia:
The Proclamation was issued in two parts. The first part, issued on September 22, 1862, was a preliminary announcement outlining the intent of the second part, which officially went into effect 100 days later on January 1, 1863, during the second year of the Civil War.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation
My son-in-law is a Jefferson descendant and a member of the Jefferson Society(?).
He was in law school at U. VA in Charlottesville in the mid 90s and we visited a few times.
With him, we were able to see parts of Monticello that are off limits to the general public (mainly the upstairs and inside the graveyard).
Very interesting.
It pays to know people in high places.
..best it be a more informative one. 
