Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s Paris Sex-Slave : Why Presidents can’t sue you for speaking truth
The sexual slavery Jefferson practiced in Paris later triggered the first Presidential sex scandal — and birthed a fundamental principal of free speech.
“No man can replace him,” Thomas Jefferson said of his illustrious predecessor, Ben Franklin, upon arriving in 1784 to take up his place as America’s new Minister to France. Yet despite working in Franklin’s shadow, Jefferson’s own years in Paris still remain the stuff of legend — and of endless scandal.
Clearly no American ever used his time in Paris more fully. A compulsive collector and cultural connoisseur, Jefferson shipped back a truly astounding array of French arts, cuisines, and concepts to Virginia — ranging from French fries to French philosophies.
Four years later in 1789, he personally witnessed the storming of the Bastille, and briefly loaned out his residence to host Revolutionary meetings. Through his friend the Marquis de Lafayette, Jefferson even helped shape the new French Republic’s founding document, The Rights of Man.
Today based on new DNA evidence there’s no longer any doubt that Jefferson also initiated sexual relations with his then fourteen-year-old slave girl, Sally Hemings, during precisely these same otherwise idyllic years in Paris. Worse yet, this scandalous sexual enslavement continued for decades, including the eight years when Jefferson occupied the White House.
Whether viewed as rape or romance, the Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship has now become an all-but-irrefutable fact of American history.
Instead the real surprise is how deeply Jefferson’s illicit Parisian passion for sexual slavery helped shape the future of slavery itself in both France and the United States — including the Louisiana Purchase, freedom of the press, sugary French pastries, and Napoleon’s worst military defeat prior to Waterloo.
In fact, Jefferson’s failure to muzzle his critics explains exactly why no President, Trump included, can sue for libel to silence the press (or ordinary citizens) simply for the “crime” of telling the truth.
Dashing Sall
Let’s begin by reviewing the sordid facts: By the time Jefferson was posted to Paris at age 40 in 1784 — five years before the outbreak of the French Revolution — he had already become a middle-aged widower. Emotionally devastated by his wife’s death, Jefferson’s mood sank so low that his old friend John Adams privately worried that Jefferson might even attempt suicide. Fortunately, life in Paris cured that despair. Ensconced in a lavish new residence on the Champs-Élysées, Jefferson immersed himself in all the many sensuous pleasures of Paris — including wine, women, and French fries, with a joyfully passionate abandon.
Yet when news of his youngest daughter Lucy’s death back in America reached France, Jefferson was once again plunged into dark despair. To ease his grief, he requested that his youngest surviving child, Polly, be sent immediately to join him in Paris — accompanied by one of Jefferson’s youngest Monticello house slaves: Sally Hemings.
Sally was in fact the mixed-race half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife: the illegitimate child of Jefferson’s father-in-law and his mistress, the slave Betsy Hemings, who had given birth to six mixed-race children. In the Southern white planter society of those times, the presence of such “shadow families” was considered completely commonplace. In this regard, Jefferson’s forthcoming affair was no exception.
But Sally Hemings was no ordinary slave. Back at Monticello she had already become known as “Dashing Sall.” One slave described her as “mighty near white” with “long straight hair down her back.” Many have speculated that Sally might even have reminded Jefferson of his long-lost wife. Regardless, at age fourteen Sally irrefutably became the object of Jefferson’s lifelong sexual attentions.
The First Presidential Sex Scandal
Fifteen years after arriving in France, and serving as the nation’s third President, Jefferson’s cohabitation with Hemings remained the worst-kept secret in Washington. In fact, Jefferson’s youngest illegitimate son, Thomas Easton Hemings, was born during his father’s last year in the White House, when Jefferson was 65 years old.
Given President Jefferson’s penchant for attacking the sexual morality of his political opponents — especially Alexander Hamilton — this couldn’t remain an open secret forever. Yet ironically, it was Jefferson’s own paid scandal-monger, a ferocious journalistic hack named James Callendar, who finally broke the story when snubbed by the new President: “It is well known,” a vengeful Callendar sneered in print, “that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. By this wench Sally our president had several children. The African Venus is said to officiate as housekeeper at Monticello.”
Just for the record, there was never really much doubt that Callendar’s scandalous accusations were accurate — even without modern DNA analyis to confirm them. This was, after all, the same President whose house slaves were frequently recognized by outsiders as his own children. Among those shocked by just such a revelation was Jefferson’s own eldest (white) grandchild, who blushingly recorded the presence of slave “children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.”
Others seated at Jefferson’s dinner table were equally shocked. As his grandson reported, “A gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson looked so startled as he raised his eyes from [Jefferson] to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.” Indeed, as Jefferson’s chagrined grandson himself concluded, “Sally Hemings was a house servant and her children were brought up as house servants — so that the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who visited this political Mecca.”
Thus began the first and arguably the greatest of all Presidential sex scandals — a sex scandal that has its origins in Paris.
Freedom of Speech Is Not Slander
At least one result of the Jefferson-Hemings scandal was positive, helping to establish and enshrine our First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
As Governor of Virgina, Jefferson is rightly hailed as the author of the Virginia Bill of Religious Freedom, which helped to inspire the Federal Bill of Rights. Yet ironically, as President Jefferson became the sworn enemy of the First Amendment — and then one of its first victims. Despite repeated efforts to sue Callendar for slander over the Sally Hemings stories, Jefferson’s legal strategies backfired.
Ever since the Jefferson-Hemings scandal, the sacred American Consitutional principle that “speaking the truth about a politician is not a crime” has remained enshrined in American jurisprudence, a central pillar of our First Amendment freedoms.
By attempting to muzzle Callendar, President Jefferson unwittingly struck a crushing blow for freedom of the press. Criticizing a monarch or president can still get you killed on much of the planet. Here in the United States, at least for now, speaking truth to power is not slander.
There remains, however, one more final catastrophic coda to consider: On the eve of yet another First Amendment suit for slandering the President, Callendar’s naked corpse was found floating face down in three feet of water in the James River. Although calls for killing Callendar had recently been published by Jefferson’s political allies, the cause of death was ruled drowning by intoxication.
No proof of involvement by Jefferson or his allies has ever been offered.
Of Human Bondage
Political scandals aside, what the Jefferson-Hemings affair highlights is the shadowy role that slavery in France played in shaping the future spread(and eventual abolition) of slavery in the United States.
For Hemings herself that history was personal — and painful: by virtue of her residence in Paris in 1789, both she and her unborn child were considered technically “free” under French law — as Jefferson was aware. So when Jefferson demanded that Sally return with him to the United States as his concubine, she at first said no.
Perhaps her reasoning ran as follows: Why should I not remain in France as a free woman to raise our child in liberty?
Exactly how Jefferson managed to persuade (or coerce) Hemings into returning with him to Monticello we will never know — but we do know that the terms of her return included a “solemn pledge that her children would be freed at the age of twenty years,” as Jefferson’s friend and apologist James Madison would awkwardly attempt to explain decades later.
To his credit, Jefferson finally did keep his pledge — but only grudgingly, belatedly, and under cover of a cowardly subterfuge. The first family slave Jefferson formally freed was his daughter Harriet Hemings. Then he quietly allowed his son Beverley and daughter Harriet to, ahem, “escape” in 1822 at ages 23 and 21.
From his deathbed in 1826, Jefferson finally freed their younger brothers Madison and Easton Hemings, who were by that time approaching the age of 21 — in a direct acknowledgement of the promise he had once made in Paris many decades prior.
Even after Jefferson’s death, Sally Hemings herself remained the legal property of the Jefferson family. His daughter, Martha Randolph, legally “inherited” Hemings — mercifully granting the aging Sally Hemings what was known in southern parlance as “her time” (a form of labor-free retirement); but that small mercy hardly compensated a lifetime of sexual enslavement. Born a slave she died a slave, living out the remainder of her years under the care of her two youngest sons, now both free men. In return for a lifetime of labor, Jefferson had never paid Hemings one cent in wages.
Light skinned and fair-haired, many of Jefferson’s children were eventually able to “pass” within white in society. Several even immigrated to Wisconsin — where, under the family name of Jefferson, they eventually took their place among the leading citizens of Wisconsin’s white community — amid territories contained within the Louisiana Purchase Jefferson secretly negotiated with Napoleon. But therein hangs an even longer tale of slavery and betrayal — this time on a grand global scale.
