Sally Hemings

Last week, when Laurence O'Donnell was interpreting the news for us,  he said, looking quite stern, "We all know what Thomas Jefferson did to Sally Hemings." But there is a lot I don't know about Hemings and Jefferson.  

Agency is the degree to which an individual has the ability to make decisions about her life. That Sally Hemings was enslaved may not mean she had no human agency. 

There's no portrait  of  the enslaved girl and little written record about her.  We're told by one or two contemporaries that she was attractive and looked a lot like her half-sister, Jefferson's wife (they had the same father). Sally wasn't much older than Jefferson's daughters and grew up with them in the same mansion and apparently got along with them. In a sense she was their half-aunt and enslaved companion. Perhaps Sally's older half-sister protected her, but Jefferson's wife died young. While dying she asked Jefferson not to remarry (which sounds odd, but in those days it would have been to protect the interests of her children from a new wife and new children). Jefferson, devastated, agreed and kept his word. 

Sally, about 15, and her older brother were eventually sent to France, where Jefferson had been serving as our ambassador. In France, where slavery was outlawed, the Hemingses found they were free if they stayed in France.. Apparently both wanted to rejoin their family in Virginia. They struck deals with Jefferson. The brother, newly trained as a French chef, agreed, in return for his freedom, to train a new chef for Jefferson in Virgina. 

Sally seems to have agreed to return to Monticello if the children she had with Jefferson would be emancipated (and if she had some privileges). Sally could not be free and  also live in Monticello--that would have violated the strange social pretenses of the period. 

How many of these odd households were there? The President, his original daughters, their enslaved half-aunt, Jefferson's enslaved children, who would eventually be set free, other nearly-white Hemingses, etc. 

After Jefferson's death, Sally Hemings moved to town, still technically enslaved to the Jefferson family. I'm guessing that that was her choice, that as Jefferson property, she was protected a little. Her children passed down a brief story. But was Sally someone people did things to or did she take some control of her life despite the odds?