Thomas Jefferson: The Man Who Wrote About Liberty While Owning 600 Slaves

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” - Thomas Jefferson

On 4th of July 1776, the Continental Congress adopted one of the most famous political documents ever written. Its principal author was a 33-year-old Virginia plantation owner named Thomas Jefferson. Among its most memorable words was a sentence that would eventually be repeated by abolitionists, presidents and civil rights leaders across the world: “All men are created equal.” It remains one of the great statements of human liberty. There was, however, an extraordinary problem. When Thomas Jefferson wrote those words, he owned human beings.

Jefferson would eventually become the third President of the United States, one of the country's Founding Fathers and one of the most celebrated political thinkers of his generation. His writings repeatedly discussed liberty, tyranny and the natural rights of mankind. Yet over the course of his lifetime he enslaved more than 600 men, women and children. In a typical year he owned around 200 people, many of whom worked on his plantations in Virginia and around 80 of whom lived and worked at Monticello, his famous home overlooking Charlottesville.

Jefferson did not simply inherit slavery as an institution and reluctantly tolerate it from a distance. Enslaved labour was fundamental to his lifestyle. Enslaved people farmed his land, cooked his food, cared for his children, made furniture, worked as blacksmiths and carpenters, maintained Monticello and helped construct the house itself. Jefferson bought people, sold people and gave enslaved people to members of his family. He understood perfectly well that slavery was morally troubling, which arguably makes the contradiction even more difficult.

In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote openly about the corrupting effects of slavery. He argued that slavery damaged both the enslaved and the person doing the enslaving, describing a society in which children grew up watching their parents exercise almost unlimited power over other human beings. He then wrote the remarkable line that opens this article, saying that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God was just. Jefferson clearly understood that there was something fundamentally wrong with slavery.

He simply continued owning slaves.

The most extraordinary part of the story concerns one particular enslaved family at Monticello: the Hemings family. Sally Hemings was born around 1773 to an enslaved woman named Elizabeth Hemings. Her father was probably John Wayles, a wealthy white planter and lawyer who also happened to be the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson. If this is correct, and historians generally believe it is, Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's wife.

That relationship alone makes what happened next unusually complicated.

Sally became Jefferson's property through his wife's family. She was therefore simultaneously an enslaved woman owned by Jefferson and the half-sister of his deceased wife. In 1787, when she was about 14 years old, Sally travelled to Europe accompanying Jefferson's young daughter Maria. Jefferson was living in Paris at the time as the American minister to France. Paris completely changed Sally's position.

In Virginia she was property. In France the situation was very different. Enslaved people brought into France could petition the courts for their freedom, and Sally appears to have understood that returning to Virginia meant voluntarily returning to slavery. Her son Madison would later describe what happened in an extraordinary newspaper interview published in 1873. According to him, Sally initially refused to return to America.

There was another reason the situation had become complicated. Madison stated that while in France his mother “became Mr. Jefferson's concubine” and was pregnant by him when the family prepared to return to Virginia. Sally was still a teenager. Jefferson was in his mid-forties.

It is impossible to discuss this as though it were an ordinary romantic relationship. Jefferson legally owned Sally Hemings. The imbalance of power between them was absolute, and an enslaved woman had none of the legal protections that would make modern ideas of consent straightforwardly applicable. Historians and descendants continue to disagree about the exact personal nature of their relationship, and Sally herself left no written account explaining how she felt about Jefferson.

What we do have is the account of their son.

According to Madison Hemings, Sally realised that France offered her a route to freedom and told Jefferson she did not want to return to Virginia. Jefferson then made her an extraordinary promise. If she returned with him to Monticello, she would receive special privileges and the children she had with him would eventually be freed when they reached the age of 21. Sally agreed.

It is difficult to imagine the decision she faced. Remaining in France may have given her personal freedom, but she was a teenage girl separated from much of her family and living in a foreign country. Returning to Virginia meant becoming enslaved again, but according to Madison's account it also came with Jefferson's promise that her future children would eventually become free. She returned to Virginia in 1789.

Over the following years Sally Hemings gave birth to at least six children believed to have been fathered by Jefferson. Four survived to adulthood: Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston. Their existence created one of the strangest contradictions in the already contradictory world of American slavery. Thomas Jefferson owned his own children.

Under Virginia law, a child's legal status followed that of the mother. Because Sally Hemings was enslaved, her children were enslaved regardless of who their father was. Jefferson could therefore write that all men were created equal while legally possessing his own sons and daughter as property.

The arrangement appears to have remained largely hidden from public discussion within Jefferson's household, although rumours circulated during his lifetime. In 1802, political journalist James Callender publicly accused President Jefferson of fathering children with Sally Hemings. Jefferson never publicly answered the allegation. For generations his defenders rejected the story, while descendants of the Hemings family continued maintaining that Jefferson was their ancestor. Then science entered the argument.

In 1998, DNA testing compared male-line descendants of Eston Hemings with descendants of Jefferson's paternal family. The Y-chromosome evidence demonstrated that Eston's male line was connected to the Jefferson family. DNA alone could not identify Thomas Jefferson individually because other Jefferson men shared the same paternal chromosome, but when combined with historical records, Jefferson's documented presence at Monticello during Sally's likely conception periods and the oral testimony of the Hemings family, the evidence became extremely difficult to dismiss.

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello, now considers Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings's children a settled historical matter.

This brings us back to the curious detail that makes their story even more interesting.

Jefferson actually kept the promise Sally was said to have extracted from him in Paris.

Beverly Hemings reached adulthood and left Monticello in 1822. Jefferson did not legally emancipate him. He simply allowed him to leave and made no attempt to bring him back. Later that same year Harriet Hemings did the same thing. She was 21 years old. Jefferson apparently arranged for her to receive money before she departed and did not pursue her as a runaway. Technically, Beverly and Harriet simply disappeared.

In reality, Jefferson appears to have deliberately allowed them to escape slavery.

Both were sufficiently light-skinned to enter white society. According to their brother Madison, Beverly and Harriet eventually lived as white people and concealed their connection to Monticello. They effectively walked out of slavery and into an entirely different racial identity, while their father remained one of the most famous men in America.

The two younger brothers, Madison and Eston, received their freedom in a more conventional way. Jefferson explicitly freed them in his will. When he died on 4th of July 1826, exactly fifty years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Madison and Eston were legally emancipated.

There is a remarkable symmetry to all of this. According to Sally's son, Jefferson had promised in Paris that their children would eventually be freed. All four children who survived into adulthood did indeed become free. Beverly and Harriet were quietly allowed to leave at around the age of 21, while Madison and Eston were formally freed in Jefferson's will. There was, however, one person Jefferson did not free.

Sally Hemings.

The woman with whom Jefferson had fathered at least six children, the woman who had returned from freedom in France after allegedly negotiating the eventual freedom of those children, remained legally enslaved when Jefferson died.

Jefferson's daughter Martha later gave Sally what was known as “her time”. This was a form of unofficial freedom that allowed her to leave Monticello and live with her sons in Charlottesville without being formally emancipated. There may have been a practical reason for doing it this way, because Virginia law created difficulties for formally freed people remaining in the state. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Thomas Jefferson never formally freed Sally Hemings himself. She lived the final years of her life as a free woman in practice, if not entirely through the legal process Jefferson could have provided. She died in 1835.

The contrast with what happened to many of Jefferson's other enslaved people is brutal. Jefferson died heavily in debt. After his death, roughly 200 enslaved people connected with his estate were sold. Families that had lived around Monticello for generations were separated as the estate attempted to pay what Jefferson owed. His own children escaped that fate. Most did not.

That is what makes the Jefferson story so uncomfortable. It would be much easier if Jefferson were simply an ignorant man who never questioned slavery. He was not. He understood the contradiction. He wrote about it. He recognised that slavery degraded human beings and feared that divine justice might eventually punish the country for maintaining it. He also benefited enormously from it.

Jefferson was not unique among the American Founding Fathers in owning slaves, nor did he create the institution. He was born into a Virginia society in which slavery was deeply embedded economically and socially. But explaining the world in which someone lived is not the same as excusing every decision they made within it. Jefferson had choices.

He freed some people. He allowed others to escape. He apparently honoured his promise to Sally concerning their children. He therefore demonstrated that he understood emancipation was possible when he personally decided it was important enough.

That makes the hundreds of people he did not free harder to ignore.

There is something almost impossible to reconcile about the image of Jefferson sitting at his desk writing about mankind's unalienable rights while enslaved people worked around him. Somewhere on the same estate lived Sally Hemings, a woman he legally owned. Around her were children who were almost certainly his own, and Virginia law regarded those children not simply as his sons and daughter but as his property.

Perhaps no single American life better demonstrates the enormous gap between the ideals on which the United States was founded and the reality in which those ideals were first written.

Thomas Jefferson gave the world the words “all men are created equal”. Sally Hemings and her children demonstrate just how far America still had to travel before those words actually meant what they said.