It seems very probably that he had the new room built so that his grandchildren would be spared the sight of her leaving his quarters each morning.
Posted on 07/03/2017 6:20:40 PM PDT by Bodleian_Girl
Archaeologists have discovered an area in Thomas Jefferson's plantation home that was once the living quarters of Sally Hemings - a slave with whom he is believed to have had six children. Her room, which was built in 1809 and was 14 feet, 8 inches wide and 13 feet long, was next to Thomas Jefferson's room. However, the bedroom went unnoticed for decades and the area was even made into a men's bathroom in 1941.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4662350/Archaeologists-Sally-Hemings-room-Monticello.html#ixzz4lozvk7ZB Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
your sense of humor is as dull as your understanding of history.
Funny you should say that, Monticello does have secret doors.
I lived across the mountain from Charlottesville for six years until I graduated from high school. I visited Monticello and was privileged to see a small portion of the unparalleled genius of Jefferson.
Also Hemings had been having children since the 1790s. Yet we're expected to believe that Jefferson waited nearly two decades to construct this "love nest". Then, after he supposedly has easy access to her, she no longer has children. Wonder why. Could it be that he wasn't having sex with her, and the room's location is entirely unrelated to that? :-)
Also the idea that she lived — openly — in a special room connected to Jefferson’s rather than to that of one of his daughter’s is preposterous. A Washington Post story has her sleeping “just steps away”. Yaelle even has her “sleeping inches from him” — inches! — as if Jefferson could just roll over and have sex with her. :-) There’s no proof of any such thing.
And why don’t these stories tell us where the door to that room went? The archaeologists must know that. (Could it be that the door didn’t open into Jefferson’s bedroom?) “Next to” can mean on the other side of a brick wall.
The Daily Mail article says that the claim that Hemings lived in that room is based on a “description of Sally’s room by one of Jefferson’s grandsons”. Yet, typical of sloppy journalism, it doesn’t quote that description, or even key passages from it. An article from NBC News omits it too, but says his description placed her room in the “South Wing” — not very specific. We don’t even know if that room was Sally’s.
In any case Jefferson’s granddaughter (Ellen Randolph Coolidge, 1796-1876) — thirteen when the room was built — states in an 1848 letter to her husband that “His [her grandfather’s] apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household.”
Also, “He lived, whenever he was at Monticello, and entirely for the last seventeen years of his life, in the midst of these young people [his grandchildren], surrounded by them, his intercourse with them of the freest and most affectionate kind. How comes it that his immoralities were never suspected by his own family — that his daughter and her children rejected with horror and contempt the charges brought against him.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/cron/1858ellenlett.html
I believe that she had the space in the loft room over his bed before the arrival of his grandchildren.
Their arrival is probably what prompted her removal from his room into a room he had built for her in 1809.
I think it was published on July 3 in the Daily Mail, but was published in Feb. of 2017 in the US.
It seems very probably that he had the new room built so that his grandchildren would be spared the sight of her leaving his quarters each morning.
Actually that should say that the Carr nephews were ruled out due to DNA.
Thomas Jefferson’s meticulous records place him at Monticello during each of Sally Hemmings conceptions.
Where is the evidence of this? I visited Monticello since the big DNA testing, and I don’t recall anything about a loft bed for Sally. But maybe I wasn’t listening during the tour. I don’t remember much about the tour. My romantic nature would like to believe that Sally was a happy concubine and that Jefferson cared for her and that they had six baby slaves together. But I don’t know what is the truth of the matter. Monticello is a beautiful place, and the tulip poplars are what I remember most.
That's one way to make sure the homework gets done. :)
Nothing I said seems to precede you thinking I’m calling you some kind of phobe? I never did. And I don’t see any kind of patter in what I said.
Sometimes a man and a woman living together singly for years end up mating. It happens. Even if the man is famous. He’s still a man. That was my whole point; why do you doubt that happened? It doesn’t mean TJ was anythIng other than human.
Someone else on the thread said the inches away thing so I just borrowed it. Heck, even if her room was on the other side of the house, it is probable they hooked up. I just don’t see that as a bad thing except of course for the slavery situation.
I read it somewhere, I’ll try and remember. But it was something I read long before this current room was discovered.
Personally, I’m not aghast at the thought of him having a concubine.
Speaking as a female, it’s not something I would do. But in her circumstances, it seems like a way she saw to enhance her situation.
None of her children remained slaves, three of the surviving four crossed the color barrier and lived as whites, and the one that didn’t had exceptionally successful children, with one of Hemmings and Jefferson’s suspected grandson’s becoming the first black man elected to state-wide office in California.
bump
perhaps then you would understand there was more to thomas jefferson than a single document, or a sentence in the document. and then, perhaps, you wouldn’t say stupid sh*t.
I suspect I may understand more than you because my family was directly acquainted with Jefferson.
William Short @ www.monticello.org
William Short (1759-1849), whom Thomas Jefferson referred to as his "adoptive son," never skyrocketed to political fame. Instead, after serving as Jefferson's secretary and working as a career diplomat, he became a successful financier. He admitted that "nothing could be less Virginian" than spending less than his income and investing the rest, but from what he called a "small patrimony," he eventually made himself a millionaire.1Thomas Jefferson to David Higginbotham, 12 September 1811
Through Jefferson he had purchased 1,334 acres of land called Indian Camp (now Morven) in 1795, and he and Jefferson had exchanged many letters about agricultural possibilities on this farm.
In 1813 he decided to sell the property to David Higginbotham (this triangular deal cancelled Jefferson's debt to Higginbotham and Jefferson paid his debt to Short after he sold his library in 1815).
David Higginbotham (1775–1853) first became acquainted with TJ while working as a factor for Robert Rives & Company late in the 1790s. Later he became a prosperous merchant in the town of Milton and a man to whom TJ was perpetually indebted. TJ considered him to be “of very fair character, steady application to business, sound in his circumstances, and perfectly correct in all his conduct,” but also “uninformed & unlettered, & so much so as to be entirely insensible of it himself.” In 1813 Higginbotham purchased through TJ’s agency William Short’s Indian Camp plantation a few miles south of Monticello. He changed its name to Morven and built a fine Federal-style brick house there in 1821. At his death Higginbotham left a personal estate worth more than $100,000, including fifty-six slaves...
David Higginbotham's home Morven as it stands today near Monticello.
So, it appears that Thomas Jefferson had the same sort of opinion of my ancestor, David Higginbotham that you have of the current one. Lol!
[Yes, that really is my name ;^) ]
. . . and that the garbage gets taken out.
> I believe that she had the space in the loft room over his bed before the arrival of his grandchildren.
Well, the children were there before the grandchildren. Did he not care what they thought about him? To have her living in a loft above his bedroom would have been outrageous, and have ended all speculation.
It appears that her living there wasn’t the prevailing opinion. Wikipedia says, “As an adult, she may have lived in a room in Monticello’s ‘South Dependencies’, a wing of the mansion accessible to the main house through a covered passageway.”
Let’s use some imagination. What would his family and friends have thought if he’d kept her in a loft above his bedroom?
> Actually that should say that the Carr nephews were ruled out due to DNA.
Ruled out as ancestors of Easton, not of descendants of the other children. A Jefferson could have fathered Easton, and the Carrs — or anybody else, for that matter -— all or some of the others.
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