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.
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(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
> It [a liaison] doesn’t mean TJ was anythIng other than human.
> I just don’t see that as a bad thing except of course for the slavery situation.
Don’t imagine that Jefferson’s detractors are going to be satisfied with some of the benign interpretations that we’ve seen in this thread. Note how this writer at Wikipedia puts it, “As shown by Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, wealthy Virginia widowers frequently raped enslaved women. Historian Joshua D. Rothman noted it was not unusual for the time for Jefferson to choose to do so.”
Once the country finishes with the cultural purge that’s taking place now with the Confederate monuments, the persons driving that purge will move on to slaveholders in general. Does anyone here really doubt that?
Other persons honored by this country are allowed to have flaws (e.g., Martin Luther King, a good orator but someone who plagiarized his doctoral dissertation while studying to become a clergyman — imagine, cheating on that! — and who had sexual affairs while a married clergyman). White slaveholders, following a practice that had been accepted for thousands of years, though, won’t be treated that indulgently — no matter how much they did to express the ideals of freedom (while conscious that their country hadn’t yet attained them). Jefferson is going to be hit, and hit hard.
If there’s compelling evidence that Jefferson fathered her children, then we’ll just have to lump it. I’m not suggesting, of course, that we brazen it out with lies. The argument can still be made that there’s doubt, though, and if people at Free Republic won’t make it, I don’t know where it will be made.
Even excessively lengthy posts can’t cover this topic adequately, of course. For persons with some time to dedicate to this matter, though, I call your attention to the site I mentioned before — https://jeffersondnastudy.com/rebuttal-to-tjmf-report/ . I’ll mention too The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, a study published in 2001 and updated in 2011. https://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Hemings-Controversy-Report-Scholars-Commission/dp/0890890854 (I don’t see a complete copy on the net.) Also I’ll mention another net site that contests many of the claims in the mainstream media and the educational establishment (neither of which, in my opinion, can be trusted) — https://www.tjheritage.org/dna-hemings/ .
Knowing how much b***s**t there is in both the media and academia, I’m not inclined to accept their claims unless logically compelled to do so.
His two surviving daughters married and moved to homes of their own.
His other children did not survive infancy and toddlerhood.
Let’s use some imagination. What would his family and friends have thought if he’d kept her in a loft above his bedroom?
Supposition.
People aren’t just “allowed” socially to have flaws. They have flaws.
Sexual affairs are not necessarily “flaws.” Adultery is a sin, owning slaves even if not a Biblical sin is definitely a moral outrage, but once one historically accepts that some European Americans kept African Americans as slaves back then, the fact that some had sex together doesn’t phase me as a sin to really get upset about. Especially since it APPEARS she wasn’t raped each and every time they conceived. I could be very wrong about it. I’m not condoning sexually abusing people in your employ (especially in slavery).
But it was true: I have read many first hand accounts of such relationships. Why would Jefferson be exempt just because he was a founding father?
There were often relatives and others at Monticello, and find it hard to believe that Jefferson would have had the effrontery to keep a concubine (he’d been publicly accused of having sex with) in a loft above his bedroom.
> Why would Jefferson be exempt just because he was a founding father?
Because he hated oppression, injustice, and all forms of abuse of power. He denounced slavery with great vehemence (see his Notes on the State of Virginia — and what he said about the slave trade in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence). He was concerned about finding a safe way to end it, avoiding what had happened in Haiti, but he had no illusions about the evil that it represented.
He kept her and her white children there for forty years, as house slaves! When the red-headed children served the table, you don’t think the guests noticed?
Jefferson’s family could see what the Hemings children looked like too — they saw them more often than guests did — but “Shortly before her death, Martha [Jefferson’s daughter] called her two sons, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and George Wythe Randolph, to her bedside and told them of Mr. Jefferson’s innocence of the charges of fathering children by a female slave...She may have been mistaken as to WHO the father of Sally’s children actually was (and then she may not have been with respect to some of the children). But she either sincerely believed Jefferson was not the father, or she was lying through her teeth on her death bed.” https://jeffersondnastudy.com/rebuttal-to-tjmf-report/
One of those same sons at her death bed grew up to acknowledge that the sons of Sally Hemmings looked so much like Thomas Jefferson that when seen walking in the dusk, one would think it was Thomas Jefferson himself.
Since the announcement of the DNA results, there has been no dispute about Eston’s descendants having Jefferson family DNA. That’s not where the controversy lies.
> One of those same sons at her death bed grew up to acknowledge that the sons of Sally Hemmings looked so much like Thomas Jefferson that when seen walking in the dusk, one would think it was Thomas Jefferson himself.
Did he say he believed Thomas was the father? (I don’t recall his having said so.)
> I believe that she had the space in the loft room over his bed before the arrival of his grandchildren.
I’m curious to know the source of the claim that Jefferson kept Hemmings in a loft above his bedroom. Do you have a historical source, and a specific quotation for that?
Make that “Hemings” (the usual spelling).
You don't recall writing this little example of psychological manipulation leading up to the inevitable "-phobe" slur?
I do.
When he wrote that the child looked so much like Jefferson that one would think it WAS Jefferson, what is the inference?
“Consider the entries of John Hartwell Cocke to his diary, a man who “was often at Monticello”, was a friend of Jefferson’s and “worked closely with Jefferson as a founder of the University of Virginia”. While Cocke did not identify children that Jefferson fathered outside of his marriage, he did lament his old friend’s behavior in his diary:
Writing in 1853 Cocke bemoaned the fact that many slave owners had children by slave women on their plantations. He went on to say that there was no wonder that this should be so when “Mr. Jefferson’s notorious example is considered.”
In an 1859 entry Cocke complained about . . . the common practice of unmarried slave owners keeping a slave woman “as a substitute for a wife. . . In Virginia . . . this damnable practice prevails as much as anywhere—probably more—as Mr. Jefferson’s example can be pleaded for its defense.”
“Loft above Jefferson’s bed...”
I read the claim a while back, long before the news of her supposed room was was published. I’ll try to find it tomorrow.
The Monticello foundation tried to refute that info in times past by saying the “closet” was too small and if you search their website it has the measurement ranges for the space.
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