> 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.)
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.”