Free Republic

Thomas Jefferson’s most famous slave, and the mother of several of the third American president’s children, died in 1835...We don’t know when news of Joseph Smith’s... religious movement reached...where Sally Hemings spent most of her 62 years, as a house servant and eventually as Jefferson’s “paramour.” But even if Mormon missionaries had come to Monticello during Heming’s lifetime, they would, per the instructions of Smith himself, have worked first to convert the masters, and only then—with the masters’ permission—the slaves. Heming’s chance to become a Mormon came much later, in a Mormon temple in Mesa, Ariz., 13 years after the...