For Hemings’s descendants, most of whom are white, this was long-sought vindication. For the descendants of Jefferson’s acknowledged daughters, who have been cool to the Hemingses’ claims in the past, this raises a difficult question about whether to open the hallowed burial grounds at the University of Virginia to the descendants of a slave. And Americans who venerate Jefferson as the embodiment of the ideals of liberty and equality in this hemisphere must decide for themselves whether this is a humanizing detail in a great man’s life, or evidence of hypocrisy so deep it calls into question everything he has come to symbolize.
The question that fires most people’s imagination, though, is what sort of relationship Jefferson had with his slave-mistress. “There’s no statement from either of them,” says Jefferson biographer Annette Gordon-Reed. “But because of the length of the relationship, and the fact that they had children over a 20-year period, it must have been more than just sex.” Was the relationship consensual, then, and even loving? “As someone who has studied slavery,” says Orlando Patterson, the Harvard sociologist, “my answer is, technically and legally, no, she had no choice. But in human terms, yes.” What impresses Patterson is that in the year 2000, the white descendants of Hemings are proud to claim a slave as an ancestor, along with a president. In that sense, at least, the country has made some progress toward the ideal of equality that Jefferson embraced in his philosophy, even as he failed to embody it in his life.
