My wife's sister, for instance, was astonished to hear from me that we do not know whether Jefferson had sex with Sally Hemings and that I thought it very unlikely. She was taught otherwise in high school. She learned from a text that stated the liaison as fact and from a teacher who regurgitated that “fact.” In my classes on philosophy, more of my students know Jefferson as the president who had a sexual affair with his slave than they know him as the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence. Something is horridly skewed.
