Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

by Jon Meacham

After the third Mrs. Wayles died in February 1761, Elizabeth Hemings, now about twenty-six years old, was “taken by the widower Wayles as his concubine,” said Madison Hemings.38 Beginning in 1762, Elizabeth Hemings bore five children to Thomas Jefferson’s father-in-law: Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, and Peter.39 In 1773 came a sixth: Sarah, who was to be known by the nickname Sally.40 Such arrangements were not uncommon in slave-owning states. In the nineteenth century, South Carolinian Mary Boykin Chestnut noted something about white women that was equally true in the eighteenth: “Any lady is able to tell who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but their own.41 Those she seems to think drop from the clouds.” It was a world of desire and denial. Sex across the color line—sex between owner and property—was pervasive yet rarely directly addressed or alluded to. The strange intermingling of blood and affection and silence suffused the world of the Forest that Jefferson came to know in 1770, the year he turned up as one of the candidates for Patty’s hand.42 It was to suffuse Monticello, too, in the fullness of time.