The daughter of Jefferson sold for a slave!
The child of a freeman for dollars and francs!
The roar of applause, when your orators rave,
Is lost in the sound of her chain, as it clanks.
[Peterson, ‘Jeffersonian Image’]
In 1802, James T. Callender attacked Thomas Jefferson in the columns of the Richmond Recorder for keeping a slave concubine named Sally Hemings and fathering children by her. Sally was described as unusually pretty and ‘mighty near white.’ When Jefferson, a widower, was United States Minister in France, the teenaged Sally was sent to join him there, ostensibly to serve as maid to Jefferson’s daughter Polly. Sally eventually had five children. The eldest had features that were ‘said to bear a striking resemblance to those of the president himself’. Another son, Madison Hemings, was named after Jefferson’s closest colleague and ‘learned to be a great fiddler.’2
To provide further credibility to this story, historians have noted that the Hemings family received favored treatment at Jefferson’s hands and in his will three of them were given their freedom.(DNA studies done in 1998 seemed to have removed all reasonable doubt that he was their father.)