I’ve written many times about Thomas Jefferson embodying American culture today. He said all the right things about freedom and liberty. He considered slavery wrong. He still practiced it. His rationalizations and justifications are ours. I link to a bunch of those posts at the bottom of this post. I recommend them.

If you want to understand how you sound to someone who lives by values you likely say you do, like do unto others as you would have them do unto you, live and let live, leave it better than you found it, and love your neighbor as yourself, read Jefferson’s rationalizations and justifications. You know they’re bogus. He knew they were bogus. He just about said he knew he would go to hell for it. But he kept violating his values, just like nearly everyone alive today.

So I read an authoritative biography of him: Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. I copied a few paragraphs on him and his normalizing slavery in his life, like we normalize polluting (recall that our culture causes suffering and death orders of magnitude greater than American slavery).

The important quote is the second, but the first gives context.

This part is in Paris in 1787, while the US was drafting the Constitution:

There, in the midst of the swirl and the storms, was a beautiful young woman at his command—a woman who may have reminded him of her half sister, his wife. The emotional content of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship is a mystery. He may have loved her, and she him. It could have been, as some have argued, coercive, institutionalized rape. She might just have been doing what she had to do to survive an evil system, accepting sexual duty as an element of her enslavement and using what leverage she had to improve the lot of her children. Or each of these things may have been true at different times.

…

According to their son Madison Hemings’s later account, Sally, who had become “Mr. Jefferson’s concubine,” was pregnant when Jefferson was preparing to return to the United States. “He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred,” Madison Hemings said.

To demur was to refuse, and Jefferson was unaccustomed to encountering resistance to his absolute will at all, much less from a slave. His whole life was about controlling as many of the world’s variables as he could. Yet here was a girl basically the same age as his own eldest daughter refusing to take her docile part in the long-running drama of the sexual domination of enslaved women by their white masters.”

…

So he began making concessions to convince Sally Hemings to come home to Virginia. “To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years,” Madison Hemings said.

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When You’re at the Top of a Dominance Hierarchy

The next quote comes later, after he finished his terms as President and returned to Monticello. I recommend thinking of what someone who didn’t fund activities that killed people as nearly everyone in our culture does would say of us. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it would be honest and it might help us understand we can act as much as we know Jefferson could have freed his slaves.

Elijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont, left an unsparing account of Jefferson. “Mr. Jefferson is tall, spare, straight in body,” Fletcher wrote in 1811. “His face not handsome but savage—I learnt he was but little esteemed by his neighbors…. The story of Black Sal is no farce—That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth—and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves—an unnatural crime with is very common in these parts—This conduct may receive a little palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful.”

Jefferson coolly recorded the births of Hemings’s children in his farm book along with other details of the lives of his slaves and of the fates of his crops. He was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of his life in his mind even as the grew up in his midst. “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children,” said Madison Hemings, who added that Jefferson was, however, “affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”

It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but Jefferson was a creature of his culture. “The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,” Josiah Quincy, Jr., of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. “It is far from being uncommon to see a gentleman at dinner and his reputed offspring a slave to the master of the table.”

This was daily reality at Monticello. In a letter to fellow biographer James Parton, Henry Randall reported some observations of Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s from the mountain. Discussing the physical similarities between Jefferson and the children of Sally Hemings, Randolph “said in one case that the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson. On one occasion, Randolph reported, “a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.” (Randolph offered these reminiscences to support the theory that Jefferson’s nephew Peter Carr was the father of Sally Hemings’s children—a theory ultimately disproved by DNA research.)

For Jefferson such ambiguities and unacknowledged truths were a part of life. “I asked Col. R[andolph] why on earth Mr. Jefferson did not put these slaves who looked like him out of the public sight by sending them to his Bedford estate or elsewhere,” Randall wrote Parton. “He said Mr. Jefferson never betrayed the least consciousness of the resemblance—and although he (Col. R[andolph]) had not doubt his mother would have been very glad to have them removed, that both and all venerated Mr. Jefferson too deeply to broach such a topic to him. What suited him, satisfied them.”

What suited Jefferson was the code of denial that defined life in the slave-owning states. It was his plantation, his world, and he would live as he wished.

“The secrets of an old Virginia manor house,” wrote Henry Randall, “were like secrets of an Old Norman Castle.” And such secrets were to be spoken of as little as possible.

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While we’re talking about Jefferson, he described how children learn slavery from slaveholding parents or, in other words, how parents corrupt their children. Here’s a quote from him:

The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.

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Posts on Jefferson we can learn from:

• I increasingly feel like I’m in Monticello listening to Thomas Jefferson
• We need the words of Thomas Jefferson and work of Robert Carter III. Instead we have the words of Carter and acts of Jefferson.
• Extreme like Thomas Jefferson or like Robert Carter III?
• Sustainability: Too many Thomas Jeffersons and not enough Muhammad Alis
• If you would have done what Thomas Jefferson didn’t, do you act now?
• Climate Week 2024 Was Monticello 1776

• ← This week’s selected media, June 2025: Thomas Jefferson and The Choice
• 823: Mark Mills, part 5: We’ll Never Have an Energy Transition →