Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NHThomas Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, then spent decades enslaving the teenage girl who bore his children. The record is documented. The word people reach for is wrong, and the accurate one is worse.
Update, Oct. 1, 2026, 2:11 a.m. EDT: This column was published with a lead image in photographic style: a two-panel picture pairing a likeness of Thomas Jefferson with a depiction of a young enslaved girl holding cotton and a rag doll. It was not a photograph and not a portrait from life. Jefferson died in 1826 and Sally Hemings in 1835, before photographic portraiture existed, and as this column notes, Hemings left no portrait. The cotton-field setting appears nowhere in the column. The image has been removed; the text of the column is unchanged.
Correction, Sept. 22, 2026, 9:51 a.m. EDT: This column cited RSA 3:2 as New Hampshire’s motto law. RSA 3:2 sets the state flag; the motto is set by RSA 3:8, which adopts “Live Free or Die,” written by General John Stark in 1809 (NH General Court). The citation and link now point to RSA 3:8, and a broken link to the 1998 Nature study was replaced.
In July 1787 a fourteen-year-old enslaved girl named Sally Hemings stepped off a ship in France to wait on the daughter of the most celebrated American in Europe. The man she had been sent to serve was Thomas Jefferson: forty-four years old, United States minister to France, and author of the sentence every American can still recite. Within two years she was pregnant with his child.
Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal. He also owned Sally Hemings, fathered at least six children with her, and kept her enslaved until the day he died. Those facts do not sit in tension with each other. They belong to the same man, and the second is not a footnote to the first. It is the part of the story American memory has spent two centuries learning to look past.
So let’s not look past it. And let’s get the word right, because the wrong word is a gift to the people who want the subject closed.
Get the word right
The temptation is to call Jefferson a pedophile. Resist it — not to soften anything, but because the label is inaccurate, and being inaccurate here hands his defenders an easy escape. Pedophilia describes sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Sally Hemings was a teenager: fourteen when she arrived in Paris, sixteen when she returned to Virginia carrying Jefferson’s child. The precise terms are statutory rape and the sexual abuse of a child, and they describe something worse than the wrong word does, because they carry a second crime the word “pedophile” leaves out. Jefferson did not only have sex with a child. He owned her.
By any standard a modern court would apply, a man in his forties having sex with a girl of fourteen to sixteen is child sexual abuse. Add that he held legal title to her body, and there is no euphemism left standing.
The reflexive defense is that this was simply how the era worked. It was not how the era’s own moral arguments worked. Jefferson knew the words he had written. He knew enslaved people could not consent, which is exactly why slaveholders never pretended the arrangement was consensual. Plenty of his contemporaries, including men he argued with directly, called slavery a crime against the rights he claimed to champion. He chose it anyway, for decades, and he profited.
What the record says
None of this is a fringe theory. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello and is nobody’s idea of a hostile witness, concluded in 2000 that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s youngest son and most likely the father of all six of her children listed in his records. In 2018 the Foundation went further and called the matter a settled historical question.
The evidence stacks in one direction. A 1998 DNA study published in Nature matched the Jefferson male line to a descendant of Hemings’s son Eston and ruled out the nephews Jefferson’s own grandchildren had blamed. The archaeologist Fraser Neiman later put the odds near 99 percent by lining up the conception dates of Hemings’s children against Jefferson’s documented presence at Monticello: she conceived when he was home, and only when he was home. And Hemings’s son Madison, in an 1873 newspaper interview, named Jefferson as his father and described the bargain his mother struck to come home from France.
The relationship began in Paris and ran for decades. Sally Hemings was also the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife — both were daughters of the same enslaver, John Wayles — so the girl Jefferson took to his bed was his dead wife’s half-sister and his legal property at the same time.
Settling the paternity question took two centuries, because Jefferson’s family spent that long denying it. The story first surfaced in 1802, when a Richmond journalist reported that the president kept one of his slaves as a concubine. Jefferson never publicly answered the charge. After his death, his white grandchildren circulated a different account, pinning Hemings’s children on Jefferson’s Carr nephews, and that cover story held up in respectable histories well into the 1990s. The 1998 DNA test took it apart: the Carr line did not match, and the Jefferson line did.
Consent was not on the table
Strip away the powdered wigs and the arithmetic is simple. Sally Hemings was property. Jefferson could sell her, her mother, and her children, together or apart, whenever he chose. The one moment she had any footing of her own came in France, where slavery had no legal force and she was free for the asking; her older brother James, enslaved in the same household, used those same French laws to bargain for his own freedom. She came back to Virginia, and back into slavery, on Jefferson’s promise to free her children when they grew up.
That is not romance. It is the only move available to an enslaved teenager with a child on the way and a forty-something owner holding every card. A relationship in which one party can be sold by the other is not a relationship. It is ownership wearing a softer name.
Ownership was not an abstraction. Under Virginia law a child born to an enslaved mother inherited her status, so every child Sally Hemings bore to Jefferson was born his property, not his heir. She could not marry him, could not testify against him, and could not leave. The man who wrote that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed built a household in which consent, for her, did not legally exist.
And she was one of six hundred
Sally Hemings was a single person inside a much larger ledger. Over his life Jefferson enslaved more than 600 human beings, more than any other president. In a typical year he held about 200, and by Monticello’s own count almost half were under the age of sixteen. In 1792 he worked out, in a note to George Washington, that he earned roughly four percent a year on the birth of enslaved children: human beings booked as compound interest.
He freed almost none of them. Beverly and Harriet Hemings were allowed to walk away in 1822; Madison and Eston were freed in his 1826 will. He freed four of Sally Hemings’s children and never freed Sally herself, and he freed no other enslaved family at all. When he died in debt, the rest — roughly 130 people, whole families with decades of roots at Monticello — were sold off to cover what he owed.
This is not a smudge on an otherwise clean record. It is the record’s foundation. The mountain, the mansion, the wine and the dinners and the long hours of leisure to write about freedom were built and paid for by people he owned.
The contradiction was not lost on Jefferson; he simply lived inside it. In Notes on the State of Virginia, the only full-length book he published, he put forward the idea that Black people were inferior to whites in body and mind, even while he fathered children with Sally Hemings and worked the labor of hundreds more. He wrote about liberty as a universal birthright and ran a plantation on the premise that it was not.
He was not blind to the wrong, which is the part that should sit badly. In 1784 he drafted an ordinance that would have banned slavery in every western territory after 1800. It lost in Congress by a single state’s vote, and the clause was struck. He knew what had slipped away; he wrote later that on that one vote the fate of millions had turned, and that “heaven was silent in that awful moment.” Then he went home and kept owning people for forty more years. A man who sees the open door and refuses to walk through it does not get graded on a curve.
Monticello itself no longer hides any of this. Its own exhibits now tell visitors plainly that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’s children, and a 2012 Smithsonian exhibition built around his slaveholding drew more than a million people. The institution with the most to lose by telling the truth went ahead and told it. The holdouts are the rest of us.
Sally Hemings outlived Jefferson by nine years. He never freed her; after his death his daughter quietly let her go, and she spent her last years in Charlottesville with two of the sons she had borne him. She left no diary, no portrait, and no words in her own hand. Almost everything known about her was written down by the people who owned her, or by the historians who later studied them.
What this has to do with New Hampshire
New Hampshire took its motto from General John Stark, the state’s most famous Revolutionary soldier, who raised a toast in 1809 that the Granite State liked enough to stamp on every license plate: “Death is not the worst of evils.” The point was blunt. Bondage is worse than dying.
Jefferson held six hundred people in exactly the condition Stark named as worse than death, including a child he fathered children with and never set free. That is not a reason to scrub him from the national story. It is a reason to stop sanding him down. A country grown-up enough to hold both ideas at once, that he wrote the words and that he was a child-abusing enslaver of hundreds, is a country mature enough to deserve the words. The marble can take the weight. Live free or die meant something specific. For six hundred people, Jefferson chose the opposite, and called it Monticello.
— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report
Your Turn
You tell me: How were you taught about Jefferson and slavery in a New Hampshire classroom — the full record, or the polished version? Write the editor at granitestatereport@gmail.com.
Fact check
| # | Claim | Status | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, was the third president (1801–09), born 1743, died July 4, 1826. | VERIFIED | Monticello, Brief Biography; Britannica. |
| 2 | Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people over his life, the most of any U.S. president; about 200 in a typical year, nearly half under sixteen. | VERIFIED | Monticello, Brief Biography; White House Historical Association. |
| 3 | Sally Hemings (1773–1835) was enslaved at Monticello and was a half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha, both fathered by John Wayles. | VERIFIED | Monticello, Life of Sally Hemings. |
| 4 | Hemings, about 14, went to Paris in 1787 to attend Jefferson’s daughter; the sexual relationship is understood to have begun before her 1789 return, when she was 16 and Jefferson was in his mid-40s. | ATTRIBUTED | Monticello; Jefferson–Hemings historical record (onset dated “before 1789”). |
| 5 | Madison Hemings, in an 1873 Ohio newspaper interview, named Jefferson as his father and described his mother’s agreement to return from France on Jefferson’s promise to free her children. | ATTRIBUTED | Madison Hemings account, Pike County Republican (1873), via Monticello. |
| 6 | A 1998 DNA study (Foster et al., Nature) matched the Jefferson male line to a descendant of Eston Hemings and excluded the Carr nephews. | VERIFIED | Nature (Nov. 5, 1998); Monticello report. |
| 7 | The Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded (2000) Jefferson most likely fathered all six of Hemings’s children in his records, and in 2018 called the matter “settled.” | VERIFIED | Thomas Jefferson Foundation / Monticello. |
| 8 | Fraser Neiman’s analysis put the probability near 99% by matching the children’s conception windows to Jefferson’s documented presence at Monticello. | ATTRIBUTED | Neiman analysis, via Monticello / William & Mary Quarterly. |
| 9 | Under French free-soil law Hemings was free while in France and could have remained; she returned to slavery in Virginia. | VERIFIED | White House Historical Association; Monticello. |
| 10 | Enslaved women “had no legal right to refuse unwanted sexual advances.” | VERIFIED | Monticello, Life of Sally Hemings (verbatim). |
| 11 | Jefferson freed four of Hemings’s children (Beverly and Harriet left in 1822; Madison and Eston freed in his 1826 will), never formally freed Sally, and freed no other enslaved family; about 130 people were sold after his death. | VERIFIED | Monticello; “Thomas Jefferson and slavery” (Wikipedia, primary-sourced). |
| 12 | In a 1792 note Jefferson calculated roughly 4 percent annual “profit” on the birth of enslaved children. | ATTRIBUTED | Smithsonian Magazine, quoting Jefferson’s 1792 note to Washington. |
| 13 | “Live Free or Die” comes from John Stark’s 1809 toast, was adopted as New Hampshire’s motto in 1945, and is codified at RSA 3:8. | VERIFIED | NH.gov, State Motto; RSA 3:8. |
| 14 | In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), his only full-length book, Jefferson advanced the view that Black people were inferior to whites. | ATTRIBUTED | Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia; Britannica. |
| 15 | The accusation surfaced in 1802 (James Callender, Richmond); Jefferson’s family later attributed the children to his Carr nephews, an explanation the 1998 DNA study excluded. | VERIFIED | Monticello; White House Historical Association; Nature (1998). |
| 16 | Monticello’s current exhibits affirm Jefferson’s paternity, and the 2012 Smithsonian exhibition “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” drew more than one million visitors. | VERIFIED | Monticello; Jefferson–Hemings controversy record. |
| 17 | Jefferson never formally freed Sally Hemings; she was released informally after his death by his daughter and died in Charlottesville in 1835. | VERIFIED | Monticello, Life of Sally Hemings. |
| 18 | Jefferson’s 1784 ordinance would have banned slavery in the western territories after 1800; the anti-slavery clause was defeated in Congress (seven states to six) and deleted. He later lamented the single vote that decided it. | VERIFIED | Encyclopedia.com; Library of Congress; “Thomas Jefferson and slavery” (Wikipedia, primary-sourced). |
Reach the editor directly — confidentiality respected where possible.
granitestatereport@gmail.com · (603) 931-9264
Editor’s note. Every load-bearing claim above was checked against primary sources, principally the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s own research and the 1998 Nature study; see the fact-check table. “Statutory rape” and “child sexual abuse” are used as descriptions under modern standards, not as legal findings against a man who died in 1826. A vocal minority, led by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, still disputes Jefferson’s paternity and points to his brother Randolph; the Foundation and the field of early-American historians treat the question as settled, and this piece follows that consensus. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.
