I visited Monticello over the weekend and was learning about his plantation and his relationship with Sally Hemings, as well as their children together. However, it only hit me once I got home that all of their children together were all held as slaves under his ownership, and were only freed at his death.
Particularly considering that these children were only 1/8 black (the tour guide also gave a story of one of the children marrying a white man and living the rest of her life as a free white woman) and the fact that his wife had died years before any children with Sally Hemings were born, was it standard practice for slave owners to keep their own children as slaves, especially if the children in question passed as white in society? Is there any evidence that Jefferson regretted enslaving his own children? Would there have been societal/social backlash at the time from enslaving one's own children, in addition to having children with a slave in the first place?
Thanks!
Hi there -- while there was a "discussion" below that delved into issues of "how well" Jefferson might have treated his children (whom he kept as slaves), no one involved in the thread other than one user seems to have made the obvious point that there can be no question of "consent" in the Jefferson-Hemings relationship, in which one party owned the other as literal chattel. We will happily entertain an answer which puts Jefferson's serial and ongoing rape of his chattel slave (not only at his slave labor camp in Monticello, but also while he was representing American interests in France) in the context of other unequal sexual relationships in the antebellum United States, but we will not stand for rape apologia dressed up as nostalgia here.