Looking into Jefferson is fascinating - his life is so packed with accomplishments, failures, great ideas, and horrific mistakes, and he is somehow very consistent in spite of being such a deeply contradictory person...

By the time he emancipated her children, the people of his time definitely knew of the allegations regarding his relationship with Sally Hemmings, questions about it having been publicly raised numerous times in the past. One would think that the Federalists would have used the emancipation to further reinforce the character questions they’d previously put forth about him, and that even Democratic-Republicans would have balked at the potentially nepotistic optics of the situation.

Did people at large generally not know about this action? Was emancipation a totally private happening? Am I using as a model too modern of a relationship between the press/public and the political elite of the time? It would be understandable if, in a time before universal education and suffrage, people were less informed or politically involved...but also, the salacious nature of the accusations would have been base enough for even the crudest American to understand...

I have a lot of questions about the morality of this time, the combination of what would now be considered extreme religiousness with such callous indifference to the suffering created by chattel slavery smacks of such deep hypocrisy to my modern mind that it’s almost unintelligible. Still, I can clearly see how even people as morally alien to my own sensibilities could find problems with emancipation of slavery based on a potential kinship. I would greatly appreciate any illumination that can be shed on how society reacted to learning that one of their founding fathers was giving preferential treatment to the products of a long term, inter-racial sexual relationship with a slave he owned; I think it might help some other, broader pieces of my understanding of the time fall more accurately in place. Thanks!