When a president's daughter vanished (Kerrison/WaPo)

[eppur_se_muova]

What the disappearance of Thomas Jefferson's daughter can tell us about racism in America.

By Catherine Kerrison January 25

Catherine Kerrison is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, and the author of the forthcoming book "Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black in a Young America."

Many people know that Thomas Jefferson had a long-standing relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings. But fewer know that they had four children, three boys and a girl, who survived to adulthood. Born into slavery, Sally’s daughter Harriet boarded a stagecoach to freedom at age 21, bound for Washington, D.C. Her father had given her $50 for her travel expenses. She would never see her mother or younger brothers again.

With her departure from Monticello in 1822, Harriet disappeared from the historical record, not to be heard of again for more than 50 years, when her brother told her story. Seven-eighths white, Harriet had “thought it to her interest to go to Washington as a white woman,” he said. She married a “white man in good standing” in that city and “raised a family of children.” In the half-century during which she passed as white, her brother was “not aware that her identity as Harriet Hemings of Monticello has ever been discovered.”

So how did we lose a president’s daughter? Given America’s obsession with the Founding Fathers, with the children of the Revolution and their descendants, why did Jefferson’s child disappear? As it turns out, America has an even greater obsession with race, so that not even Harriet Hemings’s lineage as a president’s daughter was sufficient to convey the benefits of freedom. Instead, her birth into slavery marked her as black and drove her decision to erase her family history.

Harriet Hemings passed as white to protect her fragile freedom. Jefferson had not issued her formal manumission papers, so until the abolition of slavery in 1865, by law she remained a slave, which meant her children also inherited that condition. But in a society that increasingly associated blackness with enslavement, Hemings used her white skin not only to ensure her children’s freedom, but to claim for them all the rights and privileges of whiteness: education, the vote, a home mortgage, any seat they chose on a streetcar. To reveal herself as the daughter of Jefferson and his slave would have destroyed her plans for a better life for her descendants.
***
more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/01/25/how-did-we-lose-a-presidents-daughter/?utm_term=.4f17d6b4424f

[Squinch]

1. The more I read about Jefferson, the more scummy I find him.

[MaryMagdaline]

2. You would think he would have learned

From his own children how monstrous slavery is

[wishstar]

3. Interesting, thanks for posting- comments interesting too, many posters in denial

One of the commentators is a descendent of Jefferson who does a good job shooting down the posters who are determined to deny the overwhelming evidence of Jefferson's paternity of Sally's kids

[GeoWilliam750]

4. Very interesting

[MosheFeingold]

5. If you want to know about Jefferson

Read what Alexander Hamiliton wrote and said about Jefferson.

Hamilton despised Jefferson as a person and slavery -- and yet supported Jefferson over his friend Aaron Burr.

Jefferson was very complex, with such conflicting ideas in his head that it is hard to believe he could remain sane.

He was both a great man and a terrible failure as a human being, all at once.

In short, he's an American, writ large.