Sally Hemings and her children were ‘Heritage Americans’

James Callender first alleged that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemings, more than 200 years ago. A century and a half ago, one of those children, Madison Hemings, stated publicly that Jefferson was his father. But only in the past week has the genetic evidence proved irrefutable, indicating that it was the Founding Father himself and not any of his other male relatives who sired the Hemings children.Since as far back as Callender’s first allegation, naysayers have insisted that the Hemings family’s paternity was a smear of either Jefferson or his American project more broadly. Jefferson’s granddaughter, through his wife, insisted that such relationships were “moral impossibilities,” a defense that was echoed repeatedly and across the political aisle. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which was founded expressly to deny his paternity after 1998 DNA testing ruled out Jefferson’s nephews as possible fathers of the Hemings children, wrote that “the only reason” arguing the president’s responsibility “is that for those who want to reconstruct American history in accordance with their own racial and political fantasies, it’s very useful to show that Thomas Jefferson fathered a child on a black slave.”And surely, there are the sort of bad-faith actors who wish to erase the good and the bad of American history that are guilty of such a sin. But for centuries, American conservatives have understood that the personal flaws of the founders make our founding no less extraordinary. But a faction of the Right has recently adopted a parallel logic to the progenitors of Woke 1. Whereas the woke Left wants to discredit our current values and patriotism by indicting the personal characters of our past, the woke Right wants to assign modern patriotism to people based expressly on their genetic heritage. Rather than consider that first and second generation Americans can embrace, fulfill, and embody our founding ideals as well as those who have been here for centuries, the woke Right insists that only “Heritage Americans” are true Americans, otherwise, they are interlopers who don’t quite deserve to count.As the Blaze host Auron MacIntyre said on Tucker Carlson‘s show last year, “Heritage Americans are those that are actually tied. You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” as opposed to American identity as “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” At the Federalist, Brianna Lyman insists that the use of the term means “giving the people who built the country and have preserved the country” credit because they “formed communities, established our institutions, developed customs, fought wars, and went so far in the Constitution to say all of it was being done for our ‘posterity.'”Well, by the Woke Right logic, Sally Hemings and her children were Heritage Americans, and their descendants deserve as much patriotic credit. By these same standards, would Jefferson deserve condemnation for engaging in behavior that actively undermined the institutions, customs, and Enlightenment philosophy that Jefferson himself created?If you could view the tableau of Jefferson and Hemings in the Hotel de Langeac in 1789, the latter negotiating her terms to return to Virginia, what would strike modern eyes is likely not the dynamic of a slave and a master. While in France, Hemings was a paid servant and legally a free person, likely living in Jefferson’s mansion while dressed and trained as a lady’s maid to Jefferson’s younger daughter, whom Hemings had been charged with accompanying during Jefferson’s tenure as American minister. The most jarring disparity between the three-quarters-white, straight-haired, and fair-skinned Hemings and Jefferson is not race but age.Hemings was born in 1773, making her 15 or 16 when a 45-year-old Jefferson likely impregnated her. Even by contemporary standards, this would have been considered a bizarre age gap. When George Washington’s 19-year-old stepson married the 16-year-old Eleanor Calvert, both he and Martha were alarmed at how young they were. Elite young women usually waited until they were at least 17 or 18 years old to marry, while women of the masses usually didn’t marry until their early 20s. And contemporaries noted that Hemings seemed young for her age. When Abigail Adams met a 14-year-old Hemings in 1787, the future first lady described her as “quite a child.”And remarkably, this child exerted astounding agency. When she became pregnant in Paris, she refused to return to Virginia, where she was legally property, successfully extracting an incredible concession from Jefferson: He promised extraordinary privileges and freedom for their children at 21.The Hemings story shocks modern sensibilities for many of its grotesqueries, but also because it challenges the obvious moral contours of a 45-year-old owner impregnating his teenage slave. In a legal system that regarded a 15-year-old girl as property, Hemings bartered with one of the most powerful men in the country, and even without any legal leverage once she returned to Virginia, she won. Jefferson quietly sent off two of their older children to escape Monticello and freed the two younger children upon his death. Of the four surviving adult children, who were seven-eighths white and reportedly resembled Jefferson, three married into white society and secretly discarded the fact that they were born in bondage.There are select privileges that these Heritage Americans indeed deserve. Currently, the Monticello Association bans Hemings descendants from being buried alongside their Jefferson relatives born in wedlock. As the descendants of Hemings and Jefferson have so long insisted, Heritage Americans deserve to be interred in the historic cemeteries housing their ancestors. Congressionally chartered organizations such as the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and Daughters of the American Revolution correctly provide federal recognition and honorific status to those Heritage Americans who descend from those who forged our country at the crossroads. If we really wanted to honor the greatest Heritage Americans, we would abolish the estate tax to allow the most blue-blooded billionaires to pass on centuries of their compounded genetic fortune to their Heritage American descendants.After all, the paragons of these Heritage Americans are not the downwardly mobile descendants of a guy whose union factory closed after NAFTA, but Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George W. Bush, and Taylor Swift. All four of these Americans are direct Mayflower descendants with various bankers, business magnates, white-shoe lawyers, and politicians littered throughout the generations past. What better way to honor these Heritage Americans than to allow future baby Kelce-Swift to inherit mom’s $2 billion net worth without paying a single cent back to Uncle Sam?But of course, this is usually not the focus of the Heritage American clan any more than actually reconciling Jefferson’s personal conduct with his politics is the priority of the woke Left.And in fact, Jefferson’s behavior epitomized his own writings on the only issue so contentious that it drove America to civil war. Jefferson clearly believed that slavery was morally corrosive, turning owners into “despots” and slaves into “enemies” who would consequently hate their country. He also deeply feared that ending the practice, which he knew God despised, would rupture the country, so he assumed that emancipation would require slaves to be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” He echoed this logic with his treatment of his own biological children, and unlike the Civil War, the silent emancipation and reinvention of the Hemings children worked — just in a way that abdicated Jefferson’s responsibility as a father.TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY STARES DOWN AN EARLY ENDJefferson’s personal flaws didn’t cleanly contradict his public philosophy, and they certainly didn’t undermine it. The Hemings children instead demonstrate that the struggle to realize America’s promise is nearly as old as the promise itself, and if anything, it’s every bit as hard as Jefferson suspected it would be.The Hemings children are indeed Heritage Americans, but Jefferson knew that the “artificial aristocracy” based on birth was second to the “natural aristocracy” of “virtue.” Or, in other words, Americans.