- Thomas Jefferson served as the U.S. minister to France between 1784 to 1789.
- In 1787, he was joined in Paris by his youngest daughter, Maria, and Sally Hemings, an enslaved teenager on his Virginia plantation, Monticello.
- Jefferson and Hemings, who was 30 years his junior, began a sexual relationship while in Paris that ultimately produced at least six children.
The sexual relationship between third U.S. President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a Black woman enslaved by him, is put under the microscope in a new documentary series. As the image comes into focus, it’s alternately enlightening and disturbing — depending on what century you live in.
Thomas Jefferson, the six-part documentary series that premiered on the History channel Feb. 17 and is airing over three consecutive nights, presents an in-depth portrait of the founding father with the most complicated legacy.
He was the author of the Declaration of Independence who made “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” the American mantra — yet he owned hundreds of enslaved people during his lifetime and considered Black Americans to be inferior to White Americans, a point of view he wrote about at length in his 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia.
One of the enslaved people on his Virginia plantation, Monticello, was Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his late wife, Martha Jefferson, who died in 1782 at age 33. Hemings gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children (four survived to adulthood). Thomas Jefferson‘s fourth episode, which premieres on Feb. 18, goes deep into the genesis of their personal relationship. But first, we have Jefferson in Paris with his eldest daughter, Martha, serving as minister to France, a post he held between 1784 and 1789.
Three years in, Jefferson decided he had been separated long enough from his younger daughter, Maria, whom he’d left behind in Virginia. “In 1787 Jefferson insists that his daughter Maria come to France,” says Susan A. Kern, author of The Jeffersons at Shadwell, in the documentary series.
Being 8 years old at the time, Maria wasn’t expected to travel alone. “And he says, ‘She should come with a careful Negro woman,’ ” historian Annette Gordon-Reed explains, adding, “They send Sally Hemings, who is at the time 14 years old.”
Kern continues: “And so 14-year-old Sally Hemings, who has known Virginia her whole life, is asked to be the company for young Maria Jefferson on this weeks at sea and then arrival in France.”
In July of 1787, teenaged Hemings and 8-year-old Maria arrived in Paris.
“There will be dramatic changes in both his and Sally Hemings’ personal life during his time in Paris,” says Frank Colgiano, author of A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson, and the American Public.
Niya Bates from Princeton University’s Department of History picks up the story: “When they get to Paris, Sally Hemings is very quickly thrust into a position that many Americans, especially the enslaved people, were never in. She travels over the ocean and into this unfamiliar territory.”
Adds Gordon-Reed: “She comes from an extremely rural place to a metropolis. Paris was a very active place, so it would have been a very exciting time for her, but kind of scary.”
Bates continues: “She’s by herself. She’s got an older brother, but he’s also hired out, trained to become a professional chef. She can’t speak French, and the only people that she knows are Jefferson and his daughter. And so her world in France would have been pretty confusing because Jefferson is attempting to conceal that he has enslaved people in France because French law actually prohibits enslaved people in the city.”
According to the documentary series, Jefferson went to great lengths to conceal the implications of French law from Hemings, who was officially in Paris as a paid chambermaid and not as an enslaved woman. Eventually, her relationship with Jefferson evolved into something more intimate than master and servant.
“In 1789 when she’s 16 years old, Jefferson starts buying her a good amount of clothing. Before he’s just paying her the salary. But then he’s buying clothes for her,” says Gordon-Reed.
Kern adds, “Jefferson is in his 40s, his wife has died. He is used to having people around him who tend his body, who dress him and undress him. It’s clear that Sally and Jefferson begin a sexual relationship.”
Here the narrator chimes in. “When exactly Thomas Jefferson begins his physical relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings is unknown,” he says, “but it is clear that the physical relationship begins while she is in France, between 1797 and 1789, when she would have been between 14 and 16 years old.”
In contemporary terms, we’d probably call this “grooming” — or perhaps something worse, since Hemings, as the property of Jefferson, didn’t have the option of resisting any advances made by him. But 250 years ago, even without the imbalance of power created by the slavery dynamic, a sexual relationship between a grown man and a teenage girl was acceptable in a way it would never be in 2025.
“There is no ethical landscape in our world today that says that a sexual relationship between a 40-year-old male and a 16-year-old enslaved female is OK,” Kerns says. “It’s an unequal power relationship. That is absolutely certain. But many people in early Virginia got married at the age of 16, men and women. Some people got married younger. It was not the scandal in the 18th century that certainly it would be today.”
Still, a revisionist version of history persisted for years. In it, Jefferson was a beacon of liberty who made a promise to his beloved wife on her deathbed never to remarry. Only in recent decades has the story of his relationship with Hemings become more common knowledge, and, ultimately, it was proven by DNA tests done on their descendants, two of whom appear in the documentary series.
At the end of Jefferson’s stay in Paris, Hemings, who by that time was aware of the implications of French law, agreed to return to Virginia with him under one condition: She would remain enslaved, but her children would be free when they turned 21.
Her sexual relationship with Jefferson continued, according to expert evidence presented in the documentary series’ sixth episode, and produced at least six children. As those who survived to adulthood came of age, Jefferson kept his promise. But when he died on July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the man who preached that “all men are created equal” freed only a handful of his enslaved people — a small number that didn’t include the one who bore him six children.
The six episodes of Thomas Jefferson will stream on the History channel the day after they premiere.
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