Telling the whole tale at Monticello
THE room where historians believe Sally Hemings slept was just steps away from Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom. But in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello turned it into a restroom.
The floor tiles and bathroom stalls covered over the story of the enslaved woman, who was owned by Jefferson and had a long-term relationship with him. Their liaison was a scandal during his life and was denied for decades by his descendants. But many historians now believe the third president of the United States was the father of her six children.
Time, and perhaps shame, erased all physical evidence of her presence at Jefferson’s home here, a building so famous that it is depicted on the back of the US’s 5-cent piece.
Now the floor tiles have been pulled up and the room is under restoration – and Hemings’s life is poised to become a larger part of the story told at Monticello.
When the long-hidden space opens to the public next year, it will mark a dramatic shift in the way one of the nation’s most revered Founding Fathers is portrayed to the more than 440,000 visitors who tour this landmark annually.
It’s part of a $35 million restoration project that will bolster Monticello’s infrastructure but also reconstruct and showcase buildings where enslaved people lived and worked. The man who wrote the words “all men are created equal” in 1776 was master of a 2,000hectare working plantation who over the course of his life owned 607 slaves.
“Visitors will come up here and understand that there was no place on this mountaintop that slavery wasn’t,” said Christa Dierksheide, a Monticello historian. “Thomas Jefferson was surrounded by people, and the vast majority of those people were enslaved.”
When Jefferson’s critics wrote salacious stories in the early 1800s alleging that the widowed politician had a longterm liaison with one of these slaves, it was said that he kept her “in a room of her own” at Monticello.
Historians do not know exactly how old Hemings was when she lived there, and no portraits or photographs of her exist. But step into the brick room, the floor still covered in red dirt, and it is not hard to imagine her sitting in a chair, warming herself in front of the fireplace.
Historians know that Hemings was a seamstress and worked for a time as Jefferson’s chambermaid. In 1787, when she was 14, Jefferson had Hemings accompany his young daughter Maria to Paris, where he was an envoy negotiating trade agreements. According to accounts from Hemings’s son Madison, their personal relationship began in France.
Four of Hemings’s children lived to adulthood, and documentary evidence, along with genetic links found in DNA tests of Hemings and Jefferson descendants in 1998, led most historians to believe that Jefferson was their father. Jefferson allowed these children to live free, and his family granted Sally Hemings an unofficial freedom after Jefferson’s death.
Monticello historians hope the restored room will humanise the image of Hemings. Her space will be outfitted with period furniture and artifacts, such as bone toothbrushes and ceramics excavated on the property.
“It will portray her outside of the mystery,” said Niya Bates, public historian of slavery and African-American life at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and runs Monticello as a museum.
“She was a mother, a sister, an ancestor for her descendants, and [the room’s presentation] will really just shape her as a person and give her a presence outside of the wonder of their relationship.”
Hemings’s new prominence at Monticello is part of a decades-long shift. In 1993, as Monticello celebrated the 250th anniversary of Jefferson’s birth, guides began giving a “Plantation Community” tour that incorporated stories of the enslaved. But little remained of Mulberry Row, where the slaves worked.
At its height, the complex just 60 metres from Jefferson’s house bustled with more than 20 workshops, sheds and dwellings. Enslaved teenagers wove textiles and forged nails there. But by the end of the 19th century, nearly all the buildings on Mulberry Row had been torn down.
Lucia Stanton, a now-retired historian who began working there in 1968, and her colleagues sought to recreate this lost world via an oral history project, interviewing more than 100 descendants of Monticello’s enslaved people.
“Once you start to look at the details of the whole scene at Monticello – work, family life, punishment – it is richer,” said Stanton, who wrote a book about slavery on the plantation. “It is so much better to try to see something whole.”
At Monticello’s Mulberry Row, a rebuilt slave cabin has been staged as a space where John Hemmings (Sally’s brother spelled his name with two M’s) might have lived with his wife, Priscilla. An iron workshop has been reconstructed and a textile shop is being restored. The stables will soon be opened to highlight the men who cared for Jefferson’s prized horses.
Leslie Bowman, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, raised about $20 million of the funding for these projects from David Rubenstein, the private-equity billionaire and philanthropist who has a particular interest in Mulberry Row.
“If you are going to get people to come to historic sites, you should show them what it was really like,” said Rubenstein, who has also underwritten renovations to the slave quarters at Arlington House and James Madison’s Montpelier.
“The good and bad of history.”