he most powerful man in America. But in Monticelo, in that small room next to his, lived his secret. The slaves of Montichelo knew, the neighbors suspected, the visitors noticed the light-skinned children who resembled the president, but no one spoke.
not publicly until someone did. In September 1802, a journalist named James Callender published an article in the Recorder newspaper. Cender, an ally of Jefferson, had supported him politically, but the two had had a falling out. Cender wanted revenge and had the perfect story to destroy Jefferson. The article said that President Jefferson kept one of his slaves as a concubine, that her name was Sally, that he had had several children with her, that these children lived in Montichelo, that they resembled Jefferson,
that everyone in Virginia knew it, but no one dared to say it. Calender wrote with specific details, names, ages, descriptions. I was making it up, I was reporting what I had heard, what many knew, what no one had dared to publish. The scandal exploded. Newspapers across the country picked up the story.
Jefferson’s political enemies , the Federalists, used the article to attack him. They published obscene cartoons. They wrote satirical poems, they called him a hypocrite. They said that the man who had written that all men are created equal had slave children, that the president of the nation kept a slave mistress, that he was a liar, a fraud, a man without morals.
Jefferson did not respond, never denied the article, never confirmed anything, he simply remained silent. His daughters defended their father, saying it was impossible, that he would never do such a thing, that the light-skinned children in Montichelo were the children of Jefferson’s nephews, not his, and that Calender was lying out of revenge.
But Jefferson himself never said anything, not a single public word about Sally Hemings, not a single denial, not a single confirmation. The scandal eventually died down. Jefferson was re-elected in 1804, served his second full term, and kept returning to Montelo, kept seeing Sali, kept having children with her because power protects.
And Jefferson had all the power. I didn’t have any. In 1805, Sally gave birth to a boy. They called him Madison. He was her fifth living child. Beverly was 7 years old. Harriet had four. Madison grew up knowing who her father was. Years later, when he was an adult and free, he gave an interview to a newspaper. He told the whole story.
He said that his father was Thomas Jefferson, that his mother was Sally Hemings, that he had grown up in Montichelo knowing this, that everyone knew it, that nobody talked about it, but that it was true. In 1808, Sally gave birth to her last child. They called him Eston. She had the fairest skin of them all.
