Harriet’s mother was herself the child of a mixed-race woman and a white master as a result, Harriet and her brothers had a high enough percentage of European ancestry that they would have been considered white under Virginia law. Although the exact circumstances of her early life have been lost to time, those details that are known suggest that Harriet experienced a childhood defined by contradictions. Harriet Hemings was born in May 1801 on Jefferson’s estate, the second daughter to bear the name after the death of her elder sister in 1797. She grew up in a world where she was both a Jefferson and a slave and lived as both a Black woman and a white woman over the course of her life. Harriet Hemings was the daughter of the most powerful man in the country and an enslaved woman thirty years his junior. While the question of how to approach the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and never freed the mother of his children is one that will undoubtedly continue to spark fierce debate for years to come, the Jefferson-centric narrative often neglects the unique experiences of those children. Over the course of the last few decades, the unequal relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, has come to dominate discussions of Jefferson’s legacy as a politician and as a man. Engraving of Monticello circa 1892 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
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