![]() ![]() ![]() The law prevented slaves from giving testimony in courts against white people. What the violation meant to the woman was irrelevant. If her owner raped her, it was no crime at all. Forcing a slave woman to have sex against her will was considered a trespass against her owner. Slave women were unprotected against rape. With the law's protection they could be beaten to death as part of legitimate "correction." They were denied legal marriage. They were defined in statutes as chattel or real estate. People were bought and sold against their will. None of these conditions approach the systematic degradation and violence of American slavery sanctioned by state and church. There are women who are held in bondage and forced to work as prostitutes or to clean others' homes and care for others' families while their own families go unattended. There are workers all over the world who live desperate lives with little hope of advancement for themselves or their children. Yet, slavery is a different matter altogether. "These are the things," at least some of us say, "that we're still working to overcome." We also know that hierarchies, based on any number of factors, exist in every society, enriching the lives of some and blighting the lives of others. When we encounter these practices while studying the eighteenth century, we react knowingly. Most Americans today admit the existence of racism and sexism, even as we often disagree about examples of them. Those attitudes, years in the making by the time Hemings was born, fascinate because they are at once utterly familiar and totally alien. She was, by law, an item of property-a nonwhite, female slave, whose life was bounded by eighteenth-century attitudes about how such persons fit into society. Hemings lived at a time when chattel slavery existed in every American colony, but was dramatically expanding and thriving in the Virginia that was her home. She lived through the Revolution in the home of one of the men who helped make it and died during the formative years of the American Republic, an unknown person in the midst of pivotal events in national and world history. JOIN ME ON SOCIAL Art and Logo created by Jacob VerdajoElizabeth Hemings began life when America was still a colonial possession. New Monticello Exibit Has picture of whole familyĬHECK OUT MY OTHER PODCAST A DAY WITH CRIMEĭON'T FORGET TO RATE, COMMENT AND SUBSCRIBE Thomas Jefferson's Black and white relatives meet each other In 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of Monticello announced its plans to have an exhibit titled Life of Sally Hemings, and affirmed that it was treating as a settled issue that Jefferson was the father of her known children. Following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, and a 1998 DNA study (completed in 1999 and published as a report in 2000) that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings' youngest son, Eston Hemings, the Monticello Foundation asserted that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely her other five children as well. The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children is the subject of the Jefferson–Hemings controversy. For more than 200 years, her name has been linked to Thomas Jefferson as his “concubine,” obscuring the facts of her life and her identity. Sally Hemings is one of the most famous-and least known-African American women in U.S.
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