Thomas Jefferson
On Thomas Jefferson I read Catherine Kerrison’s tome “Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America”.
Kerrison cuts through Jefferson’s mythology to show the man how he was in his home and with his family.
What sticks with me the most is when Harriet, daughter of Sally Hemmings (a slave) and Jefferson, is freed (and this is a remarkable moment in itself) as negotiated by Sally. She walks, as far as anyone knows, into southern white society to live an unrecorded, undiscovered, normal life. Since Jefferson was darker-skinned-white and Sally Hemmings was lighter-skinned-black, she is light enough in complexion to never be questioned and returned to chains. She is the ultimate counter-example to the Antebellum South’s idea that blacks are genetically inferior and divinely destined for servitude. Here is a black woman, according to the one drop rule, living amongst them, with desire for freedom, wielding that freedom, and them none the wiser! She smashes the idea of black and white at the time. And its amazing it is so intimately connected to one of the founding fathers who failed to live up to protecting the liberties he inked to paper.