Every Generation Is an "Independant Nation": Colonization, Miscegenation, and the Fate of Jefferson's Children

Abstract

T THOMAS Jefferson never acknowledged his mixed-race children with Sally Hemings. Little evidence of any kind exists about how he thought or felt about those children. But Jefferson did have a great deal to say about demoralizing implications of miscegenational relationships for Virginia's master class. His well-known concern, bordering on obsession, with generational sovereignty also suggests that he was sensitive to fate of his unacknowledged children with Hemings. I propose to reconsider Jefferson's life-long advocacy of African colonization for clues about how he might have understood history of his unacknowledged shadow family. By I824, when in a letter to Jared Sparks, editor of North American Review, Jefferson offered fullest exposition of his thinking about emancipation and expatriation of American slaves, his idiosyncratic approach was of little interest or relevance to movers and shakers in American Colonization Society (ACS).1 But this fascinating letter does speak, obliquely, to crucially important private as well as public issues. Jefferson's ideas about colonization were first developed in an amendment to A Bill concerning Slaves that he drafted when he was a member of committee charged with revising Virginia's laws in I779. Although, as Jefferson recalled, committee endorsed the principles of amendment-the freedom of all born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age-the amendment was never submitted to General Assembly because the public mind would not yet bear proposition.2