| Episodes |
The Jefferson-Hemings scandal dies down once Callender dies in 1803 and once Jefferson wins election to a second term in 1804, but it certainly doesn't die. British traveler-critics kept the controversy alive as part of their attack on American culture in our early national period, and, leading up to the Civil War, African Americans and abolitionists targeted Jefferson and his personal relation to slavery. It's clear that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship was part of the African American oral tradition and a thorn in its cultural memory.
Suggested basic sources:
David Walker, David Walker's Appeal (1829): see how Jefferson figures (though without reference to Sally) in this early anti-slavery text by an African American. See pertinent Walker selections at the PBS Africans in America web site.
William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853): this first African American novel is based on Jefferson's mulatto children. For key specific framing references to Jefferson, see Chap 1, "The Negro Sale" (esp. pp. 60, 64) and Chap. 25, "Death is Freedom" (esp. p. 218).
For a good selection of contextual material and a collection of secondary sources, see Robert S. Levine, ed. Clotel, or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States by William Wells Brown. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.
