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Thomas Jefferson: The Life Of Sally Hemings

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“All men are created equal,” wrote Thomas Jefferson but his deeds did not always match his eloquent words. Like most of the other aristocratic landowners in Virginia; Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and the third president of the United States, owned slaves. One of them was a woman named Sally Hemings who was one-quarter African and was probably the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and a half-African slave. If this genealogy is correct Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha. Indeed observers at the time notes that Hemings looked remarkably like Martha Jefferson, who had died on September 6, 1782, when Jefferson was

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