Sally Hemings herself died here in Charlottesville in 1835. A subsequent DNA study in 1998 strongly supported Gordon Reed's argument that Jefferson was the likely father of several of Sally Hemings' children. And Annette Gordon Reed's Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an American controversy, which came out in 1997. Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings, a novel, published in 1979.

This notorious relationship has been the subject of any number of books and articles in recent years, most prominently these two, that you see on the screen. And it's likely that the relationship between them began there, when Hemings was a girl, of 14 or 15. Jefferson and Hemings were together during the future president's residence in Paris, during the 1780s. That Thomas Jefferson fathered several children with his slave, Sally Hemings. Clotel was based on what were then rumors, but is now the largely accepted historical fact. And in 1853, while living in London, he published Clotel, or The President's Daughter, a narrative of slave life in the United States, widely considered the first novel written by an African American. A few years later he fled to England in order to evade the Fugitive Slave Act. He escaped in 1834, while working on a steamboat crew, and published his memoirs, Narrative of William W Brown, A Fugitive Slave, in 1847.

William Wells Brown was born in Kentucky, the son of a white plantation owner and a slave woman named Elizabeth. The author was himself born into slavery before escaping and establishing an international reputation as a writer in various genres. The story it tells begins right in those years, when this university was being built, built in large part by the labor of slaves, the University of Virginia's original labor force in the early 19th Century. The novel I will be discussing in this lecture, Clotel, or The President's Daughter, has an important relationship to the University of Virginia. I'm standing on the grounds of the University of Virginia, an institution that was conceived and designed by Thomas Jefferson during the years following his presidency.

Clotel by William Wells Brown