The trouble with Thomas Jefferson: the eloquent founder's original sin.

• Author: Root, Damon W.
• Position: The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family - Book review

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, by Annette Gordon-Reed, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 800 pages, $35

IN 1775 the English essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson wrote a spirited political pamphlet rifled Taxation No Tyranny. His subject was the loud and increasingly aggressive rhetoric coming from the American colonies, where criticism of British economic policy was giving way to calls for popular revolution. "How is it," Johnson retorted, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

It's still a good question. Perhaps no one illustrates the paradox better than Thomas Jefferson. The celebrated author of the Declaration of Independence, which famously declares that "all men are created equal" and are born with the inalienable rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," Jefferson was also a slaveholder, a man whose livelihood was rooted in the subjugation of hundreds of human beings, including members of his wife's family and his own.

At the center of Jefferson's tangled, frequently horrifying web of blood and bondage were two women: Elizabeth Hemings and her daughter Sarah, better known as Sally. Elizabeth, the daughter of an African slave and an English sea captain, was the slave mistress of a Virginia slave owner and broker named John Wayles. Sally Hemings was the youngest of their six children. Wayles also had children from his three marriages, including a daughter named Martha. Sally Hemings, in other words, was Martha Wayles' half-sister. At her father's death in 1773, Martha inherited his human property, including Elizabeth and Sally Hemings. In 1772 Martha married Thomas Jefferson. Thus the Hemingses came to Monticello.

In 1782 Martha died from complications after giving birth to her sixth child with Jefferson. Among those with him at her deathbed were Elizabeth and Sally Hemings, who then was 9 years old. Edmund Bacon, one of Jefferson's overseers at Monticello, reported that as Martha lay dying she asked her husband not to remarry. "Holding her hand, Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again," Bacon recalled. "And he never did."

That doesn't mean Jefferson became celibate. In 1789,while serving as U.S. envoy in Paris, he almost certainly began a four-decade-long relationship with his late wife's half-sister. (In addition to the oral testimony of numerous Hemings family members, the evidence for their relationship includes DNA tests conducted...