(quirky music) - Thomas Jefferson was America's foremost philosopher of liberty, who in drafting the Declaration of Independence, gives us the civic creed that the nation remains organized around.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights."

The United States is organized around that idea, and the ideal of self-government as the best system to protect those natural rights.

Jefferson is also like everybody in the elite class of Virginia, an enslaver.

(upbeat jazz music) (slow rock ballad) (sober music) - Jefferson had a couple of different plantations.

Monticello is the home plantation, it's the place that he decides in an early age where he will build on top of a mountain just two miles away from where he's born.

- It's this stunningly beautiful place that aspires to these lofty ideals, that was built by enslaved labor, built amongst this world of radical inequality, to espouse the ideas of equality.

It's a fascinating place.

- Of course, he's born into a slave society, and he knows at a very young age that he will inherit enslaved people upon his coming of age.

His very first memory is of being carried on a pillow by an enslaved man.

Jefferson marries Martha Wayles Skelton, who shall become Martha Jefferson in 1772.

And she dies 10 years later, after a series of miscarriages and pregnancies.

It's through her father that he'll acquire over 10,000 acres of land and over 130 enslaved people.

Robert Hemings is Jefferson's enslaved valet, and he's present in Philadelphia as a 14-year-old while Jefferson is writing the Declaration of Independence.

They're living in the same building on seventh and High St., what is now 7th and Market St.

About 20 years later, a little bit less than that, Robert Hemings is the first person that Jefferson frees.

There's this real connection between Robert Hemings being present at the Declaration of Independence and then pursuing his own personal freedom later in life.

- The Hemings family was the largest family at Monticello, free or enslaved, five generations of the Hemings that's lived here.

And probably the most well known member of the Hemings family is Sally Hemings, and that is because she was the mother of at least six children who were fathered by Thomas Jefferson.

Martha Jefferson and Sally Hemings were half sisters.

- She's born into slavery in 1773, (sober music continues) and as a teenager, she will be transported to France to accompany Jefferson's youngest daughter, while he's minister to France.

And it's there, according to Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings and Jefferson's son, that their connection, their relationship begins when she's around the age of 17 or so.

Ultimately, Jefferson and Hemings will have about six children together, four of whom will live to adulthood hood.

- The two elder Hemings children are allowed to leave this plantation when they're young adults, and they're allowed to leave without pursuit.

This was uncommon here at Monticello.

One of his white granddaughters would later write that anyone who was sufficiently white enough to pass into white society was allowed to leave.

Jefferson and Hemings' youngest sons, Madison and Eston Hemings, they were formally freed by their father and his will.

Sally Hemings, after Thomas Jefferson's death, went and lived in the town of Charlottesville, the closest town to us, and lived with her sons for some time.

- During the era of enslavement, it was very, very common to have mixed race people.

One fifth of all enslaved people in Mississippi were mixed race in some way, shape or form.

So sexuality was an enormous portion of slavery, having control over women's reproductive rights, having control over sexual access to enslaved women.

And of course, the most famous case is Thomas Jefferson himself.

- A journalist actually began writing articles to expose the relationship, so there were a series of articles written that Jefferson ignored.

Many of the white Jefferson family members denied that such a thing had occurred.

- It was published during Thomas Jefferson's life when he was the president of the United States, it was widely discussed and widely known, though the culture and the behavior of a slave-owning society at the time.

These things were not openly discussed, but they were known.

Jefferson himself never commented at all.

What we know about it today largely comes from the conversations of their descendants.

(tranquil music) Thomas Jefferson is one of the most divisive figures in American history, and always has been.

It's not new that people would argue over what Jefferson thought, what Jefferson actually meant, or who gets to claim Thomas Jefferson.

- He's the author of the Declaration of Independence, that not only helped lay the first principles for this country itself, but have inspired others throughout the ages to advocate for their own independence and liberty and individual rights.

- The Declaration of Independence was brilliant in one sense, and it later became a document that was very useful for African Americans and our struggle for our own freedom.

- We have Thomas Jefferson's final draft of the Declaration of Independence in his own hand, and it's the one that Jefferson believed was the pristine version.

And he always said, once Congress got their hands on it, they meddled with it, they changed words, they changed the power of the document, that his final draft was actually the best draft.

- In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's original draft, there are 168 words blaming chattel slavery and the transatlantic system on the imposition of the British crown.

- In Jefferson's final draft, he said, "inherent rights," "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and the thinking is that Congress may have thought that word was too highly charged, that people who didn't have rights would say all rights are inherent, that is natural, they apply to all people, they apply to women, to people that are currently enslaved, people that didn't own property, we all have these rights.

And so, Congress changed that original phrase, "inherent rights," to "certain unalienable rights."

And I always wonder, would American history have been different if we'd been talking about inherent rights instead?

- What I want people to leave Monticello realizing is that they can hold two contradictory ideas in their head at the same time.

That truth is discoverable, but also complex.

So that Jefferson could be the philosopher of liberty, the enslaver, and the critique of slavery at the same time, we need to look in a mirror and think about our possibilities, our contradictions, our opportunities, to overcome our own flaws.

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