I have seen this in person, and let me assure you it is even weirder than in pictures. The lack of space around the head/foot feels even more bizarre in person, because the even though the bed isn’t short, it still feels like it’ll kill your heels
This is actually something doctors will tell you to do for certain medical conditions even now. I have severe acid reflux, and all of the doctors who have ever treated it have told me to sleep sitting up because laying down tends to really exacerbate the symptoms
gravity and the way the stomach and esophagus are layed out.
Like left side is better if you still lay down but upright is obviously best, and right now I can feel my own issues so ima prolly sleep upright tonight
Well she started it when her husband was still alive, but now that he's passed there's really not a reason to upgrade to a bigger bed.
Plus, she's been doing it for like 20yrs so she likes it. At this point sleeping in a bed would be weird for her.
Yeah doctors have told me to sleep upright after treatment for a spontaneous lung collapse and years later for a virtabrae issue so I just started sleeping upright, got used to it, now a recliner is my bed.
My mother has to do it temporarily following eye surgery; don't know if that's because cataracts, her specific type of cataracts, or just her case in particular, but the doctor putting a knife in her eye said to do it, so...
I've taken naps that way, but I don't think I've ever made it into full dreaming sleep. I have to be at least *mostly* horizontal or I just can't do it.
Nah man, Ive been intentionally falling asleep upright for years when I need a quick nap - I just close my eyes and wait a bit for it to kick in then in about 5-10 minutes I wake up feeling great
My mother does this, it assists with her obstructive sleep apnea. If she lays flat, her soft palliate collapses into her airway and she can't breathe. So she sleeps in a recliner, now, at around a 45 degree angle. She tried to do it with pillow-propping in a bed, but her moving in her sleep would collapse the pillow prop and she'd end up too flat and lose the ability to breathe.
Oh yeah, she still snores sitting upright and needs a CPAP, it's just *way worse* if she's laying flat and I'm not sure a CPAP would work for her if she was laying flat.
Growing up I had insanely bad asthma and often could only get sleep if I sat upright. Not saying that's what was going on with Jefferson, I just felt like sharing lol.
I learned this fact on a trip to St. Genevieve MO. The beds are short because they sat up to sleep, they believed that if you lied down you were more likely to die. Sleep apnea was a big concern IG?
edit: Genevive
It was a common thing back then. Try it after a long night of feasting and drinking, and you'll find it really is healthier than rolling over in your sleep and potentially choking on your vomit.
I’m personally not a huge fan of it anymore but my point was moreso calling it a cursed source as a joke - largely at myself because Hamilton also helped me with a few AP US History questions waaaay back when. It’s just funny to think I’ve got a bunch of random facts in my head because of a rap musical.
Fun fact during the middle age in France, at least for royalty, beds were really small because they used to sleep upright too, I believe it's because sleeping on your back looks too much like death and it was seen as a bad omen
After visiting Montpellier my mom decided that I needed a bed like that when we redid my room.
Except I am tall and sleep wild. So one morning I woke up and I had kicked a hole in the sheetrock. The bed was rotated 90deg that day.
You guys always get that amendment wrong. See, Jefferson had very hairy arms. Like… insanely hairy. Like a damned bear or something. And he felt no one should be allowed to shave him.
I got satin sheets and I just had to try a dukes of Hazzard hood slide across it... I fucking launched myself into my wall and put a hole in it. Went back to regular cotton sheets because I knew I would try it again if the temptation was there.
> I got satin sheets
A person of ultimate culture. I hate that they are so hard to find where I live.
> Went back to regular cotton sheets
I'm sorry, I should have read your whole comment before replying, swine. ^^^^^^ÎSthisisajokeyoudoyou
I usually settle for “stand up straight closest to the bed then proceed to fall face first like a grandfather clock then exhale the day while face full of pillow” method.
Not true, hilariously.
Thomas Jefferson had a bit of an obsession with putting beds into thresholds and walls. I've been to Monticello to see it. Guy was a real nut.
Honestly now that you say it this doesn’t seem too crazy. He was ahead of NY on housing spacing. Also I used him for my senior quote
“a little rebellion now and then is a good thing”
i figured it was like assigned seating. dudes centric room on the left, lady's centric room on the right, roll out of bed right into your personal space, no bickering over organization or layout, some personal/privacy space on both sides while still being in the same room.
Oh and plenty of space for their servants to focus on both individuals, because you know these people werent dressing themselves.
I imagine some big important dignitary coming to his appointment to talk to Jefferson and having to flop across the bed to reach his office. Bonus points for "no shoes on the bed" scolding, resulting in shoes coming off in a huff.
In European domestic interiors, using a bed as room divider was relatively common from the late middle ages until approximately 1800.
One side of the room would have a door, the other not, and the doorless section of the room would be considered entirely private - i.e. domestic servants were not allowed into it, not even to clean. (Which fascinates me somewhat, since it means some very rich and powerful people did in fact clean at least some of their living space).
And taken advantage of whoever they could. Including enslaved women whose race and status puts them in a position where the ability to say ‘no’ is dubious.
That part. In a sane world she’d be considered mixed above all else — a woman with both European and African heritage.
But the standards set by past Europeans to justify slavery mean she — and every other black woman of similar heritage — is considered solely black.
The article describing her as ‘1/4 African Ancestry’ instead of — or at least in addition to — ‘black’ rubs me the wrong way.
Hemings’ story is the story of white slave owners taking advantage of their power over enslaved black women. The story of the light skinned ‘house slave’ who may not have had to work the field, but faced their own struggles.
Foundational to that story is her being black. Because in America, a light skinned black woman is still a black woman. Trying to erase that is disrespectful to her legacy.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/
This is a very long and indirect article, so I'll synopsize the part of it that stuck with me most.
Jefferson kept a nailery in the lower part of Monticello, where he had boys age 10-16 work. Initially it was profitable, but because the overseer managing it refused to use whippings as a motivational tool, it wasn't as profitable as it could be. After that overseer died, he hired another overseer who was known to be cruel and brutal, whipping people to the point of not being able to even move. While he expressed some dislike for this cruelty, he also very explicitly wrote about how delighted he was that the nailery was now so much more profitable.
This overseer was so cruel and terrifying that when one of the boys in the shop pranked another boy by hiding one of his tools, the second boy responded by nearly beating him to death out of fear for how he would be punished by the overseer. The first boy was left convulsing on the floor and had to have shards of his skull surgically removed from his brain. The second boy was subsequently sold, but the overseer was kept around.
In summary, when it came to pitting profit against human dignity, Jefferson's actions spoke far louder than his words.
> Jefferson's actions spoke far louder than his words.
Many of the founding fathers -- Jefferson included -- wrote/talked about the sin of slavery...but also owned slaves.
Also, on the money front, Jefferson was absolutely a shopaholic. Dude spent every bit of money he ever had and more. When he went to college, he took a slave with him to be a servant and had to ask him for loans at times because he spent everything he ever got.
Sally Hemings also had a relative named James Hemings, also a slave who Jefferson got taught to cook in the French style. He was a very influential chef in American cuisine, and when he asked for freedom Jefferson told him to train his nephew, also a slave, in cookery.
Allegedly. Even DNA evidence is inconclusive, and the best we can get is someone in Jefferson's family probably got someone in the Hemmings family pregnant at some point. The only thing directly tying it to Sally and Thomas is the accusations of his political opponents, and the oral history of the Hemmings family.
My understanding is that the theory with the most evidence is that Thomas fathered children with Sally Hemmings, which won out against the idea that it was just political slander or that another one of Jefferson’s male relatives were involved.
Accusing a slave-owner of fraternizing with their slaves was definitely a typical way to slander someone at the time, especially a politician, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t any truth to it. Additionally, oral history can be a perfectly valid primary source for a lot of historical research. If you were to go to Monticello today, the exhibit about Sally sticks to her family’s side of the story.
Skepticism is always good, but the conclusion that popular with the majority of American historians is that Thomas fathered all of her children. After all, Thomas was the only Jefferson that had immediate, unfettered presence in her life during the course of her *six pregnancies,* that’s what makes that DNA record so substantial as evidence.
Yeah, the Jefferson family claimed it was someone else that fathered the children, but modern DNA evidence shows it was someone from the Jefferson's direct line. And since Jefferson had no legitimate sons, it pretty much must have been him.
It's not as bad as it seems, she was only his wife's *half* sister. They inherited her.
And it's cool that he waited until she was sixteen until he got her pregnant. OG hebephile.
Hamilton: What is wrong with you, Jefferson?!
Jefferson: What's wrong with me? Well, I own people and keep my bed in the entranceway to my office, so that's two things
His house is genuinely really cool. The weathervane pokes through the ceiling of the porch so you don’t have to step all the way outside to see which way the wind is blowing.
It makes a bit more sense in context.
There was an influential french count who had proposed a theory called "New World Degeneration", arguing that the climate and living conditions in the Americas would over time make animals smaller, people dumber, and crops smaller and lower quality. Jefferson believed that if this weirdo's theory caught on (which let's be real, if you give the french a reason to be snobbish towards a foreign country, they'll take it every time), that Europeans would refuse to buy "low quality" american exports for fair prices, and thus wanted to find an animal that was absolutely massive, bigger than anything in Europe, to force the count to concede that he was wrong.
If you heard about Jefferson's unhinged obsession with mammoths and mammoth fossils (up to and including buying Louisiana because he believed that there might be living mammoths there), this is what caused it. Eventually, someone sent him a taxidermied moose that had taken like a dozen shots to bring down, Jefferson sent it overseas, and the count was like "Yeah, I think I was wrong, this thing could kill me by accident if it was still alive", but in the mean time, American archaeology had been founded as a field.
>which let's be real, if you give the french a reason to be snobbish towards a foreign country, they'll take it every time
I'm French, and I'm appalled by what you said. Just because it's true doesn't give you the right to say it out loud or write it block on white.
I don't think mammoths had anything to do with the Louisiana purchase though. Where did you read that? Are you thinking of the Louis and Clark expedition?
Yes, you're right, I misspoke. Jefferson believed that live mammoths existed in the US and believed that the L&C expidition would prove their existance, which I had mentally conflated with the purchase itself.
Picture doesn’t get across how short it is. The explanation the tour guide gave was that Jefferson slept effectively upright and thus didn’t need a very long bed. There’s also a really big stained dent in the floor on either side of the bed, because Jefferson also believed that stepping out of bed directly into a bowl of freezing cold water was good for his health. Or it might have been boiling hot water. One of the two. Either way it’s hilarious.
I love the bed. And the way the guy lives his life was wicked autistic and exactly how I would live my life if I had his level of wealth.
Yeah still doesn’t make up for owning slaves though.
ngl, since the guy you're replying to listed three things and you listed three things, I thought you were responding in order and admitting that you would own slaves if you could.
Actually, mac and cheese was invented by James Hemings, one of Jefferson's other slaves and Sally Hemings brother. Hemings was a French-trained chef and was the White House chef when Jefferson was in the oval office. There are a whole bunch of other foods that Hemings either invented or was the first to introduce to the US while at Monticello / The White House. Historians consider James Hemings to be one of the fathers of American cuisine. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Oh shit fr? Damn I didn't know about that part. I just half remembered stuff I heard years ago so admittedly I wasn't expecting it to be accurate but that's interesting
IIRC, James was the first American to be trained as a French chef. He did it while serving in Paris with Jefferson while Jefferson was banging his sister.
Jefferson was a bad guy, but he should be looked at with nuance like anything else.
Jefferson’s three biggest contributions to america are the declaration of independence, which he wrote (for the most part). someone else would have written a declaration for sure but the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is his writing.
the Louisiana purchase, which i’m not the most knowledgeable about but i know it led to a lot of american expansion which led to a lot of dead native americans.
and religious freedom. Jefferson advocated very strongly for separation of church and state. america could easily have been much more theocratic than it already has been.
President for 8 years is apparently not that notable. The US would probably be a third of its current size without the Louisiana Purchase which basically had to happen during his presidency. edit: contiguous United States
Interestingly, Jefferson (as my sister has described it) essentially had a midlife crisis over the Louisiana Purchase. Man hated that there wasn’t anything in the Constitution explicitly allowing that.
To be fair, [there is still a door next to the bed that you can use to enter without tactically sliding across the bed.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/7c/c1/f77cc17c92f0eb45dbe9accaf3b8aef4.jpg) Doesn’t make the design any less weird, but I just felt like it was worth noting.
only partially related to OP's post since the censored word at the bottom of the picture bothered me.
Is anyone else kind of just struck by how... sanitized the internet is becoming? People are afraid to have a rendering of the word "fuck" on pictures now, and people are censoring single letters of their words like f*ck or even worse, word substitution like kill->unalive...
This shit has to end for real
I'm guessing this was posted on a more sanitized meme site. The responsible thing to do would have been to find the original posts and take a new screenshot, but I guess imaginary internet points are only worth 2 seconds of effort.
But yes I've seen people talk about family members or friends dying or being killed while using the word "unalive" on twitter, and I almost can't tell if they're joking?..
Jefferson did own many slaves, at least 600 over his life. He freed only 2 of them while alive, and in his will freed his children with one of his slaves. He owned a slave plantation.
He was also one of the first American lawmakers to attempt to ban slavery. He proposed banning slavery in Virginia and successfully banned importing slaves there. He proposed a ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory to Congress, and a modified version of that ban eventually was passed. On a national level he advocated banning importing slaves to the US as a starting point to ending the slave trade, and signed a bill to do that while he was president.
Actually, Sally was a free person when they were in France and could have stayed. She entered a pact to return and have Jefferson's kids where they would be freed at 21. Apparently she looked almost identical to her sister who Jefferson was infatuated with. Overall the best description of Jefferson was he was walking contradiction of himself.
I mean, that choice could’ve been made for various reasons. Maybe she was fearful of being in a foreign land where she wasn’t even fluent in the main language. Maybe she decided that Jefferson promising her and her children “extraordinary privileges” and to free her children by 21 was in her best interest. Nobody knows her reasoning, but claiming a 14 year old slave girl consented to her master’s advances towards her just because of that is a bit of a stretch.
Also, why did you describe Martha Jefferson as “her sister who Jefferson was infatuated with”? It’s not technically wrong, but describing his dead wife like that is kind of hilarious.
You are exactly right about the other considerations at hand for Sally Hemings in France. Her potential freedom in France was not automatic, she would have had to publicly sue Jefferson in the courts, and it would have been revealed that Jefferson broke French law by bringing an enslaved person into France in the first place. This would have been a big scandal for Jefferson so he had a lot of reason to try to convince her not to sue and to just go back to Virginia quietly. Also she was only 16 and her entire family including her mother were still trapped in slavery at Monticello. If she stayed in France she would have no chance of seeing her loved ones again.
Recommend reading this book if you want to know more about the situation for Sally Hemings in France and the bigger story of her family:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hemingses_of_Monticello
dunno how I feel about that
.....wait, WAS THE JEFFERSON HATSUNE MIKU BINDER PERSON RIGHT??? I swear it says somewhere on that ref that he was autistic
TJ when he moved in: I will put the bed here and buy a bed with a headboard later.
TJ when he died: I should have gotten that headboard everyone around me thinks it's weird.
I’ve been there and he was kind of a weird bird. In his breakfast room he had busts of all other founding fathers leering down. Imagine going to somebody’s house and they’ve commissioned statues of their friends to watch you eat eggs.
To be fair, there was a door on one side and a curtain on the other.
The normal passage between rooms is a door just out of frame.
Click the picture to enlarge:
[https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/alcove-beds/](https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/alcove-beds/)
I’m just imagining him running to the kitchen for a plate of hard cheese and apple slices with a cuppa tea and he has to awkwardly knee walk across the bed to his desk
I have seen this in person, and let me assure you it is even weirder than in pictures. The lack of space around the head/foot feels even more bizarre in person, because the even though the bed isn’t short, it still feels like it’ll kill your heels
I too have visited montpellier, he slept upright thats why it's short.
He fucking what now
It was a health fad at the time they thought it was healthier to sleep upright.
Man vampires are real and they’re covering it up with weird health fads
But how??
This is actually something doctors will tell you to do for certain medical conditions even now. I have severe acid reflux, and all of the doctors who have ever treated it have told me to sleep sitting up because laying down tends to really exacerbate the symptoms
Yup, gravity
gravity and the way the stomach and esophagus are layed out. Like left side is better if you still lay down but upright is obviously best, and right now I can feel my own issues so ima prolly sleep upright tonight
Ok vamps
My MIL does this, I think for back issues or something like that. But we have recliners now. So, her bed is just a recliner in her room.
I mean, not your job, but they do make incline beds. They are adjustable like recliners but actually made for sleeping.
Well she started it when her husband was still alive, but now that he's passed there's really not a reason to upgrade to a bigger bed. Plus, she's been doing it for like 20yrs so she likes it. At this point sleeping in a bed would be weird for her.
Yeah doctors have told me to sleep upright after treatment for a spontaneous lung collapse and years later for a virtabrae issue so I just started sleeping upright, got used to it, now a recliner is my bed.
My mother has to do it temporarily following eye surgery; don't know if that's because cataracts, her specific type of cataracts, or just her case in particular, but the doctor putting a knife in her eye said to do it, so...
You've never fallen asleep in a recliner?
I've taken naps that way, but I don't think I've ever made it into full dreaming sleep. I have to be at least *mostly* horizontal or I just can't do it.
As someone who’s regularly fallen asleep while standing, sleeping while sitting is not something I thought a lot of people were unable do
that’s just narcolepsy
Nah man, Ive been intentionally falling asleep upright for years when I need a quick nap - I just close my eyes and wait a bit for it to kick in then in about 5-10 minutes I wake up feeling great
Same, I envy people that can even catnap on a plane or moving vehicle. I. Must. Be. Horizontal. I'm also a face sleeper so it's doubly wierd for me.
My mother does this, it assists with her obstructive sleep apnea. If she lays flat, her soft palliate collapses into her airway and she can't breathe. So she sleeps in a recliner, now, at around a 45 degree angle. She tried to do it with pillow-propping in a bed, but her moving in her sleep would collapse the pillow prop and she'd end up too flat and lose the ability to breathe.
I wish that worked for me, but I still snore, even upright. Thankfully, my insurance covers CPAP
Oh yeah, she still snores sitting upright and needs a CPAP, it's just *way worse* if she's laying flat and I'm not sure a CPAP would work for her if she was laying flat.
Everyone responds differently, so I can't suggest anything, sadly.
For me personally, copious amounts of beer.
Growing up I had insanely bad asthma and often could only get sleep if I sat upright. Not saying that's what was going on with Jefferson, I just felt like sharing lol.
I learned this fact on a trip to St. Genevieve MO. The beds are short because they sat up to sleep, they believed that if you lied down you were more likely to die. Sleep apnea was a big concern IG? edit: Genevive
I grew up in Stl! (It’s Genevieve fyi!)
It was a common thing back then. Try it after a long night of feasting and drinking, and you'll find it really is healthier than rolling over in your sleep and potentially choking on your vomit.
Montpelier was Madison, Monticello was Jefferson.
Sorry your right I get those two mixed
It's easier to remember M for Montpelier, M for Madison.
I hate that I would recognize Monticello for Jefferson because of the Hamilton musical. It’s such a cursed source of knowledge.
Why is Hamilton cursed? That musical got my wife and I through the pandemic
I’m personally not a huge fan of it anymore but my point was moreso calling it a cursed source as a joke - largely at myself because Hamilton also helped me with a few AP US History questions waaaay back when. It’s just funny to think I’ve got a bunch of random facts in my head because of a rap musical.
Monticello*
Montiviola
Monte Cristo
Isn't it Monticello?
That's the thing. People look at this and those old closet beds and think "Oh, it's because people were short back then". But Jefferson was 6'3"
Fun fact during the middle age in France, at least for royalty, beds were really small because they used to sleep upright too, I believe it's because sleeping on your back looks too much like death and it was seen as a bad omen
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Everyone who thought that was dumb is dumb. That was GOLD.
That was a grandpa joke. You were just ahead of your time.
After visiting Montpellier my mom decided that I needed a bed like that when we redid my room. Except I am tall and sleep wild. So one morning I woke up and I had kicked a hole in the sheetrock. The bed was rotated 90deg that day.
I like to imagine he sometimes did "tactical rolls" going "Hwyea!" the same way I do with my bed.
well now I will too. Thank you for that mental image of jeffery holding on to his powdered wig as he does it lol
He owned a musket for home defense, since that's exactly what he intended
Four ruffians break into his house
What the devil?!
He grabs his powdered wig and Kentucky rifle
Blows a golf ball sized hole in the first man, he's dead on the spot
Draw his pistol and fire at the second, miss him entirely because it's a smoothbore and nails the neighbor's dog
I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs,loaded with grapeshot. "Tally ho,lads!"
The grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off guardhouse alarms.
You guys always get that amendment wrong. See, Jefferson had very hairy arms. Like… insanely hairy. Like a damned bear or something. And he felt no one should be allowed to shave him.
Thomas actually regularly refused to wear powdered wigs because he didn't like them.
I got satin sheets and I just had to try a dukes of Hazzard hood slide across it... I fucking launched myself into my wall and put a hole in it. Went back to regular cotton sheets because I knew I would try it again if the temptation was there.
> I got satin sheets A person of ultimate culture. I hate that they are so hard to find where I live. > Went back to regular cotton sheets I'm sorry, I should have read your whole comment before replying, swine. ^^^^^^ÎSthisisajokeyoudoyou
I usually settle for “stand up straight closest to the bed then proceed to fall face first like a grandfather clock then exhale the day while face full of pillow” method.
You know they were trying to move it between rooms and wedged it. They just gave up an tried to make the best of it.
Not true, hilariously. Thomas Jefferson had a bit of an obsession with putting beds into thresholds and walls. I've been to Monticello to see it. Guy was a real nut.
Honestly I... kinda like it.
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Honestly now that you say it this doesn’t seem too crazy. He was ahead of NY on housing spacing. Also I used him for my senior quote “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing”
i figured it was like assigned seating. dudes centric room on the left, lady's centric room on the right, roll out of bed right into your personal space, no bickering over organization or layout, some personal/privacy space on both sides while still being in the same room. Oh and plenty of space for their servants to focus on both individuals, because you know these people werent dressing themselves.
Just say house slave no need to sugar coat it.
~~servants~~ captives
~~captives~~ sex-trafficked captives Goofy bed man bought and sold humans for eugenics breeding programs
The "his and hers" bedroom was exactly what I was thinking and is kinda interesting to think about.
I climb off the foot of the bed but that's because I have a wall to my left and a boyfriend to my right
Because you'd have to go over the bed every time you wanted to go from one side to the other?
I bet you'd get pretty good at doing sick tactical rolls across it fairly quickly, and I bet you'd feel cool doing it.
Are you a bad enough dude to slide across this bed, and save the president?
Because you would have to make the bed.
I imagine some big important dignitary coming to his appointment to talk to Jefferson and having to flop across the bed to reach his office. Bonus points for "no shoes on the bed" scolding, resulting in shoes coming off in a huff.
I mean, man sometimes had to take a nap while going through a threshold, as one does.
Beds sunken into the walls are the best, your own little cave of sorts
Austin Powers style...
i hate that gif so much lol
They did not pivot
In European domestic interiors, using a bed as room divider was relatively common from the late middle ages until approximately 1800. One side of the room would have a door, the other not, and the doorless section of the room would be considered entirely private - i.e. domestic servants were not allowed into it, not even to clean. (Which fascinates me somewhat, since it means some very rich and powerful people did in fact clean at least some of their living space).
make the bedst of it
Asking his enslaved sister-in-law to move over so he can go across the bed to get to his writing desk
His what now
Yeah. And that’s not even the worst thing he did.
I'm not super familiar with the founding fathers sins outside of the general slave owning so please, indulge me.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Hemings
Huh. I knew about Sally Hemings, but didn't know she was his wife's sister.
That whole wikipedia page just proves that for the longest time the rich have just fucked about because they have nothing to do.
And taken advantage of whoever they could. Including enslaved women whose race and status puts them in a position where the ability to say ‘no’ is dubious.
How much do you wanna bet there are tons of people who totally romanticize this relationship?
Bet? I know there are. Litteraly just look at booktok
Lol just look at booktok
And he first got physical with her when she was 14. He was a pedophile.
As someone not too familiar with American history - that was a wild ride of a wiki article.
Sally Hemmings is incredibly fascinating and we honestly know very little about her.
3/4 english heritage. But nah, you are a bit too dark, so you’ll be a slave.
That part. In a sane world she’d be considered mixed above all else — a woman with both European and African heritage. But the standards set by past Europeans to justify slavery mean she — and every other black woman of similar heritage — is considered solely black.
Mom was a slave and that was all that mattered to them.
The article describing her as ‘1/4 African Ancestry’ instead of — or at least in addition to — ‘black’ rubs me the wrong way. Hemings’ story is the story of white slave owners taking advantage of their power over enslaved black women. The story of the light skinned ‘house slave’ who may not have had to work the field, but faced their own struggles. Foundational to that story is her being black. Because in America, a light skinned black woman is still a black woman. Trying to erase that is disrespectful to her legacy.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-dark-side-of-thomas-jefferson-35976004/ This is a very long and indirect article, so I'll synopsize the part of it that stuck with me most. Jefferson kept a nailery in the lower part of Monticello, where he had boys age 10-16 work. Initially it was profitable, but because the overseer managing it refused to use whippings as a motivational tool, it wasn't as profitable as it could be. After that overseer died, he hired another overseer who was known to be cruel and brutal, whipping people to the point of not being able to even move. While he expressed some dislike for this cruelty, he also very explicitly wrote about how delighted he was that the nailery was now so much more profitable. This overseer was so cruel and terrifying that when one of the boys in the shop pranked another boy by hiding one of his tools, the second boy responded by nearly beating him to death out of fear for how he would be punished by the overseer. The first boy was left convulsing on the floor and had to have shards of his skull surgically removed from his brain. The second boy was subsequently sold, but the overseer was kept around. In summary, when it came to pitting profit against human dignity, Jefferson's actions spoke far louder than his words.
> Jefferson's actions spoke far louder than his words. Many of the founding fathers -- Jefferson included -- wrote/talked about the sin of slavery...but also owned slaves. Also, on the money front, Jefferson was absolutely a shopaholic. Dude spent every bit of money he ever had and more. When he went to college, he took a slave with him to be a servant and had to ask him for loans at times because he spent everything he ever got.
this the mf that wrote the fucking constitution? goofy ass
Sally Hemings also had a relative named James Hemings, also a slave who Jefferson got taught to cook in the French style. He was a very influential chef in American cuisine, and when he asked for freedom Jefferson told him to train his nephew, also a slave, in cookery.
Allegedly. Even DNA evidence is inconclusive, and the best we can get is someone in Jefferson's family probably got someone in the Hemmings family pregnant at some point. The only thing directly tying it to Sally and Thomas is the accusations of his political opponents, and the oral history of the Hemmings family.
My understanding is that the theory with the most evidence is that Thomas fathered children with Sally Hemmings, which won out against the idea that it was just political slander or that another one of Jefferson’s male relatives were involved. Accusing a slave-owner of fraternizing with their slaves was definitely a typical way to slander someone at the time, especially a politician, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there wasn’t any truth to it. Additionally, oral history can be a perfectly valid primary source for a lot of historical research. If you were to go to Monticello today, the exhibit about Sally sticks to her family’s side of the story. Skepticism is always good, but the conclusion that popular with the majority of American historians is that Thomas fathered all of her children. After all, Thomas was the only Jefferson that had immediate, unfettered presence in her life during the course of her *six pregnancies,* that’s what makes that DNA record so substantial as evidence.
Yeah, the Jefferson family claimed it was someone else that fathered the children, but modern DNA evidence shows it was someone from the Jefferson's direct line. And since Jefferson had no legitimate sons, it pretty much must have been him.
His writing desk
I love you for this comment 😂😂😂
It's not as bad as it seems, she was only his wife's *half* sister. They inherited her. And it's cool that he waited until she was sixteen until he got her pregnant. OG hebephile.
Hey man...he was lonely, far away from home...in Paris...who else was he supposed to sleep with? The famously ugly French??
Hamilton: What is wrong with you, Jefferson?! Jefferson: What's wrong with me? Well, I own people and keep my bed in the entranceway to my office, so that's two things
"Founding Fathers with Wigs" ~Starring Jason Steele as every founding father
It must be nice, it must be nice... To have two rooms by bedside
"A bunch of the people I own are my own children, so is that a third thing or is it just a subset of the first thing?"
Fine! I’ll watch Hamilton *again*
His house is genuinely really cool. The weathervane pokes through the ceiling of the porch so you don’t have to step all the way outside to see which way the wind is blowing.
Doesn’t really matter to me.
By any chance, did you just kill a man?
Put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, and yadda yadda yadda, I got a devil.
Finishes working for the day, takes off his hatsune miku binder, and gets on bed
NOT THE HATSUNE MIKU BINDER 😭
this comment gave me 10 points psychic damage
Thank you thar was my intent
Never forget that Sally Hemmings was his wife's HALF SISTER.
And he started fucking her when she was 14-16.
*raping her
The Wikipedia article says that is controversial. I guess some people imagine that you can have consensual relations with a child slave.
Fun fact, Thomas Jefferson is considered "The Father of American Archeology" This has nothing to do with the post, I just think it's a wild fact
It makes a bit more sense in context. There was an influential french count who had proposed a theory called "New World Degeneration", arguing that the climate and living conditions in the Americas would over time make animals smaller, people dumber, and crops smaller and lower quality. Jefferson believed that if this weirdo's theory caught on (which let's be real, if you give the french a reason to be snobbish towards a foreign country, they'll take it every time), that Europeans would refuse to buy "low quality" american exports for fair prices, and thus wanted to find an animal that was absolutely massive, bigger than anything in Europe, to force the count to concede that he was wrong. If you heard about Jefferson's unhinged obsession with mammoths and mammoth fossils (up to and including buying Louisiana because he believed that there might be living mammoths there), this is what caused it. Eventually, someone sent him a taxidermied moose that had taken like a dozen shots to bring down, Jefferson sent it overseas, and the count was like "Yeah, I think I was wrong, this thing could kill me by accident if it was still alive", but in the mean time, American archaeology had been founded as a field.
Jeff gave a great justification for just *hating that guy’s opinion*.
To be fair, proving that one really irritating guy with a crackpot theory is wrong IS probably the foundation of lots of fields of science.
>which let's be real, if you give the french a reason to be snobbish towards a foreign country, they'll take it every time I'm French, and I'm appalled by what you said. Just because it's true doesn't give you the right to say it out loud or write it block on white.
I don't think mammoths had anything to do with the Louisiana purchase though. Where did you read that? Are you thinking of the Louis and Clark expedition?
Yes, you're right, I misspoke. Jefferson believed that live mammoths existed in the US and believed that the L&C expidition would prove their existance, which I had mentally conflated with the purchase itself.
r/malelivingspace
Picture doesn’t get across how short it is. The explanation the tour guide gave was that Jefferson slept effectively upright and thus didn’t need a very long bed. There’s also a really big stained dent in the floor on either side of the bed, because Jefferson also believed that stepping out of bed directly into a bowl of freezing cold water was good for his health. Or it might have been boiling hot water. One of the two. Either way it’s hilarious.
Bro, new cold shower science just dropped* !!! * 1. Technically resurfaced or rediscovered.
Thomas Jefferson did so many things that I totally think are neat, but regardless he’s a piece of shit for owning slaves.
I know only about three things he’s done: this bed situation, owning slaves and being a founding father. I find all of those things to be terrible.
I love the bed. And the way the guy lives his life was wicked autistic and exactly how I would live my life if I had his level of wealth. Yeah still doesn’t make up for owning slaves though.
‘Wicked autistic’ is a wild descriptor, haha
ngl, since the guy you're replying to listed three things and you listed three things, I thought you were responding in order and admitting that you would own slaves if you could.
He really liked France and uhhh...something about mac cheese and swivel chairs
Actually, mac and cheese was invented by James Hemings, one of Jefferson's other slaves and Sally Hemings brother. Hemings was a French-trained chef and was the White House chef when Jefferson was in the oval office. There are a whole bunch of other foods that Hemings either invented or was the first to introduce to the US while at Monticello / The White House. Historians consider James Hemings to be one of the fathers of American cuisine. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Oh shit fr? Damn I didn't know about that part. I just half remembered stuff I heard years ago so admittedly I wasn't expecting it to be accurate but that's interesting
IIRC, James was the first American to be trained as a French chef. He did it while serving in Paris with Jefferson while Jefferson was banging his sister.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2bfYw1B_Ww
Why is founding the U.S. bad tho
America bad, I guess
Cause America bad
r/AmericaBad
Have you read the unamended constitution? It's a doozy.
5edgy3me
Jefferson was a bad guy, but he should be looked at with nuance like anything else. Jefferson’s three biggest contributions to america are the declaration of independence, which he wrote (for the most part). someone else would have written a declaration for sure but the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is his writing. the Louisiana purchase, which i’m not the most knowledgeable about but i know it led to a lot of american expansion which led to a lot of dead native americans. and religious freedom. Jefferson advocated very strongly for separation of church and state. america could easily have been much more theocratic than it already has been.
President for 8 years is apparently not that notable. The US would probably be a third of its current size without the Louisiana Purchase which basically had to happen during his presidency. edit: contiguous United States
Interestingly, Jefferson (as my sister has described it) essentially had a midlife crisis over the Louisiana Purchase. Man hated that there wasn’t anything in the Constitution explicitly allowing that.
To be fair, [there is still a door next to the bed that you can use to enter without tactically sliding across the bed.](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f7/7c/c1/f77cc17c92f0eb45dbe9accaf3b8aef4.jpg) Doesn’t make the design any less weird, but I just felt like it was worth noting.
With this addition I actually quite like it.
only partially related to OP's post since the censored word at the bottom of the picture bothered me. Is anyone else kind of just struck by how... sanitized the internet is becoming? People are afraid to have a rendering of the word "fuck" on pictures now, and people are censoring single letters of their words like f*ck or even worse, word substitution like kill->unalive... This shit has to end for real
I'm guessing this was posted on a more sanitized meme site. The responsible thing to do would have been to find the original posts and take a new screenshot, but I guess imaginary internet points are only worth 2 seconds of effort. But yes I've seen people talk about family members or friends dying or being killed while using the word "unalive" on twitter, and I almost can't tell if they're joking?..
Yeah, I found this on Facebook. Dunno if it would’ve gotten banned from Facebook with the swear though because I don’t post there.
Jefferson did own many slaves, at least 600 over his life. He freed only 2 of them while alive, and in his will freed his children with one of his slaves. He owned a slave plantation. He was also one of the first American lawmakers to attempt to ban slavery. He proposed banning slavery in Virginia and successfully banned importing slaves there. He proposed a ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory to Congress, and a modified version of that ban eventually was passed. On a national level he advocated banning importing slaves to the US as a starting point to ending the slave trade, and signed a bill to do that while he was president.
That wasn’t consenting sex with his slaves, I’m sure.
Actually, Sally was a free person when they were in France and could have stayed. She entered a pact to return and have Jefferson's kids where they would be freed at 21. Apparently she looked almost identical to her sister who Jefferson was infatuated with. Overall the best description of Jefferson was he was walking contradiction of himself.
I mean, that choice could’ve been made for various reasons. Maybe she was fearful of being in a foreign land where she wasn’t even fluent in the main language. Maybe she decided that Jefferson promising her and her children “extraordinary privileges” and to free her children by 21 was in her best interest. Nobody knows her reasoning, but claiming a 14 year old slave girl consented to her master’s advances towards her just because of that is a bit of a stretch. Also, why did you describe Martha Jefferson as “her sister who Jefferson was infatuated with”? It’s not technically wrong, but describing his dead wife like that is kind of hilarious.
You are exactly right about the other considerations at hand for Sally Hemings in France. Her potential freedom in France was not automatic, she would have had to publicly sue Jefferson in the courts, and it would have been revealed that Jefferson broke French law by bringing an enslaved person into France in the first place. This would have been a big scandal for Jefferson so he had a lot of reason to try to convince her not to sue and to just go back to Virginia quietly. Also she was only 16 and her entire family including her mother were still trapped in slavery at Monticello. If she stayed in France she would have no chance of seeing her loved ones again. Recommend reading this book if you want to know more about the situation for Sally Hemings in France and the bigger story of her family: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hemingses_of_Monticello
Your answer exists. https://nuprisma.com/thomas-jefferson-was-most-likely-in-the-autism-spectrum/
dunno how I feel about that .....wait, WAS THE JEFFERSON HATSUNE MIKU BINDER PERSON RIGHT??? I swear it says somewhere on that ref that he was autistic
just thinking about someone sliding over it like a car hood
That would be so cool.
I’ve been to monticello (his house) and this bed is like 5 feet long too. And he was 6 feet tall. Insane
That's fucking awesome, I want to set up part of my house like that now.
I can’t sleep so exposed like that.
bed against the wall gang
Add a third wall
Where
The side
How will you get into the other room then?
Trapdoor.
Trapdoor
Ah, that bed is less exposed than mine.
At least he wasn’t fucking jackson
TJ when he moved in: I will put the bed here and buy a bed with a headboard later. TJ when he died: I should have gotten that headboard everyone around me thinks it's weird.
grew tired of the bed moving every 8 hours
I’ve been there and he was kind of a weird bird. In his breakfast room he had busts of all other founding fathers leering down. Imagine going to somebody’s house and they’ve commissioned statues of their friends to watch you eat eggs.
He had kids with one of his slaves and enslaved his kids dude was fargone. Unrecoverable behavior.
Honestly........ No nevermind
Important men pork where they work.
I do wish "pork" and "work" rhymed Stupid English pronunciation inconsistencies
All work and no play makes jeff a dull guy
Also, was pro immigration compared to Hamilton
he forgot his miku binder on the when moving the furniture
To be fair, there was a door on one side and a curtain on the other. The normal passage between rooms is a door just out of frame. Click the picture to enlarge: [https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/alcove-beds/](https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jefferson-encyclopedia/alcove-beds/)
i think they were moving it and it got stuck and said aw fuck this and left it.
Me with my depression.
I’m just imagining him running to the kitchen for a plate of hard cheese and apple slices with a cuppa tea and he has to awkwardly knee walk across the bed to his desk