John Adams another Founding Father died hours later on the same day of July 4, 1883.
At Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Virginia, he owned many slaves and grew tobacco. Jefferson did not hate slavery in his younger years, but he grew to despise slavery and often proclaimed his hatred of it as he grew in knowledge and experience of the pain of slavery.
Jefferson’s first wife passed suddenly and he never remarried. Thomas Jefferson fell in love with his gorgeous mulatto slave named Sally Hemings and had many children by her.
A wealthy plantation owner and the third President of the United States and the first Secretary of State in America lived an extravagant lifestyle following his eight-year presidency at Monticello. Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Charlottesville, Virgina eventually fell into foreclosure. All of his valuables were sold to maintain his estate but failed. Jeffersons library of his collection of books remain to this day in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
The woman Jefferson loved, named Sally Hemings was devoted and stayed by Jefferson’s side until his death and remained on the estate afterward with their sons. Sally was 30 years younger than Jefferson who had freed her as a slave many years prior to his passing.
Thomas Jefferson never married the woman he loved and grew old with. It was unheard of and frowned upon to marry a person of color in the times of Thomas Jefferson. Sally Hemings died at age 62 in 1835 in Charlottesville, Virgina at the home of her freed sons, Madison and Eston.
Rest in Peace.