'Mulattoes' and Sexual Bondage in Denton County

Comparative portraits of Thomas Jefferson and his sixth-great-grandson Shannon LaNier. Of Jefferson LaNier states, “He was a brilliant man who preached equality, but he didn’t practice it. He owned people. And now I’m here because of it.”

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One of the problems of research into the sexual offenses of bondage in the US is the lack of specific and direct records. One need not look much further than the long controvery surrounding the sexual relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, an enslaved woman of whom the former president claimed ownership. Correspondance between Jefferson and others indicated a sexual relationship as did the rumors of the time. Yet, because the aggressors rarely left direct evidence of their sexual offenses, historians worked for two centuries to deny or question-to-the-point-of-silence the paternity of six children who resembled contemporaneous descriptions of Sally Hemmings and President Jefferson. In 1974, UCLA Professor Fawn Brodie

The end of the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Beginning of the Internal Slave Breeding Industry

On September 1, 1802, embittered political foe James Callendar broke the previously-whispered story of Thomas Jefferson's sexual relationship with Sally Hemmings in an article for The Richmond Recorder. Three weeks later, Callender followed up with a moral musing:

"If eighty thousand white men in Virginia followed Jefferson's example, you would have FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND MULATTOS in addition to the present swarm. The country would no longer be habitable, till after a civil war, and a series of massacres. We all know with absolute certainty that the contest would end in the utter extirpation of both blacks and mulattoes."

During the presidency of Thomas Jefferson in 1807, congress passed “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States…from any foreign kingdom, place, or country" effectively banning the Atlantic Slave Trade in the United States as of January 1, 1808.