In Sally & Tom, Artists and Histories Compete to Maddening Effect

Thomas Jefferson owned 607 enslaved people in his lifetime, despite acknowledging slavery’s horrors. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote that a child, imitating his slave-owning parents, “gives a loose to his worst of passions, and … cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.” Jefferson’s “peculiarities” were sexual: Jefferson’s estate Monticello […]