Beginning in 1730s colonial Virginia and running to Jefferson's death in 1826, this history follows four generations of the Hemings family—enslaved, and bound by blood to Thomas Jefferson through his wife's father. It traces Elizabeth Hemings's descendants, including Sally and James, inside the households of Monticello and Paris.
Owners and the people they owned could be bound by blood well before any later relationship between them. A master might father children with an enslaved woman, so that his enslaved daughter was also the half-sister of his free daughter. Plantation households were tangled extended families, not two separate worlds.
Asking how a slaveholder could write about freedom assumes our own view was normal, yet most people of that era did not think slavery wrong. The more revealing question is how someone raised entirely inside the institution, served by enslaved people from his first memory, came to see it as wrong at all. That he knew it was wrong and kept doing it is what makes judging him necessary.
A system like slavery lies as a heavy cover over everyone inside it, but people still go through it as individuals with different personalities and ways of moving through the world. Even within one enslaved family, behaviors and experiences diverged sharply. What the system shrinks is people's range of opportunity, not their distinctness as human beings.
When someone is pulled out of their surroundings, they get treated as a symbol, a 'problem,' or an object of gossip, and real understanding becomes impossible. The same holds for the powerful: you cannot grasp a slaveholder's life without placing him in his specific relationship to the people he held. Restoring the full web of family and circumstance is what turns a figure back into a person.