Thomas Jefferson’s most famous slave, and the mother of several of the third American president’s children, died in 1835, five years after Mormonism’s founding. We don’t know when news of Joseph Smith’s small but growing religious movement reached Monticello, Va., Jefferson’s grand estate where Sally Hemings spent most of her 62 years, as a house servant and eventually as Jefferson’s “paramour.” But even if Mormon missionaries had come to Monticello during Heming’s lifetime, they would, per the instructions of Smith himself, have worked first to convert the masters, and only then—with the masters’ permission—the slaves.
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