standards, most husbands at least up to the 2nd world war were guilty of rape, in that their wives had little or no choice in the matter, and were effectively prisoners of their circumstances, if not de facto slaves.

the biggest problem with leftist micro-sociology is that it likes to define away the realities of human experience and psychology in order to satisfy, tautologically, its ideological (and in particular, moral) constraints.

Sally Hemings may well have fallen head over heels in love with Thomas Jefferson, and she may well have adored him as their relationship went on -- as you say, we will never know. Those who understand the world through ideological abstractions simply define this away, by stating categorically that it is impossible for a slave to love, in any mode, the slave's owner. Love gets redefined to mean something beyond the emotional experience: the emotional experience burdened with the context of the power-balance of the social and economic relationship between the two individuals. And so I repeat: By that standard, scarcely a woman ever loved a man through the last 2 millennia of western civilization.

A few months back, there was a lot of outrage over a children's book that portrayed a "happy" slave, "happily" preparing a cake for George Washington. I believe the book was eventually pulled from the shelves. I didn't ever read the book, and I rather doubt most of the outraged folk did either, but the essential character of their complaint was bizarre. They seemed outraged at the notion that a human being in bondage might nonetheless take pride in mastery of a craft -- that there could ever be any moment of personal satisfaction in the life of a slave. This is beyond silly. We know damned well that people in all degrees of servitude (which includes pretty much every person in our society who is not self-employed and with sufficient financial security to tell a significant fraction of potential customers to take a hike) take pride in their accomplishments, in their skills, in their mastery, in their expertise and knowledge. We also know damned well that people in all degrees of servitude (or enforced social inferiority of any kind) can respect, admire, and even love the people whom they serve, or to whom they must defer as a matter of caste.

I'm not saying it's right that they should -- like most Americans, I'm very uncomfortable with the general notion of social inferiority. It's a common enough theme in the literary genre of american-fish-out-of-water for an American to find himself stomping bullishly through a British or European social milieu, baffled by the docility of the socially inferior and the casual (and empirically baseless) condescension of the socially superior. Usually, the narrative portrays the primary victim of the American's native democratic behavior to be the inferior person, who is at best embarrassed at being pushed forward into behaving outside the established cultural boundaries.

I also suggest that it's a bit over the top to describe Jefferson as "merciless". He may have been less merciful than suits our own moral standards, but such evidence as is available suggests he was rather more merciful than most of his contemporaries, and not only with respect to his treatment of Monticello's slaves.