Sally Hemings

Sarah "Sally" Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was a black woman enslaved to the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, inherited among many others from his father-in-law, John Wayles.

Hemings' mother was Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings.^[1] Hemings' father was John Wayles, the enslaver of Elizabeth Hemings who owned her from the time of her birth.^[2] Wayles was also the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha, making Hemings the half-sister to Jefferson's wife.

Hemings' maternal grandmother was an enslaved African woman whose name is not recorded.^[2] Hemings' maternal grandfather was John Hemings, an English captain.^[2] Therefore, Hemings was of 3/4 European and 1/4 African descent , making her both black and a quadroon according to contemporary American racial classification. This also means Hemings was the third generation of women in her family to be impregnated by a free man during her enslavement and the second to be impregnated by the man she was enslaved to.

Martha Jefferson died during her marriage in 1782. In 1787, at 14, Hemings accompanied Jefferson's daughter to Paris where they joined Thomas Jefferson. In Paris, Hemings was legally free, as slavery was not legal in France. At some time during her 26 months in Paris, Jefferson is believed to have begun intimate relations with her. As attested by her son, Madison Hemings, Sally agreed with Jefferson that she would return to Virginia and resume her life in slavery, as long as all their children would be freed when they came of age.

Multiple lines of evidence, including modern DNA analyses, indicate that Jefferson impregnated Hemings several times over the years they lived together on Jefferson's Monticello estate, and historians now broadly agree that he was the father of her six children.^[3] Whether this should be described as rape remains a matter of controversy, as there is no evidence that Jefferson forced Hemings to have intimate relations; however, if Jefferson did force her, there would be limited evidence given his ownership of her and the inherent insularity of a slave estate. Additionally, her ability to consent is dubious given Jefferson's near-complete control over Hemings as his property and the fact that she was between 14 and 16 years old when he began having sex with her, while he was in his 40s.^[4] Four of Hemings' children survived into adulthood and were freed by Jefferson or his will as they came of age.^[5] Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835 in the home of her freed sons.^[6]

The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children is the subject of the Jefferson–Hemings controversy. Following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation empaneled a commission of scholars and scientists who worked with a 1998–1999 genealogical DNA test that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings' youngest son, Eston Hemings.^[7][8] The Foundation's panel concluded that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely her other five children as well.^[9] A rival society was then founded, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which commissioned another panel of scholars in 2001 that found that it had not been proven that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children; the panel, however, was unable to disprove that Thomas Jefferson had fathered her children.^[10] In 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of Monticello announced its plans to have an exhibit titled Life of Sally Hemings, and affirmed that it was treating as a settled issue that Jefferson was the father of her known children.^[11]