Sally Hemings

Sarah "Sally" Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was a female slave with one-quarter African ancestry owned by president of the United States Thomas Jefferson, one of many he inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles.

Hemings's mother was Betty Hemings,^[1] the daughter of a female slave and an English captain, John Hemings. Sally's father, the owner of Betty, John Wayles, was also the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha. Therefore, Sally was half-sister to Jefferson's wife and was of approximately three quarters English descent. Martha died during her marriage in 1782. In 1787, when she was 14, Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson's daughter, also named Martha, to Paris where they joined Thomas Jefferson. There Sally was a legally free and paid servant as slavery was not legal in France. At some time during her 26 months in Paris, the widower Jefferson began intimate relations with her.

As attested by her son, Madison Hemings, Sally later 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 years while they lived together on Jefferson's Monticello estate, and historians now broadly agree that he was the father of her six children.^[2] Whether this should be described as rape remains a matter of controversy ^{[by whom?]}. Four of Hemings's children survived into adulthood and were freed as they came of age during Thomas Jefferson's life or in his will.^[3] Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835 in the home of her freed sons.^[4]

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 was published in 2000^[5][6] that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings' youngest son, Eston Hemings. The Foundation's panel concluded that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely her other five children as well.^[7] A rival society was then founded, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which commissioned another panel of scholars in 2001 that found that it has not been proven that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children.^[8]

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.^[9] The exhibit opened in June 2018.^[2]