Sally Hemings

Early life

Sally Hemings was born about 1773 to the enslaved Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings and her mother's owner, John Wayles. Betty's parents were a "full-blooded African" enslaved woman and a white English sea captain surnamed Hemings. Captain Hemings tried to purchase his daughter Betty from their enslaver, Francis Eppes, but the planter refused out of curiosity about how the mixed ethnicities would turn out in Betty. Upon Eppes' death his daughter, Martha Eppes, inherited Betty, and took her as a personal slave upon her marriage to Wayles.

Wayles was born to Edward and Ellen (née Ashburner) Wayles, in Lancaster, England. Following Martha's death, Wayles remarried and was widowed twice more. Several sources assert that Wayles took Betty Hemings as his concubine and that Sally was the youngest of the six children they had during the last 12 years of his life. These children were younger half-siblings to his daughters by his wives. His first child, Martha Wayles (named after her mother, Wayles' first wife), married the young planter and future president Thomas Jefferson.

The children of Betty Hemings and John Wayles were three-quarters European in ancestry and fair-skinned. According to the 1662 Virginia Slave Law, children born to enslaved mothers were considered enslaved under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem: the enslaved status of a child followed that of the mother. Betty and her children, including Sally Hemings and all Sally's children, were legally enslaved even though the fathers were their white enslavers and the children were of majority-European ancestry.

John Wayles died in 1773 and the next year his daughter Martha and her husband, Thomas Jefferson, inherited the Hemings family among a total of 135 enslaved people from Wayles' estate, along with 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) of land. Sally was an infant that year and about 25 years younger than Martha. She, her siblings, their mother Betty, and various other enslaved people were brought to Monticello, Jefferson's home. The mixed-race Wayles-Hemings children grew up at Monticello at the top of the enslaved hierarchy, and as such were trained and given assignments as skilled artisans and domestic servants. Betty Hemings' other children and their descendants, also mixed race, were bestowed privileged assignments as well. None worked in the fields, but were still enslaved people without any legal status or rights.

Appearance

The formerly enslaved Isaac (Granger) Jefferson described Hemings' physical appearance as "Sally was mighty near white. Sally was very handsome, long straight hair down her back". Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph recalled her as "Light colored and decidedly good looking". She was 14 years old when she went to Europe, but stayed briefly with Abigail Adams in London before going to Jefferson in Paris, and Adams, who did not know her age, thought she appeared 15 or 16 at that time.

Hemings in Paris

In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was appointed the American envoy to France; he took his eldest daughter Martha (Patsy) with him to Paris, as well as several of his slaves. Among them was Sally's elder brother James Hemings, who became a chef trained in French cuisine. Jefferson left his two younger daughters in the care of their aunt and uncle, Francis and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes of Eppington in Chesterfield County, Virginia. After his youngest daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, died in 1784 while Jefferson was away, Jefferson sent for his surviving daughter, nine-year-old Mary (Polly), to live with him. The teenage slave, Sally Hemings, was chosen to accompany Polly to France after an older female slave became pregnant and could not make the journey. Correspondence between Jefferson and Abigail Adams indicates that Jefferson originally arranged for Polly to "be in the care of her nurse, a black woman, to whom she is confided with safety"; Adams wrote back: "The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her, was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her."

In 1787, Sally, aged 14 accompanied Polly to London and then to Paris. In London, they stayed with Abigail and John Adams from June 26 until July 10, 1787. Jefferson's associate, a Mr. Petit, arranged transportation and escorted the girls to Paris. In a letter to Jefferson on June 27, 1787, Abigail wrote: The Girl [who appeared to Abigail to be 15 or 16] who is with [Polly] is quite a child, and Captain Ramsey is of opinion will be of so little Service that he had better carry her back with him. But of this you will be a judge. She seems fond of the child and appears good natured." On July 6, Abigail wrote to Jefferson, "The Girl she has with her, wants more care than the child, and is wholy incapable of looking properly after her, without some superiour to direct her.

The widowed Jefferson, aged 44 at the time, was serving as the United States Minister to France. Hemings spent two years there and most historians believe Jefferson and Hemings' sexual relationship began while they were in France or soon after their return to Monticello. The exact nature of their relationship remains unclear. The Monticello exhibition on Hemings acknowledged this uncertainty, while noting the power imbalance inherent in an intimate relationship between a successful, wealthy white male and a quarter-black female slave 30 years his junior. The president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation said, "We really can't know what the dynamic was. Was it rape? Was there affection? We felt we had to present a range of views, including the most painful one." Hemings remained enslaved in Jefferson's house until his death in 1826. In 2017, a room identified as her quarters at Monticello, under the south terrace, was discovered in an archeological examination. It is being restored and refurbished.

Return to the United States and children's freedom

In 1789, Sally and James Hemings returned to the United States with Jefferson, who was 46 years old and seven years a widower. As shown by Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, sexual relationships between wealthy Virginia widowers and female slaves were not unknown. White society simply expected such men to be discreet about them.

According to Madison Hemings, Sally's first child died soon after her return from Paris. Hemings had six children after this; their complete names are in some cases uncertain:

Harriet Hemings [I] (October 5, 1795– December 1797)

Beverly Hemings, possibly William Beverley Hemings (April 1, 1798– after 1873)

Thenia Hemings, named after Sally's sister (born in 1799 and died in infancy)

Harriet Hemings [II] (May 1801– Unknown)

Madison Hemings, possibly James Madison Hemings (January 19, 1805– November 28, 1877)

Eston Hemings, possibly named Thomas Hemings (May 21, 1808– January 3, 1856)

Jefferson recorded births of slaves in his Farm Book. Unlike his practice in recording births of other slaves, he did not identify the father of Sally Hemings' children. This could have been because one of his family members or even he himself fathered them, or it could have been that he simply did not know.

Sally Hemings' documented duties at Monticello included being a nursemaid-companion, lady's maid, chambermaid, and seamstress. It is not known whether she was literate, and she left no known writings. She was described as very fair. She is believed to have lived as an adult in a room in Monticello's "South Dependencies", a wing of the mansion accessible to the main house through a covered passageway.

Jefferson–Hemings controversy

The Jefferson–Hemings controversy is the question of whether Jefferson impregnated Sally Hemings and fathered any or all of her six children of record. There were rumors of this as early as the 1790s. Jefferson's sexual relationship with Hemings was first publicly reported in 1802 by one of Jefferson's enemies, a political journalist named James T. Callender, after he noticed several light-skinned enslaved people at Monticello. He wrote that Jefferson "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves" and had "several children" by her. After that the story became widespread, spread by newspapers and by Jefferson's Federalist opponents.

Jefferson himself is never recorded to have publicly denied this allegation. However, several members of his family did. In the 1850s, Jefferson's eldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, said that Peter Carr, a nephew of Jefferson, had fathered Hemings' children, rather than Jefferson himself. This information was published and became the common wisdom, with major historians of Jefferson denying Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children for the next 150 years.

In the late 20th century, historians began re-analyzing the body of evidence. In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published a book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, that analyzed the historiography of the debate, demonstrating how historians since the 19th century had accepted early assumptions. They favored Jefferson family testimony while criticizing Hemings family testimony as "oral history", and failed to note all the facts.

A consensus began to emerge after the results of a DNA analysis, commissioned in 1998 by Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which operates Monticello as a house museum and archive. The DNA evidence showed no match between the Carr male line, proposed for more than 150 years as the father(s), and the one Hemings descendant tested. It did show a match between the Jefferson male line and the Eston Hemings descendant.

Since 1998 and the DNA study, several historians have concluded that Jefferson maintained a long sexual relationship with Hemings and fathered six children with her, four of whom survived to adulthood. Others argued that the DNA instead supported a weaker conclusion, that "Thomas was only one of eight or more Jeffersons who may have fathered Eston Hemings". The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) published in 2000 an independent historic review in combination with the DNA data, as did the National Genealogical Society in 2001; scholars involved mostly concluded Jefferson might be the father of all Hemings' children.

Children's lives

In 2008, Gordon-Reed published The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, which explored the extended family, including James's and Sally's lives in France, Monticello and Philadelphia, during Thomas Jefferson's lifetime. She was not able to find much new information about Beverley or Harriet Hemings, who left Monticello as young adults, moving north and probably changing their names.

Madison Hemings' memoir (edited and put into written form by journalist S. F. Wetmore in the Pike County Republican in 1873) and other documentation, including a wide variety of historical records, and newspaper accounts, has revealed some details of the lives of the Beverley and Harriet, and younger sons Madison and Eston Hemings (later Eston Jefferson), and of their descendants. Eventually, three of Sally Hemings' four surviving children (Beverley, Harriet, and Eston, but not Madison) chose to identify as white adults in the North; they were seven-eighths European in ancestry, and this was consistent with their appearance. Harriet was described by Edmund Bacon, the longtime Monticello overseer, as "nearly as white as anybody, and very beautiful". In his memoir, Madison wrote that both Beverley and Harriet married well in the white community in the Washington, D.C., area. For some time, Madison wrote to Beverley and Harriet and learned of their marriages. He knew that Harriet had children and was living in Maryland. But gradually she and Beverley stopped responding to his letters, and the siblings lost touch. Madison also claimed publicly in the 1873 memoir that he was Thomas Jefferson's son, and he had done likewise on the 1870 U.S. census.

Both Madison and Eston married free women of color in Charlottesville. After their mother's death in 1835, they and their families moved to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio. Census records classified them as "mulatto", at that time meaning mixed-race. The census enumerator, usually a local person, classified individuals in part according to who their neighbors were and what was known of them. Around 60 years later, a Chillicothe newswriter reminisced in 1902 about his acquaintance with Eston (then a well-known local musician), whom he described as "a remarkably fine looking colored man" with a "striking resemblance to Jefferson" recognized by others, who had already heard a rumors of his paternity and were credulous of it.

High demand for slaves in the Deep South and passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 heightened the risk for free black people of being kidnapped by slave catchers, as they needed little documentation to claim black people as fugitives. Legally free people of color, Eston and his family later moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to be farther away from slave catchers. There he changed his name to "Eston H. Jefferson" to acknowledge his paternity, and all his family adopted the surname. From then on, the Jeffersons lived in the white community.

Grandchildren and other descendants

Madison's descendants

Madison's sons fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Thomas Eston Hemings enlisted in the 175th Ohio Infantry Regiment; captured, he spent time at the Andersonville POW camp and died in a POW camp in Meridian, Mississippi. According to a Hemings descendant, his brother James attempted to cross Union lines and "pass" as a white man to enlist in the Confederate army to rescue him. Later, James Hemings was rumored to have moved to Colorado and perhaps passed into white society. Like some others in the family, he disappeared from the record, and the rest of his biography remains unknown.

A third son, William Hemings, enlisted in the regular Union Army as a white man. Madison's last known male-line descendant, William, never married and was not known to have had children. He died in 1910 in a veterans' hospital.

Some of Madison Hemings' children and grandchildren who remained in Ohio suffered from the limited opportunities for blacks at that time, working as laborers, servants, or small farmers. They tended to marry within the mixed-race community in the region, who eventually became established as people of education and property.

Madison's daughter, Ellen Wayles Hemings, married Alexander Jackson Roberts, a graduate of Oberlin College. When their first son was young, they moved to Los Angeles, California, where the family and its descendants became leaders in the 20th century. Their first son, Frederick Madison Roberts (1879–1952) – Sally Hemings' and Jefferson's great-grandson – was the first person of known black ancestry elected to public office on the West Coast: he served for nearly 20 years in the California State Assembly from 1919 to 1934. Their second son, William Giles Roberts, was also a civic leader. Their descendants have had a strong tradition of college education and public service.

Eston's descendants

Eston's sons also enlisted in the Union Army, both as white men from Madison, Wisconsin. His first son John Wayles Jefferson had red hair and gray eyes like his grandfather Jefferson. By the 1850s, John Jefferson in his twenties was the proprietor of the American Hotel in Madison. At one time he operated it with his younger brother Beverley. He was commissioned as a Union officer during the Civil War, during which he was promoted to the rank of Colonel and served at the Battle of Vicksburg. He wrote letters about the war to the newspaper in Madison for publication. After the war, John Jefferson returned to Wisconsin, where he frequently wrote for newspapers and published accounts about his war experiences. He later moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he became a successful and wealthy cotton broker. He never married or had known children, and left a sizeable estate.

Eston's second son, Beverley Jefferson, also served in the regular Union Army, as a white man. After operating the American Hotel with his brother John, he later separately operated the Capital Hotel. He also built a successful horse-drawn "omnibus" business. He and his wife Anna M. Smith had five sons, three of whom reached the professional class as a physician, attorney, and manager in the railroad industry. According to his 1908 obituary, Beverley Jefferson was "a likeable character at the Wisconsin capital and a familiar of statesmen for half a century". His friend Augustus J. Munson wrote, "Beverley Jefferson['s] death deserves more than a passing notice, as he was a grandson of Thomas Jefferson .... [He] was one of God's noblemen – gentle, kind, courteous, charitable." Beverley and Anna's great-grandson John Weeks Jefferson is the Eston Hemings descendant whose DNA was tested in 1998; it matched the Y-chromosome of the Thomas Jefferson male line.

There are known male-line descendants of Eston Hemings Jefferson, and known female-line descendants of Madison Hemings' three daughters: Sarah, Harriet, and Ellen.

Cultural depictions of Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings has been the main subject of a novel, a television mini-series, a stage play, two operas, and an operatic oratorio. She is also the subject of the second half of the film Jefferson in Paris. She has also appeared as a supporting character or a subject of discussion in many other shows and stage productions.

The power dynamic between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is portrayed in Titus Kaphar's Behind the Myth of Benevolence, a portrait of the founding father peeling back to reveal the nude figure of Hemings.

Jennie Lightweis-Goff draws a parallel between Hemings and La Malinche of Mexico, arguing that "Stories of captive women in the arms of white men are hollowed out for purposes of mythmaking: aspirational racial reconciliation or pure allegory of domination. Think of Sally Hemings, who was in her teens when she began bearing children by Thomas Jefferson; she has been reduced to either First Girlfriend or First Victim, depending on era and purpose...without attention to the complexities of [her life]."