Sarah "Sally" Hemings ( 1773 – 1835) was an enslaved woman 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, the daughter of an enslaved African woman and English captain John Hemings. Sally's father, the owner of Betty, John Wayles, was also the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha. 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. Whether this should be described as rape remains a matter of controversy. 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. Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835 in the home of her freed sons.
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 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. 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.
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. The exhibit opened in June 2018.
Early life
Sally Hemings was born about 1773 to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings (1735–1807), a woman also born into slavery. Sally's father was their slave owner John Wayles (1715–1773). Betty's parents were another enslaved woman, a "full-blooded African", and a white English sea captain, whose surname was Hemings. Annette Gordon-Reed speculates that Betty's mother's name was Parthena (or Parthenia), based on the wills of Francis Eppes IV and John Wayles. Captain Hemings tried to purchase them from Eppes, but the planter refused. Upon Eppes' passing, Parthena and Betty were inherited by his daughter, Martha Eppes, who took them with her as personal slaves upon her marriage to Wayles.
John Wayles was the son of Edward and Ellen (née Ashburner) Wayles, both from 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 had six children by her during the last 12 years of his life, the youngest of these being Sally Hemings. These children were younger half-siblings to his daughters by his wives. His first child, Martha Wayles (named after her mother, John 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 people under the principle of : 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 slaves, even though the fathers were their white slave owners and the children were of majority-white ancestry.