Background
Ethnicity:
In colonial America, the status of the mother - free or slave determined the status of the child. Sally Flemings's father, John Wayles, was white, but her mother, Elizabeth Hemings, was a mulatto slave the child of a white father and an African mother.
Elizabeth was Wayles’ slave from birth, and after the death of his wife, she became his mistress. Together they had six children. Wayles died in 1773, the same year Sally was born. Sally, her mother, and her five siblings (along until about 125 other slaves and 11,0 acres of land), were inherited by Martha Wayles Jefferson, wife of Thomas Jefferson. Sally Hemings was Martha’s half-sister, sharing the same father. Since Martha was born in wedlock, she had rights to the family estate. The Hemings children were taken to Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia estate, and made house slaves.
Connections
Martha Jefferson died in September of 1782, leaving Thomas Jefferson a widower and the father of two girls. He was sent as a diplomat to France two years later.Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha, joined him in Paris to attend school, and in 1787, he sent for his daughter, Maria, who brought Sally with her.
Historians are not certain exactly what happened in Paris fee person in Paris, as slavery had been abolished there. In the fall of 1789, Jefferson returned to America with his two daughters, as well as Sally and her brother James, who had been in Paris working for Jefferson and apprenticing as a chef.
By all accounts, Sally was visibly pregnant when she arrived back at Monticello. Many years later, in 1873, Madison Hemings, Solly’s sixth child, spoke of his mother’s return from Paris in the newspaper, the Pike County Republican. During her time in Paris, he said, "My mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and »hen he was called back home she was [pregnant] by him. He went on to say that his mother balked at returning to America, because “in France she was free, while [in] Virginia she would be re-enslaved. ” Madison Hemings said that Jefferson “promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years" if Sally left Paris. “Soon after their arrival, [my mother] gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. ”
Between 1790 and 1808, Sally Hemings gave birth to seven children while residing at Monticello. Two children were listed as “runaways” in Jefferson’s personal records, but the reality was that they were allowed to walk away, and were able to blend into the free white world of Washington, D.C., because of their light-colored skin. Two other children were freed in Jefferson’s will when he died in 1826, and his daughter, Martha, freed Sally Hemings, who died in 1835.
The public first learned of Sally Hemings in 1802, during the second year of Jefferson’s presidency, when the Richmond Recorder published an article that speculated on a relationship between Hemings and the president. The possibility that Jefferson had fathered Sally’s children caused great controversy. At the time, the charge was proven neither true nor false; the president himself never denied or confirmed the relationship.
Historians argued about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship for years, but the results of a 1998 DNA test on known descendants of both Jefferson and Hemings added great weight to the historical evidence for a connection. The complex test results showed a definite genetic link between the two families, but could only confirm that a Jefferson family member, and not necessarily Thomas Jefferson, fathered Sally Hemings’s children. The president’s brother, Randolph, and his two sons, spent some time at Monticello. More tests will be needed before any definitive scientific findings can prove Jefferson’s paternity one way or another.
