Sally Hemings

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. 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 of land. 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." 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 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. Sally Hemings remained in France for 26 months. Slavery had been abolished in that country after the Revolution in 1789; Jefferson paid wages to her and James while they were in Paris. He paid her the equivalent of $2 a month. In comparison, he paid James Hemings $4 a month as chef-in-training, and his Parisian scullion $2.50 a month; the other French servants earned from $8 to $12 a month. Jefferson purchased some fine clothing for Hemings, which suggests that she accompanied Martha as a lady's maid to formal events. According to her son Madison's memoir, Hemings became pregnant by Jefferson in Paris. She was about 16 at the time. Under French law, Sally and James were free and could have petitioned to stay; a return to Virginia meant a return to slavery. She agreed to return with him to the United States in exchange for his promise to free her children when they came of age (at 21). Hemings' strong ties to her mother, siblings, and extended family likely drew her back to Monticello. ==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) 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. In 2017, the Monticello Foundation announced that what they believe to be Hemings' room, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom, had been found through an archeological excavation, as part of the Mountaintop Project. It was space that had been converted to other public uses in 1941. Hemings' room will be restored and refurbished as part of a major restoration project for the complex. Its goals include telling the stories of all the families at Monticello, both enslaved and free. In his memoir, published posthumously, Bacon said Harriet was "near white and very beautiful", and that people said Jefferson freed her because she was his daughter. However, Bacon did not believe this to be true, citing someone else coming out of Sally Hemings' bedroom. The name of this person was left out by Rev. Hamilton W. Pierson in his 1862 book because he did not wish to cause pain to anyone living at that time. Jefferson formally freed two slaves while he was alive: Sally's older brothers Robert, who bought his freedom, and James, who was required to train his brother Peter as a chef for three years to get his freedom. Jefferson eventually (including posthumously, through his will) freed all of Sally's surviving children, Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, as they came of age. (Harriet was the only female slave Jefferson allowed to go free, and these were the only slaves freed as they came of age.) Of the hundreds of slaves he legally owned, Jefferson freed only five in his will, all men from the Hemings family. They were also the only slave family group freed by Jefferson. Sally Hemings' children were seven-eighths European in ancestry, and three of the four entered white society after gaining their freedom; their descendants likewise identified as white. His will also petitioned the legislature to allow the freed Hemingses to stay in the state. This informal freedom allowed Hemings to live in Virginia with her two youngest sons in nearby Charlottesville for the next nine years until her death. Hemings lived to see a grandchild born in a house that her sons owned. Although Jefferson inherited great wealth at a young age, he was bankrupt by the time he died. His estate, including his slaves (besides the Hemings), was sold at auction by his daughter Martha to repay his debts. ==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. 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. In an article that appeared in Science, eight weeks after the DNA study, Eugene Foster, the lead co-author of the DNA study, is reported to have "made it clear 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, In an interview in 2000, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed said of the change in historical scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings: "Symbolically, it's tremendously important for people ... as a way of inclusion. Nathan Huggins said that the Sally Hemings story was a way of establishing black people's birthright to America." such as the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS, founded shortly after the DNA study), dispute Jefferson's paternity of Hemings' children. All but one of 13 TJHS scholars expressed considerable skepticism about the conclusions. She noted that the Jefferson, Bacon/Pierson, and Randolph material contained various ambiguities, partisanship, timeline errors, and contradictions or outright misrepresentations. She suggested that Madison Hemings probably knew who his father was, and there was no evidence that ghostwriter Wetmore injected fiction even if he polished the wording for print. She also indicated that the claim of a Jefferson–Hemings separation during one conception period cannot be sustained, and that Wallenborn did not correctly understand that material. Stanton stated outright that "Sally Hemings never conceived in Jefferson's absence.") produced in June a heated follow-up reply to Stanton's rebuttal. He claimed that many scholars agreed with his version, and that Jordan had contradicted his support of Stanton's, having expressing skepticism of a Jefferson–Hemings affair in a PBS-TV documentary (though it is unclear if this was recorded before the DNA research and subsequent report). Wallenborn repeated many of his original points in more detail; bolstered the potential reliability of Bacon while casting doubt of that of the Madison-via-Whetmore memoir; and insisted again that "the son of Sally that most resembled Thomas Jefferson" surely meant Eston (without any new evidence). He added the argument that Madison Hemings' probable date of conception was close to that of the death of Jefferson's daughter Maria (arguably not a likely inspiration for sexual involvement); and that during Jefferson's presidency, Sally Hemings' exact whereabouts did not survive in any records. Wallenborn attempted to use two sets of records to show gaps in Jefferson's known location during some of the conception periods – but editorial interpolation of footnotes by Jordan with additional records closed those gaps in every case, supporting Stanton's claim. Wallenborn added another new observation, of what he called "some striking coincidences", that Sally Hemings' known pregnancies stopped, despite Thomas Jefferson's presence, after both his brother Randolph and Randolph's son Thomas married women outside Monticello, c. 1808 or 1809. ==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) 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. 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. Madison's family were the only Monticello Hemings descendants who continued to identify with the black community. They intermarried within the community of free people of color before the Civil War. Over time, some of their descendants passed into the white community, while many others continued within the black community. Both Eston and Madison achieved some success in life, were well-respected by their contemporaries, and had children who built on their successes. They worked as carpenters, and Madison also had a small farm. Eston became a professional musician and bandleader, "a master of the violin, and an accomplished 'caller' of dances", who "always officiated at the 'swell' entertainments of Chillicothe". He was in demand across southern Ohio. The aforementioned journalist neighbor in Chillicothe described him thus: "Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent, he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody's attention to him." ==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. 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 , a grandson of Hemings, through her son Eston 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. 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]." ==See also==