Sally Hemings was the enslaved half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's late wife
Sally Hemings was born about 1773, the daughter of an enslaved woman and her enslaver, John Wayles, whose daughter Martha married Thomas Jefferson. That made Hemings a younger half-sister of Jefferson's wife. Inherited by the Jeffersons as an infant, she grew up enslaved at Monticello, and DNA evidence shows Jefferson fathered at least two of her sons.
Wayles died in 1773, and the next year Martha and Thomas Jefferson inherited 135 enslaved people from his estate, among them Betty Hemings and her children, along with 11,000 acres. The Wayles-Hemings children, three-quarters European in ancestry, were trained as skilled artisans and household servants and never worked the fields, yet under Virginia's 1662 law they took their mother's enslaved status and had no legal rights.
In 1787, aged 14, Hemings travelled with one of Jefferson's daughters via London, where they stayed with Abigail and John Adams, to Paris, where the widowed Jefferson was serving as American minister. Slavery was illegal in France, so she was legally free there, and Jefferson paid her the equivalent of 2 dollars a month while she learned French. Historians believe their sexual relationship began during her 26 months in Paris, when she was between 14 and 16 and he was in his mid-40s.
Back in Virginia she was his property, and she could not have refused him without risking punishment, sale or violence. According to her son Madison, she agreed to return to slavery in exchange for Jefferson's promise that her children would be freed as adults. All four who survived to adulthood were eventually released, either by Jefferson in life or through his will. She died in Charlottesville in 1835.
Paternity was long disputed. A 1998–1999 DNA study matched the Jefferson male line with a descendant of her youngest son, Eston, and a panel for the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which has owned Monticello since 1923, concluded Jefferson fathered Eston and probably all her children. A rival panel in 2001 argued that Randolph Jefferson or his sons could have been responsible. Later testing against a profile built from Jefferson's own hair conclusively established that he fathered Madison and Eston.
Source: Sally Hemings
