Sally Hemings

Who She Was

Sally Hemings was one of the most famous African American women in U.S. history — and one of the least knowable. She was born enslaved, the daughter of the enslaver John Wayles and his enslaved servant Elizabeth Hemings, which made her the half-sister of Jefferson's wife Martha. She came to Monticello as a toddler, as inherited property. She spent two and a half years free in Paris, and at sixteen negotiated with one of the most powerful men in America — trading her own return to slavery for a promise of freedom for children not yet born. She bore Thomas Jefferson at least six children, raised the four who survived, and lived to see every one of them free: a nearly fifty-year head start on emancipation.

The Essentials

• Born 1773 into slavery in Virginia; her mother was Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings, her father Betty's enslaver, John Wayles.
• Half-sister of Martha Jefferson — same father. Little was documented about either woman, and no image of either survives.
• Three of her four grandparents were of European descent; her maternal grandmother was an unnamed African woman.
• Came to Monticello around 1774–76 as a toddler, inherited with her mother and siblings after Wayles died. By tradition, the dying Martha gave nine-year-old Sally her hand bell.
• Nursemaid to Polly, Jefferson's younger daughter — and in 1787, at fourteen, escorted her across the ocean to Paris.
• Free in France (1787–89): she worked as a domestic in Jefferson's household, earned wages, learned French, and under French law could simply have stayed free.
• Mother of at least six children fathered by Jefferson between 1790 and 1808; four survived. She raised them in the house and never worked in the fields.
• Never legally emancipated. After Jefferson's death in 1826 she was "given her time" by his daughter, and lived unofficially free in Charlottesville with her sons Madison and Eston until her death in 1835.
• The location of her grave is unknown.

The Treaty of Paris — Her Defining Act

In 1789 Jefferson prepared to sail home. Sally, sixteen and pregnant, refused to go — in Paris she was free. What followed, in her son Madison's telling, was a negotiation between an enslaved teenager and the American minister to France. She agreed to return to Virginia and to slavery, on terms:

She kept her side; decades later, he kept his. The child she carried home from Paris "lived but a short time." She did not negotiate for — and never received — her own legal freedom. Historians like Annette Gordon-Reed ask us to see her not merely as Jefferson's "concubine," a word from an 1802 newspaper attack, but as an enslaved sixteen-year-old who bargained with power and won her children's future. Enslaved women had no legal right to refuse their owners; within that brutal fact, she carved out the one thing she could.

What Did She Look Like?

Only two people who knew her left descriptions:

Her Children

Two other children died in infancy. After Beverly and Harriet crossed the color line, they had to deny their own mother; she had little, if any, contact with them again. One family, split forever by America's racial ledger.

Why Her Name Endures

In 1802 the journalist James Callender made her a national scandal; Jefferson never responded, and his acknowledged family denied everything for nearly two centuries. His unacknowledged family never stopped telling the truth. In 1873 Madison Hemings published his memoir naming his father; in 1998 a DNA study linked a Hemings male descendant to the Jefferson male line; and today Monticello — through its exhibits and the Getting Word oral history project — presents her children's paternity as historical fact.

Her legacy is the thing she extracted from an impossible position: her four children escaped, decades early, the system that held their mother, their grandmother, and their great-grandmother. As the historian Annette Gordon-Reed put it, whatever we may feel about that bargain today — it mattered to her.