Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson at Monticello — and, through her father John Wayles, she was the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife, Martha. As a teenager she traveled to Paris with Jefferson's daughter; historians believe her relationship with Jefferson began there. Under French law she could have claimed her freedom on that soil, but she returned with him to Virginia.

She had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood — Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston. A 1998 DNA study linked the Jefferson male line to her son Eston's descendants, and Monticello now states plainly that Jefferson fathered her children. He never acknowledged them publicly, and never freed Sally. He freed her two youngest sons in his will and allowed the two older children to leave; after Jefferson's death in 1826, his daughter granted Sally her freedom unofficially, and she lived out her life in nearby Charlottesville.