Sally Hemings (1773-1835)

July 18, 2007 
/ Contributed By: Richard Johnson

| Hemings Jefferson

Sally Hemings's descendants

Photo by Robert Barclay

Sally Hemings was born into slavery in Virginia, probably at Guinea Plantation in Cumberland County, the youngest of six children of Elizabeth Hemings allegedly fathered by her white master John Wayles. Her mother was herself the child of an enslaved African woman and an English sea-captain, making Sally three-fourths white in ancestry.

On Waylesโ€™ death in 1773, the Hemings family was inherited by Martha, his eldest legitimate child, and brought to the Monticello plantation of Thomas Jefferson whom Martha had married the previous year.ย  There the children grew up as house slaves staffing Monticello during the years that encompassed Martha Jeffersonโ€™s death in September 1782 and Jeffersonโ€™s departure to Paris, France on diplomatic service in 1784.ย  Three years later, Sally Hemings traveled to France as companion and maid to Jeffersonโ€™s eight-year-old daughter Maria, staying until 1789.

As France was overtaken by revolution and the status of slavery abolished, Sally and her older brother James, in Paris as Jeffersonโ€™s personal servant, were paid a monthly wage.ย  There too, Sallyโ€™s son Madison later recalled, his mother began a relationship with Jefferson that would produce six children between 1795 and 1808, including three while Jefferson was president.ย  This relationship, a political scandal at the time but one long denied by Jeffersonโ€™s admirers, now seems not only circumstantially possible in terms of Jeffersonโ€™s recorded stays at Monticello but highly probable, and with recent DNA evidence showing that Eston, the youngest of Sallyโ€™s children, was fathered by a Jefferson, most likely Thomas.

After returning from France, Sally Hemings lived on at Monticello with her family, in the slave quarters and then in one of the โ€œservantโ€™s roomsโ€ under Monticelloโ€™s south terrace.ย  Her fellow slave Isaac Jefferson remembered her as โ€œmighty near whiteโ€ฆvery handsome, long straight hair down her back,โ€ while Thomas Jeffersonโ€™s grandson recalled her as โ€œlight colored and decidedly good looking.โ€ย  In the 1820s, two of her children were allowed to leave Monticello for freedom elsewhere and two more were freed by the terms of Jeffersonโ€™s will, two of only five slaves he ever formally emancipated and a further indication of his special regard for the Hemings family.

After Jeffersonโ€™s death in 1825, his daughter Martha gave Sally Hemings her โ€œtimeโ€ (she was listed as โ€œfreeโ€ in 1826) and she moved with sons Eston and Madison to a house in Charlottesville where she died in 1835. Of her surviving children, all of whom moved north out of Virginia, two would pass for โ€œwhiteโ€ and two for โ€œblack,โ€ indicative of the complex life strategies imposed by a world of racial groupings at once legally segregated yet socially and emotionally intermingled.ย  Sally Hemingsโ€™ own life embodies both the narrow options and hard choices open to a woman defined as born black and enslaved in early America.

About the Author

Author Profile

Richard Johnson is Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of two books, Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies, 1675-1715 (1981) and John Nelson, Merchant Adventurer: A Life Between Empires (1991), as well as some twenty essays and articles on early American and early modern Atlantic history. He has served as Chair of the University of Washingtonโ€™s History Department and twice been the Universityโ€™s UW Alumni Lecturer. He received the Universityโ€™s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Johnson, R. (2007, July 18). Sally Hemings (1773-1835). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/hemings-sally-1773-1835/

Source of the Author's Information:

Fawn Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (New York: Norton, 1974); Annette Gordon-Read, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999).

Further Reading