Sarah Hemings
was an enslaved woman of mixed race owned by President Thomas
Jefferson and who is believed to have had a
long-term relationship and six children with him, of whom four survived
and all were given freedom by Jefferson. Hemings was the youngest of six
siblings by the planter John
Wayles and his mixed-race slave Betty
Hemings; Sally was three-quarters European and a
half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha
Wayles Skelton.
In
1787, Hemings, at the age of 14, accompanied Jefferson's youngest daughter Mary (Polly) to
London and then to Paris, where the widowed Jefferson, 44 years old at the
time, was serving as the United States
Minister to France. Hemings spent two years there. It is believed by
most historians that Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Hemings either
in France or soon after their return to Monticello. Hemings had six children of
record born into slavery; four survived to adulthood. Hemings was a
domestic servant in Jefferson's house until his death.
The
historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children is
known as the Jefferson–Hemings
controversy. Following renewed historic analysis in the late 20th
century and a 1998 DNA study
that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings'
last son, Eston Hemings, there is a
near-consensus among historians that the widower Jefferson fathered her son
Eston Hemings and probably all her children. A small number of historians,
however, still disagree.
Hemings'
children lived in Jefferson's house and were trained as domestic servants and artisans.
Jefferson freed all of Hemings' children: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston,
as they came of age (they
were the only slave family freed by Jefferson). They were seven-eighths
European in ancestry, and three of the four entered white society as adults.
Descendants of those three identified as white. Hemings was "given
her time", and lived her last nine years freely with her two younger sons
in Charlottesville, and saw a
grandchild born in the house her sons owned.
Sally
Hemings was born about 1773 to Betty Hemings (1735–1807),
a mulatto slave.
Her father was their master John Wayles (1715–1773). Her mother
Betty was the daughter of Susanna, an enslaved African, and John Hemings, an
English sea captain. Susanna and Betty Hemings were first held by Francis
Eppes IV, where Susanna was referred to as Susanna Epps. John Hemings
tried to buy them from Eppes, but the planter refused to give them up. The
mother and daughter were inherited by Francis' daughter, Martha Eppes, who took
them with her as personal servants upon her marriage to the planter John Wayles. His parents were Edward
Wayles and Ellen Ashburner-Wayles, both of Lancaster, England.
After
Martha's death, Wayles married and was widowed twice more. Several
sources assert that the widower John Wayles took his slave Betty Hemings as a concubine and
had six children by her during the last 12 years of his life; the youngest of
these was Sally Hemings. They were half-siblings to his daughters by his
wives; his first child, Martha Wayles (named after her mother, John Wayles'
first wife), married the young planter Thomas Jefferson.
The biracial children
of Betty Hemings by Wayles were three-quarters European in ancestry and very
fair skinned. (They had a white maternal grandfather and two white paternal grandparents.)
Since 1662 in Virginia slave law, children born to enslaved mothers were
considered slaves under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem.
Elizabeth and her children, including Sally Hemings, and all their children,
were legally slaves, although the fathers were the white masters and the
children were majority-white in ancestry.
After
Wayles died in 1773, his daughter Martha and Jefferson inherited the Hemings
family among a total of 135 slaves from his estate, as well as 11,000 acres of
land. The youngest Wayles-Hemings child was Sally, an infant that year and
about 25 years younger than Martha. Scholars have noted that as the mixed-race Wayles-Hemings children
grew up at Monticello, they were trained and given assignments as skilled
artisans and domestic servants, at the top of the slave hierarchy. Betty
Hemings' other children and their descendants, also mixed race, also had
privileged assignments. None worked in the fields.
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