Sarah "Sally" Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835)

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.