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ISSUE 070 · DEEP DIVE · MYTHS & MISINFORMATION

Sally Hemings was born into slavery in 1773. According to her son and other accounts, her father was John Wayles — the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha. If so, she was her late mistress's half-sister.

In 1787, aged about fourteen, she was sent to Paris to accompany Jefferson's youngest daughter. Jefferson, then the American minister to France, was 44. Under French law, an enslaved person brought into the country could claim their freedom.

Her son Madison Hemings described what happened next in a memoir published in 1873: “in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him.” To change her mind, Jefferson “promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years.”

She went back. According to Madison, she was already pregnant by Jefferson when they returned in 1789. She was about sixteen. He was 46.

Historians still argue about what to call this. “Relationship” suggests a choice she could not freely make: she was a teenager, and she was his property. What the record does show is that she used the one moment of leverage she would ever have — and got a promise out of the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Monticello's records list six children born to Sally Hemings between 1795 and 1808. Two died in infancy. Jefferson kept the promise to the other four: Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822, and Madison and Eston were freed in his will in 1826.

Sally herself was never freed by him. After his death, his daughter Martha let her leave Monticello, and she spent the rest of her life with her sons in Charlottesville. She died in 1835.

The secret did not stay secret for long. In 1802 a journalist named James Callender wrote that Jefferson had for years “kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves” — a woman named Sally — and had “several children” by her.

Jefferson's white family had an answer. His grandchildren, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Coolidge, said the fathers were Jefferson's nephews, the Carr brothers. For most of the next two centuries that was the respectable version, and the historians who rejected it were in the minority.

In 1998 a team led by the pathologist Eugene Foster tested the Y chromosome, which passes from father to son almost unchanged. Jefferson had no surviving sons by his wife, so the team used male-line descendants of his paternal uncle, Field Jefferson, and compared them with descendants of Eston Hemings, the Carr family and a man named Thomas Woodson.

Three results came back. Eston's descendants matched the Jefferson Y chromosome. The Carr line did not — which ended the nephew story. And the Woodson line did not match either: a family that had believed for generations that it descended from Jefferson and Hemings's first child turned out not to.

The journal Nature ran the study under the headline “Jefferson fathered slave's last child.” That went further than the data. The test showed that a man carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome fathered Eston — and about 25 adult men in Virginia carried it at the time. The researchers later said the title “was misleading.”

What closes the gap is everything else. Jefferson was often away from Monticello for months at a time, yet a study of his own records found he was there when each of Hemings's children was conceived. Add Madison Hemings's account, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, concluded in 2000 that Jefferson very probably fathered Eston and likely all six. A rival panel of scholars dissented in 2001, pointing to his younger brother Randolph. It remains the minority view.

The Hemings story can crowd out the larger one. Jefferson enslaved more than 600 people over his lifetime. He freed ten — all of them from the Hemings family.

He died in 1826 owing $107,000, more than $2 million today. His heirs advertised “130 valuable negroes” for sale, and nearly 100 people were sold over five days at Monticello in January 1827. “We were scattered all over the country,” recalled Peter Fossett, who was sold as a boy, “never to meet each other again until we meet in another world.”

Eston Hemings, meanwhile, eventually moved to Wisconsin with his family, changed their surname to Jefferson, and lived the rest of his life as a white man.

The DNA test on its own did not prove that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children. What it did was destroy the alternatives his family had relied on for two centuries — and the timing and her son's testimony do the rest. Almost every serious historian now accepts it.

The most remarkable person in the story is the one with the least power: a teenage girl in Paris who understood exactly what France meant for her, and made the most famous man in Virginia keep his word.

Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account” and the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (2000), monticello.org.

Hemings, M., “Life Among the Lowly, No. 1,” Pike County Republican (13 March 1873), as reproduced by PBS Frontline.

Foster, E. A. et al., “Jefferson fathered slave's last child,” Nature 396 (1998), and the authors' clarification in Nature (7 January 1999); Columbia University 21st C on the headline controversy.

Callender, J. T., Richmond Recorder (1 September 1802).

Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, Report of the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter (2001, revised 2011).

Thomas Jefferson Foundation, “Jefferson's Debt,” the 1827 dispersal sale, Monticello's slavery FAQs, and the Getting Word oral history project entries on Eston Hemings Jefferson and Peter Fossett.

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