Who Was Sally Hemings? - slave woman

Ebony, June, 1999 by Laura B. Randolph

HER name evokes hundreds of years of mystery, hundreds of years of curiosity, hundreds of years of secrecy surrounding a story--now part of history--that wouldn't die. For nearly two centuries, while historians dissected every piece, every part, every peculiarity of Thomas Jefferson's life, almost no one asked the question that is now on everyone's lips: Who was Sally Hemings?

That the author of the Declaration of Independence had two families--the first by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and the second by Sally Hemings, his beautiful slave and his wife's half-sister--is something generations of Hemings' descendants have been telling the world for nearly two centuries.

Long before a recent DNA test proved with near certainty that Sally Hemings had a relationship with and at least one child by the most famous of the Founding Fathers, "We kept the faith in the truth of our family's 200-year-old oral history," says John Q.T. King, 77, the great-great-grandson of Hemings' first child, Thomas Woodson.

But, because historians were so eager to dismiss any suggestion that Jefferson would become intimately involved with a slave, they almost unanimously denounced all accounts of his relationship with Sally Hemings as farce. "The project of defeating the notion of a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings demanded that Hemings herself be kept invisible," New York Law School Professor Annette Gordon-Reed explains in her fascinating book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.

As a result, far too little is known about the beautiful slave woman with whom many scholars now believe America's third president had a nearly 40-year relationship. While scant and inadequate, according to seasoned scholars, some biographical facts about Sally Hemings are known:

* Born in 1773, her given name was probably Sarah

* Her mother was Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, a slave on Jefferson's father-in-law's plantation and the daughter of an English sea captain and an African slave woman

* Her father was John Wayles, the father of Jefferson's wife, who took Sally's mother as his mistress after the death of his third wife (Betty Hemings bore Wayles' six children of whom Sally was the youngest).

Incontrovertible information about Sally Hemings' life is also in short supply. Research shows she came to Monticello, Jefferson's Virginia plantation home, with her mother and siblings after her family became Jefferson's "property" as part of his inheritance from his father-in-law's estate. At Monticello, Hemings worked in "the big house," performing the duties of a household servant.

From the time she was a teenager, Hemings was said to be breathtakingly beautiful. While there are only two known descriptions of her, both point out Hemings' extraordinary looks. Monticello slave Isaac Jefferson remembered that she was "mighty near white ... very handsome, long, straight hair down her back," and Jefferson's oldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, described her as "light colored and decidedly good-looking."

In the summer of 1787, at the age of 14, Hemings accompanied Jefferson's 8-year-old daughter, Mary, to Paris, where Jefferson was serving as minister to France. On the trip over, "Sally must have issued her own declaration of independence for good Captain Ramsay, in whose care the two girls had been put, made his laments later," author Pearl M. Graham wrote nearly 50 years ago in the Journal of Negro History, referring to the ship captain who said Hemings would be of "little service" to Jefferson and, consequently, he "better carry her back with him."

Ignoring the captain's recommendation, when Mary and Sally arrived in London, Jefferson asked his old and dear friends, John and Abigail Adams, to meet them. While many scholars find Jefferson's decision not to meet his daughter's ship odd, what is more curious, many say, is his decision to send his butler to escort the two girls from London to Paris.

While no one can know Jefferson's reasons for sending a servant to pick up his daughter, author Conor Cruise O'Brien speculates Abigail Adams had a lot to do with his decision. "I believe he was afraid to be in the same room with Sally and Abigail Adams," O'Brien says in his book, The Long Affair.

But afraid of what? Jefferson and Hemings had yet to become involved. O'Brien and others have speculated that the reason Jefferson did not want to go to London to pick up his daughter is because he did not want to face questions from Abigail Adams about Hemings, questions that would go to the heart of what O'Brien calls "the Jefferson-Wayles-Hemings pattern of family relationships."

It was a pattern that made Hemings the half-sister of Jefferson's late wife. It was a pattern that made Hemings the aunt of Jefferson's daughters. And most important, says O'Brien, it was a pattern that Jefferson knew Abigail Adams, who referred to Hemings as "The Girl," didn't merely disapprove of, but "detested." Given that fact, "it is understandable that Jefferson did not want to meet Abigail in the presence of his daughter, and of the young slave who was [her] aunt," O'Brien concludes.