Sally Hemings

Exploring extraordinary Black lives of the Founding Era, such as that of Sally Hemings, can transform our understanding of American history. Born in Virginia in 1773, Sally Hemings was an enslaved woman in the household of Thomas Jefferson. In 1787, at the age of 14, she accompanied Jefferson’s daughter Polly to London and then to Paris, where Jefferson was serving as the US Minister to France.

Since Hemings was considered free under French law, she initially refused to return to Jefferson’s estate of Monticello in Virginia, and only did so upon securing a promise of freedom for herself and her unborn children. In 1802, allegations of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Hemings surfaced, resulting in an explosion of political satire in the press. Genetic analysis has determined that Hemings’s six children likely were fathered by Jefferson. Her four surviving children—Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings—were freed in the 1820s.

Upon Jefferson’s death, Hemings lived the last nine years of her life as a free woman. She died in Charlottesville in 1835. While Hemings left no writings behind, her struggle to obtain freedom—for herself and for her children—reminds us that, for African Americans, the rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were hard won. 

Annette Gordon-Reed discussed her Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Hemingses of Monticello, on Book Breaks on May 17, 2020

Annette Gordon-Reed places the connection between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson in a modern perspective in When the Past Speaks to the Present: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Recent years have witnessed an explosion of interest in, and historical scholarship about, American slavery. Both in the academy and outside of it, Americans have come to realize that part of our national consciousness was shaped between 1619 and 1865, when racially based slavery flourished in North America. Historians have always written about slavery, of course, even when the institution was in place. But with the exception of the works of black scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, most historical writing about slavery in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was produced by white southerners, who focused on slavery from the perspective of the slave-owning class rather than the enslaved. Read more

Jon Kukla gives us an opportunity to reconsider the twice-told tale of Sally Hemings in Sally Hemings: Given Her Time

Sally Hemings claims a special place in American history. Her experiences were both commonplace and extraordinary, from plantation life in Virginia to the diplomatic whirl of Paris and back. Born into slavery in an age and culture that placed extreme limits on all women, Sally Hemings spent every moment of her life negotiating the junctures of race, gender, family, plantation life, slavery, and political culture in early America. Born into slavery in 1773, her achievement was remarkable. She died in 1835 in modest security and relative freedom—given her time, in the language of the day—comforted by the fact that all her children had escaped the hopeless bonds of enslavement for lives of promise as free Americans.  Read more