No written records or portraits exist of Sally Hemings, the Monticello slave who bore at least one, if not more, children by Thomas Jefferson. The mystery surrounding her and the nature of her relationship with Jefferson captures the imagination, leading to questions that, ultimately, only Tom and Sally could answer.
Were they star-crossed lovers? Cruel master and submitting slave? Could Jefferson really love someone he owned? Did Sally love him?
Information on Hemings can be found on the "Matter of Fact" web page, published by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Inc.: <http://www.monticello.org/Matters/people/ Sally_Hemings.html>, and in a Jan. 8,1999, editorial by E. M. Halliday and a Nov. 8, 1989, article by Darly Royster Alex, both published in The New York Times.
From these sources we learn that Hemings, 28 years younger than Jefferson, was the illegitimate daughter of John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law. As such, Sally Hemings had the same father and was a half-sister to Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson. Sally's mother was one of Wayles' slaves, Elizabeth Hemings, who was herself the product of an interracial affair between a slave and a sea captain.
Jefferson inherited Hemings and her mother from Wayles, and the two came to live at Monticello in 1776. It is believed that when she was only 6 or 8 years old, Sally began caring for Jefferson's daughter, Martha. When Sally was 14 and Martha was 8, they traveled together to France where Jefferson, then a widower, was the American ambassador in Paris.
Years later, in a written account of his life, Sally's oldest son, Madison, would write that their affair began in Paris and that, eventually, over the course of her life, Sally would name Jefferson as the father of all seven of her children.
Rumors of an affair between the two began in public as early at 1802 when a disgruntled politician published an account of their liaison in a Virginia newspaper. Jefferson, in keeping with a lifelong policy not to respond to attacks on his character, did not directly deny the rumors.
While most scholars have denied the possibility of the affair for years, those who have supported it point to circumstantial evidence such as Jefferson's presence at Monticello each time Sally conceived and the correlating fact that she never conceived during his absences. There also are recorded remarks by Jefferson's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who noted the resemblance of Sally's children to the Jeffersons.
Still, others point to the fact that Jefferson was 65 years old when Hemings gave birth to Eston and suggest it was unlikely that he would begin a new liaison at that point in his life.
Lastly, scholars point to the fact that, of all the hundreds of slaves Jefferson owned, the only complete family at Monticello to be freed in his will were Sally's children.
Jefferson did not make provisions to free Sally herself. Because laws governing slavery required slaves to leave the state in which they had been freed, romantics interpret this to mean that Jefferson did not want to lose the woman he loved.
Although she was never officially "freed," after Jefferson's death, Martha Jefferson Randolph granted Sally "her time," a form of unofficial freedom that enabled her to remain in Virginia. In her remaining years, Sally lived in Charlottesville with her sons, Madison and Eston, until her death in 1835.
Financial records at Monticello indicate that Sally was well-trained in Paris, especially in the arts of needlework and the care of clothing, and when Martha Jefferson was introduced to French society, there was a great increase in expenses for clothing for her and for Sally as well.
The only known descriptions of Sally come from the Monticello slave Isaac Jefferson, who recorded her as "mighty nearly white...very handsome, long straight hair down her back" and from Randolph who described her as "colored and decidedly good looking."
"She ran so much of Monticello; she spoke French; she was well traveled. I think she must have been brilliant," descendant Dorothy Jefferson Westerinen says.