Sally Hemings
This is an accepted version of this page Sarah "Sally" Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was a woman enslaved to third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, inherited among many others from his father-in-law, John Wayles.
As attested by her son, Madison Hemings, Sally later agreed with Jefferson that she would return to Virginia and resume her life in slavery, as long as all their children would be freed when they came of age.
[2] Whether this should be described as rape remains a matter of controversy by historians, as there is no evidence that Jefferson sexually assaulted her, but due to his near-complete control over her life, and that she was a teenager, between 14 and 16 years, when he was in his 40s, the circumstances for coercion are present.
[21][18] The mixed-race Wayles-Hemings children grew up at Monticello at the top of the enslaved hierarchy, and as such were trained and given assignments as skilled artisans and domestic servants.
[24] Jefferson left his two younger daughters in the care of their aunt and uncle, Francis and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes of Eppington in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
The Monticello exhibition on Hemings acknowledged this uncertainty, while noting the power imbalance inherent in an intimate relationship between a successful, wealthy white male and a quarter-black female slave 30 years his junior.
[22] She is believed to have lived as an adult in a room in Monticello's "South Dependencies", a wing of the mansion accessible to the main house through a covered passageway.
[42] In 2017, the Monticello Foundation announced that what they believe to be Hemings' room, adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom, had been found through an archeological excavation, as part of the Mountaintop Project.
Jefferson eventually (including posthumously, through his will) freed all of Sally's surviving children,[44] Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, as they came of age.
In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published a book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, that analyzed the historiography of the debate, demonstrating how historians since the 19th century had accepted early assumptions.
[56] A consensus began to emerge after the results of a DNA analysis,[57][58][59][60][61] commissioned in 1998 by Daniel P. Jordan, president of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation,[62] which operates Monticello as a house museum and archive.
The DNA evidence showed no match between the Carr male line, proposed for more than 150 years as the father(s), and the one Hemings descendant tested.
[63] Since 1998 and the DNA study,[57] several historians have concluded that Jefferson maintained a long sexual relationship with Hemings and fathered six children with her, four of whom survived to adulthood.
[8][67] In an interview in 2000, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed said of the change in historical scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings: "Symbolically, it's tremendously important for people ... as a way of inclusion.
Until very recently, American historians were no more receptive to arguments about a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings than The Da Vinci Code's Catholic Church was to a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
Virginius Dabney concluded that given Jefferson's documented horror of miscegenation, "It would indeed have been the height of hypocrisy for a man who entertained such views and expressed them over most of his adult life to have sired mulatto children."
[62] While Wallenborn concurred with the validity of the genetic testing and with the documentary research collected, he disputed some of the interpretation, and concluded: "The historical evidence is not substantial enough to confirm nor for that matter to refute [Jefferson's] paternity of any of the children of Sally Hemings.
Second is an unequivocal counterclaim made by Jefferson's foreman Edmund Bacon and published by H. W. Pierson (with the name of the alleged actual father redacted).
She suggested that Madison Hemings probably knew who his father was, and there was no evidence that ghostwriter Wetmore injected fiction even if he polished the wording for print.
[74] He claimed that many scholars agreed with his version, and that Jordan had contradicted his support of Stanton's, having expressing skepticism of a Jefferson–Hemings affair in a PBS-TV documentary (though it is unclear if this was recorded before the DNA research and subsequent report).
Wallenborn repeated many of his original points in more detail; bolstered the potential reliability of Bacon while casting doubt of that of the Madison-via-Whetmore memoir; and insisted again that "the son of Sally that most resembled Thomas Jefferson" surely meant Eston (without any new evidence).
[74] Wallenborn accused TJF of rushing the report to finalization without accounting for his objections, and concluded his letter in a much more hostile tone than in his original minority report: "If the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and the DNA Study Committee majority had been seeking the truth and had used accurate legal and historical information rather than politically correct motivation" that it would have written "it is still impossible to prove with absolute certainty whether Thomas Jefferson did or did not father any of Sally Hemings' five children" (emphasis in original).
[77] She was not able to find much new information about Beverley or Harriet Hemings, who left Monticello as young adults, moving north and probably changing their names.
Madison Hemings' memoir (edited and put into written form by journalist S. F. Wetmore in the Pike County Republican in 1873)[62] and other documentation, including a wide variety of historical records, and newspaper accounts, has revealed some details of the lives of the Beverley and Harriet, and younger sons Madison and Eston Hemings (later Eston Jefferson), and of their descendants.
[78] Eventually, three of Sally Hemings' four surviving children (Beverley, Harriet, and Eston, but not Madison) chose to identify as white adults in the North; they were seven-eighths European in ancestry, and this was consistent with their appearance.
[81] Around 60 years later, a Chillicothe newswriter reminisced in 1902 about his acquaintance with Eston (then a well-known local musician), whom he described as "a remarkably fine looking colored man" with a "striking resemblance to Jefferson" recognized by others, who had already heard a rumors of his paternity and were credulous of it.
The aforementioned journalist neighbor in Chillicothe described him thus: "Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent, he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody's attention to him.
According to a Hemings descendant, his brother James attempted to cross Union lines and "pass" as a white man to enlist in the Confederate army to rescue him.
[87] Some of Madison Hemings' children and grandchildren who remained in Ohio suffered from the limited opportunities for blacks at that time, working as laborers, servants, or small farmers.
Their first son, Frederick Madison Roberts (1879–1952) – Sally Hemings' and Jefferson's great-grandson – was the first person of known black ancestry elected to public office on the West Coast: he served for nearly 20 years in the California State Assembly from 1919 to 1934.
