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Sarah "Sally" Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835) was a female slave with one-quarter African ancestry owned by president of the United States Thomas Jefferson, one of many he inherited from his father-in-law, John Wayles. Hemings's mother was Betty Hemings, the daughter of a female slave and an English captain, John Hemings. Sally's father, the owner of Betty, John Wayles, was also the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha. Sally was half-sister to Jefferson's wife and was of approximately three quarters English descent. Martha died during her marriage in 1782. In 1787, when she was 14, Sally Hemings accompanied Jefferson's daughter, also named Martha, to Paris where they joined Thomas Jefferson. There Sally was a legally free and paid servant as slavery was not legal in France. At some time during her 26 months in Paris, the widower Jefferson began intimate relations with her. 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. Multiple lines of evidence, including modern DNA analyses, indicate that Jefferson impregnated Hemings several times over years while they lived together on Jefferson's Monticello estate, and historians now broadly agree that he was the father of her six children. Whether this should be described as rape remains a matter of controversy. Four of Hemings's children survived into adulthood and were freed as they came of age during Thomas Jefferson's life or in his will. Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835 in the home of her freed sons. The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children is the subject of the Jefferson–Hemings controversy. Following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation empaneled a commission of scholars and scientists who worked with a 1998–1999 genealogical DNA test that was published in 2000 that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings' youngest son, Eston Hemings. The Foundation's panel concluded that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely her other five children as well. A rival society was then founded, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which commissioned another panel of scholars in 2001 that found that it has not been proven that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children. In 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of Monticello announced its plans to have an exhibit titled Life of Sally Hemings, and affirmed that it was treating as a settled issue that Jefferson was the father of her known children. The exhibit opened in June 2018. Early life Sally Hemings was born about 1773 to Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings (1735–1807), a woman also born into slavery. Sally's father was their slave owner John Wayles (1715–1773). Betty's parents were another female slave, a "full-blooded African", and a white English sea captain, whose surname was Hemings. Annette Gordon-Reed speculates that Betty's mother's name was Parthena (or Parthenia), based on the wills of Francis Eppes IV and John Wayles. Captain Hemings tried to purchase them from Eppes, but the planter refused. Upon Eppes' passing, Parthena and Betty were inherited by his daughter, Martha Eppes, who took them with her as personal slaves upon her marriage to Wayles. John Wayles was the son of Edward and Ellen (née Ashburner) Wayles, both from Lancaster, England. Following Martha's death, Wayles remarried and was widowed twice more. Several sources assert that, Wayles took Betty Hemings as his concubine, and had six children by her during the last 12 years of his life, the youngest of these being Sally Hemings. These children were younger half-siblings to his daughters by his wives. His first child, Martha Wayles (named after her mother, John Wayles' first wife), married the young planter and future president Thomas Jefferson. The children of Betty Hemings and John Wayles were three-quarters European in ancestry and fair-skinned. According to the 1662 Virginia Slave Law, children born to slave mothers were considered slaves under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem: the enslaved status of a child followed that of the mother. Betty and her children, including Sally Hemings and all Sally's children, were legally slaves, even though the fathers were their white slave owners and the children were of majority-white ancestry. After John Wayles died in 1773, his daughter Martha and her husband, Thomas Jefferson, inherited the Hemings family among a total of 135 slaves from Wayles' estate, along with 11,000 acres (4,500 ha) of land. The youngest of the six Wayles-Hemings children was Sally, an infant that year and about 25 years younger than Martha. She, her siblings, their mother, and various other slaves were brought to Monticello, Jefferson's home. As the mixed-race Wayles-Hemings children grew up at Monticello, they were trained and given assignments as skilled artisans and domestic servants, at the top of the enslaved hierarchy. Betty Hemings' other children and their descendants, also mixed race, were bestowed privileged assignments, as well. None worked in the fields. Appearance The former slave Isaac (Granger) Jefferson described Hemings's physical appearance as "Sally was mighty near white..Sally was very handsome, long straight hair down her back ”. While Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph recalled her as "Light colored and decidedly good looking.” Hemings in Paris In 1784, Thomas Jefferson was appointed the American envoy to France; he took his eldest daughter Martha (Patsy) with him to Paris, as well as several of his slaves. Among them was Sally's elder brother James Hemings, who became a chef trained in French cuisine. Jefferson left his two younger daughters in the care of their aunt and uncle, Francis and Elizabeth Wayles Eppes of Eppington in Chesterfield County, VA. After his youngest daughter, Lucy Elizabeth, died in 1784, Jefferson sent for his surviving daughter, nine-year-old Mary (Polly), to live with him. The child slave, Sally Hemings, was chosen to accompany Polly to France after an older female slave became pregnant and could not make the journey. Correspondence between Jefferson and Abigail Adams indicates that Jefferson originally arranged for Polly to "be in the care of her nurse, a black woman, to whom she is confided with safety"; Adams wrote back: "The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended her, was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her." In 1787, Sally, aged 14, accompanied Polly to London and then to Paris, where the widowed Jefferson, aged 44 at the time, was serving as the United States Minister to France. Hemings spent two years there. Most historians believe Jefferson and Hemings' sexual relationship began while they were in France or soon after their return to Monticello. The exact nature of their relationship remain.... Discover the Sally J Samuel popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Sally J Samuel books.