https://allthatsinteresting.com/sally-hemings

Sally Hemings, The Enslaved Woman Who Had A 38-Year Relationship With Thomas Jefferson


By Gina Dimuro | Edited By Kaleena Fraga
Published June 24, 2026
Rumors of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson's relationship spread even while they were alive — and DNA testing in 1998 suggested that Jefferson was indeed the father of Hemings' four children who survived into adulthood.

Sally Hemings is one of the most famous women in American history. Rumors, as well as modern DNA testing, have long suggested that she had a decades-long relationship with Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, one that produced four surviving children. However, as an enslaved woman living in the 18th-19th centuries, Sally left behind few records of her own.

We don’t know how Sally felt about her relationship with Jefferson. We don’t know how she felt about having his children. As an enslaved woman, Sally would have had virtually no power, no way to resist him.

But we do know that Sally Hemings used her position to win “extraordinary privileges” for herself and her children. Her negotiations with Jefferson, which began when Sally was just 14 years old, meant that her four children — Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston — spent their adult lives free.

This is the full story of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who had a 38-year relationship with Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.

The Murky Early Life Of A Young Enslaved Girl

Though the exact date of Sally Heming’s birth is unknown, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation reports that she was likely born around 1773. Her mother was Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved woman. Her father is believed to be John Wayles, a Virginia plantation owner.

Wayles also had a daughter named Martha Wayles Skelton, who would have been Sally’s half-sister. In 1772, about a year before Sally was born, Martha married a young Virginia lawyer named Thomas Jefferson.

Then, when Wayles died, Martha inherited Elizabeth and her family — which included Sally as well as her brother, James. As Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s son later wrote: “On the death of John Wayles, my grandmother, his concubine, and her children by him fell to Martha, Thomas Jefferson’s wife.” As such, Sally and the rest of the Hemings family “consequently became the property of Thomas Jefferson.”

Sally Hemings was just a toddler at the time. As she got older, she was tasked with being a nursemaid for Jefferson’s youngest daughter, Maria. However, little else is known about her childhood.

Indeed, there are not even any portraits of Sally Hemings, so we don’t know what she looked like. But according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, she was described as “light colored and decidedly good looking,” and “mighty near white…very handsome [with] long straight hair down her back.”

Then, when Sally Hemings was 14 years old, her life changed dramatically.

How Sally Hemings’ And Thomas Jefferson’s Relationship Began In Paris

The 1780s were a time of tragedy and change for the Jefferson family. In 1782, Martha Jefferson died at the age of 33. According to Encyclopedia Virginia, Sally Hemings may have been present during Martha’s final moments. She may have even heard Martha tell her husband that she “could not die happy” if she knew her children would have a stepmother. To this, Jefferson “solemnly” promised to never remarry, and he never did.

Then, in 1784, Jefferson left for Paris to serve as the Minister to France. Shortly after his arrival, he called for his young daughter, Maria, to join him. An older enslaved woman was meant to accompany Maria, but when she became unable to travel, Sally Hemings was chosen to go instead.

Sally and Maria arrived in London in June 1787, and stayed with Jefferson’s friends, John and Abigail Adams, before continuing on to Paris. Abigail wrote Jefferson to inform him of their arrival and to let him know that: “The old Nurse whom you expected to have attended [Maria], was sick and unable to come. She has a Girl about 15 or 16 with her.” In another letter, Abigail added: “[Sally] seems fond of [Maria] and appears good natur[e]d.”

Sally, who was actually 14 at the time, continued onto Paris with Maria. There, she was reunited with her brother James, who had accompanied Jefferson to France to study French cuisine.

According to Gilder Lehrman, Sally likely split her time in Paris between the Hôtel de Langeac, where Jefferson lived, and the Abbaye de Panthémont, where Maria and her sister Martha were at school. Suddenly, she was in a whole new world: a city with nearly as many people as the entire state of Virginia, the epicenter of European culture. And, legally, she was free.

That wasn’t all that changed. It was during Sally Hemings’ time in Paris that her relationship began with Thomas Jefferson. The exact circumstances of their relationship are unknown — and as an enslaved woman, Sally would have had virtually no power — but by the time Jefferson prepared to return to the United States in 1789, Sally was pregnant with his child.

“Their stay (my mother and Maria’s) was about eighteen months,” Madison wrote. “But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called home she was enceinte [pregnant] by him.”

Then, in a shocking act of defiance, Sally Hemings refused to return to Virginia with Jefferson. In France, she was free. But Jefferson wanted her to come back with him, and so he agreed to her conditions.

“To induce her to [return] he promised her extraordinary privileges,” Madison Hemings wrote, “and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promises, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia.”

Sally Hemings’ Life Back In Virginia

With her conditions met, Sally Hemings returned to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation. Over the next 38 years, her relationship with Jefferson quietly continued. They would have six children, four of whom survived into adulthood: Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston.

According to Madison, Sally was tasked with taking care “of [Jefferson’s] chamber and wardrobe [and to] look after us children and do such light work as sewing, etc.” Plantation overseer Edmund Bacon additionally said of Sally and her daughter: “I was instructed to take no control of them.”

Meanwhile, Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson’s relationship continued — even after Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1801. At the same time, rumors about Jefferson and Sally began to spread. They reached a fever pitch on Sept. 1, 1802, when James Callender, a journalist known for his smear campaigns, published an explosive expose in which he claimed that the president was having an affair with an enslaved woman.

“It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is Sally,” Callender wrote in the Recorder. He even claimed that the president had had “several children by her.”

Some believed Callender; others saw his allegations as baseless political slander. That said, visitors to Monticello often noticed the resemblance between Jefferson and some of the enslaved people living there.

According to Gilder Lehrman, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson, later told a biographer that there were enslaved “children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins…” Randolph continued that, “in one case that the resemblance was so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.”

However, Jefferson himself never responded to the allegations. Callender died the next year and his story faded — though it never entirely went away.

But despite the scrutiny, Thomas Jefferson was good to his word: He eventually granted Sally Hemings’ children their freedom. Madison and Eston (born in 1805 and 1808, respectively) were freed in Jefferson’s will after Jefferson’s death in 1826. Beverley and Harriet (the couple’s eldest pair of children born in 1798 and 1801, respectively) were permitted to leave Monticello in 1822 — after which they both passed themselves off as white.

No other enslaved people at Monticello were freed.

Sally Hemings’ Place In American History

The true nature of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings will never be known, but Callender’s 1802 article was the start of a deluge of gossip and rumors that have continued over two centuries. Since 1802, they’ve become an essential part of American history, the subject of frequent debate between historians. Did Jefferson have a decades-long relationship with Sally Hemings? Did she give birth to his children?

For a long time, many historians dismissed the rumors about Sally Hemings as little more than idle gossip. Jefferson’s family also claimed that they were false. However, Sally’s descendants long insisted they were true.

Then, in 1998, DNA testing of samples taken from both Jefferson and Hemings’ descendants did indeed indicate that there was a link between “an individual carrying the male Jefferson Y chromosome” and the Hemings family. Although the testing could not identify the specific individual, the study concluded that “the simplest and most probable” explanation was that Jefferson had fathered Hemings’ children after all.

Today, it is more or less accepted as fact that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship that lasted 38 years and produced four surviving children. This history is accepted even at Monticello.

But Sally Hemings remains an enigmatic figure in American history. She left no records of her own, so historians know little about her early life, her time in Paris, her relationship with Thomas Jefferson, or her thoughts and feelings about having his children. Even the location of her grave is unknown.

What is known is that Sally Hemings ended her life as a free woman. Though Jefferson never formally freed her himself, she was “given her time” — and thus emancipated — by his daughter Martha. In an 1830 census, Sally, Madison, and Eston are all listed as “free white people.”

She died in 1835, leaving behind far more questions than answers.