Sally Hemings: The Mother of Jefferson’s Children and the Price She Paid

Paris, the autumn of 1789. A girl of sixteen refuses to board a ship. Under the law of France, she is free where she stands. Under the law of Virginia, where the ship is going, she is property, and she is already carrying a child. Her name is Sally Hemings. She is the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s late wife. She is the mother of his children, and she belongs to him. She does not run. She names her terms. Free my children. All of them. Even the ones not born yet. He agrees, and she gets on the ship. Every one of those children walked out of Monticello free. She never did. There is a room at Monticello, the house Thomas Jefferson built on a mountaintop in Virginia, that visitors walked past for seventy-six years without knowing what it was. It is small, fourteen feet and eight inches wide, thirteen feet deep. It has no windows. It was built in 1809 below ground level in the south wing of the house, a short walk from Jefferson’s own bedroom. In 1941, the people entrusted with preserving that house laid tile over its brick floor, set partitions against its plaster walls, and made it a men’s restroom. It stayed that way for the rest of the century, through Truman, through Eisenhower, through Kennedy, through the moon landing and Watergate, and the bicentennial summer of 1976. In 2017, archaeologists took the tile up again. The woman who had lived in that room left no letters we know of and no diary. There is no portrait of her, not one in any collection anywhere in the world. Four descriptions of her survive. Every one of them was written by somebody else. She died in Charlottesville in 1835, and no one alive can tell you where she is buried. Her name was Sally Hemings. Nearly everything we know about her comes from a single afternoon in 1873 when her son sat down with a reporter from a small newspaper in Ohio. He was sixty-eight years old. He had outlived almost everyone. He told the reporter what his mother had told him and what her mother had told her before that. When he reached the oldest part, the part that happened three generations before he was born, he added a quiet line that could stand over this entire story. Such is the story that comes down to me. What comes down to us is this. In the autumn of 1789 in Paris, a girl of sixteen refused to board a ship. She belonged to Thomas Jefferson, the man who had written thirteen years before that all men are created equal.

Under the law of France, she was free where she stood. Under the law of Virginia, she would not be, and she was already carrying a child who, if she chose wrong, would be born the property of its own father. She did not run. She negotiated. Tonight we tell the story of the bargain she made in that city, what she asked for, what it cost her, and what the record says she was worth in the end. It begins four generations earlier in a Virginia port town with a sailor who tried to buy his own daughter. Sometime in the 1730s in the port of Williamsburg, Virginia, an English sea captain named Hemings learned that a woman he knew had given birth to his daughter. The woman was enslaved. She had been born in Africa and carried across the ocean in the hold of a ship, and she belonged to a planter named John Wales, which meant the child belonged to him too, from the first hour before she had a name. The captain went to Wales and offered to buy her, not to hire her, to buy his own daughter and take her away and make her free. Wales said no. According to the account that came down through the family, the captain offered an extraordinary price and was refused again. So he made a different plan. He would take the child by force if he had to, by stealth if he could. But word travels through a household. Somebody carried it to the great house, and Wales brought the mother and the baby inside under his own eye, where a sailor could not reach them. The captain sailed out of Williamsburg. He never came back. The daughter he could not buy was named Elizabeth Hemings. Her family called her Betty. She would spend her entire life as the property of the man who had refused to sell her and then of his heirs, and she would live long enough to hold six of her grandchildren. We should stay with her a moment because of how her story ends. Betty Hemings died at Monticello, an old woman in bed. Among the people in the room was a small boy, three years old, who was her grandson. He was eating a piece of bread. He looked at his grandmother and because he was three and did not understand what was happening, he asked her if she would like some. She said no. She said granny didn’t want bread anymore. She died shortly afterward. That boy would live another seventy years and it was the first thing he could remember about anything. Betty Hemings had fourteen children in all. Six of them were fathered by John Wales after his wife died. The arrangement lasted years, and her grandson, writing in 1873, used the word concubine for it because it was the only word the century had given him. The youngest of those six children was born in 1773. Her name was probably Sarah.

Everyone called her Sally. John Wales died that same year. He never saw the child grow. And in the division of his estate, everything he had owned was parceled out among his heirs. The land, the debts, and the people. The largest share went to his eldest daughter by his first marriage. Her name was Martha. Martha Wales was married to a lawyer from Albemarle County who had just turned thirty. Under Virginia law, whatever came to a wife came to her husband. So, in 1774, a one-year-old girl became the property of Thomas Jefferson. Consider what that meant inside one household. Sally Hemings and Martha Jefferson had the same father. They were sisters, half-sisters, born eight months apart in status and twenty-five years apart in age. One of them was the Lady of the House at Monticello. The other was carried up the mountain as a toddler and entered in the records as property. Nobody in that house pretended not to know. It simply had no bearing on anything. The Hemings family was not sent to the fields. They were brought into the house and given the work that required trust. Sally’s half-brother Martin became the butler. Her brother Robert traveled with Jefferson to Philadelphia in 1775 when the Continental Congress met. Her mother, by most accounts, ran the household itself, and Sally, from about the age of six, was set to watch Jefferson’s youngest daughters. That was the work. Mind the children, fetch what was needed, stay close, stay quiet. There is almost nothing else. No school, no letters, no record of a single thing she said. In the summer of 1781, when British dragoons came up the mountain, and Martin Hemings hid the family silver rather than tell them where Jefferson had gone, Sally was eight years old and somewhere in that house. We know she was there. We do not know where she stood. Only four descriptions of her survive from anyone who saw her.

The fullest was given decades later by a blacksmith named Isaac Granger, who had been enslaved at Monticello himself, and who remembered her as mighty near white, very handsome, with long, straight hair down her back. That is the most detailed portrait of Sally Hemings that exists. Fifteen words from a man who worked in the shop. Then, in 1782, the woman at the center of the house began to die. Martha Jefferson had endured at least eight pregnancies in ten years and had buried most of the children. Her last delivery came in May. She never recovered from it. She lay ill through the summer and on the sixth of September she died. She was thirty-three. Her husband did not take it well. He shut himself away for weeks, and when he came out, he rode the mountain roads alone until he could bear the house again. Two years later, he accepted a post in Paris and left the country, taking his eldest daughter with him, and one enslaved man, Sally’s older brother James, whom he intended to have trained as a French cook. Sally stayed behind. She was eleven. For the next three years, she was sent where the younger Jefferson girls were sent, to relatives’ plantations, doing what she had always done, minding the children. And then in 1787, a letter came from France asking that eight-year-old Polly be put on a ship and sent to her father. An older woman was supposed to travel with her. She had just given birth and could not go. So they sent the girl who had been minding Polly since Polly could walk. She was fourteen. She had never been off a plantation, and now she was crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the company of a child. They were five weeks at sea. When they landed in London, they were met by Abigail Adams, the wife of the American minister there, who took one look at the arrangement and wrote to Paris in something close to alarm. The girl sent to look after Polly, she reported, was quite a child herself. But she added something else almost in passing that the girl seemed fond of the child and appeared good-natured. It is one of the four descriptions, and it is the only one that says anything at all about who Sally Hemings was rather than what she looked like.

Two weeks later, a carriage carried her out of London toward Paris, toward a city where slavery did not exist, and where a girl of fourteen was about to discover that the law could work a different way. She arrived in Paris in the middle of July 1787. The first thing that happened to her was a needle. Smallpox was in the city and Jefferson had her inoculated by one of the famous doctors, Sutton, which in that era meant being deliberately infected, then shut away somewhere outside the city until the danger passed. She would have spent weeks alone in a room, sick, in a country whose language she did not speak at fourteen. When she came back, they began to train her. She was taught needlework and the care of fine clothing, how to launder linen that cost more than a field hand was valued at, how to keep silk from ruin. She was taught to dress hair the way Paris wore it that season. She was being made into a ladies’ maid because Jefferson’s daughters were boarding at a convent school and moving in society, and society required an attendant. She was also taught French, not formally so far as anyone recorded, but she was in that house and in that city for more than two years, and her son said afterward that by the end of it she was just beginning to understand the language well, and she was paid. This is the part that matters. In France, there was no slavery, not as a sentiment, as a fact of law which the courts enforced and which any enslaved person brought into the country could invoke. So Jefferson put her on the household books, and from time to time entered a wage beside her name, twelve livres a month, roughly two dollars. Her brother James, in the same house, was being paid more than twice that, and paid regularly. The Frenchman who washed the dishes was paid more than she was. Still, she was fourteen years old and for the first time in the history of her family, going back to a woman taken from Africa and a captain who could not buy his daughter, money was being handed to a Hemings for her work. For five weeks in the spring of 1789, Jefferson sent her to board with the family’s landlady, a woman named Duprey. Nobody has ever explained why. She was there over a month in a French woman’s household in a city that did not recognize the claim anyone had on her.

Five weeks in sixty-two years, it is the only stretch we can point to when Sally Hemings lived somewhere that the Jefferson family did not control. That same spring, Jefferson’s daughter Patsy turned seventeen and began going out in Paris society, and Sally went with her into rooms with chandeliers on evenings that ran late, standing along the wall where a maid stands. The expense books registered the change without commenting on it. Jefferson started buying more clothing for his daughter, and at the same time, more clothing for Sally. Outside those rooms, the city was coming apart. Bread had failed. In July, the crowds took the Bastille, and the American minister, who had helped write one revolution, watched a second one begin from his windows. And inside the Hôtel de Langeac, something else had happened. By the time Jefferson was recalled to America in the autumn of 1789, Sally Hemings was pregnant. She was sixteen. He was forty-six and he owned her. We should be plain about the shape of that once and then go on. There is a debate about it that has run for two hundred years and the historian who has spent her career on this family, Annette Gordon-Reed, has set out the terms of it as clearly as anyone. Whatever else was or was not true between them, she has pointed out he could have sold her if he chose. She could not refuse him. That is not a footnote to this story. It is the ground the whole story stands on. Now the ship. Jefferson made arrangements to sail in the autumn and Sally Hemings told him she was not going. Understand what she was saying. In Paris she was free and if she went back to Virginia she would be a slave again. Her son wrote it in exactly those terms eighty-four years later in a newspaper in Ohio. She could stay sixteen years old, pregnant, illiterate, in a foreign city on the edge of a revolution with no money and no family but a brother who was making the same calculation in the same house. She could stay and be free and be entirely alone, or she could get on the ship and be property again. So she refused. And then she did something that almost nobody in her position in the entire history of American slavery is recorded as having done. She named her terms. He offered privileges, extraordinary ones, her son called them. That was not enough.

What she required was something else, and it had nothing to do with her at all. She required a promise that her children would be freed, every one of them at twenty-one. Not the child she was carrying alone, the ones after it, children who did not exist yet, who had not been conceived, whose names nobody knew. She was sixteen years old, and she was negotiating for people who had not been born. He agreed. Her son called it a solemn pledge. There was no document. There could not be. A contract between a man and the woman he owned is not a contract. It is a note in a private ledger, enforceable by nothing but the character of one party to it. She had known that man since she was a toddler in his house. She had watched him for sixteen years, and she made the only assessment available to her, and decided he would keep his word. Her son chose a careful phrase for that decision. She relied upon the promises, he wrote, implicitly. Somewhere in those weeks, Jefferson was booking births on a ship called the Clermont, and he sent instructions about where his people should be quartered. There is a line in the record. He asked that Sally’s berth be convenient to that of his daughters. That is all. That is the entire documentary trace she leaves on the voyage that decided her life. One clause in someone else’s letter about the placement of a bed. They sailed in October, and there was one more thing about the arrangement she had just made, which she could not have missed, and which no one has ever written down for her. Every one of those promises came due on a date. The first of them was twenty-one years away. She would have to survive that long, and so would he. The child born soon after they reached Virginia lived only a short time. That is the whole record. No name, no date, no place of burial. Nothing to say whether it was a boy or a girl. Her son mentions it in one line and moves on because that was all his mother had told him or all he was willing to put in a newspaper. The first payment on the bargain of 1789 came due immediately and there was nothing to collect. She was seventeen.

Around her the country was assembling itself. Jefferson went to New York as the first secretary of state, then to Philadelphia, then home to Virginia in a temper, then back out as vice president. He was away for months at a stretch, for years at a stretch. Montichello ran without him. And in 1795, she had a daughter in October. The girl lived to two years old and then died. Six children in all between 1795 and 1808. Four of them lived. Beverly, then Harriet, then Madison, then Eston. Here is the fact that historians eventually did the arithmetic on and it is worth stating flatly without adornment. Every one of those six children was conceived while Jefferson was at Montichello. Several of them were conceived within about three weeks of his arriving home from Philadelphia or Washington. He was absent from that house for years of the relevant period. And in all those months she did not conceive once. A statistical study of it was published in the William and Mary Quarterly in January of 2000. That is all the study did. It counted. Her work, meanwhile, was what it had always been. Her son described it later, and his description is the closest thing we have to a job title. It was her duty, for as long as he could remember, to take care of Jefferson’s chamber and his wardrobe, to look after the children, and to do light work such as sewing. The chamber, the wardrobe, the children, sewing. In 1809, when Jefferson came home from the presidency for good and began the last long rebuilding of his house, a room was finished in the south wing, fourteen feet and eight inches by thirteen. Brick floor, plastered walls, no window below the level of the ground. His own bedroom was a short walk away along the passage. That is where she lived. We know it because Jefferson’s own grandson said so decades afterward to a biographer. Consider the house from her position in it. Upstairs, Jefferson’s daughter Patsy, now a married woman with an enormous family, ran the household when her father was away. Sally Hemings took her orders, and Martha Randolph was her niece, her half-sister’s daughter. The whole arrangement was a matter of blood that nobody in that house could name out loud, and nobody could possibly have forgotten. Sally’s own children were there too, growing up in it. They were kept near the great house and given light errands until they were fourteen, and then set to trades. The boys to carpentry, Harriet to spinning and weaving in the little textile factory on the plantation. And they were allowed to be with their mother.

Her son said so specifically as though he knew it was not ordinary, which it was not. They also knew who their father was. Everyone did. He never said it. In 1805, in the middle of all this, Sally Hemings gave birth to a son while the wife of James Madison happened to be visiting Montichello. Dolly Madison asked for the privilege of naming the baby. She promised his mother a fine present in exchange for the honor. Sally agreed. The boy was named Madison. The present never came. Her son wrote it down sixty-eight years later in a single dry clause, and you can still hear the shrug in it. She never gave his mother anything. A promise made to Sally Hemings in the same house in the same years by one of the most admired women in America and simply not kept because there was nothing in the world that could make her keep it. Everything depended on the character of the man who had made the other one. Three years before Madison was born, that man had become the most famous cuckold of his own reputation in America. In September of 1802, a journalist named James Callender, a man Jefferson had once quietly funded to attack John Adams and had then abandoned when the funding became inconvenient, published the story in a Richmond newspaper. He wrote that the man the people delighted to honor kept as his concubine one of his own slaves. He said her name was Sally. The word was Callender’s. He chose it as a weapon and he aimed it at a president. The newspapers of the republic picked it up and ran it for two years. They printed jokes. They printed verses. They invented a nickname for her which was not her name and which will not be repeated here. Jefferson never answered the charge directly.

He was reelected in 1804 in a landslide and the thing burned out as these things do. Nobody asked her anything. There is no evidence she ever saw a single one of the articles and no one recorded her saying one word about the year the entire country discussed her. She may not have been able to read them. We did not know that either. She was thirty. She had roughly two decades of that house still ahead of her and the arithmetic she had done in Paris was still running. Her oldest surviving son, Beverly, had been born in 1798, which meant that the first promise was going to come due in 1819. And then three years after that, the second. Down the mountain, three miles away in the town of Charlottesville, there was a house that belonged to Sally Hemings’s oldest sister. Mary Hemings had been the first of Betty’s children, born twenty years before Sally. While Jefferson was in Paris, she had been hired out to a Charlottesville merchant named Thomas Bell, and she stayed in his household, and they had two children, and they lived as husband and wife for the rest of his life, though the law of Virginia forbade them to marry. In 1792, Bell bought her and those two children from Jefferson and made them free. Mary Hemings Bell owned property on Main Street. Her descendants held that ground for a hundred years. Two daughters of the same mother. One of them was free at thirty-nine and a property owner in town. The other was in a windowless room on the mountain and would be for another thirty-four years. The record does not say whether they saw each other. Charlottesville was three miles away, and the Hemingses moved between the mountain and the town constantly, and Mary Bell used her freedom to send clothes and possessions to the family members she had left behind in slavery. It would be strange if they never met. There is no letter because neither of them could write one that survives, and nobody thought to ask. Meanwhile, the dates were coming. Beverly Hemings turned twenty-one in 1819. Harriet turned twenty-one in the spring of 1822. And in 1822, both of them left Monticello. Jefferson entered them in his farm book as runaways. They were not runaways. That is the point of the entry. When people actually ran from Montichello, Jefferson pursued them. He wrote letters. He posted notices.

He spent real money to get them back because they were assets and he was in debt. For these two, he did nothing. No advertisement was ever placed. No one went after them. The word in the ledger was a bookkeeping fiction, and it was the cheapest way in Virginia to let someone go. Not a manumission deed, not a petition, not a public act that anyone could point to during an election year, just a word in a private book. The overseer at Montichello, a man named Edmund Bacon, described the departure years later. He said he paid Harriet’s stage fare to Philadelphia and gave her fifty dollars on instructions. Fifty dollars and a seat on a coach going north. She was twenty-one years old and she was nearly white in appearance. And both of those facts had been arranged for her by other people long before she was born. What she did with them was walk into white America and shut the door. Her brother wrote about it half a century later with a precision that is hard to read quickly. Harriet married a white man of good standing in Washington City. He could give the name. He says so plainly in the newspaper, but he will not. And he explains why in three words. For prudential reasons. She raised a family. As far as he knew, no one in that community ever suspected there was African blood in the line. He had not heard from her in ten years. He did not know whether she was living or dead. That is what the bargain cost on delivery. Harriet Hemings got everything her mother had negotiated for in Paris. And the price of keeping it was that she could never be her mother’s daughter again in public out loud to anyone for the rest of her life. Her own brother had to withhold her married name from a newspaper to protect her. Beverly did the same. Washington, a white wife from a family in good circumstances, one daughter who never knew. So, in the space of a few months in 1822, Sally Hemings watched two of her four children walk down the mountain into freedom and understood that she would probably not see either of them again, and that if she ever did, she would have to pretend she did not know them. She was forty-nine years old. She had two sons left at home, Madison and Eston, aged seventeen and fourteen. Their dates were still years out, 1826 and 1829, which brought the whole arrangement to a question that had been sitting underneath it since Paris, and that everyone in that house could do the arithmetic on. Jefferson was seventy-nine. He was also, by this point, ruined.

The debts he had inherited from John Wales fifty years earlier had never been paid off. He had added to them steadily for decades with building and books and wine and the endowment of a university and he had co-signed a note for a friend that collapsed on him. By the mid-1820s he owed something over one hundred thousand dollars, which was a fortune, and everything he owned was collateral, the house, the land, the people. He knew what would happen when he died. He said so. Sally Hemings could not read a ledger, but she did not need one. She had lived in that house for fifty years. She had watched the mountain sell people before. Jefferson had sold off dozens in the 1780s and 1790s to service the same debt, and she knew perfectly well what a Virginia estate did when its owner died owing money. The promise from Paris covered her children. It had never said one word about her. On the third of July, 1826, Thomas Jefferson lay dying in his bedroom, a short walk down the passage from her room, and asked what the date was. He held on through the night. He died the following afternoon, the fourth of July, fifty years to the day after the Continental Congress adopted the document he had written. The country went into mourning for a founder. And in the south wing, a fifty-three-year-old woman waited to find out what he had put in the will. The will freed five people.

Out of roughly two hundred human beings held at Montichello, five. And every one of the five was a Hemings. Three of them were older men who had served him for decades, her brother John the joiner who had built the woodwork of that house, her nephews Joseph Fawcett and Burwell Colbert, the blacksmith and the butler. The other two were Madison and Eston, her sons, almost certainly his. He went further for those two than the law allowed. Virginia required a freed person to leave the state within a year or risk being enslaved again, and everything the Hemingses had, their mother, their aunts, their cousins, the only ground they knew, was in Virginia. The record indicates he asked the legislature to let them stay. If that is right, it was a deliberate act, and it should be said plainly, because a man is not made simple by dying. Madison was twenty-one and a half. Eston was eighteen, and was given the remainder of his time shortly afterward. The bargain struck in Paris in 1789 had now been executed in full. Four children, four times free. No other enslaved family at Montichello, not one in fifty years, came out of that place whole. Her name was not in the document, not as a beneficiary, not as a legatee, not in a clause, not in a line. The woman who had lived in that house for fifty-two years, whose four children he had just freed, who had kept his chamber and his wardrobe, is absent from the will of Thomas Jefferson. Then the estate was settled. In January of 1827, the advertisements ran in the Virginia papers. The sale was held over five days at the top of the mountain. Nearly a hundred people were auctioned to pay a debt of more than one hundred thousand dollars, families that had been at Montichello for three generations sold in lots to whoever came up the road. Joseph Fawcett stood there a free man by the will and watched his own wife and children put up and had to arrange over years to buy them back one by one. Some of them he never recovered. Betty Hemings’s descendants were scattered across Virginia in five days. And before a sale there is an inventory. Someone walks the property with a book and writes down what is there and what it is worth so the executives know what they have. Land, furniture, livestock, tools, people. Sally Hemings appears in that inventory. She is listed among the property of the estate, and beside her name, according to the record, is a figure, fifty dollars, the same number that had been counted into her daughter’s hand five years before, to buy her a seat on a coach out of Virginia and a life nobody could take from her. Fifty dollars bought Harriet Hemings her freedom. Fifty dollars is what the appraisers wrote down for her mother.

She was fifty-three years old and she had been in that house since she was one. And by the arithmetic of the state of Virginia in the winter of 1827, those two things came to the same amount. She was not sold. Jefferson’s daughter Martha Randolph, her half-sister’s child, her niece, the woman she had taken orders from for thirty years, appears to have quietly given her what was called her time. It was not manumission. It was not a document filed at the courthouse. It was an understanding. Nobody would come after her. Nobody would claim her. Nobody would put her in a lot. She could go. Sally Hemings walked down the mountain in 1827 and never went back. She had won everything she had asked for in Paris, every single term, and she had asked for nothing for herself, which meant that the one thing she never received from anyone in sixty-two years was a piece of paper with her own name on it saying she belonged to herself. There is one more thing in the record from those years, and it is the hardest one. Her son Madison was a grown man by then, and he had known Thomas Jefferson for twenty-one years, had lived in his house, run his errands, learned a trade on his instruction, watched him every day of the last decade of his life. When Madison sat down in Ohio in 1873 to say what his father had been like, he was fair about him. He said he was the quietest of men at home, hardly ever angry, uniformly kind to everyone around him. And then he wrote this. He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children. We were the only children of his by a slave woman. He was affectionate toward his white grandchildren. Fourteen grandchildren. Twelve of them lived to be adults.

He was affectionate toward them and Madison had watched it happen in the same rooms for twenty-one years. That is the accounting. In one column, a promise kept exactly to the letter at real cost over thirty-seven years. In the other, a man who could not bring himself to touch his own son’s head. Both of those are true. They were true at the same time in the same house about the same person. That is the thing this story will not let anyone put down. She had four free children and she had a valuation. Her sons took a house in Charlottesville and they took their mother to live with them. That is how Madison put it. He and Eston rented a house and mother lived with them until her death, nine years. She was in her fifties and then her sixties in a town three miles from the mountain on the same street where her older sister’s family had lived free for a generation. She had two sons in the house. She had no owner, no papers, and no way of knowing where her other two children were. The census taker came in 1830 and wrote the three of them down as free white persons. Three years later, after the Nat Turner rising, Virginia counted its free black population more carefully, and this time she answered for herself. She said she was a free woman of color and that she had lived in Charlottesville since 1831.