Thomas Jefferson and Haitian Emigration - Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings (c. 1773–1835) was a mixed-race slave who was of three-quarters European ancestry, the youngest of six children of the mulatto slave Betty Hemings and the widower John Wayles, Jefferson's father-in-law. They were half-siblings of Jefferson's wife Martha. Following her father's death in 1773 a year after her marriage, Martha Jefferson and her husband inherited Betty Hemings and her 10 children among more than 100 slaves of her father; they also inherited 11,000 acres of land. Sally was an infant; as she and other Hemings children grew up at Monticello, they were trained and assigned to domestic duties. Hemings was described as a "light colored and decidedly good looking" mulatto. By Virginia law since 1662, as children of slave mothers, the Hemings were all born into slavery, regardless of their father's race or status, by the principle of partus sequitur ventrum.

By chance, in 1787 Sally Hemings at the age of 14 was chosen to accompany Mary (Polly), the youngest daughter of Jefferson, to Paris to rejoin her father; the widower was serving as the U.S. Minister to France. According to her son Madison Hemings, she became Jefferson's concubine while they were in Paris and became pregnant in 1789. Based on Jefferson's promise to free her children, she returned with him that year to the United States. Her first child died young. She had a total of six additional children, who were noted for their resemblance to Jefferson. The historic question of whether Jefferson was the father of her children has been known as the Jefferson-Hemings controversy (see below and main article). A 1998 DNA study showed a match between an Eston Hemings descendant and the Jefferson male line.

Jefferson freed each of Sally Hemings' surviving children: Beverley, Harriet, Madison and Eston, as they came of age. Three of the four entered white society as adults; they were seven-eighths European in ancestry. Following Jefferson's death, his daughter Martha Randolph, a niece of Sally Hemings, gave the older woman "her time," an informal freedom. The former slave lived freely with her two younger sons in Charlottesville for her last nine years, in the house they owned.