Sally Hemings - Biography

Biography

Sally Hemings was born to Elizabeth Hemings (1735-1807), the daughter of Susannah, an enslaved African, and John Hemings, an English sea captain. Susanna and Elizabeth Hemings (also known as Betty Hemings) were first held by Francis Eppes IV. John Hemings tried to buy them from Eppes, but he refused to give them up. The mother and daughter were inherited by Francis' daughter, Martha Eppes, who took them with her as personal servants to her marriage to John Wayles as his first wife.

After Martha's death, the planter Wayles married and was widowed two more times. Several sources assert that the widower John Wayles took his slave Betty Hemings as a concubine and had six children by her during the last 12 years of his life; the youngest was Sally Hemings. They were half-siblings to his daughters; the first, Martha Wayles (named after her mother, John Wayles' first wife), married the young planter Thomas Jefferson.

The biracial children of Betty Hemings were three-quarters European in ancestry and very fair. (They had a white maternal grandparent and two white paternal grandparents.) Since 1662 in Virginia, children born to enslaved mothers took their legal status as slaves under the principle of partus sequitur ventrem. According to the law, Elizabeth and her children, including Sally Hemings, and all their children, were legally slaves, even when the fathers were the white masters.

After Wayles died in 1773, his daughter Martha and Jefferson inherited the Hemings family as among 135 slaves from his estate, as well as 11,000 acres of land. The youngest Wayles-Hemings child was Sally, an infant that year and about 25 years younger than Martha. Scholars have noted that 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 slave hierarchy. Betty Hemings' other children and their descendants, also mixed race, also had privileged assignments. None worked in the fields.