Sally Hemings’s father was John Wayles, and her mother was an enslaved woman named Betty Hemings. John had been married thrice previously. After all three of his wives died, the last of which survived barely a year after their marriage. Wayles appeared to have soured on marriage and took up with his 26-year-old enslaved woman, Betty Hemings. They had six children together, including Sally, who was the youngest. John Wayles was twenty years older than Betty.
Thomas Jefferson became part of John Wayles’s family when he married one of Wayles’s white daughters, Martha Wayles, in 1772. Part of the dowry Jefferson received for the marriage and then from the estate of John Wayles, who died a year after the wedding, was 135 enslaved people, including Betty Hemings and herten0 mixed-race children. Six of those children are known to have been fathered by John Wayles after his third wife’s death. The other four were born before that, obviously fathered by a white man; whether they were from Wayles or not, I cannot say.
Sally Hemings was born in 1773, almost everybody says so; www.monticello.org says she was born in 1773, but “The exact date and month is unknown.” Other sources most definitively state that Sally was born in 1773, but nobody knows when. She wasn’t born at Monticello but arrived as part of John Wayle’s estate in 1774. It is unclear whether she was born at the time of Wayles’s death. Based on his death, she could have been born as late as early 1774.
Inconsistent with the accurate recording of births and deaths of enslaved people by both Thomas Jefferson and John Wayles, no such record exists of Sally’s birth. If there were such a record, it wouldn’t be the first time a historian covered up a historical fact to cast Thomas Jefferson in a better light. Edwin Betts set aside documentation that Jefferson had teen enslaved boys beaten at the nailery he operated at Monticello because it would have tarnished Jefferson’s image.
We do know that Jefferson sent for Sally Hemings to accompany his 8-year-old daughter to Paris, purportedly to be her governess and responsible for Polly’s care. To be fair to Jefferson, he did not specifically request young Sally; he even suggested an older enslaved woman that was too ill to take the job. Two adults observed Sally and thought her too immature to be up to the task. The first was Captain Ramsey, who accompanied the girls on their transatlantic voyage. His account was relayed to Jefferson by then First Lady Abigail Adams.
Abigail Adams provided her report on Sally, which differed little from Captain Ramsey:
I encourage readers who viewed the Jefferson/Hemings relationship as a romance or saw her as a temptress to consider that she was just a child when Jefferson began raping her. There’s simply no other word that will do except pedophile. Abigail Adams recognized Sally as a child, so should have a man thirty years her elder.
If Sally Hemings was born in the second half of 1773, or early 1774, she would have been thirteen when brought to France, something no one is prepared to acknowledge. When Madison Hemings wrote about Sally’s time in Paris, he said”
“Four years after her arrival in Paris the then seventeen-year-old Sally Hemings would negotiate a treaty with Jefferson”
That would have made her thirteen when she arrived. You could say it’s nitpicking to fight for a year’s difference in age, but you must wonder why every source insists she was fourteen (which is nothing to brag about) instead of even younger. Sally arrived in London on June 26, 1787, where she and Polly were entrusted to the care of Abigail Adams. On July 15, 1787, she arrived in Paris, where she fell under Jefferson’s overly watchful eye. Based on the range of possible birthdates, there’s over a fifty percent chance she was thirteen, not fourteen when she arrived. The one thing I’m sure of is that we couldn’t count on historians to tell us any differently.
In film and television, Sally’s time in Paris has been portrayed multiple times, always by actresses in their mid-twenties. Let a 13 or 14-year-old girl portray her; that would be more accurate than perpetuating the lie of a consensual relationship. For no particular reason, I’ll note that Sally had two enslaved sisters who also had children by white men while at Monticello. Neither had the right by law to deny their rapists. The culture of the rape of Black women ran deep at Monticello, just like the rest of America. Food for thought.
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This post was previously published on Black History Month 365.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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