Random Families That Descended From Thomas Jefferson And Sally Hemings - His Slave (12 items)

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  (#7) At The Monticello Association Luncheon, Some White Descendants Wanted To Kick Out The Black Descendants

  In 1999, less than a year after DNA evidence proved Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children, some of Jefferson's white descendants attempted to kick his Black descendants out of a luncheon. It was the 86th annual Monticello Association meeting, and the white members voted on whether to let the Black descendants stay while they debated the scientific evidence. Deborah Edwards, a descendant of Madison Hemings, told The Washington Post, "In days gone by, they wore Wamsutta sheets and pillowcases. Today they wear suits. Same scene. Different days."

  One of the white descendants, Theresa Shackelford, denied the claim. "We'd like more thorough research. We're not racists. We're snobs."
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  (#1) Hemings Wasn't Just Jefferson's Slave - She Was Allegedly His Wife's Half-Sister

  The Jefferson family tree has always been pretty complicated, even in the late 1700s. Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles in 1772. Sometime after Martha passed in 1782 after giving birth to seven children, Jefferson began a relationship with his teenage slave, Sally Hemings. In addition to being Jefferson's property, Hemings was also allegedly the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife.

  Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, supposedly had children with his Black slave, Betty Hemings. Betty later gave birth to Sally. In fact, Sally moved to Monticello (Jefferson's estate) after Martha inherited her father's property upon his death. Sally's job included watching after Jefferson's daughter Polly, who, if Wayles was Sally's father, was also Sally's niece.

  While historians are still unsure if John Wayles was Sally Hemings's father, DNA evidence has persuaded the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to conclude Jefferson and Hemings did, in fact, have children together.
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  (#9) In 2018 Sally Hemings Was Finally Recognized At Monticello

  Jefferson's home at Monticello has been a museum since 1923. But for nearly a century, Monticello largely ignored the role Sally Hemings played in Jefferson's life and family. In 1941, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation turned Sally Hemings's room into a bathroom. Starting in the 1990s, Monticello began to include information about Hemings, much to the disdain of those who claimed Jefferson never fathered children with her. 

  In June 2018 Monticello launched a new exhibit highlighting Sally's life and important role in American history. Niya Bates, Monticello Public Historian of Slavery and African American Life, told The Washington Post, "It will portray her outside of the mystery. She was a mother, a sister, an ancestor for her descendants, and [the room's presentation] will really just shape her as a person and give her a presence outside of the wonder of their relationship."
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  (#5) Sally Hemings's Son Eston Changed His Last Name To Jefferson

  Born in 1808, Eston Hemings was the youngest child of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. He lived as a slave for almost 20 years until Jefferson's will freed Eston in 1827. Around 1850, Eston adopted the last name Jefferson. He moved his family, which included three children, to Wisconsin.

  Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge complained around the same time about freed slaves taking their former master's last name: "One very notorious villain who never had been the property of Mr. Jefferson took his name and proclaimed himself his son. He was as black as a crow, and born either during Mr. Jefferson's absence abroad, or under some other circumstances which rendered the truth of his assertion simply impossible." She added that the father of Sally Hemings's children was not Jefferson, but Samuel Carr. However, a 1998 DNA test proved Ellen wrong. 
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  (#2) Jefferson's Granddaughter Said She Didn't Believe He Would 'Rear A Race Of Half-Breeds'

  Jefferson's white children, like Martha Jefferson Randolph, played important roles in Jefferson's presidency. But they cut his Black descendants out of the family tree. Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, Jefferson's granddaughter, argued he wouldn't have "[carried] on his low amours in the circle of his family" or "[reared] a race of half-breeds."

  Coolidge deemed Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings a "moral impossibility," arguing that Jefferson was too good of a man and a father to have a relationship with a slave, much less one so close to the family:

  I would put it to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable in his domestic character as Mr. Jefferson, so devoted to his daughters and their children, so fond of their society, so tender, considerate, refined in his intercourse with them, so watchful over them in all respects, would be likely to rear a race of half-breeds under their eyes and carry on his low amours in the circle of his family.
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  (#11) A 1998 DNA Test Proved That Jefferson Was The Father Of Hemings's Son Eston

  For decades, Black and white descendants of Thomas Jefferson disagreed about the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. Some white descendants pointed to Jefferson's uncle Field Jefferson or John Carr, a cousin, as the true father. But in 1997 historian Annette Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, and the next year, a DNA test provided scientific proof.

  The 1998 DNA test showed definitively that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings's youngest child. The analysis also ruled out other rumored fathers.

  Even after the DNA evidence, some denied the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society claimed in a 2001 report that Jefferson was almost certainly not the father, proposing that the Founding Father's brother Randolph was the birth father. Today skeptics are in the minority. In 2009 Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

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