He could easily pass for white. Years later, when he was free, he changed his last name. He called himself Eston Hemings Jefferson. He took his father’s surname, the surname he was never legally entitled to use, but which was his by blood. Sally Hemings, you had children with Thomas Jefferson. Four survived to adulthood.
Beverly, Harriet, Madison and Eston. All with light skin. All with Jefferson’s features. All slaves by birth. Because the law stated that children followed the condition of their mother. It didn’t matter who the father was. If the mother was a slave, the children were slaves. Even if the Father was the President of the United States, even if the Father had written that all men are created equal.
The law was clear and the law protected men like Jefferson, never women like Sally. After the 180 scandal, Thomas Jefferson served two full terms as president, 8 years. During those years he traveled constantly between Washington DC and Monticelo. He spent months in the capital. Then he would return to Virginia, and every time he came back, Sally was there. The scandal changed nothing.
Jefferson didn’t sell her, he didn’t send her away, he didn’t end the relationship, he simply carried on as if nothing had happened because he could, because nobody could force him to do anything different. In 1809, Jefferson finished his presidency. He was 66 years old. He was tired of politics. He returned to Montichelo to stay, to live out his last years on his plantation with his white family and with Sali.
She was 36 years old, and had spent half her life with Jefferson. She had had six children of her own. He had lost two. She had raised four and was still their slave. Life in Monticelo had a strange routine. Jefferson lived in the main house with his white daughters and grandchildren. Sally lived in a small room in the south building, connected to the house by a corridor.
His children lived nearby. Beverly worked as a carpenter. Harriet helped around the house. Madison and Eston were still children. They all worked, but not like the other slaves, not in the fields under the sun, not being whipped by overseers; they worked in the house, learned trades, and had privileges that the other 300 slaves of Monticelo did not have.
Visitors noticed the light-skinned children, asked who the slaves were, and received evasive answers. They are part of the Hemings family. They are good workers. They have white blood, but they never said whose. Everyone knew it, but no one said it out loud. It was the secret they all shared, the secret they protected.
Because Jefferson was power, Jefferson was respected, because speaking the truth out loud would mean destroying everything. A slave named Isaac Jefferson, who worked at Montichelo for years, gave an interview many years later. She talked about life on the plantation, and mentioned Sally Hemings. She said that she was the lady-in-waiting to Jefferson’s daughters, that she was much loved by the family, that she never worked in the fields, that she was always close to Mr. Jefferson.
But Isaac never said that Sali was Jefferson’s concubine. She never said that her children were Jefferson’s, although she clearly knew because everyone knew. Jefferson’s white daughters also knew, or at least suspected. They saw the Hemings children every day. They saw how much they resembled their father. They saw the privileges they had.
They saw Sally living in a room next to Jefferson, but they never spoke about it. Years later, after Jefferson had died, Jefferson’s granddaughters denied the whole story. They said it was impossible, that their grandfather would never do something like that, that the Hemings children were the children of Jefferson’s nephews.
