Meet The Family That Descended From Thomas Jefferson And Sally Hemings - His Slave

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.

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.

Thomas Jefferson's grandchildren and great-grandchildren fought in the American Civil War, but not on the same side. Several of his white descendants fought for the Confederates, and one, George Wythe Randolph, even served as the Confederate States Secretary of War. Four of Sally Hemings's grandchildren took up arms for the Union: two fought as white men, and two described themselves as Black. One, John Wayles Jefferson, became a colonel and publicly identified as white even though until he was 15, he lived as a Black man. When he encountered an acquaintance who knew him as a Black man, Jefferson begged him "not to tell the fact that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command."

In the 1840s, two of Thomas Jefferson's Black children were living in Ohio. Eston and Madison Hemings both publicly acknowledged Jefferson as their father, and newspaper reports quietly identified them as the Founder's children. The Cleveland American reported, "Jefferson injured in the person of his descendants," noting "his own son, now living in Ohio, is not allowed a vote." The paper followed up by reporting, "We are credibly informed that a natural son of Jefferson by the celebrated 'Black Sal,' a person of no little renown in the politics of 1800 and thereafter, is now living, in a central county of Ohio." The reports appeared in an anti-slavery journal.

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 1829. 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.

In the 1940s, descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings hid their relationship to the Founding Father. Julia Jefferson later told The New York Times her father kept the family's connection with Thomas Jefferson secret. William McGill Jefferson and his brothers "met in the '40s and decided to kill the story." The Jeffersons, a white-passing family living in Illinois, chose to hide their Black ancestry rather than publicize their Colonial heritage. As Julia Jefferson explained, "Those were terrible times for Black people, and I would like to think they were trying to protect us."

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."

When two of Jefferson's Black children chose different paths - Eston Hemings Jefferson decided to live as a white man, and Madison Hemings identified as Black - it shaped their descendants' history. Frederick Madison Roberts, the grandson of Madison Hemings and the great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, became the first Black man elected to the California State Assembly in 1918. In 1873, Madison Hemings wrote about growing up at Monticello. He named Thomas Jefferson as his father and wrote that Sally Hemings, gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself), and Eston - three sons and one daughter.

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.

In the 1970s and '80s, African American historians argued that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's six children. In 1974 biographer Fawn Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, which described an affair between Jefferson and Hemings. After reading the book, Jean Jefferson called Brodie to confirm whether her relative Eston Hemings, also known as E.H. Jefferson, was Sally's son. The connection established a link between Eston and his 20th-century white descendants. But before the DNA test in 1998, many of Jefferson's white descendants refused to believe the Founding Father also fathered Black children.

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 2008, Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize the following year.

In 1998, following the bombshell results of the DNA test linking Jefferson and Hemings, Oprah Winfrey invited the descendants to appear on her show. Lucian K. Truscott IV, a white descendant of Jefferson, recalled the moment in American Heritage: When I walked into the studio in Chicago to do The Oprah Winfrey Show in November of 1998, I sat between Oprah and my sister Mary and looked at the audience. The first two rows were filled with more than 25 of them, my cousins. Truscott immediately recognized the family resemblance and invited his Hemings cousins to the Jefferson family reunion at Monticello. But for years after the show aired, the Monticello Association, which owns the graveyard where Jefferson descendants are buried, refused to bury Jefferson's Black descendants.