Mosaic

Meet Sally Hemings

Home and Hearth
 Monticello now explains without cant the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a childhood occupant of one of his slave cabins, below, who later moved into the estate's South Wing and bore her master six children.

near Charlottesville, Virginia, has stopped hedging about Thomas Jefferson fathering six children with Sally Hemings, a daughter of an enslaved family that Jefferson’s wife Martha inherited from her parents in 1774. On June 16, 2018, Monticello added to its tour an exhibit on Hemings and her children that expressly acknowledges Jefferson’s paternity. Housed in a windowless room in the South Wing where Hemings lived, the display reclaims a space that had been converted into a public restroom. A new online exhibit establishes Sally’s ancestry, tracing her and her children’s lives. Three-quarters European, Sally had the same father as Martha Jefferson, John Wayles. Wayles owned Sally’s mother, Elizabeth Hemings, and is thought