The Sally Hemings Room: What the Nineteen Ninety-Eight DNA Test Proved

The Hemings family had been saying it for generations. Sally Hemings's son Madison Hemings gave an interview to an Ohio newspaper in eighteen seventy-three in which he stated plainly that Thomas Jefferson was his father. He named his siblings. He named the arrangement his mother had negotiated for their freedom. He described his own life after leaving Monticello. The interview was published and then largely ignored, dismissed by Jefferson family defenders and most mainstream historians as a fabrication or an exaggeration or, at most, the confused memory of a man who wanted a famous father.

For over a century the Hemings family's account was treated as an oral tradition at best, a politically motivated claim at worst. The Jefferson family's denial was accepted as the authoritative version.

In nineteen ninety-eight, a study published in the journal Nature reported the results of DNA testing on male-line descendants of Eston Hemings, Sally's youngest son, and on male-line descendants of Jefferson's paternal uncle. The Y-chromosome analysis showed a match. A Jefferson male had fathered Eston Hemings. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation reviewed the evidence in two thousand and concluded that Thomas Jefferson was the most probable father of all six of Sally Hemings's children.

Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife Martha. She was fourteen years old when Jefferson brought her to Paris as a companion and attendant to his daughter. She was enslaved. Jefferson never freed her. The arrangement she is documented to have negotiated, informally, with no legal standing, was that her children would be freed when they came of age. Jefferson honored that in several cases. He did not honor it universally, and he never freed Sally Hemings herself. She was freed after Jefferson's death by his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph, and she lived out her remaining years in Charlottesville.

The room at Monticello where Sally Hemings lived and worked is now interpreted. It is adjacent to Jefferson's bedroom. The Hemings family waited more than a century for the documentation to catch up with what they already knew.