At 16 and Free in Paris, She Chose Slavery So Her Children Could Be Free
Pregnant and legally free, she refused to sail home and won a promise of freedom for her children.
The Rest Is History · The Man Who Really Founded America: Thomas Jefferson | Founding Fathers EP 4In September 1789, in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, was packing to sail home to Virginia. He assumed Sally Hemings would go with him. She was 16, pregnant, and described as good-looking, with long straight hair falling down her back. She said she would not.
Two years earlier Jefferson had sent for his younger daughter, Maria, then only 8, to join him in France. Maria needed an attendant for the journey. The person sent with her was her 14-year-old aunt, Sally Hemings, an enslaved girl owned by Jefferson.
On the way they stopped in London, where Abigail Adams, the wife of America's ambassador to Britain, looked after them. Adams thought Sally was a hopeless attendant, all over the place, and guessed she was 17 or 18. She also noted that Sally was light colored and bore a family resemblance to Patty, Jefferson's dead wife.
This is the story of a negotiation in which Jefferson, the powerful statesman and slave owner, had little leverage. By the time the party reached Paris, Sally had learned French. Her elder brother James was also in Paris, training as a chef, so she was not alone. Most important, France had no slaves. Legally, Sally was free. There was no law that could force her onto the ship.
That account comes from Madison Hemings, Sally's son, who later wrote down her history. He reported that Jefferson simply took her return for granted, and that Sally demurred. A free teenager, carrying a child, she told Jefferson, the ambassador, that she was staying. Jefferson, who was used to being obeyed, was stunned.
In the end Sally agreed to go back to Virginia, into slavery. Madison Hemings, her son, wrote that "to induce her to do so," Jefferson "promised her extraordinary privileges and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of 21 years." Under Virginia law, a child took the legal status of the mother, so any child Sally had would be born enslaved. It was freedom for her future children in exchange for her own return to bondage.
Jefferson kept that promise. In his will, her children by him were emancipated. Sally herself could not be formally freed, but she was given an informal, de facto freedom. After Jefferson's death she left his plantation and lived with two of her sons in Charlottesville, about two miles away. She died there in 1835, at 62, in a grave whose location is unknown.
Questions people ask
Why were Sally Hemings's children enslaved if their father was Thomas Jefferson?
Yes. Under Virginia law at the time, a child's legal status followed the mother, so the children of an enslaved woman were enslaved even if the father was white and even if the father owned them. That rule meant Sally's children were born enslaved in Virginia, and needed a formal act by Jefferson to become free.
How could Sally Hemings be free just by being in France?
French courts had held since the early 1700s that any enslaved person who reached France could claim freedom, because slavery had no legal basis on French soil. The principle did not free colonies, but it meant Sally could have petitioned for her liberty in Paris and lived there as a free woman.
What happened to Sally's brother James, the chef in Paris?
James Hemings trained in French cooking while in Paris and later cooked at Monticello and in Philadelphia. Jefferson eventually freed him, after requiring him to train a replacement, and James later worked as a cook for pay before his death in 1801.