Хто зустрічався з Sally Hemings?

Sally Hemings, whose given name may have been Sarah, (c. 1773 – 1835) was an enslaved woman, inherited among many others by the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson, from his father-in-law, John Wayles. Her mother was Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings. Hemings's father was John Wayles, the enslaver of Elizabeth Hemings who owned her from the time of her birth. Wayles was also the father of Jefferson's wife, Martha, making Hemings the half-sister to Jefferson's wife.

Hemings's maternal grandmother was an enslaved African woman whose name is not recorded. Hemings's maternal grandfather was John Hemings, an English captain. Therefore, Hemings was of 3/4 European and 1/4 African descent, making her a quadroon according to contemporary American racial classification. This also means Hemings was the third generation of women in her family to be impregnated by a free man during her enslavement and the second to be impregnated by the man she was enslaved to.

Martha Jefferson died during her marriage to Thomas Jefferson in 1782. In 1787, at 14, Hemings accompanied Jefferson's daughter to Paris where they joined Thomas Jefferson. In Paris, Hemings was legally free, as slavery was not legal in France. At some time during her 26 months in Paris, Jefferson is believed to have begun intimate relations with her. As attested by her son, Madison Hemings, Sally agreed with Jefferson that she would return to Virginia and resume her life in slavery, as long as all their children would be freed when they came of age.

Multiple lines of evidence, including modern DNA analyses, indicate that at least one member of the Jefferson family fathered at least six children with Hemings over the course of several decades at Jefferson's Monticello estate. Historians broadly agree that Jefferson was the father. Jefferson is purported to have begun sexual relations with Hemings when she was an adolescent, likely when she was between the ages of 14 and 16, while he was in his mid-40s and exercised near total legal, economic, and physical control over her life. Under these conditions, meaningful consent was impossible. As an enslaved person, Hemings would not have been able to refuse sexual access without risk of punishment, sale, or violence, and any absence of recorded force reflects the structural secrecy and power imbalance inherent in slavery rather than evidence of voluntariness. Many historians and scholars therefore describe Jefferson’s actions as sexual exploitation or rape within chattel slavery. Four of Hemings' children survived into adulthood and were freed by Jefferson or his will as they came of age. Hemings died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1835 in the home of her freed sons.

The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Hemings' children is the subject of the Jefferson–Hemings controversy. Following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, an organization which has owned Monticello since 1923 and is dedicated to preserving and educating on Jefferson’s legacy, empaneled a commission of scholars and scientists to investigate the parentage of Hemings’s children. The Foundation panel worked with a 1998–1999 genealogical DNA test and found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Hemings's youngest son, Eston Hemings. The Foundation panel concluded that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely Hemings’s other five children as well. In response to this finding, as well as to the growing historical consensus that Jefferson fathered Hemings's children, critics founded Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society. The Society commissioned another panel of scholars in 2001, which concluded that it had not been proven that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' children. The Society’s panel acknowledged that Jefferson may have fathered Hemings's children, but concluded that Randolph Jefferson or his sons may have also been the father. In 2018, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation of Monticello announced its plans to have an exhibit titled Life of Sally Hemings, and affirmed that it was treating as a settled issue that Jefferson was the father of her known children.

То́мас Дже́фферсон (англ. Thomas Jefferson; 13 квітня 1743 — 4 липня 1826) — учасник Першої американської революції, 3-й президент США, один із засновників цієї держави, видатний політичний діяч, дипломат і філософ. Національний герой США.

Зображений на дводоларовій банкноті і п'ятицентовій монеті. Був головою комітету написання Декларації незалежності США.