In Search of Sally Hemings in the Post-DNA Era

Abstract

South are utterly anonymous today. A few extraordinary women who managed to escape from slavery are well known, such as Harriet Tubman-the heroine of Underground Railroad.' But vast majority of slave women who remained in bondage led lives left entirely unrecorded and unremembered. One striking exception is Hemings, who has been subject to centuries of commentary-quite possibly more than any other black woman who lived out her life in slave South. A woman of many nicknames, dashing Sally has long been famous as female slave whose name was coupled with that of founding father Thomas Jefferson in an 1802 scandal about widowed president's private life.2 At that time, a disaffected Republican journalist wrote of Jefferson that the man, whom it delighth people to honor, keeps, and has for many past years has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.3