Bora 1773
Bermuda Hundred, Virginia
Died 1835
Charlottesville, Virginia

American mulatto slave

The general story of the life of Sally Hemings—a mulatto (a person of mixed black and white ancestry) slave who served her master as a domestic servant and possibly his concubine (mistress)—was not all that unusual in late-eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century United States. What makes Sally Hemings's tale especially interesting is that her white master, and some argue, the likely father of her seven children, was Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), the third president of the United States (1801-1809). Hemings's relationship with Jefferson probably began sometime in 1788, when the two of them were in Paris, France, and lasted until his death in 1826.