"All men are created equal” wrote Thomas Jefferson, but his deeds did not always match his eloquent words. Like most of the other aristocratic landowners in Virginia, Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia and third president of the United States, owned slaves. One of them was a woman named, Sally Hemings who was one-quarter African, and was probably the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and a half-African slave, if. If this genealogy is correct, Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife, Martha. Indeed, observers at the time noted that, Hemings looked remarkably like Martha Jefferson, who had died on September 6 1782, when Jefferson was thirty-nine.