Thomas Jefferson's will freed his two youngest sons by Sally Hemings, and his debts sent 130 enslaved people to auction

Jefferson owed about $100,000 in his last months. In February 1826 the Virginia General Assembly approved a lottery to raise money for him. His will freed five men, all from the Hemings family: Burwell Colbert, John Hemings, Joe Fossett, and Madison and Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings's sons, who were approaching 21. He asked the legislature to let them stay in Virginia. Sally Hemings was not freed by the will. She left Monticello with her sons and was counted as a free white woman in the 1830 census. Her older children Beverly and Harriet had been allowed to leave in 1822. In 1827 a five-day auction at Monticello sold 130 enslaved people. Joe Fossett's wife Edith and their children were among them. He bought the freedom of his wife and two youngest children. In 1831 his daughter Martha Randolph sold Monticello for $7,500. In 1802 the journalist James Callender had printed that Jefferson fathered children with "Sally". In 1873 Madison Hemings told an Ohio newspaper that Jefferson was his father. In November 1998 a Y-chromosome study in Nature matched a descendant of Eston Hemings to the Jefferson male line. In January 2000 the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which has owned Monticello since 1923, found a high probability that Jefferson fathered Eston and most likely all six of Hemings's children. In 2018 it called the matter settled.