Jefferson. In 1773 his wife, Martha Wayles, inherited more than one hundred enslaved people from her father John Wayles. These included the six mixed-race children (identified as being three-quarters white) whom he fathered with his enslaved concubine Betty Hemings, a multiracial woman born of an Englishman and an enslaved African (Black) woman. Martha Wayles's three-quarters white ("quadroon") half-brothers and half-sisters included the much younger Sally Hemings. Some years later, the widower Jefferson took Sally Hemings (then between 14 and 16 years of age) as a concubine. Over 38 years, he had six children with her, four of whom survived to adulthood. As their mother was enslaved, they, too, were enslaved from birth. Under Virginia law at the time, being seven-eighths European ("octoroon") would have made the Jefferson–Hemings children legally white if they had been free. Jefferson allowed the two eldest to "escape" and freed the two youngest in his will. As adults, three Jefferson–Hemings children passed into white society: Beverly and Harriet Hemings in the Washington, DC area, and Eston Hemings Jefferson in Wisconsin. He had married a mixed-race woman in Virginia, and both their sons served as regular Union soldiers. The oldest gained the rank of colonel. Historians had long discounted rumors that Jefferson had this relationship. But in 1998, a Y-DNA test confirmed that a contemporary male descendant of Sally Hemings (through Eston Heming's descendants) was a direct, genetic descendant of the male line of Jeffersons. It was Thomas Jefferson who was documented as having been at Monticello each time Hemings conceived, and the weight of historical evidence favored his paternity. Mixed-race communities in the Deep South In the colonial cities on the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, there arose the Creole peoples as a social class of educated free people of color, descended from white fathers and enslaved black or mixed-race women. As a class, they intermarried, sometimes gained formal education, and owned property, including enslaved people. Moreover, in the Upland South, some enslavers freed their slaves after the Revolution through manumission. The population of free black men and free black women rose from less than 1% in 1780 to more than 10% in 1810, when 7.2% of Virginia's population was free black people, and 75% of Delaware's black population was free. Concerning the sexual hypocrisy related to whites and their sexual abuse of enslaved women, the diarist Mary Boykin Chesnut said: This only