In 1802, journalist James Callender publicly accused Thomas Jefferson of having children with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman he held at Monticello, and Jefferson never responded. Jefferson's recognized family denied that Hemings's children were his, while his unrecognized family regarded their connection to him as an important family truth, and later recollections from people connected to Monticello and visitors to the neighborhood repeated that Jefferson and Hemings had a long sexual relationship and children together. Since 1802, oral histories, published recollections, statistical data, documents, and a 1998 DNA study linking one of Hemings's male descendants to the Jefferson male line have pointed to Jefferson as the father of Sally Hemings's children. In Hemings's lifetime, the word "concubine" referred to a woman who had sexual contact with a man to whom she was not married but had no legal or social standing, and whose children could not inherit from their father. The relationship between Jefferson and Hemings remains painful and complicated because enslaved women had no legal right to consent, masters controlled their labor, bodies, and children, and the nature of their sexual encounters can never be fully known. Sally Hemings is presented not only as Jefferson's concubine but as an enslaved woman who, at age 16, negotiated with one of the nation's most powerful men to improve her condition and secure freedom for her children, while still living within the insecurities and deprivations of slavery at Monticello.