Elizabeth Hemings ( 1735 – 1807) was an enslaved woman of mixed-race in colonial Virginia. With her owner, planter John Wayles, she had six children, including Sally Hemings. These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were considered slaves from birth; they were half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other slaves were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha Jefferson and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
More than 75 of Betty's mixed-race children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were born into slavery. They were forced to work on Jefferson's plantation of Monticello.[ John Wayles Paternity] Many had higher status positions as chefs, butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians in the household.[ Betty Hemings - Monticello Explorer] Jefferson gave some of Betty's slave descendants to his sister and daughters as wedding presents, and they lived on other Virginia plantations.
Betty's oldest daughter Mary Hemings became the common-law wife of wealthy merchant Thomas Bell, who purchased her and their two children from Jefferson in 1792 and granted them greater freedoms than other slaves were typically permitted.
Biography
According to the oral history of her descendants, Betty was the daughter of a "
White people captain of an English trading vessel" and "a full-blooded African" mother, making Elizabeth a
mulatto. In his memoir, Madison Hemings said the captain's surname was Hemings; the family tradition was that he had tried to buy Betty when he discovered his daughter had been born.
[ "1873: Madison Hemings' Memoir", Jefferson's Blood: Chronology, February 2000] Annette Gordon-Reed speculated that Elizabeth's mother's name was Parthenia, based on the wills of Francis Eppes IV and John Wayles.
[Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, (New York: Norton, 2008), 50-52.] The place of her birth is uncertain (Hemings said it was Williamsburg
), but by 1746 Betty was recorded as the property of Francis Eppes IV of the
Bermuda Hundred plantation.
Betty's grandson Madison Hemings related the family tradition that Betty was born into slavery as the property of "John Wales" (meaning he owned her mother. The family said Captain Hemings plotted to kidnap his daughter, but Wayles took measures against this.)
After John Wayles married Martha Eppes in 1746, her father Francis Eppes IV gave the couple Betty and her mother as part of his daughter's wedding settlement. He stipulated that Betty would always belong to Martha and her heirs (rather than being part of her husband's property). Betty was trained as a domestic servant at one of Wayles' plantations.
In the 1750s, Betty Hemings gave birth to the first four of her twelve children, whose father was a slave. The children were:
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Mary Hemings (1753 – after 1834), recognized as a seamstress;
[ Lucia C. Stanton, Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello, University of North Carolina Press, 2000, pp. 103-104, accessed 13 August 2011] she was hired out to Thomas Bell and later purchased by him in 1792; she became his common-law wife and they had two children together.
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Martin Hemings (1755 - after 1795), who became the butler at Monticello;
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Betty Brown (1759 – after 1831). Already serving as the personal servant of Martha Jefferson, Betty accompanied her to Monticello after Skelton's marriage to Thomas Jefferson. She was among the domestic enslaved workers the Jeffersons took to Williamsburg and Richmond when the planter was governor. During the British invasion of Richmond in 1781, Betty and her sister Mary Hemings were taken as prisoners of war.
[ "The Descendants of Elizabeth Hemings: Betty Brown" , Plantation and Slavery, Monticello, accessed 20 March 2011][Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, University of Virginia, 1998 edition with preface on DNA data, pp. 91-92. Note: Thomas Jefferson Randolph, the president's oldest grandson, told the biographer Henry Randall that Betsey, like her younger half-sister Sally Hemings, had children who resembled Jefferson. He said that Samuel Carr was the father. The historian Annette Gordon-Reed thought Randolph's assertion might be part of the family's attempt to deflect paternity questions from Jefferson, as there is no corroborating statement or evidence. Carr was disproved as the father of Sally's children by Y-DNA testing of male-line descendants.])
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Nance Hemings (1761 – after 1827), in 1785, Jefferson gave her to his sister as a wedding gift.
[Bear, James A, The Hemings Family of Monticello, Ivy Press, Virginia, 1980, pp. 3-6] Ten years later, he repurchased her, as she was a skilled weaving; he had started a cotton factory at Monticello.["Nance, Plantation and Slavery, Monticello][Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families at Monticello'', Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2003]
Betty's owner, John Wayles, was widowed three times. In 1761, after the death of his third wife, Wayles and Betty began a relationship that produced six children.[ "John Wayles", Jefferson's Community: Relatives, Monticello. Footnote to Wayles' paternity: Isaac Jefferson, Memoirs, 4; Madison Hemings, "Life Among the Lowly," Pike County Republican, March 13, 1873. A December 20, 1802 letter from Thomas Gibbons, a Federalist planter of Georgia, to Jonathan Dayton states that Sally Hemings "is half sister to his first wife." Similarly, a letter from Thomas Turner in the May 31, 1805 Boston Repertory states, "an opinion has existed . . . that this very Sally is the natural daughter of Mr. Wales, who was the father of the actual Mrs. Jefferson."] If that is true, they were half-siblings to his eldest daughter Martha Wayles, who married Thomas Jefferson. As the historians Philip D. Morgan and Joshua D. Rothman have written, there were numerous such interracial relationships in the Wayles-Hemings-Jefferson families and Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern.[Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Interracial Relationships Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861, University of North Carolina Press, 2003] Her children by Wayles were:
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Robert Hemings (1762–1819), who purchased his freedom from Thomas Jefferson in 1794;
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James Hemings (1765–1801), freed by Jefferson in 1796 after training his brother Peter for three years to replace him as a chef;
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Thenia Hemings (1767–1796), who was sold to James Monroe in 1794.
[ "Mary Hemings."]
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Critta Hemings Bowles (1769–1850), who married Zachariah Bowles, a free man of color. Sometimes called Critty, she was a domestic slave at Monticello from 1775 until 1827,
[ "Critta Hemings Bowles", Plantation and Slavery, Monticello, accessed 21 March 2011] She then lived with her husband at his 96-acre farm north of Charlottesville in Albemarle County.
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Peter Hemings (1770 – after 1834), served as chef to Jefferson after being trained by his brother James; and
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Sally Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835), who had a relationship with Jefferson from about 1789.
[ Jefferson's Blood, PBS Frontline, 2000, accessed 10 March 2012, Woodson, A President in the Family, Paeger, 2001, 31,240] Sally was with him to his death in 1826, after which she was "given her time" (informal freedom) by his surviving daughter Martha Randolph.
After Wayles died in 1773, all eleven members of the Hemings family and 124 other slaves were inherited by his daughter Martha Wayles and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
While resident at Monticello, Betty Hemings had two more children:
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John Hemings (1776–1833), whose father was Irish workman Joseph Neilson; John was freed in Jefferson's will after decades of service as a skilled carpenter; and
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Lucy Hemings (1777–1786), whose father was believed to have been a slave.
Betty Hemings had her own cabin at Monticello in the last decade of her life, from 1795 to 1807. She raised produce and sold it to the Jefferson household: cabbages, strawberries, and chickens. Her former cabin site is being investigated as an archeological site. It is expected to yield new information about the daily lives of the slave population at Monticello.[Saraceni, Jessica E. "The Matriarch of Mulberry Row", Archeology Magazine, 1997]
John Wayles
Historians have tended to accept that Betty Hemings and John Wayles had children together. Her last six children were multiracial, with three-quarters white ancestry. As is the case of many relationships between slaveholders and enslaved workers, documentary evidence is slight. Betty was mentioned in John Wayles' will, which some take as an indication of a relationship. However, the marriage contract between John Wayles and Martha Eppes stipulated that Betty, her mother, and their descendants should go to Martha Wayles and her heirs forever. According to contemporary accounts, some of Betty's children (including Sally) appeared nearly white. Other support is found in private letters from the first decade of the 19th century, which later became public.
The enslaved community at Monticello was aware of the relationship. In 1873 Betty's grandson Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson, both former enslaved workers at Monticello, published newspaper interviews which said Wayles was the father of Sally Hemings and several other of Betty's children.[ Footnotes section, John Wayles article at the Monticello Wiki][Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. University of Virginia Press (April 1997), pp. 128-130. ]
Descendants
Betty Hemings has numerous descendants. Some of note are:
- From the family line of daughter Sally Hemings
- Madison Hemings - 2x great-grandson Frederick Madison Roberts, first African-American state politician in California;
- Eston Hemings Jefferson - great-grandson John Wayles Jefferson, accepted as white and served as a colonel in the regular Army in the Civil War and wealthy cotton broker; 2xgreat-grandson Walter Beverly Pearson, white industrialist; John Weeks Jefferson, white descendant whose DNA matched that of the Jefferson male line in 1998 test.
- From the family line of daughter Mary Hemings
- James Monroe Trotter husband of Mary's great-great-grandaughter Virginia Isaacs
- William Monroe Trotter, activist for civil rights and abolition in Boston
Fountain Hughes was a descendant of Wormley Hughes, one of Betty's grandsons who worked for Jefferson at Monticello.[ "Hughes (Hemings)", Getting Word, Monticello Foundation, accessed 26 May 2013] At the age of 101 disputed;, when living in Baltimore in 1949, Fountain Hughes gave what is believed to be the last surviving recorded interview of a former enslaved person. It is available online through the World Digital Library and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.[ "Interview with Fountain Hughes, Baltimore, Maryland, June 11, 1949", American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, World Digital Library, accessed 26 May 2013]
Footnotes and citations
Further reading
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Lucia Stanton, Preface by David Brion Davis, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello, Monticello Monograph Series, Charlottesville, Virginia: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000
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Byron W. Woodson Sr., Foreword by Dr. Michelle Cooley-Strickland, A President in the Family, Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson, (Westport CT, Praeger, 2001)
External links
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Monticello Explorer: Elizabeth Hemings
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François Furstenberg, "Jefferson's Other Family: His concubine was also his wife's half-sister", review of Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, Slate, 23 September 2008
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Digital Archeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
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Roll of the slaves of John Wayles which were allotted to T. J. in right of his wife on a division or the estate, Farm Book, 1774–1824, page 11, by Thomas Jefferson electronic. Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003
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Eppington Plantation Heritage Site
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