Sally Hemings was born in 1773 at The Forest, the plantation home of her enslaver and father, John Wayles. Her mother was Elizabeth Hemings, an enslaved, mixed-race woman who was also owned by John Wayles (the father of Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson’s wife). Following John Wayles’ death, the Hemingses (Sally Hemings, her mother, and her siblings) were brought to Monticello in 1774 as a part of Thomas Jefferson’s inheritance from his father-in-law. As of now, we know little about Sally Hemings’ early childhood.
Martha Wayles Skelton, Jefferson’s wife and Sally Hemings’ half-sister, died in September of 1782. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson left Virginia for Paris to serve as Minister to France. His youngest daughters, Maria and Lucy, went to Eppington Plantation (the home of Jefferson’s sister-in-law), with Sally Hemings sent with them as a lady’s maid. Three years later, in 1787, a 14-year-old Sally Hemings accompanied Maria Jefferson on her trans-Atlantic voyage to reunite with her father and older sister in France.
Hemings spent two years in Paris as a lady’s maid to Jefferson’s daughters, where she had the option of suing for her freedom. According to Madison Hemings’ recollections, upon his mother’s return to Monticello in 1789 at the age of 16, she was “enciente,” or pregnant, by Thomas Jefferson. Thereafter, she labored as a domestic servant in the main house, and Jefferson referred to her as “Maria’s maid” in 1799. In the years that followed, Sally Hemings had at least six children by Jefferson:
A child born shortly after their return from France
Madison Hemings’ recollections state that while in Paris, Jefferson promised his mother that he would free any children they might have when they reached the age of twenty-one. Four of their six children survived to adulthood, and all of them became free close to their twenty-first birthdays. In 1822, Beverly Hemings and his sister Harriet Hemings were allowed to leave Monticello without pursuit and passed into white society. Madison Hemingsand Eston Hemings were two of the five individuals freed by Jefferson in his will.
Sally Hemings was unofficially freed after Jefferson’s death in 1826 and lived with her sons Madison and Eston in Charlottesville until her own death in 1835.
Betsy Hemmings (the surname is spelled with two m’s by Betsy and her descendants) was born at Monticello in 1783, daughter of Mary Hemings and an unidentified father. According to her family’s oral history, her father was Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson’s son-in-law John Wayles Eppes was the father of her children.
As an infant Hemmings was taken to live with Thomas Bell, a respected white merchant in Charlottesville, to whom her mother had been hired while Jefferson was in France. Thomas Bell and Mary Hemings later had two children together and lived together in what their neighbors came to consider a common-law marriage. When Mary Hemings asked to be sold to Bell in 1792, Jefferson consented, agreeing to sell with her only “such of her younger children as she chose.” Nine-year-old sister Betsy and her twelve-year-old brother Joe Fossett returned to live in bondage at Monticello, while their mother and younger half-siblings became free and inherited Bell’s estate.
In 1797, at age fourteen, Hemmings was once again forced to leave Monticello and her family after Jefferson gave her to his daughter Maria and her husband John Wayles Eppes as part of their marriage settlement. When Maria died in 1804, Hemmings was relocated a further time when Eppes moved with his young son Francis Wayles Eppes to Millbrook, in Buckingham County, Virginia, where he and his second wife, Martha Burke Jones, lived and had four children.
Because she lived and died in bondage and because the Buckingham County records burned in 1869, it has not been possible to learn the names of all of Betsy Hemmings’s own children. However, her descendants (including Edna Jacques, pictured above) have not forgotten their connection to her. Their family stories and those of descendants of John and Martha Jones Eppes shed light on the close ties of family as well as the separations of slavery that must have been felt by Betsy Hemmings. They tell of her distress when some of her children were taken by Francis Eppes to Florida in 1828,
When Betsy Hemmings died in 1857 at age seventy-three, the Eppes family commissioned an elaborate grave marker for her adjacent to that of John Wayles Eppes, who had died in 1823. The two markers, so similar and so near, do nothing to dispel the stories of her relationship with Eppes and his family. As a testament to the love felt by those with whom she lived, Betsy Hemmings’s inscription begins, “Sacred to the Memory of our Mammy, Betsey Hemmings who was Mother, Sister & Friend to all who knew her. The pure in heart shall see God.”
Three daughters of Consuelo and Elmer Wayles Roberts were interviewed together in Los Angeles: Paula Henderson, Robin Roberts-Martin, and Ellen Hodnett, a teacher and school principal. They recalled their father, a graduate of U.C.L.A., a mortician, and a probation officer. In 1976 he told Time magazine he thought Thomas Jefferson would be “unhappy about man’s inability to learn anything about living with his fellow man, despite all the advances in technology.”
The Roberts sisters had vivid memories of their grandfather William Giles Roberts, who ran the family mortuary before moving to his farm northeast of Los Angeles. They are proud of the Robertses as one of the earliest and most influential black families in Los Angeles. As for their Jefferson ancestry, the genetic tests of 1998 were “just a scientific confirmation of what we already knew.” As Paula Henderson said, “It was really important in the Roberts family that each person do something important. It didn’t matter who your relatives were if you didn’t do something yourself.”
Lewis Hern, like his father and grandfather before him, did not live with his wife and children. Several generations of Herns had “abroad” marriages, in which husband and wife belonged to different owners, a common feature of slavery in Virginia. Although Lewis Hern and Georgeanna were married by an Episcopal minister in 1853, they had to live apart until freedom came in 1865.
In the post-war years, Lewis Hern progressed from being a farmworker at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson Thomas J. Randolph, to becoming the owner of his own farm. He was a founding deacon of Union Run Baptist Church and, together with George Hughes, purchased a hundred acres of Albemarle County land in 1870. At that time Hern was one of relatively few rural residents in the county to send his children to school. The Hern (now Hearns) family’s stress on education as well as their ties to the land, the Hughes family, and Union Run Church have continued in succeeding generations to the present day.
Three daughters of Consuelo and Elmer Wayles Roberts were interviewed together in Los Angeles: Paula Henderson, Robin Roberts-Martin, and Ellen Hodnett, a teacher and school principal. They recalled their father, a graduate of U.C.L.A., a mortician, and a probation officer. In 1976 he told Time magazine he thought Thomas Jefferson would be “unhappy about man’s inability to learn anything about living with his fellow man, despite all the advances in technology.”
The Roberts sisters had vivid memories of their grandfather William Giles Roberts, who ran the family mortuary before moving to his farm northeast of Los Angeles. They are proud of the Robertses as one of the earliest and most influential black families in Los Angeles. As for their Jefferson ancestry, the genetic tests of 1998 were “just a scientific confirmation of what we already knew.” As Paula Henderson said, “It was really important in the Roberts family that each person do something important. It didn’t matter who your relatives were if you didn’t do something yourself.”
Fountain Hughes spent his boyhood in slavery on the Hydraulic Mills property of the Burnley family near Charlottesville. After the Civil War, in which his father was killed while with the Confederate Army, his mother, Mary Hughes, had to hire Fountain out for a dollar a month. In the 1880s he purchased horses and a carriage and worked as a hack driver, but soon sought greater opportunities in Baltimore, MD. There he worked for several decades for the Shirley family as a farmer and gardener.
An interview with Fountain Hughes in 1949 is among the few surviving sound recordings of former slaves. He had vivid memories of slavery in central Virginia and of the harsh conditions for black people during and after the Civil War. His longevity attracted notice and led to numerous articles about him in Baltimore newspapers. Shallie Marshall, his only surviving descendant, remembers outings to the Shirley farm to visit her great-grandfather, “Pap.”
George Hughes was related to two important enslaved families at Monticello, the Hemings family through his father and the Granger family through his mother, Ursula Granger Hughes (1787–after 1847). After Jefferson’s death in 1826, Hughes, his mother, and his siblings remained in slavery at Edgehill, the plantation of Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph; his father was given his freedom unofficially.
After Emancipation in 1865, George Hughes was a farm manager at Edgehill, while his wife, Sarah Jane, was cook at the Edgehill School for Girls. Hughes was a deacon of the Union Run Baptist church pastored by his brother Rev. Robert Hughes. In 1870 George Hughes and his friend Lewis Hern, grandson of Monticello slaves David and Isabel Hern, made a successful bid for one hundred acres of Albemarle County farmland. Hughes and Hern (Hearns) descendants still live on the property today.
In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War. Lloyd Hughes, known as Peter, attended the University of Maryland and works for the Coca-Cola company.
In 1996, four generations of the Hughes family of Fauquier County came to Monticello soon after learning of their descent from Rev. Robert Hughes of Union Run Baptist Church and head gardener Wormley Hughes of Monticello. The connection might have been broken because their ancestor, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War.
Lloyd Hughes, a lifelong resident of Fauquier County, VA, served in the U. S. Army in World War II and afterward worked as a carpenter and cook. He was proud of how his daughter Karen White’s research made the connection to Monticello and recalled his father, John Henry Hughes, who worked with horses and as a gardener, as did his Monticello ancestor: “Gardening, it all comes back to that, yard and gardening.”
Patti Jo Harding became the family historian and, with the help of her cousin Diana Redman and Getting Word consultant, Beverly Gray, has been gathering information from courthouses and graveyards to understand the rich history of her family. She was present at the very first Getting Word interview, with other members of her family. She said, “Everybody keeps talking about Thomas Jefferson, … but I’d like to find out more about Sally.”
The Trent sisters—Janie Mosley, Omega Calimese, and Bertha Harmon—are descended from Betsy Hemmings through both their maternal and paternal lines. They heard the history of their connection to Monticello from their aunt Lucy Ann Trent, who was a teacher. Their grandparents, who purchased a Buckingham County farm in freedom, lost two of their sons in a West Virginia mine accident at the end of the nineteenth century. As Bertha Harmon said, they have a “strong willed, hard working, loving family,” a family that has always tried “to do the right thing, to try to help people that needed help and strive for the best.
