Hemings-Elizabeth

Jillian Sim, a writer and mother of two, was raised in the white world. Her grandmother, Ellen Love, an actress, told her many family stories heard from her mother, Anita Hemmings Love. She mentioned connections to Jefferson and an English sea captain, but never spoke of descent from enslaved people. Jill Sim learned of her African American ancestry only after her grandmother’s death in 1994. She published an account of her discovery in American Heritage, which tells the story of Anita Hemmings, who made headlines around the world in 1897 when it was revealed that she was passing for white at Vassar College.

Jill Sim believes, but cannot yet say with certainty, that she is descended from Elizabeth Hemings’s son Peter Hemings, a Monticello cook and brewer who worked as a tailor after he became free in 1827, purchased by a relative at the Monticello estate sale.

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
• Harriet Hemings (1795-1797)
• Beverly Hemings (1798-post 1822) ​
• Daughter (1799-1800) ​
• Harriet Hemings (1801-post 1822) ​
• Madison Hemings (1805-1877) ​
• Eston Hemings (1808-1856) ​

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 Hemings and 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.

The majority of those interviewed for the Getting Word project trace their ancestry to Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings. According to her grandson Madison Hemings, she was the daughter of an English sea captain named Hemings and an enslaved woman. She came with her children to Monticello about 1775, part of the inheritance from John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law. There she was a valued domestic servant. Over seventy-five of her descendants lived and worked at Monticello as butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians.

Elizabeth Hemings had twelve known children. According to Madison Hemings, six of them were fathered by Wayles (Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, and Sally). All of the men and women freed by Jefferson (either officially or unofficially) were her children or grandchildren. Oral histories passed through many generations of the descendants of her daughters Mary Hemings Bell, Betty Brown, and Sally Hemings include the tradition of descent from Jefferson.

Mary Hemings was Elizabeth Hemings’s oldest child. After the 1774 division of the estate of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, she was brought with her family to Monticello, where she was a valued household servant. She had six children, the two youngest with white merchant Thomas Bell, who became her common-law husband.  Bell purchased Mary Hemings and their children, Robert and Sarah, freed them, and bequeathed them his considerable property.

Jefferson was unwilling to sell Mary Hemings Bell’s older children, Joseph Fossett and Betsy Hemmings, who remained in slavery at Monticello. After Thomas Bell’s death in 1800, Mary—described in one court document as his “relict & widow”—lived with her children and grandchildren in a house on Charlottesville’s main street. She maintained close ties with her still-enslaved relations at Monticello.  Her free status and property helped her son Joseph Fossett minimize the fragmenting of his family at the Monticello dispersal sale in 1827.

In 1772, Elizabeth Hemings’s second daughter, Betty Brown, was the first of her family to come to Monticello, as the enslaved personal maid of Jefferson’s wife Martha. In the words of a member of Jefferson’s family, Betty Brown was “quite a personage on the mountain.” After almost sixty years of domestic work in the main house, she was one of the last of the Hemingses to live on the Monticello mountaintop, remaining there until the property was sold in 1831. 

Described as “light colored & decidedly good looking,” Betty Brown had seven children who lived to adulthood. Among these were  enslaved head gardener Wormley Hughes, enslaved Monticello butler Burwell Colbert, and enslaved nailmaker Brown Colbert. Her sons Edwin and Robert both became runaways after being given and sold away from Monticello. Her daughter Melinda Colbert Freeman married and lived in freedom in Washington, DC.  Betty Brown died in the early 1830s, probably before her daughter Mary Colbert and son Brown Colbert chose to seek freedom in the African colony of Liberia in 1833.