Hemings
James Monroe Trotter
Born in slavery in Mississippi, James Monroe Trotter was educated in Ohio and became a schoolteacher. In June 1863 he and his friend William H. Dupree traveled to Boston to enlist in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Both were commissioned second lieutenants in 1864 but had to wait a year for official recognition. Trotter was one of most prominent spokesmen in the dispute over equal pay for African American soldiers.
After the war, Trotter and Dupree returned to Ohio, married sisters Virginia and Maria Elizabeth Isaacs, and moved to Boston where they obtained good positions in the U.S. Postal Service. In 1878 Trotter published a groundbreaking survey of African American music. His distinguished war record and support of the Democratic Party led to appointment as District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds in 1887, the highest government office open to blacks. Trotter’s passionate commitment to equality inspired his famous son, William Monroe Trotter.
Virginia Isaacs Trotter
Virginia Isaacs, daughter of Tucker and Ann-Elizabeth Fossett Isaacs, was raised on a farm in Ross County, Ohio. After the Civil War she and her sister Maria Elizabeth Isaacs married two veterans of the Civil War, Lts. James Monroe Trotter and William H. Dupree. Both couples settled in Boston, where Trotter and Dupree were well-known figures after distinguished service as officers in the 55th Massachusetts Infantry regiment. Virginia Trotter and her sister were described by a contemporary as women of “charming sociability and cultured manners.”
The Trotters lived in Hyde Park, a largely white suburb of Boston, and accumulated property, particularly after James Monroe Trotter’s appointment to the lucrative position of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. They had three children, William Monroe, Maude, and Bessie. After her husband’s early death, Virginia Trotter managed the family investments and supported her son Monroe, allowing him to establish the Boston Guardian, and become a leading voice in the early civil rights movement.
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter, the most famous of known descendants of Monticello’s enslaved families, was the son of Virginia Isaacs and James Monroe Trotter. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, which he viewed as the exemplar of “real democracy.” But his world began to contract, as the Jim Crow line moved inexorably up from the south. He gave up a lucrative real estate business to start a newspaper, the Boston Guardian, and raised his voice against the accommodationist principles of Booker T. Washington. In 1905 he and W. E. B. Du Bois took the lead in founding the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the NAACP.
In his long, militant and uncompromising fight for “full equality in all things governmental, political, civil and judicial,” Trotter presented petitions, led picketing and demonstrations, and confronted presidents in the White House. His last national effort was described at the time as a movement for “the fulfillment of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.”
Karen Hughes White
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. Their ancestor was Reverend Hughes’s son, also Wormley Hughes (1851-1901), who left Albemarle County with the Union army in the confusion at the end of the Civil War; his parents were “broken hearted.”
The research of Karen Hughes White, an archivist and founder of the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County, was the key to making her family’s connection to the Hughes, Granger, and Hemings families of Monticello. At the Getting Word Gathering in 1997, Karen’s extended family members said that, thanks to her, they were “overwhelmed with joy” to be brought together in the place of their ancestors.
Jesse Scott
Jesse Scott, son of a Pamunkey Indian, was a violinist and dance band leader well known throughout Virginia. One contemporary recalled a dance at which Scott and his sons Robert and James formed the band: “Such music they made as the gods of Terpsichore will never hear again in this generation.” At the 1827 Monticello dispersal sale, Jesse Scott represented his wife’s family. He purchased his sister-in-law Edith Fossett and two of her children, so they would not be separated from their husband and father, Joseph Fossett.
Robert Scott
Robert Scott was born free, the son of Sarah Bell and Jesse Scott, a free man of color whose mother was a Pamunkey Indian. The Scott trio (Robert, his brother James, and his father) were well known musicians who traveled all over Virginia playing at dances at private homes, mountain resorts, and the University of Virginia
Scott married Nancy Colbert, probably the daughter of Burwell and Critta Colbert of Monticello. He was able to purchase her and some of their nine children out of slavery. In 1857 Robert Scott, who had more than three-quarters white ancestry, successfully petitioned the court to be declared “not negro”–an intermediate status between white and black or “mulatto.”
Robert Scott lived in the Bell-Scott house on Charlottesville’s main street for almost ninety years. He was a rich source of recollections about Jefferson and, at his death, was described as “a man who in the course of a long life never failed to command the respect of his fellow citizens.”
Sarah Bell Scott
Sarah Jefferson Bell, the daughter of Mary Hemings and white merchant Thomas Bell, lived in freedom on Charlottesville’s main street. Her husband, Jesse Scott, with their sons James and Robert Scott, led a dance band well known throughout Virginia.