Hemings

Robert Hughes

Robert 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–post 1847).  After Jefferson’s death in 1826, Robert 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. 

Robert Hughes was the Edgehill blacksmith and a Baptist preacher.  He and his wife, Sidney Evans, a household servant, and their children became free at the end of the Civil War.  Hughes began acquiring land, owning 130 acres at his death.  He was the founding minister of the still-flourishing Union Run Baptist Church adjacent to Edgehill.  In 1997 Getting Word participants, including Rev. Robert Hughes’s descendant Timothy Hughes witnessed the rediscovery of the founding minister’s grave marker. The marker had been previously located ten years prior by J. Calvin Jefferson, another Hughes descendant. The first word revealed on the stone was “Memory.”  

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.

Virginia Craft Rose

Virginia Rose was the daughter of Elizabeth Letitia (Bessie) Trotter and Henry Kempton Craft, a Harvard graduate, electrical engineer, teacher, and YMCA executive.  He was the grandson of William and Ellen Craft, famous for their daring escape from slavery in 1848.  Bessie Trotter, who attended the New England Conservatory of Music, was the sister of the prominent civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter.

Virginia Rose attended the University of Pittsburgh, graduated from Barnard College, and did graduate work at Western Reserve University.  She married Joshua Rose in 1934 and they moved to California, where he headed the Oakland branch of the YMCA.  She passed her pride in her Trotter and Craft heritage along to their three children, who shared memories of cross-country car trips to keep up with their East Coast roots.  Only late in life did Mrs. Rose begin to “ponder” her connection to the Fossetts of Monticello.  As she said in 2006, “You don’t know who you are until you know where you came from.”

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.