| Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings |
| Born |
c. 1735
possibly Bermuda Hundred, Henrico County, Virginia |
| Died |
1807
Monticello |
| Nationality |
American |
| Occupation |
Domestic servant |
| Children |
Sally Hemings, John Hemings, Mary Hemings, James Hemings, Martin Hemings, Critta Hemings, Robert Hemings, Bett Hemings, Thenia Hemings, Nance Hemings, Peter Hemings |
| Parents |
Captain John Hemings and Susannah, an enslaved African woman. |
| Relatives |
Harriet Hemings, Madison Hemings, Eston Hemings, Frederick Madison Roberts, John Wayles Jefferson |
Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings (c. 1735 – 1807) was a mulatto slave, who in 1761 became the concubine of the planter John Wayles of Virginia. He had become a widower for the third time. He had six children with her over a 12-year period. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and more than 100 other slaves were inherited as part of his estate by his daughter Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and her husband Thomas Jefferson.
Eventually more than 75 of Betty's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were born into slavery and worked at Jefferson's plantation of Monticello.[1] They were skilled chefs, butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians.[2] Jefferson gave others to his sister and daughters as wedding presents, and they lived at 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 in 1792 and informally freed them. Mary was the first of several Hemingses to gain freedom before the Civil War. Betty's daughter Sally Hemings is widely believed by historians to have had six children as the mistress of Thomas Jefferson in a nearly four decades long relationship. He freed all her four surviving children when they came of age, two in his will.
According to the oral history of her descendants, Betty was the daughter of a slave named Susannah, and a slave-ship captain named John Hemings.[3] The place of her birth is uncertain, but by 1746, Susannah (then known as Susannah Eppes) and Betty were recorded as the property of Francis Eppes IV of the Bermuda Hundred plantation.[3]
Betty's grandson, Madison Hemings, related the story that Betty was born into slavery as the property of "John Wales" (meaning he owned her mother.) The family said that Captain John Hemings tried to buy his mixed-race daughter from Wayles, but the planter refused to sell them. Captain Hemings plotted to kidnap his daughter, which Wayles got word of and took measures against.[4] It is possible that Wayles could have sold Betty to Francis Eppes and later regained ownership of her when he married Eppes' daughter Martha as his first wife, or her grandson Madison may have confused some of the chronology.
After John Wayles married Martha Eppes, the daughter of Francis Eppes IV, in 1746, her father gave Susannah and Elizabeth/Betty to the couple as part of the wedding settlement, with the stipulation that they would always belong to Martha and her heirs. The two became domestic servants 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:
- Mary (1753-after 1834), recognized as a seamstress,[3] she was hired and then purchased by Thomas Bell in 1792, with whom she had a common-law marriage and two children. He informally freed her and their two children, and willed them his estate in Charlottesville. Her older children stayed at Monticello as slaves (see her page);
- Martin Hemings, he became the butler at Monticello;[3]
- Bett or Betsey, called Betty Brown (1759-after 1831). Already serving as the personal servant to Martha Wayles Skelton, Betty accompanied her to Monticello after Skelton's marriage to Thomas Jefferson. She was among the domestic slaves taken by Jefferson to Williamsburg and Richmond when he was governor. Betty and her sister Mary Hemings were taken as prisoners of war during the British invasion of Richmond in 1781.[3] Betty's two sons were Wormley Hughes (1781–1858) and Burwell Colbert (1783-c. 1862) who each served Jefferson. Colbert later served for decades as the butler and personal valet to Jefferson, who freed him by his will of 1826.[5][6])
- Nance Hemings (1761-1827+), in 1785 Jefferson gave her to his sister as a wedding gift.[7] Ten years later he bought her back, as she was a skilled weaver and he had started a cotton factory at Monticello.[8][9]
John Wayles was widowed three times. In 1761, after the death of his third wife, Wayles took Betty Hemings as his concubine. According to her descendants and other sources, she had six children with Wayles.[10] They were each half-siblings to his 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, Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern.[11][12] Her children by Wayles were:
- Robert Hemings (1762–1819), purchased his freedom from Thomas Jefferson in 1794;
- James Hemings (1765–1801), freed by Jefferson in 1796 after training his brother Peter for three years to replace him as a chef;
- Thenia Hemings (1767–1795);
- Critta Hemings Bowles (1769–1850), married Zachariah Bowles, a free man of color. In 1827 she was purchased and freed by Francis W. Eppes, whom she had cared for as a nurse when he was young, starting in 1802. (His mother was Mary Jefferson Eppes, Jefferson's second daughter).[13]
- Peter Hemings (1770-after 1834), served as chef to Jefferson after being trained by his brother James; and
- Sally Hemings (c. 1773-1835), believed to be concubine to Jefferson from about 1789. She had six children by him, four of whom survived.[14] She 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.[7] The Jeffersons had the Hemings children trained as skilled artisans and domestic servants, giving them privileged positions at the plantation. No member of the Hemings family worked in the fields.
While resident at Monticello, Betty Hemings had two more children:
- John Hemings (1776–1833), whose father was an Irish workman Joseph Neilson; John was freed in Jefferson's will after decades of service as a skilled ironworker; and
- Lucy Hemings (1777–1786), whose father was believed to be a slave.
In the last decade of her life, Betty Hemings had her own cabin at Monticello, from 1795 to 1807. She raised produce and sold it to the Jefferson household: items such as 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 enslaved African Americans at Monticello.[15]
Historians have tended to accept the account that Betty Hemings and John Wayles had children together. Her last six children were multiracial and very light-skinned, evidence of a European father. They were three-quarters European. As is the case of many relationships between slaveholders and slaves, documentary evidence is slight. Betty was mentioned in John Wayles' will, which some take as an indication of a relationship. According to contemporary accounts, some of Betty's children were nearly white in appearance. Other support is found in private letters from the first decade of the 19th century, which later became public.
The slave community at Monticello was well aware of the relationship. In 1873 Betty's grandson Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson, both former slaves at Monticello, published newspaper interviews which said Wayles was the father of Sally Hemings and several other of Betty's children. [16][17]
Betty Hemings has numerous descendants. Some of note are:
- From the family line of daughter Sally Hemings
- Madison Hemings - 2xgreat-grandson Frederick Madison Roberts, state politician in California; Eston Hemings Jefferson - great-grandson John Wayles Jefferson, colonel in Civil War and wealthy cotton broker; 2xgreat-grandson Walter Beverly Pearson, industrialist; John Weeks Jefferson, descendant whose DNA matched that of Jefferson male line in 1998 test
- From the family line of daughter Mary Hemings
- James Monroe Trotter
- William Monroe Trotter
- ^ John Wayles Paternity
- ^ Betty Hemings - Monticello Explorer
- ^ a b c d e 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
- ^ "Memoirs of Madison Hemings", Jefferson, PBS Frontline
- ^ "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.
- ^ a b Bear, James A, The Hemings Family of Monticello, Ivy Press, Virginia, 1980, pp. 3-6
- ^ [ "Nance Hemings"], Plantation and Slavery, Monticello
- ^ Lucia Stanton, Free Some Day: The African-American Families at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2003
- ^ "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."
- ^ Philip D. Morgan (1999). "Interracial Sex In the Chesapeake and the British Atlantic World c.1700-1820". In Jan Lewis, Peter S. Onuf. Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: history, memory, and civic culture. University of Virginia Press. ISBN 978-0-8139-1919-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=jaoC2BtS4OIC&pg=PA52&lpg=PA52&dq=Philip+D.+Morgan&source=bl&ots=3IBM322VaS&sig=ukr6SZY7w6_z1qC0WRJBwvU15Fs&hl=en&ei=6E42S8WdHYa7lAfVm82XBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CB0Q6AEwBzge#v=onepage&q=Philip%20D.%20Morgan&f=false.
- ^ 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
- ^ "Critta Hemings Bowles", Plantation and Slavery, Monticello, accessed 21 March 2011
- ^ Jefferson's Blood, PBS Frontline, 2000, accessed 10 March 2012
- ^ Saraceni, Jessica E. "The Matriarch of Mulberry Row", Archeology Magazine, 1997
- ^ 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. ISBN 0-8139-1698-4.
- Lucia Stanton, Preface by David Brion Davis, Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello, Monticello Monograph Series, Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2000
- Monticello Explorer: Elizabeth Hemings
- 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
- Digital Archeological Archive of Comparative Slavery
- 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 edition]. Thomas Jefferson Papers: An Electronic Archive. Boston, Mass.: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2003
- Eppington Plantation Heritage Site
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