The Hemingses of Monticello

American author and historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s non-fiction book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) tells the history of four generations of the Hemings slave family who were eventually owned by President Thomas Jefferson until his death in 1826. The year after its publication, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for History, making Gordon-Reed the first African-American to win this award.

The most famous member of the Hemings family is undoubtedly Sally Hemings. Born Sarah Hemings around 1773, there is a near-complete historical consensus that Sally and Thomas Jefferson were engaged in a long-term relationship—inasmuch as an extended period of regular sexual congress between a master and his slave could be termed a "relationship"—and that Jefferson was the father of her five children. However, unlike most scholarship on the slaves of Monticello, Gordon-Reed's book is about much more than just Sally.

Gordon-Reed unearths records of the Hemings family going back to Sally's mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings. Betty was born in 1735 to the white "captain of an English trading vessel" and a "full-blooded African woman" believed to be named Parthenia. "Hemings," records state, is the last name of her father, the English captain. The records are less clear as to Betty's birthplace, but many sources suggest it was Williamsburg, Virginia. At some point early in her life before 1746, Betty became the property of Francis Eppes IV, owner of the Bermuda Hundred plantation in the colony of Virginia. When the planter and slave trader John Wayles married Eppes’s daughter, Martha Eppes, Betty became Wayles's property.



Just two years later, Martha passed away due to complications related to childbirth. Wayles remarried Tabitha "Mary" Cocke, but she too passed away sometime between 1756 and 1759. Wayles's third wife, Elizabeth Lomax Skelton, died in 1761. After Elizabeth Lomax's death, Wayles is reported to have taken Betty as his mistress. With Betty, who already had four other children, Wayles fathered six additional children: Robert, James, Critta, Thenna, Peter, and the famous Sally. According to Virginia's laws, all of these children would be kept in slavery. Although Sally and her siblings were three-quarters European and "very fair-skinned," the laws in Virginia dictated that ancestry aside, the slave status of a child was dictated entirely by the slave status of the mother. This principle was known as partus sequitur ventrem, or  "that which is brought forth follows the womb" in Latin.

In describing the relations between Wayles and Betty, Madison Hemings, one of Sally and Jefferson's sons, said that Betty "was taken by the widower Wayles as his concubine."

In 1773, the approximate year of Sally's birth, John Wayles died. According to his will, his eldest daughter, Martha, who was married to Thomas Jefferson, inherited the 135 slaves belonging to his estate. The mixed-race Wayles-Hemings children were all sent to Jefferson's primary plantation Monticello. There, they were trained not to work in the fields but to be domestic servants and artisans, which placed them near the top of the social slave hierarchy.



In 1784, two years after his wife, Martha's death, Jefferson relocated to Paris where he served as the American envoy to France. Later that year, Sally also moved to France as a companion and servant to Jefferson's nine-year-old daughter, Polly (Sally would have been around eleven at the time). Sally was actually paid a very small wage for her work in Paris: $2 a month, which was much less than the $8-$12 a month received by Jefferson's French-born servants. By 1789, around the time Sally was set to return to America, slavery had been abolished in France and, therefore, she could have petitioned for her freedom. Nevertheless, Sally decided to return to Virginia with Jefferson, even though it meant she would remain a slave.

In the years following her return to Monticello, Sally had five children who survived past infancy, all of whom are considered by historians to be the sons and daughters of Thomas Jefferson: Harriet Hemings, Beverly Hemings, a second daughter named Harriet (the first died at the age of two), Madison Hemings, and Eston Hemings. Though the children were all seven-eighths European ancestry, again according to Virginia law, they were all slaves. Jefferson aided Harriet in "escaping" to Washington, D.C. where she and her older brother Beverley both married into white families, assimilating into white society, even though they were both still legally slaves. Madison and Eston, meanwhile, were legally freed by Jefferson in his will following his death in 1826. They chose to stay in the South with their mother Sally, also now freed, at a home in Charlottesville, Virginia. Only after her death did they move to a free state, both settling in Chillicothe, Ohio.

The Hemingses of Monticello is a fascinating and well-researched historical record of one of the most famous enslaved families in American history.