Betty Hemings

Elizabeth Hemings (c. 1735 – 1807) was a female

Betty's grandson Madison Hemings related the family tradition that Betty was born into slavery as the property of "John Wales" (meaning he owned her mother. The family said Captain Hemings plotted to kidnap his daughter, but Wayles took measures against this.)^[4] Wayles may have sold Betty to Francis Eppes and later regained ownership of her when he married Eppes' daughter Martha as his first wife, or else Betty's grandson Madison may have confused some of the chronology.

After

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;^[6] she was hired out to Thomas Bell and later purchased by him in 1792; she became his common-law wife and they had two children together.^[3] He informally freed her and their two children, and willed them his estate in Charlottesville. Jefferson kept her older children at Monticello as enslaved workers (see her page); Mary Hemmings' daughter Betty Hemmings had a common-law relationship with John Wayles Eppes after his first wife Mary Jefferson Eppes
  died as a result of childbirth.
• Martin Hemings (1755 - after 1795), who became the butler at Monticello;^[6]
• Betty Brown (1759 – after 1831). Already serving as the personal servant of
  prisoners of war.^[6] Betty's two sons were Wormley Hughes (1781–1858) and Burwell Colbert (1783 – c. 1862), who both served Jefferson as adults. Colbert served for decades as the butler and personal valet to Jefferson, who freed him by his will of 1826.^[7][8]
  )
• Nance Hemings (1761 – after 1827), in 1785, Jefferson gave her to his sister as a wedding gift.[9] Ten years later, he repurchased her, as she was a skilled weaver; he had started a cotton factory at Monticello.^[10][11]

Betty's owner, John Wayles, was widowed three times. In 1761, after the death of his third wife, Wayles and Betty began a relationship that produced six children.^[12] If that is true, they were half-siblings to his eldest 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 and Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern.^[13][14] Her children by Wayles were:

• Robert Hemings (1762–1819), who 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 (1767–1796), who was sold to James Monroe in 1794.^[15]
• Critta Hemings Bowles (1769–1850), who married Zachariah Bowles, a free man of color. Sometimes called Critty, she was a domestic slave at Monticello from 1775 until 1827,^[16] when most of Jefferson's slaves were sold following his death. Critta was purchased and freed by Francis W. Eppes, whom she had cared for as a nurse when he was young, starting in 1802. (His parents were John Wayles Eppes and Mary Jefferson Eppes, Jefferson's second daughter, who had died young).^[17] She then lived with her husband at his 96-acre farm north of Charlottesville in Albemarle County.^[16] She had a son, James, who was a carpenter at Monticello. After cruel treatment by a white overseer, Gabriel Lilly, he ran away in about 1804.^[16]
• Peter Hemings (1770 – after 1834), served as chef to Jefferson after being trained by his brother James; and
• Sally Hemings (c. 1773 – 1835), who seems to have had a relationship with Jefferson from about 1789.^[18] She had six children, four of whom survived and whom Jefferson freed.^[19] Sally 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.^[9] The Jeffersons had the Hemings mixed-race 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 Irish workman Joseph Neilson; John was freed in Jefferson's will after decades of service as a skilled carpenter; and
• Lucy Hemings (1777–1786), whose father was believed to have been a slave.

Betty Hemings had her own cabin at Monticello in the last decade of her life, from 1795 to 1807. She raised produce and sold it to the Jefferson household: cabbages, strawberries, and chickens. Her former cabin site is being investigated as an

The enslaved community at Monticello was aware of the relationship. In 1873 Betty's grandson Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson, both former enslaved workers at Monticello, published newspaper interviews which said Wayles was the father of Sally Hemings and several other of Betty's children.^[21][22]

Descendants

Betty Hemings has numerous descendants. Some of note are:

From the family line of daughter Sally Hemings

Madison Hemings - 2x great-grandson Frederick Madison Roberts, first African-American state politician in California;

Eston Hemings Jefferson - great-grandson John Wayles Jefferson, accepted as white and served as a colonel in the regular Army in the Civil War and wealthy cotton broker; 2xgreat-grandson Walter Beverly Pearson, white industrialist; John Weeks Jefferson, white descendant whose DNA matched that of the Jefferson male line in 1998 test.

From the family line of daughter Mary Hemings

James Monroe Trotter

William Monroe Trotter, activist for civil rights and abolition in Boston

Fountain Hughes was a descendant of Wormley Hughes, one of Betty's grandsons who worked for Jefferson at Monticello.^[23] At the age of 101 [disputed; probably ~92], when living in Baltimore in 1949, Fountain Hughes gave what is believed to be the last surviving recorded interview of a former enslaved person. It is available online through the World Digital Library and the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.^[24]

Footnotes and citations