Betty Hemings

Elizabeth Hemings ( 1735 – 1807) was an enslaved woman of mixed ethnicity in colonial Virginia. With her enslaver, planter John Wayles, it is claimed she had six children, including Sally Hemings. These children were three-quarters white, and, following the condition of their mother, they were considered slaves from birth; they were possibly half-siblings to Wayles's daughter, Martha Jefferson. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and some 120 other enslaved people were inherited, along with 11,000 acres and £4,000 debt, as part of his estate by his daughter Martha and her husband Thomas Jefferson.

More than 75 of Betty's mixed-race children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were born into slavery. They were forced to work on Jefferson's plantation of Monticello. Many had higher status positions as chefs, butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians in the household. Jefferson gave some of Betty's enslaved descendants to his sister and daughters as wedding presents, and they lived on other Virginia plantations.

Betty's oldest daughter Mary Hemings became the common-law wife of wealthy merchant Thomas Bell, who purchased her and two of their 6 children from Jefferson in 1792 and granted them greater freedoms than other enslaved people were typically permitted. Mary was the first of several Hemingses to gain freedom before the American Civil War. Betty's daughter Sally Hemings had six children, all of whom are believed to have been fathered by Thomas Jefferson, between 1795 and 1808. Jefferson freed all four of her surviving children when they came of age; two of them by his will. His daughter Martha Randolph gave Sally "her time," an informal freedom allowing her to live with her sons during her last decade of life.

Biography According to the oral history of her descendants, Betty was the daughter of a "White captain of an English trading vessel" and "a full-blooded African" mother, making Elizabeth a mulatto. In his memoir, Madison Hemings said the captain's surname was Hemings; the family tradition was that he had tried to buy Betty when he discovered his daughter had been born. Annette Gordon-Reed speculated that Elizabeth's mother's name was Parthenia, based on the wills of Francis Eppes IV and John Wayles. The place of her birth is uncertain (Hemings said it was Williamsburg 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. ) Nance Hemings (1761 – after 1827), in 1785, Jefferson gave her to his sister as a wedding gift. Ten years later, he repurchased her, as she was a skilled weaver; he had started a cotton factory at Monticello.

Betty's enslaver, 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. 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. 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. 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, 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). She then lived with her husband at his 96-acre farm north of Charlottesville in Albemarle County. She had seven children, five of whom survived and whom Jefferson freed. 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.

John Wayles Historians have tended to accept that Betty Hemings and John Wayles had children together. Her last six children were multiracial, with three-quarters white ancestry. As is the case of many relationships between slaveholders and enslaved workers, documentary evidence is slight. Betty was mentioned in John Wayles's will, which some take as an indication of a relationship. However, the marriage contract between John Wayles and Martha Eppes stipulated that Betty, her mother, and their descendants should go to Martha Wayles and her heirs forever. According to contemporary accounts, some of Betty's children (including Sally) appeared nearly white. Other support is found in private letters from the first decade of the 19th century, which later became public.

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.

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; 2x great-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 husband of Mary's great-great-granddaughter Virginia Isaacs 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. At the reported 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.

Footnotes and citations