Harriet Hemings

Harriet Hemings (May 1801 – after 1822) was born into slavery at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, in the first year of his presidency. Most historians believe her father was Jefferson, who is now believed to have fathered, with his slave Sarah "Sally" Hemings, four children who survived to adulthood.

While Jefferson did not legally free Harriet, in 1822 when she was 21, he aided her "escape". He saw that she was put in a stage coach and given $50 (~$ in ) for her journey. Her brother Madison Hemings later said she had gone to Washington, D.C., to join their older brother Beverly Hemings, who had similarly left Monticello earlier that year. Both entered into white society and married white partners of good circumstances. All the Hemings children were legally slaves under Virginia law at the time, in accordance of which they inherited the status of their enslaved mother, who was three-quarters European in ancestry (making them seven-eighths European in ancestry). Jefferson freed the two youngest brothers in his will of 1826, so they were legally free.

Beverly and Harriet stayed in touch with their brother Madison Hemings for some time, and then Harriet stopped writing.

Early life and education

In 1773, Jefferson and his wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson had inherited Sally Hemings, her mother Betty Hemings and ten siblings from the estate of her father John Wayles, along with more than 100 other slaves. The widower Wayles had had a 12-year relationship with Betty Hemings and six mixed-race children with her. They were therefore half siblings to Jefferson's wife, and they were three-quarters European. Sally was the youngest. As the historians Philip D. Morgan and Joshua D. Rothman have written, there were numerous interracial relationships in the Wayles-Hemings-Jefferson families, Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern.

Harriet is believed to be the daughter of Sally Hemings and the widower Thomas Jefferson. It is widely believed that Jefferson and Hemings had a 38-year secret relationship beginning in Paris several years after the early death of his wife. Hemings was said to have a child born in 1790 after she returned from Paris, but it died as an infant. Hemings' first daughter who was recorded, was born in 1795. She was named Harriet but she died in infancy. This name was prominent among women in Jefferson's family. It was customary to name the next child of the same sex after one who had died. Harriet's surviving siblings were her older brother William Beverley, called Beverley; and younger brothers James Madison and Thomas Eston Hemings. Like the other Hemings children, Harriet had light duties as a child, which she spent mostly with her mother. At the age of 14, she was started in training to learn weaving and later worked at the cotton factory on the plantation.

In 1822, at the age of 21, Harriet left Monticello. Jefferson instructed his overseer Edmund Bacon to give her $50 to help on her journey. Although legally she had escaped and was a "fugitive", Jefferson never tried to persuade her to return or posted notice of escape. Harriet Hemings was the only female slave he "freed" in his lifetime. this was not accurate. Jefferson had no such policy and freed few slaves. There were many mixed-race slaves at Monticello, both in the larger Hemings family and other slave families. Coolidge appeared to be trying to cover up his freeing the children of Sally Hemings.

Bacon wrote,

Jefferson indirectly and directly freed all four of the Hemings children when they reached the age of 21: Beverley and Harriet were allowed to escape in 1822; the last two sons, Madison and Eston, were freed in his will of 1826. They were the only slave family from Monticello whose members all achieved freedom. He said that Harriet and Beverley both had children. According to the scholar Annette Gordon-Reed, Harriet likely chose to move to Washington in order to join her brother Beverley, who was already there. Their younger brother Madison said in his 1873 memoir that they had both moved there, where they married and had families. Madison said Harriet later married a white man in good standing in Washington City . The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF), which runs Monticello, conducted an independent historic review in 2000, as did the National Genealogical Society in 2001; both reported scholars who concluded Jefferson was likely the father of all of Hemings' children. Historian Catherine Kerrison has attempted to examine and re-evaluate Hemings' life through the limited sources available.

A vocal minority of critics, such as the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS), dispute Jefferson's paternity of Hemings's children. They have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to determine that Jefferson was the father of Hemings's children. The TJHS report suggested that Jefferson's younger brother Randolph Jefferson could have been the father because the DNA evidence only concluded a male Jefferson was the father. Dr. Foster wrote, "It is true that men of Randolph Jefferson's family could have fathered Sally Hemings' later children...We know from the historical and the DNA data that Thomas Jefferson can neither be definitely excluded nor solely implicated in the paternity of illegitimate children with his slave Sally Hemings."

Other members of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello family have (as of 2018) accepted the fact that Thomas Jefferson is the father of Sally Hemings' six children. Eston Hemmings changed his name to Jefferson in his lifetime. In 1873, Madison Hemings and Israel Gillette separately recorded reminiscences of life at Monticello. Both identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of all of Sally Hemings's children. A Philosophic Cock, engraved by James Akin, 1804 shows Jefferson as a cock and enslaved Sally(notice turban) as his hen. In 1811, Elijah Fletcher wrote "the story of Black Sal is no farce – That [Jefferson] cohabits with her and has a number of children with her is a sacred truth."

In popular culture William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, 1853, Project Gutenberg Etext, University of Vermont Wolf by the Ears (1991) by Ann Rinaldi