Betty Hemings - Biography

Biography

According to the oral history of her descendants, Betty was the mulatto daughter of Susannah Epps, a full-blood African woman enslaved in Virginia and Captain John Hemings, an English captain of a trading ship. Madison Hemings in his memoir said the surname of the captain was Hemings; the family tradition was that he had tried to buy Betty when he discovered his daughter had been born. The place of her birth is uncertain (Hemings said it was Williamsburg), but by 1746, she was recorded as the property of Francis Eppes IV of the Bermuda Hundred plantation.

Betty's grandson, Madison Hemings, related the family story 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. 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 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 the couple Elizabeth/Betty and her mother as part of the wedding settlement, with the stipulation that she would always belong to Martha and her heirs. Betty was trained as a domestic servant 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, 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;
• 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. 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.)
• Nance Hemings (1761-1827+), in 1785 Jefferson gave her to his sister as a wedding gift. Ten years later he bought her back, as she was a skilled weaver and he had started a cotton factory at Monticello.

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. 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. 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).
• 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. 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. 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.