John Wayles Eppes - Marriage and Family - Betsy Hemmings

Betsy Hemmings

After Mary's death in 1804, Eppes moved his household and slaves to another of his plantations called Millbrook in Buckingham County, Virginia. The slaves included Betsy Hemmings, then 21 years old, who was recorded as being the nurse of his son Francis.

According to her descendants, Betsy became a concubine to Eppes in a relationship that began when he was a widower and continued for the rest of his life, even after his second marriage in 1809. Betsy bore his son, Joseph, and a daughter, whom she named Frances. This was a name traditional in the Eppes family; as noted above, Eppes' surviving son was named Francis. The names of Betsy Hemmings' other children were lost in 1869 when the records of Millbrook burned in a fire.

As the historians Philip D. Morgan and Joshua D. Rothman have written, there were numerous interracial relationships in the Wayles-Hemings-Jefferson families, as well as in Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern. For instance, Eppes' father-in-law Thomas Jefferson had such a relationship with his slave Sally Hemings when he was a widower, as his father-in-law John Wayles had had as a widower with his slave Betty Hemings; they were the parents of Sally and five other children who were half-siblings of Jefferson's wife Martha. Each man had six children with their slaves, who were also mixed-race. The succeeding generations had increasing proportions of European ancestry, so that Jefferson's "natural" children were seven-eighths European, legally white in Virginia at that time.

Betsy Hemmings lived as a slave at Milbrook for the rest of her life, and cared for the children of Eppes' second family. The matriarch of the slave community, she was distressed when in 1828 Francis Eppes took some of her grown children with him as slaves when he moved with his young family and relations to Florida.

Betsy, also called Mam Bess, died at the age of 73 in 1857. She was buried at Millbrook plantation next to her master John Wayles Eppes in the white family cemetery, which was extremely unusual for those times. Her gravesite is marked by a substantial tombstone attesting to the Eppes family's affection and respect for her; her descendants believe its location also marks the importance of her role in the life of John W. Eppes. These are the only two tombstones still visible in the family cemetery.