Shadow Family: The Hemingses and the Jeffersons at Monticello

In 1737, a mixed-race girl was born to an African mother and a British ship captain
father. She was, as all enslaved children, the child of no-one: a child who did not have legally
married parents. At the age of eleven, Elizabeth Betty Hemings was sold to the family of John
Eppes, a lawyer, plantation owner, and member of one of the rising families of Virginia.1
Described as a bright mulatto more white than the average slave woman and particularly
beautiful, Elizabeth was put to work in the plantation household. Some time after Eppes second
wife died, Elizabeth was taken as his concubine. She would eventually bear six of his children
between 1761 and 1773.2 When Martha Eppes, one of John Eppes daughters, eventually married
a young man named Thomas Jefferson, she brought along with her Elizabeth and her children as
dower slaves. Ten years later, in September 1782 - a few months after the birth of her last child Martha died. Jefferson promised never to remarry. Instead, he took Elizabeths daughter Sally as
his concubine, resulting in a relationship that would endure until his death and that would
produce six children. When newlyweds Martha and Thomas Jefferson first settled down at
Monticello, Jeffersons estate, they signalled the beginning of a familial and racial legacy that
would endure for more than two hundred years. Elizabeth Betty Hemings would go on to
occupy an important role as the starting point of a long line of descendants. It is the study of
these descendants, along with the legal and societal nuances and intricacies of interracial
intimacy that come with them, that occupies the central focus of this paper.
Monticello was a complex, mixed-race community, inhabited not only by whites and darkskinned African Americans but also by a significant number of light-skinned slaves who were
related to Jefferson and Martha in some way or another. It was also a site where multiple
1 Jason Opal, The Bondage of Elizabeth Hemings; African and English Households Under Slavery, Ca.
1750, Lecture, January 19, 2015.
2 Ibid.

different models and conceptualizations of the family played out and engaged with each other in
both contrasting and compatible ways. After nearly two hundred years, a 1998 DNA study
revealed what historians and historical figures alike had been claiming for years: Thomas
Jefferson was most likely the father of Sally Hemings children. This unleashed a torrent of new
scholarly work on the subject and reinvigorated interest in the study of slavery at Monticello.
More importantly, at least for the subject of this essay, it also brought to the forefront discussions
of miscegenation, intimacy, and family in the antebellum period. In their study of slave societies,
American historians have largely been interested in the deeper structures and sociocultural
imperatives of the time. This essay preoccupies itself with more modest, but perhaps more
poignant, questions about how these factors actually played out in the families and communities
of the southern United States. It asks: at the moment Thomas Jeffersons wife died, were
Elizabeth Hemings children part of his family?
This paper aims to answer this immensely complicated and nuanced question by looking
at the various meanings of family in different social contexts, ultimately arguing that the
question can be answered in the affirmative from a variety of perspectives. It explores three
distinct conceptualizations: the rhetoric of the family within the context of the plantation
complex; Jeffersons own attitude toward and understandings of his mixed-race kin; and the
notion of family in terms of racial and ancestral identity expressed by Sally Hemings
descendants. These interacting and intertwined understandings ultimately paint a picture of a
world where family identity was a product of many things: of social ascription; of (sometimes
painful) choices; of biological relations; and of secrecy and the transgression of boundaries. They
also paint a picture of a complex reality that existed, hidden in the grey areas between racial
divides, and often in the form of interracial families. We first turn to a notion of family at its
most traditional: that of the household.
2

In 1776, Jefferson made a census of the number of souls in my family: it numbered

117, including, besides his wife and daughter, 16 free men, their wives and children, and 83
slaves.3 Throughout his life, Jefferson would continue to use the word family to describe all
those living at Monticello under his control. Like many other southern planters, Jefferson
regarded his slaves as members of this family, whom as patriarch he had responsibility to
protect and care for.4 Jefferson was indeed, in all respects, a typical slaveholder: by the time of
his father-in-laws death in 1773, he owned one of the largest slave populations in Virginia.5 The
hollow shell of his pronouncements of the plantation as a family is more than simply ironic
(Jefferson never freed most of his slaves, justifying this by saying that such actions would be like
abandoning children6): it speaks to the larger complexity of a society built on racial hierarchies
combined with tragic intimacy. Jefferson and the rest of the inhabitants of Monticello lived in a
world that was neither black nor white, yet both at the same time. For Anglo- and AfricanAmericans alike, this began from childhood: most enslaved children on large plantations were set
to work occupying the children of white masters during their early childhood.7 Jefferson himself
had a boyhood slave companion, Jupiter Evans, who he kept by his side until the job was
transferred to Robert Hemings, the eldest of Elizabeths sons, in 1774.8 Black women would also
breastfeed white children; while interracial relationships proliferated. In 1815, Jefferson noted
the surprising number of sick in our family, both in doors and out.9 Here, he drew a spatial
distinction between the white members of the plantation family those who lived in the
3 Lucia C. Stanton, Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jeffersons Monticello
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012) 4.
4 Gordon S. Wood, The Ghosts of Monticello, in Jan Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (eds), Sally Hemings &
Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (University of Virginia Press, 1999)
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Opal, Ibid.
8 Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York; London: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2009) 125.
9 Stanton, Ibid., 5.

household and the enslaved members, who lived on the grounds. Thus Jeffersons description
of the plantation household as his family is neither a misnomer nor a paradox: it is a symbol
for the confusing, often contradictory relationship between the dimensions of the legal and the
intimate.
Though Jefferson never acknowledged his slave children publicly and never made any effort to
prepare for their financial futures, emerging evidence suggests that he treated the children of
Elizabeth Hemings far differently that the other slaves on the plantation. Whether this is because
he acknowledged that they were his wifes half-siblings, identified them as more-white/less
black because of their mixed race, or something else, the clear distinctions in the roles of the
Hemingses vis--vis the rest of the slaves seem to demonstrate a recognition of shared kinship on
the part of Jefferson. In this sense, Elizabeths children and later Sallys children occupied the
role of a shadow family at Monticello, where they coexisted with both those who were both
their masters and their family members. From their arrival at Monticello as part of Marthas
estate in 1774, Robert, James, Thenia, Critta, Peter, Sally, Mary, Martin, Betsey, and Nancy
assumed the primary roles in the Monticello household.10 Robert Hemings replaced Jupiter as
Jeffersons valet and traveling attendant; Martin became the butler; and Elizabeth and her
daughters were employed in cleaning, sewing, and in personal attendance on Martha Jefferson
and her children.11 Later, Jeffersons grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph would comment: the
entire household of servants with the exception of an undercook and a carriage driver consisted
of one family connection and their wives it was a source of bitter jealousy to the other slaves,
who liked to account for it with other reasons than the true one; viz. superior intelligence,
capacity and fidelity to trusts.12 Overseer Edmund Bacon would also take note of the
Hemingses role at Monticello, commenting that the women of the household were old family
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
4

servants and great favoritesI was instructed to take no control of them.13 The Hemings family
appeared to be a caste apart: Robert and Martin were allowed a measure of mobility no other
slave had (they often hired themselves out to masters during Jeffersons absences in public
service), while Betty and her daughters were spared working during the wheat harvest, even
when every slave was drafted to bring in the crop.14 When he was away from Monticello during
his political life, Jefferson bought the Hemings sisters Irish linen, muslin and calico for their
dresses, while other enslaved women received a uniform allotment of osnaburg, the coarse
brownish linen issued to slaves all over the south and baggy stockings of woven cloth.15 In
the words of Annette Gordon-Reed, the Hemings women were not free white women, but they
were not hard-laboring black women either.16
This is by no means an assertion that Jefferson considered the Hemingses in the same
terms in which he considered his white relatives. Madison Hemings, the third of Sallys children
with Jefferson, would later tell a newspaper that Jefferson was not in the habit of showing
partiality or fatherly affection to us children, although he was affectionate to his white
grandchildren.17 Yet the way in which the offspring of miscegenation the light-skinned
Hemings family were given privileged positions at Monticello betrays the complications of
living in a household where they were genetically related both to one another and to those who
held them in bondage. All the slaved freed by Jefferson in his lifetime or in his will were
members of the Hemings family.18 Thomas Jeffersons interracial accommodations for the
Hemings family exemplify how a white-and-black world grounded in and sustained by violence
could be both complicated by and mediated by family.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 8.
15 Gordon-Reed, Ibid.,119.
16 Ibid.,120.
17 Wood, Ibid., 24.
18 Ibid.
5

While Jeffersons white descendants have often attempted to deny the Jefferson-Hemings
relationship, fashioning an image of life at Monticello designed in part to obscure its relevance,
the descendants of Hemings have built that relationship into an integral component of their
family identity. The relationship and its notoriety have been critical reference points that have
shaped and determined the course of the familys history, both for direct descendants and for
collateral branches of the family. Of note is the similarity of this process to the processes of
community building in African slave families noted by James Sweet. Sweet argues that African
slave families emerged as alienated individuals persistently sought creative ways to stave off
isolation and constitute themselves as social beings.19 The slave family that grew out of this was
flexible: a composite of ideas and understandings, determined by natal and corporate kinship,
that structured sociability, it featured expansive notions of family and community and
operated at several overlapping registers not always apparent to Europeans.20 Sweet places
particular emphasis on the role of culture and memory in the regeneration of family among
African slaves in the Americas.21 For many slave families, this took the form of celebrating and
worshiping African ancestors; for the Hemingses and their descendants, this resulted in a
mythologization of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship and of being mixed-race that would
serve the family as a critical guidepost for remembering who they were and where their family
had been. And so, in the same fashion as the many other slave families described by Sweet, the
Hemingses and their descendants were able to forge new communities of belonging. As with
other forms of African community building, Sweet notes, the ability to harness the power of
deceased ancestors conveyed power and strength that often formed the foundation for new

19 James H. Sweet, Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in the
Atlantic World, The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (April 1, 2013) 257.
20 Ibid., 258, 270, 271.
21 Ibid., 264.

idioms of kinship, both at home and in the diaspora.22 The same would prove true for the
Hemingses.
Madison Hemings was the first of the descendants to attempt to set into stone the
relationship between the Hemingses and the Jeffersons. He told part of his family story to an
interviewer in 1873, setting down valuable information about the familys origins, life at
Monticello, and the lives of one branch of the family after emancipation.23 Before then, other
family members had already engaged in a reconstruction and/or reinforcement of familial
identity by various other means. Eston, the youngest son of Sally, adopted the surname of
Jefferson upon moving to Wisconsin in 1852. By taking the name, he risked exposure, passed
for white, and sustained the memory of his ties to Jefferson.24 His children continued to preserve
their connection to Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, indicating at least a minimal identification
with the man Eston knew as his father. Just as being in between black and white was
meaningful in the Antebellum era, being mixed race remained central to the Hemings identity
into the 19th and 20th centuries. This identity was sometimes challenged, shifted or reified by
different family actors. Ellen Hemings Roberts, described in her family as looking like a white
woman, seemed to prefer her grandchildren with Caucasian features.25 On the other hand, certain
white-passing descendants continued to identify as black, even when that itself was
challenged.26 Just like the African slave families described by Sweet, the Hemings family grew to
be a larger community that shared a belief in the potency of its ancestors, as well as an emphasis
on memory and on the concept of inheritance across life and death. Faced with negations of their
identity throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the Hemings family was forced to continually
reify their connection to Thomas Jefferson, constituting and solidifying their own family in the
22 Ibid., 264.
23 Gordon-Reed, Ibid., 17.
24 Stanton, Ibid., 243.
25 Stanton, Ibid., 241.
26 Ibid.
7

process. In this way, they kept the Jefferson-Hemings family at Monticello alive for successive
generations of the family. Though they were a shadow family in 1774, over time they were
able to slowly reclaim their kinship and, in the process, their identity.
For the Hemingses, and for the countless other families produced by interracial intimacy
during the Antebellum Era, the descriptor family might not have held entirely positive
connotations. Yet it is still an important one: the Hemings and the Jeffersons were a family in a
number of different interlocking ways, ranging from the notion of family within the context of
the plantation, Jeffersons own treatment of his mixed-race kin, and the role that the HemingsJefferson relationship has played in the very identity of the familys descendants. After the DNA
ruling, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association the organization of white Jefferson
descendants was faced with the question of whether the descendants of Sally Hemings should
be admitted into the organization. When asked for comment, a member, answering in the
affirmative, said that clearly, Jefferson loved her, and love is what counts.27 If Jefferson loved
Sally and her family members, why did he not free them until after his death? Why did he
employ them as attendants to his family members? Such questions though we can only guess at
the answers - evoke the interlaced themes of race and gender, and lie at the core of discussions
about the role of the family and of social interactions in history.

Works Cited
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Reprint edition. New
York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009.
Lewis, Jan, and Peter S. Onuf. Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic
Culture. University of Virginia Press, 1999.
27 Lewis, Ibid., 9.
8

Opal, Jason. The Bondage of Elizabeth Hemings; African and English Households Under
Slavery, Ca. 1750. Lecture. January 19, 2015.
Stanton, Lucia C. Those Who Labor for My Happiness: Slavery at Thomas Jeffersons
Monticello. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
Sweet, James H. Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in
the Atlantic World. The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (April 1, 2013): 25172.
doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.70.2.0251.