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Thomas Jefferson James Madison Biography & Facts

Madison Hemings (January 19, 1805 – November 28, 1877) was the son of the mixed-race enslaved woman Sally Hemings and, according to most Jefferson scholars, her enslaver, President Thomas Jefferson. He was the third of her four children to survive to adulthood. Born into slavery, according to partus sequitur ventrem, Hemings grew up on Jefferson's Monticello plantation, where his mother was also enslaved. After some light duties as a young boy, Hemings became a carpenter and fine woodwork apprentice at around age 14 and worked in the joiner's shop until he was about 21. He learned to play the violin and was able to earn money by growing cabbages. Jefferson died in 1826, after which Sally Hemings was "given her time" by Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph. The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children is the subject of the Jefferson–Hemings controversy. At the age of 68, Hemings claimed the connection in an 1873 Ohio newspaper interview, titled, "Life Among the Lowly," which attracted national and international attention. Following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, and a 1998 DNA study (completed in 1999 and published as a report in 2000) that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Sally Hemings' youngest son, Eston Hemings, the Monticello Foundation asserted that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely her other five children as well. After Hemings and his younger brother Eston were freed, they each worked and married free women of color; they lived with their families and mother Sally in Charlottesville until her death in 1835. Both brothers moved with their young families to Chillicothe, Ohio to live in a free state. Hemings and his wife Mary lived there the remainder of their lives; he worked as a farmer and highly skilled carpenter. Among their ten children were two sons who served the Union Army in the Civil War: one in the United States Colored Troops and one who enlisted as a white man in the regular army. Among Madison and Mary Hemings' grandchildren was Frederick Madison Roberts, the first African American elected to office on the West Coast. He served in the California legislature for nearly two decades. In 2010, their descendant Shay Banks-Young, who identifies as African American, together with one Wayles and one Hemings descendant, who each identify as European American, received the international "Search for Common Ground" award for work among the Jefferson descendants and the public to bridge gaps and heal "the legacy of slavery." They founded "The Monticello Community" for descendants of all the people who lived and worked there in Jefferson's lifetime. Slavery Madison Hemings was born into slavery at Monticello, where his mother Sally Hemings was a mixed-race enslaved woman inherited by Martha Wayles Skelton, the wife of Thomas Jefferson. Sally and Martha were half-sisters, both fathered by the planter John Wayles. Sally worked in the main house as a domestic servant. Jefferson's wife Martha died on September 6, 1782. While in Paris, from 1787 to 1789, Sally Hemings cared for Jefferson's daughters. She lived her teenage years as a free person in France, where there was no slavery. According to Hemings's memoir, his mother told him that his father was Thomas Jefferson, and that their relationship had started in Paris, where he was serving as a diplomat, having been appointed the Minister to France in 1784. Pregnant, she agreed to return with Jefferson to the United States based on his promise to free her children when they came of age at 21. Sally returned to Monticello and remained a domestic servant in the main house and she also became Jefferson's chambermaid. Her living quarters, located in the South Wing, adjacent to Jefferson's bedchamber, were built in 1809. Although there was no window to the outside, it likely gave her and her children a higher-level lifestyle than other enslaved people at Monticello. Hemings referred to Sally Hemings as "mother" and Jefferson as "father", who treated one another with respect. Hemings described Jefferson as even-tempered and "uniformly kind". He compared Jefferson's affectionate treatment of his white grandchildren to that of the Hemings children, who were not treated with affection or partiality. Henry Wiencek asserts that while Jefferson felt no emotion when he saw "eternal monotony" in the faces of black-skinned enslaved people, seeing himself in the faces of the Hemings children, who were enslaved, caused him to remain emotionally distant from his off-spring with Sally. Hemings grew up at Monticello with an older brother Beverley, older sister Harriet, and a younger brother Eston. Two or more other siblings died young. Sally and her four surviving children were listed together in Jefferson's Farm Book at Monticello in 1810. The children were fair-skinned and some bore a remarkable resemblance to Jefferson. Jefferson's grandchildren were not told that they were related to the Hemings children. Nothing about the Sally Hemings-Thomas Jefferson story makes sense unless the whiteness of the Hemings family is emphasized. "Negro blood" by itself did not make anyone a slave. It was the maternal descent rule of partus sequitur ventrem (the offspring of a slave belongs to the owner of the mother) that enslaved a person — if the maternal slave line was unbroken by legal manumission. Our canon considers two crosses with the pure white, and a third with any degree of mixture, however small, as clearing the issue of the Negro blood. But observe, that this does not reestablish freedom, which depends on the condition of the mother, the principle of the civil law, partus sequitur ventrem being adopted here. Hemings was named for Jefferson's close friend, James Madison. According to Hemings, Dolley Madison requested the honor of his being named after her husband, who was afterwards President of the United States. As a young child, Hemings and his siblings stayed in or near the main house, sometimes running errands. Unlike other enslaved children, they had light work, were able to stay near their mother, and knew that they would be freed upon coming of age. Hemings learned to read and write from white children and was partially self-taught. At the age of 12 or 14, Hemings was apprenticed to his uncle, Sally's brother John Hemings, to learn carpentry and fine woodworking. Beverley and Eston were also apprentices. The brothers worked in the joiner's shop at Poplar Forest and Monticello in total from 1810 to 1826. By 1824, Jefferson gave Hemings and his younger brother a patch of land to grow vegetables. At harvest, the boys were paid for 100 heads of cabbage. All three of the Hemings brothers learned to play the violin, the instrument associated with Jefferson. As an adult, Eston Hemings made a living as a musician. Their sister, Harriet, learned to weave. Hemings stated that Beverley and Harriet moved to Washington D.... Discover the Thomas Jefferson James Madison popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Thomas Jefferson James Madison books.