Madison Hemings

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Madison Hemings
Born January 18, 1805(1805-01-18)
Died November 28, 1877 (aged 72)
Nationality American
Parents Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson
Relatives Harriet Hemings, Beverly Hemings, Eston Hemings

Madison Hemings (18 January 1805 – 28 November 1877) was the son of Thomas Jefferson's slave Sally Hemings and, according to Hemings's memoir - as well as circumstantial evidence - of Thomas Jefferson himself.

Contents

[edit] Childhood

According to his 1873 memoirs[1], Madison Hemings was named for Jefferson's friend and future president James Madison at the request of Madison's wife Dolly who promised Sally Hemings a gift for the honor, though no gift was ever given. He grew up at Monticello, describing his childhood as "measurably happy" in his memoirs, living with his siblings and his mother and spared from hard labor. He described Thomas Jefferson as a kind and even-tempered man who "was uniformly kind to all about him" but "very undemonstrative", taking little or no paternal interest in Sally Hemings' children though a very loving grandfather to the children of his daughters.

At 14 years of age, Madison was apprenticed to his uncle, Sally's brother John Hemings, to learn carpentry; his younger brother Eston would join him as an apprentice two years later.

[edit] Freed in Jefferson's Will

In Thomas Jefferson's will[2] he gave immediate freedom to three slaves: John Hemings, Hemings' nephews Joseph Fossett (son of John & Sally's sister Mary) and Burwell Colbert (son of John & Sally's sister Betty), bequeathing each the tools of their trade and, for his valet Burwell, the exceptionally generous cash gift of $300. (John Hemings was a widower and evidently childless by 1826, but Colbert and Fossett were married and the fathers of large families; as Jefferson made no provision for the freedom of their wives and children, all were sold along with Monticello's other slaves at auctions held on Monticello by order of Jefferson's many creditors in 1827 and 1831.)

To John Hemings, Jefferson also bequeathed "the service of his two apprentices Madison and Eston Hemings" with instruction that the brothers each receive his freedom upon their respective 21st birthdays. In full knowledge that his estate was in debt (and thus his creditors could petition that skilled slaves, valuable assets, not be freed in his will), and in full knowledge that freed slaves could not legally remain in Virginia for more than 1 year without risking a return to slavery, Jefferson's will "humbly and earnestly" requested the legislature of Virginia not only guarantee the manumission of the five named slaves but that once freed the men receive special "permission to remain in this State, where their families and connections are". Both requests were evidently granted.

[edit] Adulthood

Twenty-one year old Madison received emancipation almost immediately after Jefferson died; with his brother Eston he rented a house in nearby Charlottesville where they eventually lived with their mother Sally. (Sally Hemings was not freed in Jefferson's will or by any other known official document, but appears to have been "given her time"- an informal emancipation probably arranged by Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha Randolph). According to Madison's memoirs, his older brother Beverly and his older sister Harriet had by this time relocated to Washington D.C. where, each being octoroon and with no obvious African ancestry in appearance, both assumed new identities as white citizens, married white spouses, and kept their paternity a secret.

In September 1831, when he was in his mid-twenties, Madison Hemings was described in a special census of the State of Virginia as being "5:7 3/8 Inches high light complexion no scars or marks perceivable", though 42 years later a journalist described him as "five feet ten inches in height, sparely made, with sandy complexion and a mild gray eye", a difference in height that implies one of these sources is wrong.[3]

In 1834 Madison wed Mary McCoy, a free woman of biracial ancestry. Sally Hemings died sometime in 1835, and the following year Madison and Mary and their infant daughter Sarah left Charlottesville for Pike County, Ohio, probably to join his brother Eston who with his own family already resided there (though Eston would eventually relocate to Wisconsin). Surviving records in Pike County state that he purchased 25 acres for $150 on July 22, 1856, sold the same area for $250 on December 30, 1859, and purchased 66 acres for $10 per acre on September 25, 1865.[4]

[edit] Children

Madison and Mary Hemings were the parents of 11 children. According to his memoirs their daughter Sarah (named for his mother) and an unnamed son who died in infancy were born in Virginia; nine more children were born in Ohio. His three Ohio born sons were Thomas Eston (named for Madison's brother and his alleged father), William Beverly (named for Beverly Hemings) and James Madison (named for his father); his six younger daughters were Julia (who died before 1870), Harriet (named for his sister), Mary Ann, Catherine, Jane and Ellen Wayles (named for a legitimate granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson). In his memoirs Madison stated that his son Thomas Eston Hemings died in Andersonville prison during the Civil War. Muster rolls show that his son William Beverly served in the 73rd Ohio Voluntary Infantry and was listed as white.

[edit] Jefferson paternity

Madison Hemings lived a quiet life as a modestly successful free black farmer and carpenter, and, other than to family and intimate friends, apparently did not disclose his belief that Thomas Jefferson was his father until his later years. The first public mentioning of his paternal claims appeared in the Eighth Decennial Census of the United States in 1870: on lines horizontal to Madison's name and under columns intended for facts about parentage, education, and recent marriage and childbirth, the census taker, William Weaver, wrote the sentence "This man is the son of Thomas Jefferson" with no editorializing as to whether Weaver believed this claim or not.[5]

The census listed him as living with his wife, his 14-year-old youngest daughter, his 35 year old widowed eldest daughter Sarah, and Sarah's two grandchildren, possessed of real estate valued at $1,500 and a personal estate valued at $300. The entire family's race described as Mulatto.

In 1873 Hemings discussed his paternity in greater detail and far more publicly when he granted an interview to journalist Samuel F. Wetmore for publication in a series entitled Life Among the Lowly (the name the same as the subtitle of Uncle Tom's Cabin), which appeared on March 13, 1873, in Wetmore's newspaper, The Pike County Republican. The article, entitled Memoirs of Madison Hemings, appearing 8 years after the Civil War, a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 70 years after James Callender's allegations of the Hemings-Jefferson affair, met with immediate and widespread interest and was soon reprinted in newspapers around the nation and gained international attention. It is the most detailed primary source of information for those who believe that Hemings and Jefferson engaged in a long term sexual relationship that resulted in the births of children.

The article also met with much condemnation and controversy as well as denials of its authenticity that began immediately and continue to this day. Among other criticisms that render the article suspect by its detractors are the fact that the interview appeared second-hand (i.e. Madison Hemings himself never publicly addressed the issue), that the interviewer Wetmore was a highly partisan anti-South Republican, and that even if true Hemings was not in a position to know about the details of his parents' relationship before his birth. In response to the immediate denials of the article (particularly those from Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, who stated that Sally Hemings' children were fathered by Thomas Jefferson's nephews, the sons of his sister Martha Jefferson Carr), Wetmore also interviewed Isaac Jefferson, an elderly surviving slave from Monticello who confirmed in an interview that the paternity of Sally Hemings' children was quite well known at Monticello.

Madison Hemings did not profit financially from his memoirs. Following the death of his wife in 1876 and his own death from tuberculosis on November 28, 1877, Hemings' debts were totalled at $963.93 while his real estate and personal goods brought only $906.59 when auctioned to satisfy the debts.

The validity of Madison Hemings' claims were more disputed than accepted by Jefferson scholars and lay historians alike for more than a century. The most detailed championing of Hemings' claims occurred in author/historian Fawn Brodie's book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. Unfortunately for the cause of Hemings' believers, Brodie's reputation as a historian in general and with her Jefferson book in particular was not spotless and at times she was demonstrably shoddy or even misleading when making an unsupported argument. She did succeed in proving, however, that Thomas Jefferson was present 9 months before the births of all of Sally Hemings' known children, a statement that had been denied by previous researchers.

The genetic testing of male-line descendants of Madison Hemings's brother Eston, undertaken in 1998 and extended later, added the most scientific evidence to the claims of Madison Hemings and the many other known descendants of his mother. In addition to proving that at least one of the descendants of Sally Hemings was fathered by a male Jefferson relative, it also disproved that they were fathered by his distaff relatives Samuel and Peter Carr as claimed by many of his legitimate descendants.

Though the tests did not conclusively prove that the Hemings descendant tested was a descendant of Thomas Jefferson himself, the genetic testing, when added to Madison Hemings' claims, the recorded oral histories of other Monticello slaves, the circumstantial evidence as noted by Brodie and other researchers, and to the lack of evidence for the presence of male-line Jefferson relatives at Monticello when Sally Hemings conceived, has led many people to accept that Thomas Jefferson's paternity of Eston Hemings was far more likely than unlikely, and that if he fathered Eston Hemings (who was conceived when Jefferson was 65 years old) then he more likely than not fathered Eston's older siblings.

This view is supported by some Jefferson biographers and scholars, some of his legitimate descendants, and even the administration of Monticello itself[6]

While many continue to hotly contest the evidence, Madison Hemings's claims as reported in 1873, at least in regard to his paternity, have progressed to the possible and, more likely, the probable.

[edit] Descendants

Madison Heming's daughter Ellen Hemings Roberts married a mortician, Andrew Jackson Roberts, with whom she moved to Los Angeles in the late 19th century. Their son, Frederick Madison Roberts, named for his grandfather Madison Hemings, was elected to the California legislature in 1918 and is believed to be the first person of African-American ancestry to have been elected to office west of the Mississippi.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Memoirs of Madison Hemings
  2. ^ Jefferson's will appears full-text at the bottom of this pageof other full-text Jeffersonian primary documents. All quotes regarding Jefferson's dispositions are taken from his will.
  3. ^ Stanton, Lucia. "Madison Hemings." Dec 1998. Monticello. 28 May 2007 <http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/appendixh.html#madison>.
  4. ^ Legal documents related to Madison Hemings as well as a transcript of his memoirs and that of Israel Jefferson's can be found in the appendices of Fawn Brodie's Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, excerpts from which can be accessed onlineat Google Books.
  5. ^ U.S. Census. Year: 1870; Census Place: Huntington, Ross, Ohio; Roll: M593_1263; Page: 699; Image: 10. Line: 13. Available through Ancestry.com and other subscription genealogical databases.
  6. ^ http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings_resource.html Monticello's statement on the Hemings controversy]

[edit] External links

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