Random Families That Descended From Thomas Jefferson And Sally Hemings - His Slave (12 items)

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  (#12) Oprah Hosted A Reunion For Jefferson's Living Descendants

  In 1998, following the bombshell results of the DNA test linking Jefferson and Hemings, Oprah Winfrey invited the descendants to appear on her show. Lucian K. Truscott IV, a white descendant of Jefferson, recalled the moment in American Heritage. "When I walked into the studio in Chicago to do The Oprah Winfrey Show in November of 1998, I sat between Oprah and my sister Mary and looked at the audience. The first two rows were filled with more than 25 of them, my cousins."

  Truscott immediately recognized the family resemblance and invited his Hemings cousins to the Jefferson family reunion at Monticello. But for years after the show aired, the Monticello Association, which owns the graveyard where Jefferson descendants are buried, refused to bury Jefferson's Black descendants.
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  (#1) Hemings Wasn't Just Jefferson's Slave - She Was Allegedly His Wife's Half-Sister

  The Jefferson family tree has always been pretty complicated, even in the late 1700s. Thomas Jefferson married Martha Wayles in 1772. Sometime after Martha passed in 1782 after giving birth to seven children, Jefferson began a relationship with his teenage slave, Sally Hemings. In addition to being Jefferson's property, Hemings was also allegedly the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife.

  Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, supposedly had children with his Black slave, Betty Hemings. Betty later gave birth to Sally. In fact, Sally moved to Monticello (Jefferson's estate) after Martha inherited her father's property upon his death. Sally's job included watching after Jefferson's daughter Polly, who, if Wayles was Sally's father, was also Sally's niece.

  While historians are still unsure if John Wayles was Sally Hemings's father, DNA evidence has persuaded the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to conclude Jefferson and Hemings did, in fact, have children together.
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  (#8) Jefferson's Great-Grandson Became The First Black Man Elected To The California State Assembly

  When two of Jefferson's Black children chose different paths - Eston Hemings Jefferson decided to live as a white man, and Madison Hemings identified as Black - it shaped their descendants' history. Frederick Madison Roberts, the grandson of Madison Hemings and the great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson, became the first Black man elected to the California State Assembly in 1918.

  In 1873, Madison Hemings wrote about growing up at Monticello. He named Thomas Jefferson as his father and wrote that Sally Hemings "gave birth to four others, and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself), and Eston - three sons and one daughter."
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  (#5) Sally Hemings's Son Eston Changed His Last Name To Jefferson

  Born in 1808, Eston Hemings was the youngest child of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. He lived as a slave for almost 20 years until Jefferson's will freed Eston in 1827. Around 1850, Eston adopted the last name Jefferson. He moved his family, which included three children, to Wisconsin.

  Thomas Jefferson's granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge complained around the same time about freed slaves taking their former master's last name: "One very notorious villain who never had been the property of Mr. Jefferson took his name and proclaimed himself his son. He was as black as a crow, and born either during Mr. Jefferson's absence abroad, or under some other circumstances which rendered the truth of his assertion simply impossible." She added that the father of Sally Hemings's children was not Jefferson, but Samuel Carr. However, a 1998 DNA test proved Ellen wrong. 
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  (#2) Jefferson's Granddaughter Said She Didn't Believe He Would 'Rear A Race Of Half-Breeds'

  Jefferson's white children, like Martha Jefferson Randolph, played important roles in Jefferson's presidency. But they cut his Black descendants out of the family tree. Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge, Jefferson's granddaughter, argued he wouldn't have "[carried] on his low amours in the circle of his family" or "[reared] a race of half-breeds."

  Coolidge deemed Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings a "moral impossibility," arguing that Jefferson was too good of a man and a father to have a relationship with a slave, much less one so close to the family:

  I would put it to any fair mind to decide if a man so admirable in his domestic character as Mr. Jefferson, so devoted to his daughters and their children, so fond of their society, so tender, considerate, refined in his intercourse with them, so watchful over them in all respects, would be likely to rear a race of half-breeds under their eyes and carry on his low amours in the circle of his family.
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  (#7) At The Monticello Association Luncheon, Some White Descendants Wanted To Kick Out The Black Descendants

  In 1999, less than a year after DNA evidence proved Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children, some of Jefferson's white descendants attempted to kick his Black descendants out of a luncheon. It was the 86th annual Monticello Association meeting, and the white members voted on whether to let the Black descendants stay while they debated the scientific evidence. Deborah Edwards, a descendant of Madison Hemings, told The Washington Post, "In days gone by, they wore Wamsutta sheets and pillowcases. Today they wear suits. Same scene. Different days."

  One of the white descendants, Theresa Shackelford, denied the claim. "We'd like more thorough research. We're not racists. We're snobs."

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