Harriet Hemings

He saw that she was put in a stage coach and given $50 for her journey. Her brother Madison Hemings later said she had gone to Washington, DC to join their older brother Beverley Hemings, who had similarly left Monticello earlier that year. Both entered into white society and married white partners of good circumstances. Seven-eighths European in ancestry, all the Hemings children were legally white under contemporary Virginia law, although they were enslaved. Jefferson freed the two youngest brothers in his will of 1826, so they were legally free.

Beverly and Harriet stayed in touch with their brother Madison Hemings for some time, and then Harriet stopped writing. According to his 1873 account, both siblings had children.

In 1773 Jefferson and his wife Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson had inherited Sally Hemings, her mother Betty Hemings and ten siblings from the estate of her father John Wayles, along with more than 100 other slaves. The widower Wayles had had a 12-year relationship with Betty Hemings and six mixed-race children with her. They were three-quarters European and Sally was the youngest. They were half siblings to Jefferson's wife. As the historians Philip D. Morgan and Joshua D. Rothman have written, there were numerous interracial relationships in the Wayles-Hemings-Jefferson families, Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern. Read Less