Mary Hemings Bell (1753-after 1834) was born into
slavery
Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
, most likely in
Charles City County, Virginia
Charles City County is a county located in the U.S. commonwealth of Virginia. The county is situated southeast of Richmond and west of Jamestown. It is bounded on the south by the James River and on the east by the Chickahominy River.
The a ...
, as the oldest child of
Elizabeth Hemings, a
mixed-race
Mixed race people are people of more than one race or ethnicity. A variety of terms have been used both historically and presently for mixed race people in a variety of contexts, including ''multiethnic'', ''polyethnic'', occasionally ''bi-eth ...
slave held by
John Wayles
John Wayles (January 31, 1715 – May 28, 1773) was a colonial American planter, slave trader and lawyer in colonial Virginia. He is historically best known as the father-in-law of Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States. ...
. After the death of Wayles in 1773, Elizabeth, Mary, and her family were inherited by
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He was previously the natio ...
, the husband of
Martha Wayles Skelton, a daughter of Wayles, and all moved to
Monticello
Monticello ( ) was the primary plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26. Located just outside Charlottesville, V ...
.
While Jefferson was in France, Hemings was hired out to Thomas Bell, a wealthy white
merchant in
Charlottesville, Virginia. She became his
common-law wife
Common-law marriage, also known as non-ceremonial marriage, marriage, informal marriage, or marriage by habit and repute, is a legal framework where a couple may be considered married without having formally registered their relation as a civil ...
and they had two children together. Bell purchased her and the children from Jefferson in 1792 and informally freed them. Mary Hemings Bell was the first Hemings to gain freedom. The couple lived together all their lives. (They were prohibited from marriage by Virginia law at the time.)
In 2007 Mary Hemings Bell was recognized as a
Patriot
A patriot is a person with the quality of patriotism.
Patriot may also refer to:
Political and military groups United States
* Patriot (American Revolution), those who supported the cause of independence in the American Revolution
* Patriot m ...
of the
Daughters of the American Revolution, because she had been taken as a prisoner of war during the
American Revolution
The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revoluti ...
. By this honor, all her female descendants are eligible to join the DAR.
Early life
Mary, the daughter of Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings, was born into slavery.
Betty was the
biracial daughter of an enslaved
African woman and, an English sea captain whose surname was Hemings.
[Lucia C. Stanton, Chapter: "Elizabeth Hemings and Her Family"](_blank)
''Free Some Day: The African American Families of Monticello'', University of North Carolina Press, 2000, accessed 13 August 2011 Mary was the first of Elizabeth's twelve children.
Hemings lived at John Wayles' plantation until his son-in-law, Thomas Jefferson, received her as part of a division of Wayles' estate on January 14, 1774.
She was a "valued household servant" and seamstress.
Like her mother and sisters, she worked in the household where she took care of Martha Jefferson and her children, sewed, and cleaned. The overseer did not have control or responsibility for managing the work of the female members of the Hemings family.
Family
Mary Hemings had six children, some of whom were freed and some of whom were separated from her when they were sold.
Initial children
She initially had four children:
*Daniel Farley (1772-1837), Jefferson gave him to his sister,
[Lucia Stanton, ''Free Some Day'', p. 132]
*Molly Hemings (1777-after 1790), Jefferson gave her to his daughter
Martha Jefferson Randolph as a wedding gift,
along with seven other slaves;
*
Joseph Fossett (1780-1858), his father was believed to be William Fossett, a white craftsman at
Monticello
Monticello ( ) was the primary plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 26. Located just outside Charlottesville, V ...
.
In 1826 Jefferson freed Joseph Fossett by his will, in recognition of his valuable service as an
ironworker
An ironworker is a tradesman who works in the iron-working industry. Ironworkers assemble the structural framework in accordance with engineered drawings and install the metal support pieces for new buildings. They also repair and renovate o ...
. To settle debts of the estate, 130 Monticello slaves were sold, including Fossett's wife
Edy and their children. With the help of his mother Mary Bell and other free family members, Fossett over several years purchased the freedom of his wife and most of his children. The family moved from Virginia to the free state of Ohio about 1840.
*
Betsy Hemmings, (1783-1857) Her descendants say their family oral tradition is that Betsy was fathered by the recently widowed Thomas Jefferson, whose wife died in 1782.
[Edna Bolling Jacques, "The Hemmings Family in Buckingham County, Virginia"]
2002, Official Website, accessed 13 February 2011 The historian Lucia Stanton found documentation that her mother Mary Hemings was one of the household slaves whom Jefferson took to Williamsburg and Richmond to care for the family when he was governor, from 1779 to 1781.
[Laura B. Randolph, "THE THOMAS JEFFERSON/SALLY HEMINGS CONTROVERSY: Did Jefferson Also Father Children By Sally Hemings' Sister?"]
''Ebony'', February 1999, accessed 16 February 2011 Jefferson gave Betsy Hemmings at the age of 14, and 29 other slaves, as a wedding gift to his daughter
Mary Jefferson and her new husband
John Wayles Eppes
John Wayles Eppes (April 1772September 13, 1823) was an American lawyer and politician. He represented Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1803 to 1811 and again from 1813 to 1815. He also served in the U.S. Senate (1817–1819). ...
. Betsy lived with the Eppes family for the rest of her life. Her descendants say she was his concubine from about age 21, after he was widowed, and through his second marriage.
[ They had a daughter, Frances, and a son, Joseph, together and other children. (The names of other children were lost when a fire destroyed the plantation records.) According to her descendants, their relationship continued after he married a second time five years later, although it was not openly acknowledged.] Betsy Hemmings was buried next to Eppes in his family cemetery at the plantation and her grave is marked by a tombstone similar to his. His second wife was buried at her daughter's plantation.[
]
With Thomas Bell
During Jefferson's stay in Paris as U.S. minister to France, his overseer hired out Mary Hemings (with her two younger children) to Thomas Bell in Charlottesville. Mary Hemings became partner to Thomas Bell and they had two children:
*Robert Washington Bell and
*Sarah Jefferson Bell. Also known as Sally, in 1802 she married Jesse Scott, who was a musician who performed across Virginia with his sons. Scott also purchased Edith Fossett and two of her children with Joseph Fossett in 1827 so that they would be free to live with Joseph.
After his return and at Mary's request, Jefferson sold Mary and her two younger children to Bell in 1792. Bell informally freed the three of them that year, acknowledging the children as his.[Gordon-Reed, Hemingses of Monticello, p. 484][''Slavery at Monticello'', Lucia Stanton, p. 18] Hemings then took Bell's name.
Thomas and Mary Bell lived the remainder of their lives together and Thomas Bell became a good friend of Jefferson. Mary Hemings Bell was the first of Betty's children to gain freedom. When Thomas Bell died in 1800, he left Mary and their Bell children a sizable estate, treating them as free in his will. The property included lots on Charlottesville's Main Street. He depended on his neighbors and friends to carry out his wishes, which they did.[Annette Gordon-Reed, ''The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family'', New York: W. W. Norton & Co., p. 410] Hemings lived in a house on Main Street. Although free, Mary Hemings remained in close communication with her enslaved family at Monticello and gave gifts to her children and others. She was remembered by them many years after her death. As an elderly man, her grandson Peter Fossett recalled how when he was a child, his free grandmother Mary gave him a suit of blue nankeen cloth and a red leather hat and shoes, grand compared to the attire of children of field slaves. She finished her days in Charlottesville. Her grave site remains unknown.
Prisoner of war and patriot
In 1780, after Jefferson was elected governor of Virginia
The governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia serves as the head of government of Virginia for a four-year term. The incumbent, Glenn Youngkin, was sworn in on January 15, 2022.
Oath of office
On inauguration day, the Governor-elect takes th ...
, he moved his family to Williamsburg, then the capital of Virginia. They took along a number of slaves as servants, including Mary Hemings and Betty Brown. The following year Jefferson relocated his household to the new capital of Richmond. With the American Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War (April 19, 1775 – September 3, 1783), also known as the Revolutionary War or American War of Independence, was a major war of the American Revolution. Widely considered as the war that secured the independence of t ...
underway, when Benedict Arnold's forces raided Richmond searching (unsuccessfully) for Jefferson, they took Mary Hemings and other Jefferson slaves as prisoners of war. They were freed from the British later that year by General Washington's forces during the siege of Yorktown
The Siege of Yorktown, also known as the Battle of Yorktown, the surrender at Yorktown, or the German battle (from the presence of Germans in all three armies), beginning on September 28, 1781, and ending on October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, Virgi ...
.
In 2007, Mary Hemings was named a Patriot
A patriot is a person with the quality of patriotism.
Patriot may also refer to:
Political and military groups United States
* Patriot (American Revolution), those who supported the cause of independence in the American Revolution
* Patriot m ...
of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) by virtue of her prisoner of war
A prisoner of war (POW) is a person who is held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The earliest recorded usage of the phrase "prisoner of war" dates back to 1610.
Belligerents hold prisoners of w ...
status during the Revolutionary War. This automatically qualifies her female descendants as eligible to join the DAR. Mary Hemings was the first Monticello slave to be honored by the DAR.
Descendants
One of Mary's most notable descendants was William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter, sometimes just Monroe Trotter (April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934), was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts. An activist for African-American civil rights, he was an early opponent o ...
, who became a prominent Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
newspaper publisher
Publishing is the activity of making information, literature, music, software and other content available to the public for sale or for free. Traditionally, the term refers to the creation and distribution of printed works, such as books, newsp ...
, human rights activist, and a founder of the Niagara Movement
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a black civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. ...
, precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is a civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909 as an interracial endeavor to advance justice for African Americans by a group including W. E. ...
(NAACP). Trotter was graduated '' magna cum laude'' from Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
in 1895; in his junior year he became the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa
The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal ...
key there.[Stephen R. Fox, , ''The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter'', pp. 17-19] Trotter was a contemporary of fellow Harvard alumnus W. E. B. Du Bois. In 1896, Trotter earned a master's degree
A master's degree (from Latin ) is an academic degree awarded by universities or colleges upon completion of a course of study demonstrating mastery or a high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice. from Harvard, planning a career in international banking. But despite his outstanding credentials, racism
Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. It may also mean prejudice, discrimination, or antagonis ...
thwarted his efforts to find work in that field.
Notes
References
Sources
*Lena Anthony, "Family Ties," ''American Spirit Magazine,'' Daughters of the American Revolution, January–February 2009, p. 4
*''Memoirs of A Monticello Slave: As Dictated to Charles Campbell in the 1840s by Isaac Jefferson, one of Thomas Jefferson's Slaves,'' University of Virginia, 1951
*Stephan R. Fox, ''The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter,'' New York: Atheneum, 1970
*Annette Gordon-Reed, ''The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,'' New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008
Edna Bolling Jacques, "The Hemmings Family in Buckingham County, Virginia"
2002, Buckingham Hemmings Website
*Lucia Stanton, ''Slavery At Monticello,'' The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, Inc., 1993
*Lucia Stanton, "Monticello to Main Street: The Hemings Family and Charlottesville," ''The Magazine of Albemarle County History,'' Vol 55, 1997
*Lucia Stanton, ''Free Some Day: The African-American Families of Monticello,'' Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Monticello Monograph Series, 2000
External links
The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia
(archive)
Monticello.org Home Page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hemings, Mary
1753 births
Year of death unknown
18th-century American slaves
Hemings family
Jefferson family
People from Charlottesville, Virginia
19th-century American people
18th-century African-American women
19th-century African-American women
People from Monticello
American people of English descent