Betty Hemings

Who was Betty Hemings?

Elizabeth "Betty" Hemings was a mulatto slave, who in 1761 became the concubine of the planter John Wayles of Virginia. He had become a widower for the third time. He had six children with her over a 12-year period. After Wayles died, the Hemings family and more than 100 other slaves were inherited as part of his estate by his daughter Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson and her husband Thomas Jefferson.

Eventually more than 75 of Betty's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren were born into slavery and worked at Jefferson's plantation of Monticello. They were skilled chefs, butlers, seamstresses, weavers, carpenters, blacksmiths, gardeners, and musicians. Jefferson gave others to his sister and daughters as wedding presents, and they lived at other Virginia plantations.

Betty's oldest daughter Mary Hemings became the common-law wife of wealthy merchant Thomas Bell, who purchased her and their two children in 1792 and informally freed them. Mary was the first of several Hemingses to gain freedom before the Civil War. Betty's daughter Sally Hemings is widely believed by historians to have had six children as the concubine of Thomas Jefferson in a nearly four decades long relationship. He freed all her four surviving children when they came of age, two in his will.