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Seven-eighths white, still enslaved
Where the family began
Her family history survives in unusual detail because her son Madison Hemings wrote it down. Her grandmother, whose name is not known, was a full-blooded African who was made pregnant by her English owner, a sea captain named Hemings. Their daughter Betty Hemings was therefore the child of a white father and an African mother. Neither woman could have refused.
Betty came into the hands of a recently widowed planter who was also a slave trader and a debt collector, a figure of dread in a Virginia whose plantations were deep in debt. He kept Betty as his concubine and fathered six children on her. Sally, born in 1773, was the last.
The law and the Jeffersons
Virginia law was modeled on Roman law, which fixed a child's status by the mother's rather than the father's. Every child Betty bore therefore belonged to him, Sally included. When he died in 1773, the Hemings family passed to his only surviving legitimate child, Martha, known as Patty, who had married Thomas Jefferson in 1771. That made Sally the half sister of Jefferson's wife and, once Jefferson and Patty had daughters, their aunt.
Patty did not set the Hemingses free. She also did not break them up and sell them, as she could have. She kept the family together and put them to work in the house instead of the tobacco fields, which by the standards of the time was a mercy.
Why did Virginia pass on slavery through the mother?
Virginia made the rule law in 1662, reversing the English common-law custom that a child took the father's status. The act dealt with the case of children born to enslaved women and free English fathers. Under it, those children were enslaved regardless of who the father was. The rule is known by its Latin name, partus sequitur ventrem, and it was copied in other colonies.
Why were Virginia planters so deep in debt?
Tobacco exhausted the soil, and prices swung with the market in London. Planters bought clothing, furniture, and tools from British merchants on credit, sometimes against the next year's crop. Historians describe the resulting debts to British merchants as a standing grievance before the Revolution. Enslaved people counted as property under Virginia law, so lenders treated them as security for the loans.
How did house work differ from field work?
Field work on a tobacco plantation meant long hours of planting, hoeing, and harvesting in the heat of a Virginia summer. House servants cooked, cleaned, sewed, and attended the family, and they lived near the main house. They also worked under the constant watch of the owner's family. Enslaved house servants often held skills, such as cooking or tailoring, that made them valuable to their owners.
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