Harriet Hemings personal life
Harriet Hemings was born in May 1801 in Slavery at Monticello. She is the daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. Many people widely believe that Jefferson and Hemings had a 38-year secret relationship beginning in Paris. Their first child was born in 1790. It died as an infant. Hemings’ first daughter was born in 1795. She was named Harriet, but she died in infancy. This name was prominent among women in Jefferson’s family. It was customary to name the next child of the same sex after one who had died. Harriet’s surviving siblings were her older brother William Beverley and younger brothers James Madison and Thomas Eston Hemings. Harriet started training to learn to weave and later worked at the cotton factory on the plantation at the age of 14. In 1822, at the age of 21, Harriet left Monticello. Jefferson instructed his overseer, Edmund Bacon, to give her $50 to help on her journey. Although legally she had escaped and was a fugitive, Jefferson never tried to persuade her to return or post notice of escape. Harriet Hemings was the only female slave he freed in his lifetime. There were many mixed-race slaves at Monticello, both in the larger Hemings family and other slave families. Coolidge appeared to be trying to cover up his freeing the children of Sally Hemings.
Jefferson-Hemings controversy
Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, planter, diplomat, lawyer, architect, and philosopher. He served as the third President of the United States of America from 1801 to 1809. The Jefferson-Hemings controversy concerns the question of whether Jefferson had an intimate relationship with his mixed race slave Sally Hemings. He became the father of her six children. The controversy dates from the 1790s. A consensus began to emerge after the results of a DNA analysis in 1998. The analysis showed no match between the Carr male line, proposed for more than 150 years as the father(s), and the one Hemings descendant tested. It did show a match between the Jefferson male line and the Hemings descendant. Since 1998 and the DNA study, most historians have accepted that the widower Jefferson had a long intimate relationship with Hemings, and fathered six children with her, four of whom survived to adulthood. Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS), disputes Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children. They have concluded that there is insufficient evidence to determine that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ children. Other members of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello family have accepted the fact that Thomas Jefferson is the father of Sally Hemings’ six children. Harriet and Beverly vanished from history, but we have more information about Madison and Eston Hemings, their brothers, who married in Charlottesville and started their families there. They both moved to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio after their mother died in 1835. Thomas Jefferson freed Harriet Hemings some years before his death. She was 21 years old at that time. Harriet Hemings disappeared from history and no one ever saw her again.
