The Jeffersons of Madison

JOHN WAYLES JEFFERSON OF MADISON was a man of considerable repute. After moving to the city in 1852 with his father Eston and the rest of his family, he made a name for himself, becoming the operator of a popular restaurant and the city’s oldest hotel, the American House.¹ When the Civil War began, John earned a commission as an officer of the Eighth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

At the height of the war, John stumbled across a childhood acquaintance. The two had known each other in Ohio, where Jefferson had lived for almost fifteen years until his family relocated to Madison. Rather than appreciate the serendipity of the moment, John responded to the chance encounter with apparent alarm. The officer quickly pulled the man aside and begged him not to tell anyone his secret: “that he had colored blood in his veins, which he said was not suspected by any of his command.”² Until his family had come to Madison, they had been registered as free blacks in Chillicothe, Ohio. He knew that his military career would be ruined if any of his men found out, not to mention his reputation in Madison. The acquaintance assured him he would tell nobody, and John successfully served for the remainder of the war.

Jefferson was actually harboring a much bigger secret. Not only was he a man of African descent commanding a group of white soldiers, but he and his family had also been hiding their true family history. Thomas Jefferson, the famed Founder, a man who putatively had no living sons, was Eston’s father and John’s grandfather. And the rest of the world could never know.

In the Shadow of a Founding Father

Eston Hemings was born on May 21, 1808, at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s palatial plantation home in Virginia, during the president’s second term. He was named Eston Hemings—he wouldn’t add “Jefferson” until he moved to Wisconsin—taking the last name of his mother, Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello. It is now widely believed that Eston was the youngest of four surviving children conceived by Jefferson and Hemings: after Beverly (b. 1798), Harriet (b. 1801), and Madison (b. 1805).³ Jefferson had inherited Sally and her family when he married his wife, Martha Wayles Skelton. Martha’s father, John Wayles, was also the father of Sally Hemings; Sally’s mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, was fathered by an English sea captain by the name of Hemings; her mother was a “full-blooded African” slave who belonged to Martha’s mother’s family, the Eppes. John Wayles took Betty Hemings as his mistress after the death of his third wife, and Sally was the sixth and last child of their union.⁴ Thus, Sally was one quarter black, the product of two generations of owner–slave relations. She was also half sister to Martha Jefferson, who died in 1782. Jefferson never remarried, and it is during his sojourn in Paris as an American envoy to the French government that Madison Hemings, Sally’s third child, stated that she “became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine.”⁵ Sally was described by Isaac Jefferson, a former slave at Monticello, as “mighty near white” and “very handsome, [with] long straight hair down her back.”⁶ Her beauty, which was remarked on by a few of her contemporaries, earned her the nickname “Dashing Sally.”⁷

The relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings was controversial for many years but has today been generally accepted as The timing of the births (all of which came nine months after a Jefferson visit to Monticello), contemporary anecdotal evidence, the discovery of racial bias in past studies of the topic, and—most vitally—the analysis of DNA evidence which ties Eston’s descendants to a Jefferson male, helped genealogists and historians reach the conclusion that all of Hemings’s children were fathered by Jefferson.