Jefferson, John Wayles, 1835-1892

John's father, Eston Hemings, was born a slave at Monticello in 1808, the youngest of Sally Hemings' six mixed-race children. They are widely understood to have been the children of President Thomas Jefferson, Hemings' master. As they were seven-eighths European in ancestry, under Virginian law at the time they were legally white. But they were born into slavery under the slave law principle of partus sequitur ventrem, by which children of slave mothers took the status of the mother. Sally Hemings was three-quarters white and a half-sister of Jefferson's late wife, Martha Wayles Skelton.

Thomas Jefferson informally and formally freed all of Sally's four surviving children. He let the first two "escape" when they came of age; they went North to Washington, DC and passed into white society, both marrying white spouses. Jefferson's will freed Madison and Eston Hemings shortly after the president's death in 1826; Eston was "given his time" so that he did not have to wait until the age of 21 for freedom. Madison, already 21, had been freed immediately. In 1830 Eston purchased property in Charlottesville, on which he and his brother Madison built a house. Their mother Sally lived with them until her death in 1835.

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