Relationship With John Wayles
Historians have tended to accept the account that Betty Hemings and John Wayles had children together. Her last six children were multiracial. As is the case of many relationships between slaveholders and slaves, documentary evidence is slight. Betty was mentioned in John Wayles' will, which some take as an indication of a relationship. According to contemporary accounts, some of Betty's children were nearly white in appearance. Other support is found in private letters from the first decade of the 19th century, which later became public.
The slave community at Monticello was well aware of the relationship. In 1873 Betty's grandson Madison Hemings and Israel Jefferson, both former slaves at Monticello, published newspaper interviews which said Wayles was the father of Sally Hemings and several other of Betty's children.
Read more about this topic: Betty Hemings
Famous quotes containing the words relationship with and/or relationship:
“Christianity as an organized religion has not always had a harmonious relationship with the family. Unlike Judaism, it kept almost no rituals that took place in private homes. The esteem that monasticism and priestly celibacy enjoyed implied a denigration of marriage and parenthood.”
—Beatrice Gottlieb, U.S. historian. The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age, ch. 12, Oxford University Press (1993)
“Whatever may be our just grievances in the southern states, it is fitting that we acknowledge that, considering their poverty and past relationship to the Negro race, they have done remarkably well for the cause of education among us. That the whole South should commit itself to the principle that the colored people have a right to be educated is an immense acquisition to the cause of popular education.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)