John Wayles Jefferson - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

John's father, Eston Hemings, was born a slave at Monticello in 1808, the youngest of Sally Hemings’ six mixed-race children, who are widely understood to have been the children of Thomas Jefferson, Hemings' master, and seven-eighths European in ancestry. Under Virginia 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 slaves took the status of the mother.

Jefferson informally and formally freed all of Sally's children. Jefferson's will freed Madison Hemings and Eston shortly after the president's death in 1826; Eston was "given his time" so that he did not have to wait until age 21. 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.

In Charlottesville, Eston married Julia Ann Isaacs, a mixed-race daughter of a wealthy Jewish merchant, David Isaacs from Germany, and Ann (Nancy) West, a free woman of color, who built an independent business in the town. Their first son John Wayles Hemings was born in Charlottesville in 1835. His first and middle name were after his maternal great-grandfather John Wayles who, as a widower, had fathered six children by his enslaved concubine Betty Hemings, of whom the youngest was Sally Hemings. Betty's children were the half-siblings of Thomas Jefferson's late wife Martha Wayles Skelton. John's sister Anna Wayles Hemings (later Jefferson) (1836–1866) was also born in Charlottesville.

After his mother died, Eston and Julia Ann Hemings moved their family to Chillicothe in the free state of Ohio, where they settled for more than 15 years. His and Julia Ann's youngest child William Beverley Hemings (1839–1908) was born there. The town had a thriving free black community and strong abolitionist activists who helped fugitive slaves along the Underground Railroad. Eston was well known as a musician and entertainer. The children were educated in the public schools. His brother Madison Hemings and his family also moved there.

In 1852, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act increased the danger to members of the African-American community as slave catchers came to Ohio, the family moved North to Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital. There Eston changed his name to Eston Hemings Jefferson to reflect his ancestry; his wife and teenage children also adopted the new surname. John was 17, Anna 16, and Beverly 13 at the time of the move. The family lived as part of the white community in Madison and for the rest of their lives. As adults, both Anna and Beverly Jefferson married white spouses; John never married. Anna died young in 1866 at the age of 30.