Madison Hemings - Childhood

Childhood

Madison was born into slavery at Monticello, where his mother Sally Hemings was a mixed-race slave inherited by Martha Wayles Skelton, the wife of Thomas Jefferson. (Sally and Martha were reported half sisters, both fathered by the planter John Wayles. He was said to have a "shadow family": six children with his slave, Betty Hemings.) As the historians Philip D. Morgan and Joshua D. Rothman have written, there were numerous interracial relationships in the Wayles-Hemings-Jefferson families, Albemarle County and Virginia, often with multiple generations repeating the pattern. According to his memoir, Sally Hemings told Madison that his father was Thomas Jefferson, and that their relationship had started in Paris in the late 1780s, where he was serving as a diplomat. Pregnant, she agreed to return with Jefferson to the United States based on his promise to free her children.

Madison grew up at Monticello. His surviving mixed-race siblings were an older brother Beverly and sister Harriet, and a younger brother Eston. According to his 1873 memoir, Madison was named for Jefferson's close friend and future president James Madison at the request of Madison's wife Dolley. Madison lived as a child with his siblings and mother, who were all spared from hard labor. He described Jefferson as kind but showing little or no paternal interest in the Hemings' children.

Like his older brother Beverley, at 14 years of age, Madison was apprenticed to his uncle, Sally's brother John Hemings, the most skilled artisan at Monticello, to learn carpentry and fine woodworking; his younger brother Eston joined him two years later. This gave each of them a valuable trade. All three of the Hemings brothers studied and learned to play the violin, the instrument associated with Jefferson. Beverley, the oldest, was good enough to be invited to play at dances held by the Jeffersons at Monticello. As an adult, Eston Hemings made a living as a musician and entertainer in Ohio.