Female slaves had no legal right to refuse unwanted sexual advances. Sally Hemings was the child of an enslaved woman and her owner, as were five of her siblings. At least two of her sisters bore children fathered by white men. Mixed-race children were present at Monticello, in the surrounding county, across Virginia, and throughout the United ...

James Hemings (1765-1801) was a Paris-trained Chef de Cuisine born into slavery in colonial Virginia. Serving as head chef for Thomas Jefferson for seven years, he prepared meals for America's political and societal elites at Monticello, New York City, and Philadelphia.

As many as 70 members of the Hemings family lived in slavery at Monticello over five generations. Elizabeth Hemings (1735–1807) and her children arrived at Monticello around 1774 as part of Jefferson’s inheritance from his father-in-law, John Wayles, who was likely the father of six of the children.

Elizabeth Hemings grew to womanhood in the family of John Wales, whose wife dying she (Elizabeth) was taken by the widower Wales as his concubine, by whom she had six children—three sons and three daughters, viz: Robert, James, Peter, Critty, Sally and Thena.

Nance Hemings, the third daughter of Elizabeth Hemings, worked as an enslaved weaver at Monticello. Jefferson inherited her in 1774 from his father-in-law, John Wayles . When head weaver Bartholomew Kindred came to Monticello in 1776, he supervised and trained Hemings in his craft until his departure in 1783.

Elizabeth Hemings was the matriarch of a prominent and extensive enslaved family that made up a third of the population at Monticello.

The newly excavated and restored first kitchen of Monticello reveals more about the lives of Ursula Granger, Peter Hemings, James Hemings, and other enslaved cooks and chefs who helped create early American cuisine.

2019年3月13日 · Harriet Hemings (1801-unknown) was the only surviving daughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. She grew up with her three brothers and a large extended family at Monticello. Like her mother, Hemings was enslaved by her father, and she worked in the textile workshop as a wool spinner.

In this episode of In the Course of Human Events, historians from Monticello's Getting Word African American Oral History Project share the recent rediscovery of Robert Hemmings’s signature, a revelation confirming the literacy and the agency of the man that Thomas Jefferson enslaved as his valet. As a teenage boy, Hemmings was at Jefferson's ...

In 1796, James Hemings left Monticello as a literate free man with $30. Over the next five years, he put his valuable culinary skills to work in Philadelphia, Baltimore and possibly Europe. In February 1801, Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to recruit him …