Passing: Renouncing the Past
Early in 1849 Eston Hemings and his wife Julia Ann left their home in Ohio to travel to Virginia to sell all their remaining property in the town of Charlottesville. About a year later they moved with their children to Madison, Wisconsin, changing both their 
surname and their race in the process. Since racial identities could be shifted only where one was unknown, Eston Hemings and his family had to live among strangers to claim their rights as citizens. In Wisconsin he became Eston H. Jefferson. His northwestwardly course, from slavery to freedom and, finally, to whiteness and its associated privileges provided his children with choices and considerations he had never had. As part of the white community, his family gained considerable prominence. His sons (Beverly Frederick Jefferson and John Wayles Jefferson, at left and right) both served in Wisconsin units during the Civil War, one afterwards becoming a leading Madison hotelkeeper and owner of a transfer company, the other one of the wealthier citizens of Memphis, Tennessee.
Accounts of Eston Hemings's residence in Ohio in the 1840s describe him as "a remarkably fine looking colored man." Tall, well-proportioned, "very erect and dignified," he had nearly straight hair with "a tint of auburn" and a "suggestion" of freckles: "Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent, he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody's attention to him." There was one drawback, however, on whatever ambitions Eston Hemings may have had: the color of his skin. He was described as "very slightly colored" and "a light bronze color." One observer stated that, "notwithstanding all his accomplishments and deserts," there would always be "a great gulf, an impassable gulf" between Hemings and whites, "even the lowest of them." Another concluded more crudely: "But a nigger was a nigger in those days and that settled it."
Even the laws did not have the power to raise Eston Hemings in the eyes of his white neighbors. In both Virginia and Ohio, he and his brother Madison were legally white, but social practice invariably invalidated the law for those who were known in a community or who had, as one writer noted of Eston Hemings, a "visible admixture of negro blood in his veins." This description echoed a phrase that by then had statutory overtones. Efforts by light-skinned mulattoes to claim their rights to the vote or public education caused confusion in Ohio courts until general practice was codified in 1859. Then, "a distinct and visible admixture of African blood" became the legal litmus test for separating black from white. It was in these circumstances that Eston Hemings left for Wisconsin. At the same time, his brother Madison Hemings remained in Ohio, living there for forty years with his family on the black side of the color line.
Regardless of which side of the color line one inhabited, the line itself was both painful and permeable. In every generation of Sally Hemings's descendants, from her children in the first half of the nineteenth century to her great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren in the mid-twentieth century, some family members vanished into a white mist. The experiences of descendants of both Madison and Eston Hemings illustrate the benefits and costs of passing for white. None of Madison Hemings's sons married. William Beverly Hemings served in a white regiment--the 73rd Ohio--in the Civil War and died alone in a Kansas veterans hospital in 1910. His brother James Madison Hemings seems to have slipped back and forth across the color line, and may be the source of stories among his sisters' descendants of a mysterious and silent visitor who looked like a white man, with white beard and blue eyes. Several of Madison Hemings's grandsons also passed for white, divorcing themselves from their sisters who stayed on the other side of the line.
Passing was not always permanent. Intermittent passing became a strategy for securing anything from a job to a haircut. Their racial identities calibrated by the day or hour, light-skinned members of the Hemings family were white in the workplace and black at home, or they borrowed a white surname to make a hairdressing appointment in a neighboring town.
Adapted from Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, "Bonds of Memory: Identity and the Hemings Family," in Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, 1999), 161-83