The participants in the Getting Word project tell stories that show the skills, values, and powerful bonds of family that have been passed down over more than seven generations.
Stories
“They Struck Up ‘Money Musk’”
“They Struck Up ‘Money Musk’”
A Chillicothe resident remembers Eston Hemings and his band.
I wonder if the music is as good now as it used to be? I was at the great Charity Ball – as a looker on – given in this city a few weeks ago, where the music was furnished by the celebrated Barracks Band, but somehow or other it didn’t affect me at all like Heming’s used to at the balls we are speaking of. When he with his violin, Graham Bell with his clarionet and Wambaw with the bass viol cut loose, there was only one thing to do, and that was – dance. When they struck up ‘Money Musk’, or ‘Wesson’s Slaughter House,’ he was a chump indeed who could sit by and look on without clinching onto a pretty girl and joining the merry throng. And there was no chance for a mistake in the girl, either, for they were all pretty – at least they looked so then. Why is it that in the matter of looks the girls of to-day compare so unfavorable with the ones of that day? Do spectacles make the difference? Eston Hemings, the Ben Hunter of that day, was a fine looking man, very slightly colored, of large size and said to have been a natural son of Thomas Jefferson, but I never went very much on that story, although I have seen a life of Jefferson in which the name of Hemings is given as one of the household, and I have no doubt that his mother was a slave of Mr. Jefferson’s. He built, I think, and lived in the brick house on Paint street occupied a few years ago by Mr. William Stanly. His wife was a fine looking woman and either of them would have had little difficulty in passing as white people, but a nigger was a nigger in those days and that settled it. He was in demand in all the neighboring towns in the winter season, and Circleville, Lancaster, Portsmouth and Columbus frequently sought his services. When he left Chillicothe it was for the West, and I recollect hearing that one of his sons was at one time a member of the Legislature of a western state. (Angus Waddle, Chillicothe Leader, 26 Jan. 1887, Beverly Gray Collection)
Themes: Arts, Music and Culture, Ohio
“The Great Changes Which Time Brings About”
“The Great Changes Which Time Brings About”
Israel Jefferson describes his work in Ohio and his visit to Thomas Jefferson’s grandson after the Civil War.
“When I came to Cincinnati, I was employed as a waiter in a private house, at ten dollars a month for the first month. From that time on I received $20, till I went on board a steamboat, where I got higher wages still. In time, I found myself in receipt of $50 per month, regularly, and sometimes even more. I resided in Cincinnati about fourteen years, and from thence came on to the farm I am now on, in Pebble township, on Brushy Fork of Pee Pee creek. Have been here about sixteen years.
“Since my residence in Ohio I have several times visited Monticello. My last visit was in the fall of 1866. Near there I found the same Jefferson Randolph, whose service as administrator I left more than forty years ago, at Monticello. He had grown old, and was outwardly surrounded by the evidences of former ease and opulence gone to decay. He was in poverty. He had lost, he told me, $80,000 in money by joining the South in rebellion against the government. Except his real estate, the rebellion stripped him of everything, save one old, blind mule. He said that if he had taken the advice of his sister, Mrs. Cooleridge [Ellen Coolidge], gone to New York, and remained there during the war, he could have saved the bulk of his property. But he was a rebel at heart, and chose to go with his people. Consequently, he was served as others had been—he had lost all his servants and nearly all his personal property of every kind. I went back to Virginia to find the proud and haughty Randolph in poverty, at Edge Hill, within four miles of Monticello, where he was bred and born. Indeed, I then realized, more than ever before, the great changes which time brings about in the affairs and circumstances of life.” (Israel Jefferson, Pike County Republican, 25 Dec. 1873)
Themes: Civil War, Monticello, Ohio
“The First Hemings To Be Manumitted”
“The First Hemings To Be Manumitted”
Edna Jacques writes about her ancestor Mary Hemings Bell, whom she had recognized as a patriot of the DAR.
Betsy Hemmings’s mother was Mary Hemings, the oldest child of Elizabeth (Betty) Hemings, matriarch of the Hemings family, but her father was not identified. During her early years, she lived in Charlottesville with her mother and half brother Joseph at the home of Thomas Bell, a wealthy Charlottesville merchant, to whom her mother had been leased during Jefferson’s absence in Paris. During this time, Thomas Bell and Mary Hemings began a common-law relationship, resulting in two children, Robert Washington Bell and Sally Jefferson Bell.
In 1792, at Mary Hemings’s request, Thomas Jefferson sold her to Thomas Bell, an unusual action for Jefferson, considering his stated views on slave women and miscegenation: Thomas Jefferson valued breeding slave women and considered their children a contribution to profit; his position on miscegenation has been widely quoted – “The amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.” Yet Mary Hemings’s request to be sold to her acknowledged common-law-husband was granted by Thomas Jefferson. Could it have been that he and Mary Hemings had a special relationship? By complying with her request, Jefferson made a public mockery of his own words.
One condition of Mary’s sale had negative consequences for Betsy. Thomas Jefferson permitted Mary to retain only two of her four children; she kept the Bell children, whom Thomas Bell freed along with Mary. But Betsy and Joseph were returned to Monticello in bondage. In 1800, Thomas Bell died leaving Mary and the Bell children a sizable inheritance, increasing their prospects for a brighter future. Perhaps their slave sister, Betsy, also envisioned a brighter future. After all, she had seen her slave mother, now known as Mary Hemings Bell, become the first Hemings to be manumitted and an owner of property on Charlottesville’s Main Street. (Edna Jacques, “The Hemmings Family in Buckingham County, Virginia,” http://www.buckinghamhemmings.com/)
“The Last I Heard Of Them”
“The Last I Heard Of Them”
Israel Jefferson speaks of the fate of his enslaved children and describes how he gained his freedom.
“During the interval of Mr. Jefferson’s death and the sale to Mr. Gilmer, I married Mary Ann Colter, a slave, by whom I had four children—Taliola, (a daughter) Banebo, (a son) Susan and John. As they were born slaves they took the usual course of most others in the same condition in life. I do not know where they now are, if living; but the last I heard of them they were in Florida and Virginia. My wife died, and while a servant of Mr. Gilmer, I married my present wife, widow Elizabeth Randolph, who was then mother to ten children. Her maiden name was Elizabeth Farrow. Her mother was a white woman named Martha Thacker. Consequently, Elizabeth, (my present wife) was free-born. She supposes that she was born about 1793 or ‘94. Of her ten children, only two are living—Julia, her first born, and wife of Charles Barnett, who lives on an adjoining farm, and Elizabeth, wife of Henry Lewis, who reside within one mile of us.
My wife and I have lived together about thirty-five years. We came to Cincinnati, Ohio, where we were again married in conformity to the laws of this State. At the time we were first married I was in bondage; my wife was free. When my first wife died I made up my mind I would never live with another slave woman. When Governor Gilmer was elected a representative in Congress, he desired to have me go on to Washington with him. But I demurred. I did not refuse, of course, but I laid before him my objections with such earnestness that he looked me in the face with his piercing eye, as if balancing in his mind whether to be soft or severed, and said,
‘Israel, you have served me well; you are a faithful servant; now what will you give me for your freedom?’
‘I reckon I give you what you paid years ago—$500,’ I replied.
‘How much will you give to bind the bargain?’ he asked.
‘Three hundred dollars,’ was my ready answer.
‘When will you pay the remainder?’
‘In one and two years.’
And on these terms the bargain concluded and I was, for the first time, my own man, and almost free, but not quite, for it was against the laws of Virginia for a freed slave to reside in the State beyond a year and a day. Nor were the colored people not in slavery free; they were nominally so. When I came to Ohio I considered myself wholly free, and not till then.
And here let me say, that my good master, Governor Gilmer, was killed by the explosion of the gun Peacemaker, on board the Princeton, in 1842 or 1843, and had I gone to Washington with him it would have been my duty to keep very close to his person, and probably I would have been killed also, as others were.
I was bought in the name of my wife. We remained in Virginia several years on sufferance. At last we made up our minds to leave the confines of slavery and emigrate to a free State. We went to Charlottesville Court House, in Albermarle county, for my free papers. When there, the clerk, Mr. Garrett, asked me what surname I would take. I hesitated, and he suggested that it should be Jefferson, because I was born at Monticello and had been a good and faithful servant to Thomas Jefferson. Besides, he said, it would give me more dignity to be called after so eminent a man. So I consented to adopt the surname of Jefferson, and have been known by it ever since.” (Israel Jefferson, Pike County Republican, 25 Dec. 1873)
Themes: Family, Monticello, Ohio, Property, Slavery
“The Strength She Gave Him In The Battle”
“The Strength She Gave Him In The Battle”
William Monroe Trotter pays tribute to his mother, Virginia Isaacs Trotter.
Trotter’s Tribute To His Mother / VIRGINIA ISAACS TROTTER / April 25, 1842—October 16, 1919 / MOTHER /
Mother love she had for her children in all its tenderness and sternness, in all its earnestness and pleasantry, in all its ambitiousness and indulgence, in all its love and leniency, yet with hope and strong appeal for their rectitude and achievement.
As all real mothers do, she labored for them and with them, holding high the standard for private life and public attitude. Born in her [line or lines evidently left out] from her saintly mother was her devotion to God and to moral ideals, and from her father, Tucker Isaacs, brave devotion to liberty and equality without the insult of restriction because of color. Her husband held racial self-respect and assertion of rights above all else.
Thus it was she taught her son to stand against any denial of right because of race as a principle of self-respect. It was not strange she encouraged him when he entered the lists against race discrimination as only a true mother can, daily offered him cheer and confidence, and backed him for organ and organization with her earthly means. The strength she gave him in the battle never can be his as when she maintained her aid and interest until heart and mind were stilled by death itself. That her sacrifice may not have been in vain we fight on. God give us strength and success and give her bliss above.
Her son, / WM. MONROE TROTTER. October 16, 1930. (Philadelphia Tribune, 7 Apr. 1932)
Themes: Struggle for Equality
“This Is Something Very Important”
“This Is Something Very Important”
After his father’s death, Ronald Smith found an ancestry chart among his possessions.
Ronald Smith: The stories that you always get, you don’t really hear about. Now if you look at what my grandmother actually put down as Thomas C. Woodson’s father, you won’t see Thomas Jefferson. What you’ll see, you’ll see the name of Thomas Woodson as being Thomas C. Woodson’s father and his mother being a slave woman. That’s all she put down.
See but there were so many taboos. You didn’t speak about certain things. And I don’t know, she said Thomas C. Woodson had a father by the name of Thomas Woodson and a slave woman. That was it that my father put down in the 1930’s. And that was a little piece of paper that I went from in order to try and pick up some things that (unclear) true.
Dianne Swann-Wright: I guess what I’d like to do is to ask you to really think about what it was that your grandmother said to you.
RS: She didn’t say this to me. She said it to my father.
DSW: Okay, well then, tell me about that and tell me what your father said to you.
RS: Now listen. My father really never said anything to me about this stuff. The only reason why I knew, I came across this, I knew he had it and when he passed away in ‘72, I said this is something very important, we should do something about it. He had drawn it up for some reason or another for a brother who died, I didn’t give you the name, had passed away in 1944. It was Karl Franklin Smith, Jr. He had drawn this thing up in the 1930’s for some reason or the other. But Karl Franklin Jr. died in 1942 and I don’t know why he drew it up and I just happened to see the thing and I used it. So it wasn’t, it’s nothing that I ever really spoke to him about or to his mother about. So I really don’t know why he did it. I really would like to know why he would do it back then, he would have done something like that, because you didn’t talk about genealogies then, or a lot of people didn’t know, so you really didn’t know so, an d there’s a lot of other things that were in there that I wish I had known about.
Themes: Jefferson Descent