Enslaved Families of Monticello

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.

Members of the family eventually occupied the most important positions in Monticello’s labor force. They helped build the Monticello house, ran the household, made furniture, cooked Jefferson’s meals, cared for his children and grandchildren, attended him in his final moments, and dug his grave. Elizabeth’s daughter Sally Hemings was likely the mother of four of his children. The nine people Jefferson freed in his lifetime and will were all members of the Hemings family.

Elizabeth Hemings occupied a single-room log house on the southern slope of Monticello mountain for the last decade of her life, when she was no longer an active member of the enslaved work force. She likely spent her time raising poultry, growing vegetables, and caring for young children. Archaeology indicates that she owned more than 30 pieces of Chinese and English ceramics, probably purchased in Charlottesville.

Though Jefferson referred to them simply as Ned and Jenny, their son Israel stated in 1873 that his parents’ names were Edward and Jane Gillette. Both farm laborers, they had 12 children and lived on the Monticello home farm. Jefferson said he had “most perfect confidence” in Edward Gillette.

The Gillette children learned a variety of valuable skills, including barrel-making, shoemaking, caring for horses, and cooking. Barnaby Gillette, a cooper, made flour barrels that Jefferson sold to the tenants of his gristmill. In 1813, Jefferson offered Gillette an incentive: the price of one barrel for every 31 he made. He could thus earn more money than most other Monticello slaves, up to $40 a year. His brothers Gill, Israel, and James Gillette worked in the stable and rode postilion for Jefferson’s landau carriage.

The family employed expertise and entrepreneurship to improve their situation, selling fish, chickens, eggs, garden produce, and wooden pails to the Jefferson family. Israel Gillette remembered Jefferson’s death as “an affair of great moment and uncertainty to us slaves.” In 1827, Edward, Jane, nine of their children, and 12 grandchildren were sold.

The story of David and Isabel Hern illustrates the strength of the African American family within an institution that constantly threatened family unity. Although slave marriage was illegal in Virginia, enduring unions were the norm at Monticello. The Herns, whose marriage lasted until Isabel’s death in 1819, had 12 children. Sons Moses and James married “abroad” (off the Monticello plantation) and persuaded Jefferson to buy their wives so they could live together.

David Hern Sr. performed a multitude of tasks in his 50 years at Monticello.  He was a skilled woodworker and wheelwright. As a carpenter, he built cabins and fences on the plantation, and also worked on the Monticello house. When Jefferson constructed his mill on the south side of the Rivanna River, David Hern Sr. and other enslaved workmen blasted the greenstone with gunpowder to create a canal to feed water to the mill. Jefferson considered him one of the “best hands” to blast rock.

David Hern Jr., a wagoner, made regular solo trips to transport goods between Monticello and Washington during Jefferson’s presidency. He was able to visit his wife, Frances Gillette Hern, an apprentice cook in the White House kitchen. Other male slaves, including Elizabeth Hemings’s sons Robert and Martin, periodically traveled and worked away from Monticello. Even with this level of autonomy, family bonds led enslaved men to keep returning to Monticello.

After Jefferson’s death, David Hern and his 34 surviving children and grandchildren were sold.

Joseph Fossett was a son of Mary Hemings Bell (daughter of Elizabeth Hemings). Bell lived in Charlottesville as a free person after Jefferson sold her to her white common-law husband, though he  refused to allow Bell to purchase her oldest children, Joseph and Betsy; they remained enslaved at Monticello. Jefferson deemed Joseph Fossett a particularly efficient nail-maker and an effective house servant and had him trained as a blacksmith at age 16. As head blacksmith during Jefferson’s retirement, Joseph Fossett worked at an anvil in the blacksmith’s shop.

During Jefferson’s presidency, Fossett’s wife, Edith Hern Fossett, was taken to Washington to be trained in the art of French cuisine. Three of the Fossetts’ ten children were born in the White House. In 1806, Jefferson sent an agent to recapture  Joseph Fossett who   left Monticello without Jefferson’s permission. Jefferson failed to realize Fossett was running to his wife in Washington. When Jefferson retired, the Fossetts were made head chef and head blacksmith at Monticello. Jefferson freed Joseph Fossett in his will, one of only five men to be freed in the will. Jefferson did not free Edith Fossett or their children, and the family was separated and sold at auction by Jefferson’s heirs.

Jefferson purchased George and Ursula Granger and their sons in 1773 because Ursula Granger was a “favorite housewoman” of his wife. Ursula supervised the kitchen, smokehouse, and washhouse from 1773 through the 1790s. George Granger, Sr. was the Monticello farm foreman and, later, overseer. The Grangers’ three sons were trusted and skilled artisans and laborers.

George, Ursula, and their son George died within months of one another in 1799 and 1800. The youngest son, Isaac, using the surname Jefferson, survived into the 1840s as a free man in Petersburg, Virginia, and his recollections of life at Monticello were recorded.

• George Granger, Sr.
• Ursula Granger
• George Granger, Jr.
• Isaac Granger Jefferson
• Minerva Granger

Though most members of their family were enslaved at Jefferson’s Poplar Forest plantation, brothers James and Philip Hubbard were brought to Monticello in their early teens to work in the nailery. In later years, both  escaped from Monticello, but for different reasons.

In 1805, with money he had saved, James Hubbard purchased forged “free papers” and new clothing. He set out on foot for Washington but was apprehended outside the city, when his papers were spotted as forgeries. Like many people enslaved in Virginia,  Hubbard was denied access to education and was unable to  recognize  the forgeries were poor quality. He was returned to Monticello in chains but escaped again six years later, remaining at large for over a year. During that year Jefferson sold James Hubbard.

Philip Hubbard also left the confines of his bondage without permission, but he traveled from Poplar Forest to Monticello. His goal was to request Thomas Jefferson intervene at Poplar Forest with the overseer to allow him to live with his wife. 

It is the pursuit of freedom that sometimes brings individuals and their efforts to maintain family units into clearest focus. The Albemarle County clerk recorded John Hemmings's and Israel Gillette's height, complexion, and distinguishing marks when they registered for their free papers in 1831 and 1844. Newspaper advertisements for runaways often provide biographical as well as physical details. Eight enslaved Monticello residents were described in this way—all but one of them after being sold away from Monticello.

A prominent theme in several of the advertisements is the effort to rejoin members of a family fragmented by sale. Israel Gillette's brother James, taken to the Richmond area in 1829, was thought to have run back to Albemarle County and to be "lurking about some of the late Mr. Jefferson's farms."

Another advertisement illustrates the harsh features of the institution of slavery and tells us something we never knew: that a man who appeared alone in Jefferson's Farm Book lists actually had a family. It reveals that the father of a runaway named Phil was Phil, the Monticello carpenter and shoemaker, who, after the death of his wife, remarried Beck, who belonged to Jefferson's neighbor. As in other "abroad" marriages, Phil, Beck, and their children—the property of two different men—were doubly vulnerable to family separation. 

Beck and her children were in fact sold away from the Monticello area, while the young Phil was bought by John Watson, a merchant in the nearby town of Milton. In his effort to reclaim Phil, Watson provided a hitherto unknown family genealogy, because he suspected Phil would attempt to rejoin his mother and siblings and wanted to alert people in Fluvanna County, where Beck lived. The strategies used by enslaved people to protect their companions, whether kin or not, is apparent in Watson's assumption about the actions of Beck's fellow enslaved individuals: "I am solicitous that the overseers of Galts and their neighbors, keep a lookout, as its more than probable Galts' people may convey him [Phil] from place to place by way of secreting him."