Madison Hemings

James Madison Hemings (January 19, 1805 – November 28, 1877) was the son of Sally Hemings, a mixed race enslaved woman, and her enslaver Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. Additional samples of Thomas Jefferson's hair were identified in the 21st century and were used to create a Jefferson DNA profile, against which those of known descendants were compared. The later DNA testing conclusively proved that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings' sons, Madison and Eston. He was the third of Sally Hemings's four children to survive to adulthood. Enslaved since birth, in accord with the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, Hemings grew up on Jefferson's Monticello plantation, where his mother was also enslaved. After some light duties as a young boy, Hemings became a carpenter and fine woodwork apprentice at around age 14 and worked in the joiner's shop until he was about 21. He learned to play the violin and was able to earn money by growing cabbages. Jefferson died in 1826 and Madison was freed in his will, after which Sally Hemings was "given her time" (an informal freedom) by Jefferson's surviving daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph. The historical question of whether Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children has been the subject of the Jefferson–Hemings controversy. At the age of 68, Hemings claimed the connection in an 1873 Ohio newspaper interview, titled, "Life Among the Lowly," which attracted national and international attention. Following renewed historical analysis in the late 20th century, and a 1998 DNA study (completed in 1999 and published as a report in 2000) that found a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Sally Hemings's youngest son, Eston Hemings, the Monticello Foundation asserted that Jefferson fathered Eston and likely her other five children as well. After Hemings and...