Basic Information
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name | Beverly Hemings |
| Born | 1798 |
| Last firmly recorded | After 1822 (left Monticello) |
| Status at birth | Enslaved at Monticello, Virginia |
| Mother | Sally Hemings |
| Father (as family testimony records) | Thomas Jefferson (attributed by family testimony and later historical consensus) |
| Occupation / Skills | Tradesman — worked as a carpenter and assistant to the coopers |
| Known movements | Recorded at Monticello; noted as leaving (recorded as “run”/left) in 1822 and—according to family memory—went to Washington, D.C., where he passed into white society |
| Documentary notes | Mentioned in Monticello Farm Book / overseer records; remembered in Madison Hemings’s 1873 reminiscence |
| Net worth | No reliable records to establish personal net worth |
Family and the Cast (a quick table I like to imagine like program notes)
| Name | Relation to Beverly | Intro |
|---|---|---|
| Sally Hemings | Mother | Enslaved at Monticello, the central maternal figure whose children—by family memory—tied two very different American worlds together. |
| Thomas Jefferson | Father (attributed) | The man of the estate whose household records, correspondence, and later family testimony form the tension around Beverly’s story. |
| Madison Hemings | Brother | Born 1805; later gave the family account that supplies much of what we know about Beverly’s departure. |
| Harriet Hemings | Sister | A younger sibling who—like Beverly, according to family recounting—left Monticello and entered white society. |
| Eston Hemings | Brother | Born 1808; freed in Jefferson’s will and later had descendants who sometimes took the name Jefferson. |
| John Hemmings | Uncle | A master carpenter at Monticello whose craft shaped the world Beverly learned to move in. |
| Thenia Hemings | Aunt (household member) | Appears in household records as part of the extended Hemings network—an elder presence in the family circle. |
| Mary Hemings Bell | Aunt | Part of the older Hemings generation; a known relative who gives depth to the family’s rooted history. |
| Elizabeth Hemings | Grandmother/matriarch | The household matriarch from whom many of the Hemings family lines trace; a name that anchors the family map. |
A Cinematic Walk Through the Records — dates, details, and the spaces between
I like to imagine Beverly as a hand in motion—measuring wood, patting sawdust from his trousers, learning the grammar of joints and hoops. Born in 1798, he arrived into a household that was also an economy: names on ledgers, skilled labor assigned, life catalogued in numbers. Monticello’s accounting voice—Farm Books, overseer notes—kept tabs on men like Beverly, listing trades, ration days, small runs and disappearances. Those entries are clinical, but they scratch hints of plot.
By 1820 there are notes of a brief runaway episode—annotations that look like stage directions: “absent,” “returned,” “taken.” Two years later, 1822, is the louder moment: Beverly is recorded as having left Monticello. That date is the hinge. My narrator’s voice leans in here: family memory, especially Madison Hemings’s 1873 account, supplies the rest—he said Beverly “went to Washington, D.C., and passed into white society.” Those three numbers—1798, 1822, 1873—are the spine of the life we can reconstruct.
Carpentry and coopering tether Beverly to a lineage of Black artisans at Monticello: his uncle John Hemmings was a master carpenter; Beverly’s own recorded work was as a tradesman—carpenter and assistant to coopers—a job that put him in contact with tools, timber, customers, the cadence of labor that could translate across social boundaries. In a sense, his craft gave him options—literal skills that could be remade into new identities in another city.
What we do not have is a neat ledger of later life. There is no documented net worth, no verified marriage or death certificate that ties the man born in Jefferson’s shadow to a later census or grave under the exact name Beverly Hemings. That absence, and the family testimony that he “passed,” is the part of the story that reads like noir—the protagonist unseen after the curtain falls.
The family around him reads like a novel’s supporting cast: Harriet and Eston and Madison—siblings whose fates diverge and loop back in surprising ways; aunts like Thenia and Mary Hemings Bell, who ground the family across generations; Elizabeth Hemings, the matriarch whose household produced a web of skilled laborers, artisans, and people whose lives were legally property but culturally indispensable.
Numbers matter here: at least three named siblings (Madison 1805, Eston 1808, Harriet younger), one matriarchal anchor, and ledger entries that punctuate the decades with small statements: rations issued, “run” noted, manumissions promised in wills. These are the punctuation marks of constrained lives.
And then the social afterlife: Beverly’s name travels into genealogies, museum retellings, descendant memories, and online family trees—places where the story is retold with affection, conjecture, and sometimes myth. The gossip I find in the footlights—fictionalizations, speculative family trees—are the popular echo of the historical record, louder in tone than certain in fact. Yet those echoes matter; they are part of how memory becomes collective.
The Missing Pages, the Possibilities, and the Truth I’ll Read Out Loud
I won’t romanticize what records cannot supply. There’s no credible dollar figure to pin to Beverly’s name—he begins life recorded as estate property; any later prosperity goes untracked. The “passing” story—Beverly leaving for Washington and living as a white man—is family testimony given decades later; it’s vivid, plausible, and emblematic of the era’s fraught choices. It’s also a reminder that lives often slip out of official trace—especially those lived at the edges of categories the state cared to catalogue.
If you want drama, history already wrote it: a young craftsman, trained in a household of extraordinary contradictions, stepping from ledger silence into a different life. It’s as if someone closed the book at the most intriguing paragraph—leaving us to imagine the rest like a director storyboarding a deleted scene.
FAQ
Who were Beverly Hemings’s parents?
Beverly was the son of Sally Hemings, and family testimony identifies Thomas Jefferson as his father—an attribution widely accepted in the family narrative.
When was Beverly born and when did he leave Monticello?
He was born in 1798, and records plus family memory indicate he left Monticello in 1822.
What work did Beverly do at Monticello?
He was recorded as a tradesman—working as a carpenter and assisting the coopers—skills learned and practiced within the Hemings household.
Did Beverly have siblings?
Yes—among them Madison (born 1805), Harriet (younger sister), and Eston (born 1808), who each followed different paths after Monticello.
Did Beverly become wealthy or leave a will?
No reliable evidence survives to establish a personal net worth or estate for Beverly Hemings.
What does “passed into white society” mean in this context?
It refers to family testimony that Beverly left and lived publicly as a white man, a choice some mixed-race people made in that era to escape racial restrictions.
Are there verified descendants of Beverly Hemings?
There are descendants in the broader Hemings/Eston lines, but no definitive public record that ties later families to Beverly by his original name.
Why is Beverly’s story important today?
Because his life—measured in ledger lines, family memories, and absences—illuminates how skill, race, family, and survival braided together in early America.
