ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 14, 1997 TAG: 9701140033
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE (AP)
SOURCE: IAN ZACK DAILY PROGRESS
MANY DESCENDANTS of Thomas Jefferson's slaves held great responsibilities and led rich lives, according to stories passed through the generations and now collected by researchers.
A fondness for horticulture runs deep in Karen Hughes White's family, a trait whose roots she can trace to an ancestor who cultivated the flora at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.
``There's a great love of gardening,'' White said. ``My dad and aunt have worked with flowers for years, and I, too, have a taste for that.''
Researchers working with White at Jefferson's mountaintop home discovered last year that her great, great, great grandfather was Wormley Hughes, identified in Jefferson's slave records as a gardener.
A pair of Monticello historians has spent the past three years tracking down and interviewing descendants of Jefferson's slaves. The oral history project, called ``Getting Word,'' is an attempt, they say, to bring into focus people and families blurred by the institution of slavery.
``It brought back to life the history that had been omitted from us,'' said White, an office associate for the Fauquier County Circuit Court and an amateur genealogist who brought a dozen members of her extended family to Monticello for a private tour in July. ``It was very rewarding.''
``Many African-Americans have been told that they can't find out about their families before slavery,'' said Dianne Swann-Wright, the project historian. ``These families feel pleased and proud that there is evidence of their ancestors' existence before 1865.''
Jefferson owned about 130 slaves at his death in 1826. He freed five in his will. Many others later were sold to pay his debts.
Swann-Wright and Lucia ``Cinder'' Stanton, Monticello's senior research historian, have conducted about 35 taped interviews with about 70 descendants of slaves in Massachusetts, California, Alabama, Ohio, and Virginia.
About two-thirds of them are descendants of Betty Hemings, a house servant and matriarch of one of the largest slave families at Monticello.
While historians are still transcribing interviews and piecing together stories and information passed through six or seven generations, it has become clear Jefferson's slaves and their children valued education, music, religion and public service, as well as family.
``From Jefferson's records we have ideas and understandings about slaves' working lives,'' Swann-Wright said. ``From the descendants and from their own words we've been able to say they were full and living people outside of Monticello, and we also are beginning to understand their values.''
According to research and information culled from interviews of descendants:
* Wormley Hughes' son, Robert, helped found and became the first pastor of the Union Run Baptist Church in Shadwell. His son became a preacher in Fauquier and Loudoun counties.
* The slave Peter Fossett, born in 1815, learned how to read while at Monticello and, after his family bought his freedom much later, became a Baptist minister in Cincinnati. His sister and husband were active in the Underground Railroad, the secret network that helped ferry slaves to freedom in the North and in Canada.
* Madison and Eston Hemings, slaves freed in Jefferson's will, moved to Chillicothe, Ohio, where Madison Hemings was a farmer and carpenter and Eston Hemings was a fiddle player. One of Madison Hemings' descendants, Frederick Madison Roberts, became California's first elected black representative in 1918.
Of course, no oral history project dealing with Jefferson's slaves could fail to address the disputed claim that Jefferson, following his wife's death, sired as many as eight children by Sally Hemings.
Although many Jefferson historians have expressed skepticism about the liaison, oral tradition among Hemings' descendants, many of whom come from completely distinct family lines, strongly supports the claim.
John Q. Taylor King, the 75-year-old chancellor and president emeritus of Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, recalled for researchers the time when he was about 6 years old and his elderly aunt Minerva in Memphis, Tenn., told him of his relationship to Jefferson.
``She took my sister and me to the family Bible, and in the beginning of the Bible was this family tree,'' said King, a retired U.S. Army general.
King said he is the great, great grandson of Thomas C. Woodson, who, according to family history, was one of the sons of Jefferson and Sally Hemings. His name does not appear in Jefferson's records.
``Frankly, I could care less being a descendant of the president of the United States in this way,'' King said. ``But I respect Sally Hemings and I respect Thomas Woodson.''
According to the Woodson family descendants, who hold regular reunions, Thomas Woodson was secretly ushered from Monticello at age 12 after rumors began spreading about a relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Angered that his father would disown him, he took the surname of the family he lived with after Monticello.
Woodson wound up in southern Ohio, 20 miles east of his brothers, Madison and Eston. All of Woodson's children became educators or ministers or both.
``We have physicians, we have lawyers, we have judges, we have teachers, we have scientists - our family members run the whole gamut of the work force,'' King said. ``I believe it's because of the emphasis that the early Woodsons put on education.''
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP Oral history project director Dianne Swann-Wrightby CNB(left) and Lucia ``Cinder'' Stanton, Monticello's senior research
historian, have studied the descendants of Thomas Jefferson's
slaves.