HEMINGS FAMILY – "An act allowing certain persons of colour, emancipated by the will of Thomas Jefferson, to remain in the Commonwealth." Pp 127, in: Acts passed at a General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, begun and held at the Capitol.

Rare and evocative coda to the exploitation of the Hemings family by Thomas Jefferson. In this act, the Virginia legislature allows Sally Hemings' two brothers—John and Burwell, her two enslaved sons—Madison and Eston, and her nephew Joe Fossett to continue living in Virginia after having been emancipated in 1826. Madison Hemings recounted that Sally had negotiated for the freedom of her unborn children while still a young teenager in France as a condition of her return to the United States. Her two daughters who lived to adulthood both left Monticello in the early 1820s and are thought to have lived as whites in the North. Sally herself was never manumitted, but she was allowed to settle with her sons in Charlottesville after Jefferson's death. These five people, the portion of the Hemings family who were closest to Sally and to Thomas Jefferson, received a special exemption from the May 1806 law that required freedmen to leave the state of Virginia within one year. Any contemporary documentary evidence of the special relationship of the Hemings family to Thomas Jefferson is very rare.

Octavo (215 x 125 mm). (Title-page with dampstain, some foxing.) Early 20th century library cloth. Provenance: Association of the Bar Library, City of New York (stamps and shelf-marks).