James was freed upon the death of his master 1796. Hercules, a slave of George Washington, and James Hemings, owned by Thomas Jefferson, began a long connection of presidents and their African-American cooks. James Hemings was born in 1765 and legally became Jefferson's property in 1774, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Although little is known about their relationship, it is indisputable that a strong power dynamic existed between John Wayles, the slave owner, and Elizabeth–a woman he literally viewed as his property. James Hemings, who was born on Wayles’s plantation in Charles City County, Virginia, arrived at Monticello at age nine on the eve of the American Revolution. Historians assert that Callender confirmed the details he published about Jefferson and Hemings by speaking with Jefferson’s Albemarle County neighbors. The result of which was, that he had been delirious for some days prior to committing the act, and it was the general opinion that drinking too freely was the cause. The story James Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved half-brother-in-law and a Paris-trained chef, is just one of the stories from Black American food history that have been largely overlooked. Prior to James Callender’s 1802 article, which pointedly identified both Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, newspaper articles, vulgar poems, and local gossip alluded to the matter. His death was a result of suicide and there is conjecture that heavy drinking was involved, based on a letter from William Evans to Thomas Jefferson in which Evans verified for Jefferson the way James died. The report respecting James Hemings having committed an act of suicide is true. Born in 1765 into slavery, Hemings is the son of Elizabeth Hemings and the man that owned both Betty and James–John Wayles. James Hemings was born 1765. I made every inquiry at the time this melancholy circumstance took place. James Hemings became the property of Thomas Jefferson in January of 1774 when he was just nine years old. Jefferson’s father, Peter Jefferson, was born on February 29, 1707 (Old Style, or 1708, New Style), near present-day Richmond.According to Thomas Jefferson, his father’s education was “quite neglected,” but he also recalled that Peter Jefferson was “of a strong mind, sound judgment and eager after information,” and that “he read much and improved himself.” In 1802, James T. Callender published an editorial in the Richmond Recorder that claimed President Thomas Jefferson had fathered a child with Sally Hemings, one of his own slaves. He and one of his brothers were at Monticello when Jefferson served as a delegate to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and wrote the Declaration of Independence in 1776. His younger sister Sally, meanwhile, became Jefferson’s mistress after his wife died, and she bore him six children. James Hemings became the couple's cook. found: Wikipedia website, Sept. 14, 2012 (James Hemings, born in Guinea, Cumberland County, Va., in 1765 and died in Baltimore, Md., in 1801; American mixed-race slave owned and freed by Thomas Jefferson, he was an older brother of Sally Hemings) The story gained traction in the Federalist press (Jefferson was a Republican), but Jefferson ignored the allegation and never commented on it. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/198684254/james-hemings James died 1801 at 36 years of age.

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