After 1826, Gillette was sold to Thomas Walker Gilmer as part of the sale of 130 slaves from Monticello following Jefferson's death, when many families were broken up.
Of his service to Mr. Jefferson, he said: "For fourteen years I made the fire in his bedroom and private chamber, cleaned his office, dusted his books, run of errands and attended him about home".
He added, "Frequently, gentlemen would call upon him on business of great importance, whom I used to usher into his presence," and "sometimes I would be employed in burnishing or doing some other work in the room where they were.
In the book Friends of Liberty, Gary Nash and Graham Russell Gao Hodges describe this conversation: "Speaking openly in the presence of Israel, Jefferson's slave who waited on their tables and stood postilion on his master's carriage, Lafayette lectured Jefferson about the retired president's continued ownership of slaves and his unwillingness to speak out as a revered American leader on the subject.
Princeton when one of its two large guns the "Peacemaker" exploded during a test firing while on a ceremonial tour on the Potomac River with 400 guests aboard.
It was the unfortunate fate of another fellow slave by the name of Armistead, who was likewise obliged to be aboard ship at the time, to also perish in the explosion.
In order to avoid the Virginia law requiring freedmen to leave the state within 12 months after manumission, Gillette was purchased in his wife's name.
[3] About 1838, while still held by Gilmer, Gillette met and married Elizabeth (Farrow) Randolph, a free woman of color and widow with ten children.
At the nearby Edge Hill plantation, around 1866 he encountered the elderly Thomas Jefferson Randolph, reduced to poverty as he had lost all his property during the Civil War.
[6] In the year 1873, Hemings and Jefferson, then both established, older men, were both interviewed by the journalist Samuel F. Wetmore, who published their memoirs successively in the Pike County Republican under the feature title: "Life Among the Lowly."
This I know from my intimacy with both parties, and when Madison Hemmings declares that he is a natural son of Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and that his brothers Beverly and Eston and sister Harriet are of the same parentage, I can as conscientiously confirm his statement as any other fact which I believe from circumstances but do not positively know.Jefferson noted that Sally Hemings and her four children had been freed at the death of Thomas Jefferson, as well as others in the Hemings family.
[7] He accused Israel Jefferson of "calumny" and adding to a political attack, and denied both that his grandfather had the relationship, and that he had freed Hemings and her children.
[7] (Note: Some facts are verifiable: Randolph's mother gave Hemings her time, an informal, discreet kind of freedom that enabled her to live in Charlottesville with her two sons; Thomas Jefferson freed two of her sons by name in his will of 1826, which was public, and had allowed the other two to "escape" earlier in 1822 when they came of age, which was known by his overseer Edmund Bacon, who wrote about it in his own memoir, and was observed by some of his neighbors at the time.
[8] In his 1874 biography of Thomas Jefferson, James Parton first published the Peter Carr paternity account; it was taken up by succeeding historians through the mid-20th century.
[8] Until the late 20th century, historians generally discounted the testimony of Hemings and Israel Jefferson in favor of the denials of the president's recognized descendants.
Following additional late 20th-century historical analysis by Annette Gordon-Reed, among others, and a DNA study in 1998 that disproved the Carr claim and showed a match between the Jefferson male line and an Eston Hemings' descendant, the scholarship has changed dramatically.