While Jefferson was in France, Hemings was hired out to Thomas Bell, a wealthy white merchant in Charlottesville, Virginia.
[1][a] Betty was the biracial daughter of an enslaved African woman and, an English sea captain whose surname was Hemings.
[2] Although free, Mary Hemings remained in close communication with her enslaved family at Monticello and gave gifts to her children and others.
[21] As an elderly man, her grandson Peter Fossett recalled how when he was a child, his free grandmother Mary gave him a suit of blue nankeen cloth and a red leather hat and shoes, grand compared to the attire of children of field slaves.
In 1780, after Jefferson was elected as the governor of Virginia during the American Revolutionary War, he moved his family to the state capitol of Williamsburg, taking along with them a number of slaves, including Hemings.
When British forces led by Benedict Arnold raided Richmond searching for Jefferson, they took Mary Hemings and other slaves owned by him as prisoners of war.
[24] One of Mary's most notable descendants was William Monroe Trotter, who became a prominent Boston newspaper publisher, human rights activist, and a founder of the Niagara Movement, precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Trotter was graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1895; in his junior year he became the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there.