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| Mary Ann Hemings, was born in 1843 to Mary and Madison Hemings would have been 17 years of age when Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States, married David Johnson in 1864, ... and was barely 23 years old on that horrible day when the great man was assassinated by disciples of evil.
Our interest in Mary Ann is not simply that she was grand-daughter to Thomas Jefferson but the fact that Madison gave her the same name as his distant cousin Mary Anna Randolph Custis who would marry Robert E. Lee which gave Lee control of the Arlington Estate where Thomas Findley Lee would be born in 1859. Thomas Findley Lee, born 1859 He also had a cousin Septima Ann Randolph born in 1814 at Monticello when he was nine years of age, ... and another illustration of the peculiar institution in which children, Black and White, were allowed to babysit, befriend and even love one another as Christians until the age of legal and social separation.
We urge viewers to understand the dynamics of a place that under-went change each time a new soul was born at Monticello and realize the magnitude of conflicting values that emerged following the death of Martha Jefferson Randolph in 1836. Thereafter occurred a complete takeover by the Randolph offspring that in 1860 would not only push Virginia to join the rebel states but lead them in establishing the confederacy and disasters that killed over 650,000 young men. And, when it was all over, Monticello was lost and the name of Thomas Jefferson and Martha Jefferson Randolph, his daughter, were tarnished in eyes of men like Madison Hemings, ... by claims of Randolph brothers that their mother instructed them on her death-bed to deny Hemings relationships. So far as we know, neither Mary Ann or her siblings were ever indoctrinated to hate or even dislike people on the basis of their race for a couple of reasons. Number one Madison's children were the same color as most Whites around them, and the second reason is that it was un-Christian for their kind of believers to hate. To Martha Jefferson's credit, ... there is no evidence that she ever espoused hatred against slaves at Monticello during her lifetime that ended in 1836 and perhaps prompting Madison and Eston to leave Virginia for Ohio. The facts are their Virginia would undergo a surge of anti-abolitionist sentiment during the 1840s-1850s leading up to the Civil War, ... and Martha Jefferson Randolph's sons would help lead it in developing stricter and tighter laws for free colored folks like Madison and Eston. Mary Ann no doubt had mourned the reported capture of her brother Thomas being held by the confederates but with war's end had been very remorseful in family sorrow upon learning her oldest brother had died in captivity. But, the death of Abraham Lincoln likely put a deep feeling of sadness that lingered for years, sort of like what many African-Americans felt when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
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