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Thenia Hemings Wayles, born 1767
Home Up Robert (Bob) Hemings Wayles, 1762 James Hemings Wayles, born 1765 Thenia Hemings Wayles, born 1767 Critta Hemings Wayles, born 1769 Peter Hemings Wayles, born 1770 Sarah (Sally) Hemings Wayles, born 1773

Mary Lee Brady, Ph.D.

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Anon Hemings Monroe, born abt 1786

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thenia Hemings Wayles born in 1767 was likely a beautiful young woman, trained as a house slave at Monticello, like her mother and sisters, by year 1783 when the war ended. She was subsequently exposed and/or leased to James Monroe prior to his marriage at age 27 to a New York socialite during 1786. 

As a mother of children not documented in Jefferson's farm book excepting on page 42 wherein she and son named Anon were issued linen, ... Thenia and her son were sold in 1794 by Thomas Jefferson to the future president. Research indicates that Monroe promptly had her and child sent to Missouri prior to his departure in same year as new U.S. Ambassador to France.   

James Monroe had established a plantation nearby Monticello and for years before had been a protégée and guest to Thomas Jefferson during years when he, Monroe, was a bachelor recovering from wounds suffered during the war that ended in 1783.  Monroe lived at Monticello during time that Thomas Jefferson trained him to become a lawyer.  Whether or not he fathered Thenia's son Anon we do not know and only a DNA test would affirm or deny but it is for certain that he had access and power to have her if he wanted. 

Like her mother and sisters, ... Thenia was another very attractive woman and certainly desirable by young men, slave or free like Monroe.  It is unrealistic for writers and historians to ever imagine that normally endowed young men after the age of puberty do not pursue happiness that includes sexual intercourse with available women.  The notion that a battle hardened soldier like Monroe would wait until he found and married a prominent White woman to marry and sexually engage is a fantasy by women writers or men who are not desirous of women. 

More research is needed into the lives of James Monroe, Thenia Hemings, her children and relationships with births in Missouri such as William Monroe Trotter possibly a descendent of Thenia Hemings and James Monroe.  

Chattel slavery as an institution, whether among the Romans, Semites or Anglo-Saxons such as dominated the colonies that became the new United States, was always about much more than manual labor of the enslaved, ... and often existed solely for the egotistical and especially sexual pleasures of the owners or in the case of James Monroe as lessee from Thomas Jefferson the leaser. Thenia Hemings was the cited property leased and sold, ... with both she and her children being of same color as parties to the first and second parts of the contract. 

Novelists like Alice Walker do not write about sexual slavery of the first and longest lasting kind in human history, ... albeit some people might argue that dependent children of their mothers were the most likely beginning victims of power being used to enslave others.  No, the post Revolutionary War heroes living as aristocrats in Virginia did not have guarded harems like the famed Arab potentates but they did have slave quarters where young maidens, and ones not so young, ... were frequently chosen and called to meet their earthly lords. 

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