How do we hear when there are so many voices?

May 24, 2026, Windsor UCC

Genesis 11:1-9 (from The Message); Acts 2:1-12 (from the NRSV-UE)

Those folks in Babel thought pretty highly of themselves. They wanted to make themselves famous by building a high tower. So God messed with their plans and garbled their speech so they could no longer understand each other.

Those followers of Jesus locked away for their own safety had no pretensions of fame. But then God’s Spirit blew through the room, they went outside, and everyone from many nations speaking many different languages could all understand what Peter was saying.

 

I’d ask you to keep both of those stories in mind as you listen to an experience I had this week.

 

It began last October, when there was a letter to the editor in the Wisconsin State Journal on a Sunday morning. The headline read: “We need conversation and less confrontation.” That caught my attention. The writer was a conservative who lived in my hometown of Fitchburg. He wrote: “Sharing a cup of coffee or raising a pint is preferable to shouting at or ignoring each other.”

I wondered if I could listen to a voice and maybe understand what someone who views the world differently than I was saying. He would identify as a conservative. I tend liberal.  So we met for coffee in February and then again this past Thursday. It went pretty well. Perhaps the Holy Spirit was helping us understand each other even though at times it seemed like we were speaking different languages. 

 

So much of our era – maybe of many eras – is marked by those gaps in understanding. Sometimes we are like the people of Babel, only listening to those who speak just like us, assuming that makes us so good that we can lord it over all as if we were like God. Sometimes we are like those followers of Jesus, afraid of what might happen if we open the doors and face those we don’t think will understand us.

 

And then the Spirit blows in.

 

It’s not that the tensions go away. It’s not that we all see things the same way. It’s that we take the time and the effort to listen to one another. 

 

Think, for a moment, about the tension between the two songs we sang at the beginning of worship today.

 

We started the service today with “God Bless America,” written in its original form by Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant, in 1918 while he was in the U.S. Army during World War I. Then he updated it in 1938 in response to Hitler’s rise in Europe – the storm clouds gathering far across the sea – and Kate Smith sang it on radio and it achieved immense popularity.

In some ways, it is a song that has crossed political divisions in our country. Both Republicans and Democrats used it at their 1940 political conventions. It was used early in the Civil Rights movement and in labor rallies. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, dozens of members of Congress stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and sang it.

 

Yet some interpreted it as over-the-top. Folksinger Woodie Guthrie wrote “This Land is Your Land” as a counter to it. Antisemitic groups protested it because it was written by a Jewish immigrant. 

 

During the 1960s, more conservative groups adopted it as anthem in response to what they saw as the growth of secular liberalism and in defense of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and liberal groups said that God should bless all nations, not just America. 

 

A pastor at Trinity UCC in Chicago in 2003 famously said that God should not bless America but condemn it for its treatment of Indigenous and Black people. 

 

These things are never simple, are they? Different voices hearing things in different ways.

 

For folks who wanted an alternative, “America the Beautiful” - the other song you heard today - grew in popularity. The words were written in the late 1800s by Katharine Lee Bates while she was in a hotel looking at Pikes Peak in Colorado. It was first published in the Fourth of July 1895 edition of the church periodical, The Congregationalist – a publication put out by our ancestors in faith. There have been efforts starting in the 1930s to have it replace the “Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem, both because it is more singable and because it is less warlike and does not have verses supporting slavery. 

 

Noel Paul Stookey – the Paul in the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary and the husband of UCC minister Betty Stookey – wrote a couple of new verses to “America the Beautiful” to bring it closer to our time. As he said, the idea that “pilgrims were trodding and alabaster cities were gleaming ….is a little out of our vocabulary in terms of sharing with the people.”  

So he added these words for the second verse:

Oh, nation of the immigrant
The slave and native son
Whose loyal families labor still
That we may live as one
America, America
Renew thy founder's call
Let liberty and justice be
The right of one and all

 

Different voices hearing things in different ways. Some people want us all speaking the same language like those folks in Babel. Others are amazed that we can hear each other across our differences like that crowd at Pentecost and value that diversity of culture.

 

I think that’s where the Holy Spirit comes in. Puerto Rican theologian Zaida Maldonado Pérez calls the Holy Spirit “the wild child of the Trinity…full of possibilities and creative potential.” She calls the Spirit “the salsa beat in our daily foxtrot.”

 

It certainly must have felt that way to the followers of Jesus gathered in that room when all heaven broke loose.

 

All of a sudden, they found the courage to open the doors. The found the grace to speak of what they knew about Jesus.

But to get to Pentecost, let’s go back to a moment to that story of the people of Babel that comes from early in the Book of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. It says the people went to the land of Shinar – that’s the river valley that is part of Babylon, a land where ultimately the Jewish people were taken in exile. 

 

This story was probably told in that time of exile when the Babylonian rulers, as oppressors do, demanded conformity in language, perhaps demanding work on this tall tower from their captive people with the hope that they could reach the heavens. They – the rulers – would be like gods.

So when God garbled the workers’ speech and scattered the people, one way of reading that is God setting the people free, respecting their differences from the rulers rather than allowing their exploitation and the demand for conformity to continue. 

 

Now we are in that room on Pentecost. There is a crowd outside from many nations, speaking many languages. There is no uniformity here. 

As the Spirit energized the followers of Jesus, they went through the doors and began to speak. As crowds will do, some were amazed and some were snarky. Just after the line Carol concluded with today - “What does this mean?” - some in the crowd say, “They are filled with new wine.” And Peter replies that they are not drunk – it is only 9 in the morning and after all, they are not from Wisconsin. Well, maybe he did not say the part about Wisconsin.

 

But Peter goes on to talk about Jesus, about the difference he made in those who encountered him, about how Jesus is, in Peter’s words, “both Lord and Messiah.” And 3,000 of the people in the crowd were baptized into the way of Jesus.

 

In the public squares of today, in the social media channels, in encounters with friends and family, maybe even in congregations, it often seems hard to understand what people with viewpoints different from ours are saying. 

Yet I think there is a desire for this to get better, for us to be able to live in a world more like that first Pentecost where people could understand each other across the barriers of country and language.

 

A group called the Dignity Index released the results of a survey earlier this year. They found that while only 31 percent of Americans treat each other with dignity, 94 percent said all people deserve to be treated that way. That’s quite a gap between reality and goal. As Paul wrote to the Romans back in the earliest days of Christianity, “For I do not do the good I want to do. Instead, I keep on doing the evil I do not want to do.”

 

 But we are not powerless. We can find ways to listen and learn from people we might disagree with. We can treat them with dignity.

 

Jesus said something about that. In that Sermon on the Mount, he tells how to transform the world.  Jesus talked 
about forgiveness, 
about not judging others, 
about not deceiving ourselves, 
about treating others as we would like to be treated, 
even about loving our enemies. 

Those are the values we need to take into the public square and into our relationships with each other. 

 

That does not mean we have nothing to say about the controversial issues of the day. It simply means that even as we carry on the prophetic work of Jesus, we must do that in a way that is true to the spirit of the gospel, that respects the message of the Gospel, that embodies the principle of love.

 

A current writer, Mark Deymaz, offers a few suggestions in his new book, Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace, that might be helpful. 
Assume the best of others. 
Pause before you speak. 
Ask good questions. 
Avoid dogmatic statements. 
Acknowledge complexities. 

 

Let me take you back to my cup of coffee last Thursday with my new conservative friend. The topic moved toward crime and punishment. Personal safety is a very high value for him. I think that is a good idea as well. Why, he wondered, do liberals always want to look out for the rights of criminals instead of the rights of victims of crime?

 

We talked a bit about people in prison. I mentioned that most of them eventually will get out and need to move back into society and it is good for all of our safety if the correctional system can make that transition a better one. 

 

He remarked on a story he had just seen on television about a college graduation ceremony last Monday at Oak Hill Correctional Institution in my hometown of Fitchburg. Through a program coordinated by UW-Madison's Prison Education Initiative, 15 men earned bachelor's degrees and 8 earned associates degrees. There are similar programs now at several other prisons. 

 

My friend thought this was a wonderful idea, as did I. We found a piece of common ground.

 

So as we go on with our lives this day, this week, I invite you to think about how we as followers of Jesus can enter today’s debates in a way that the fire of the Spirit, the wind of new ideas can transform a polarized society into one where the search for truth is a shared enterprise, not a game of conquest. 

 

If we can do that, we will be acting as boldly as those apostles did when they were filled by God’s spirit in a small, locked room many years ago. 

 

If we can do that, we will be letting God work through us in our world today.

 

As the Latin words in our next hymn say, Veni Sancte Spiritus – Come, Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesse Jackson - keeping hope alive

With Rev. Jesse Jackson’s death last week and all the homegoing ceremonies starting today, lot of memories bubbled up for me. Jackson, of course, was - as they say - a complex person. Yet the voice he gave to those facing struggles and the vision he held out for this country always resonated with me.

I first encountered him in 1968 as a college student when I had two opportunities to go to his amazing Saturday Breadbasket gatherings at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Chicago. It was sort of a church service, but also community organizing with music from Ben Branch and his orchestra and choir and special guests, including farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez during my first visit there. 

And then Jackson spoke. Well, Jackson preached and ended with his signature call and response: “I am…somebody…I may be poor… but I am…somebody.” On it went to “I am…a child of God…I am…somebody.” (You can see a classic version here when he was on Sesame Street. And here’s a more typical version with a crowd.

The second time I was there as part of an inter-racial program from Friendship House. We got to meet with him for a while after the gathering. This was only a couple of months after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed in Memphis as Jackson stood below the motel balcony when the fatal shots rang out. Our conversation with him was a more subdued one than hearing Jackson speaking from the stage. He tried to convey to us the need for the work for racial justice to continue.

(Hermine Hartman was a student who started attending Saturday Breakfast at about the same time I was there. Here is a 4-minute segment of her recollections. She ends reflecting on his “Keep hope alive” chant. 

Because of those early experiences, I followed Jackson’s career. When he ran for president in 1984 and campaigned at the Wisconsin Capital, I took my then 6-year-old daughter along to see him. As he worked his way down the line to shake hands, there were these security people with big rifles that made me both question the wisdom of bringing her and drove home the daily danger with which he had to live. 

The next go-round was during his 1988 campaign, when I had a chance to interview him on his campaign bus during a stop in Madison. I was the editorial page editor at The Capital Times and I wrote our endorsement of him in that Spring’s presidential primary in Wisconsin. He came in second behind Michael Dukakis. The Cap Times this week ran an editorial recalling that moment. You can find it here.

I never encountered him in person again, but I was shaped by his clarion calls for justice and dignity and a spirit of hope in the most discouraging of times. Those encounters have been part of the reason I have continued over the years to face the racial divides in our society, to seek ways to get across them and to advocate for changes to our political, educational, economic, and social systems that continue to divide us. 

What he said to our small group in 1968 remains true today – the work for racial justice must continue, in part because we are all…somebody. And we can’t give up. We must keep hope alive.

 

Bread, Circuses and Power

Sermon at Windsor United Church of Christ, Feb. 22, 2026

Video here - https://vimeo.com/1166184495 - about 33 minutes in

 Psalm 1; Matthew 4: 1-11

Let’s start with bread. 

Who here likes bread? 
Do you have a favorite? 
Shout it out!

Mine is cinnamon raisin. It is often part of my breakfast. 

For the ancient Israelites, a form of bread called manna came down from the skies and sustained them during parts of their 40 years in the desert. And as they looked for a messiah, they envisioned someone who could feed them forever, just like God had done in their desert wanderings.

So when this devilish figure told Jesus after he had spent 40 days fasting in the wilderness to turn stones into bread - “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.” – some of the Jewish people who heard this story would have considered this as a way to find out if this strange man really was the messiah they had been waiting for.

But Jesus was not about making bread for himself. He was about making bread for the world – not really so far from that ancient Jewish idea of what a messiah might do. 

A bit later in the Gospel according to Luke, we’ll hear about how Jesus took a few loaves of bread and managed to feed a whole crowd. 

We’ll read about him breaking bread at dinner with religious leaders and tax collectors and prostitutes, finally breaking bread with his closest followers on the night before he was executed and then breaking bread again after his resurrection – and his followers recognizing him in that breaking of bread.

Jesus was showing us not just how to reject this idea of only feeding ourselves. Through his life, though his actions, he was showing us how to feed those around us – our families, our neighbors, even those in lands far away. You do that here with things like the food pantry, helping with Norski Nibbles, with Food for Kids, with Our Churches Wider Missions offerings. 

So the tempter wanted Jesus to turn stones into bread for himself. Nope – this is not about me. And bread is not enough to sustain us in any case. We need God’s word to sustain us.

OK, then, let’s try something else. How about jumping off the very top of the temple? Sure, the angels will catch you and you will wow the crowds. Just think of all the attention you will get.

It turns out that Jesus was not really about doing dramatic things to get attention. (Yes, I know, he rose from the dead, which is more than a little dramatic, but that was not quite the same.)

But both the tempter and Jesus both knew that crowds will pay attention to drama. Have you noticed that in your lives these days?

We think we can amaze people and they will admire us. In this era a battling for attention, jumping off the temple - or climbing a nearly 1,700 foot skyscraper without ropes like Alex Honnold did in Taiwan last month - is a good metaphor.

We have a term for it these days – the attention economy. The one who gets the most attention wins. Or at least makes the most money or gets the most votes or gets the most likes. 

Maybe the test for us is a little different than the one for Jesus. Maybe the test for us is to get our focus back to the things that really matter, not the latest shiny object, not the clickbait that flies by on our screens. 

Journalists Jim VanderHei (who grew up in Oshkosh) and Mike Allen wrote this on their news site Axios last week: “Your reality is formed from what you read, see, listen to and experience… The people you follow, the videos you watch, the podcasts you hear, the news you read all shape the world you know.”

So much comes flying at us and it is not all under our control. Maybe as we go through this Lent, we can consider that the temptation for us is not to jump off the top of the temple – or free climb the 11th tallest building in the world – but rather the temptation for us is to let our attention be captured by too many things that really don’t matter. 

Here’s a fun side note. A few years ago, I had a chance to visit some of the holy sites in Israel and Palestine. One of them is the mountain described as the place in the wilderness where Jesus faced these temptations. You take a cable car up. And while you are there…you can visit the Temptation Cave. Yes – it’s a gift shop.

Of course, the folks around us – especially our kids – notice where our attention goes. And not just in gift shops.

A few years ago, according to a management consultant, Disney World executives wanted to know what captured the attention of infants and toddlers in the theme parks and hotels in Orlando. So they hired someone to observe. Was it the costumed cast members or the animated creatures or the twirling rides or the smell of snacks?

It turns out it wasn’t all the magic that Disney had created. It was their parents’ cell phones, especially when the parents were on their cell phones. The kids saw what really attracted attention.

Let’s take a break from putting your attention on me – at least I think your attention is on me. Let’s pay attention to each other. I know this is out of the normal pattern, but would you look to the person to your left and say “Neighbor” -- “I see you!” And now look to the person to your right and say “Neighbor” -- “I see you.”

That’s way better than whatever might be showing up elsewhere in our attention economy.

For Jesus, he was not about to test God with one dramatic action. Instead, he let his teachings and actions get people’s attention over several years as he moved through Galilee and then all of Israel. He used that attention then as a platform to spread the good news that God’s realm was in the midst of the people if only they would live according to the vision that God held out to them. There we are again – God’s word is there to sustain us, not flashy stunts.

OK – one more test. Here you go, Jesus. You can have so much power – all the kingdoms of the world – and for such a small price. Just fall down and worship me.

Getting and keeping power is so tempting. 

I have been thinking of a couple of stories about this temptation. One is especially timely today.

Yes, I know last Monday was Presidents’ Day. But today is the actual birthday of George Washington, that very first president. He was born in 1732 – that’s 294 years ago. He led the American forces in the Revolutionary War and was so revered that he was the unanimous choice to be the first president. And then he was re-elected unanimously to a second term. When it was time to run for a third term – to hold on to power and the admiration of the citizens of this new nation - he said no.

It was simply that he understood that power was not something to cling to. He was tired, he wanted to go back to Mount Vernon, he wanted the nation to have a truly contested presidential election. 

How many of you have seen the musical Hamilton, either in person or on TV? There’s this wonderful scene in there where Washington tells Alexander Hamilton that he will not seek another term.

At first, Hamilton doesn’t believe him. So Washington starts to sing:
   One last time.
   Relax and have a drink with me.
   One last time.
   Let’s take a break tonight.
   And then we’ll teach them how to say good-bye, to say good-bye,
   You and I.

And then a bit later, he sings, 
   The people will hear from me
   One last time
   And if we get this right
   We’re gonna teach ‘em how to say goodbye.

Let’s not turn George Washington into Jesus. But there is a lesson here about seeking and clinging to power. There is another ancient story as well.

A man named Cincinnatus – yes, our city of Cincinnati is named after him – was a Roman leader some 500 years before Jesus was born. He was a powerful figure in his prime, even a dictator at one point. After his retirement, he returned to a life of farming. But when the Roman army was nearing defeat from a rebel force, Cincinnatus was brought back from his farm to take control of the state. Within 16 days, they vanquished the foe. And then he gave up his power again.

Power is a tricky thing – not just for government leaders but for business executives and yes, for clergy. Even for people in positions of power in organizations or – gulp – congregations. Knowing when to use power for good and when to let it go is one of life’s harder choices. 

Henry Sanders, the publisher of the news site Madison365, wrote about that this past Wednesday. He said: “There’s a quiet shift that happens in leadership if you’re not careful. You start believing that if you don’t hold it together, it won’t hold…The more responsibility you carry, the easier it becomes to assume everything depends on you.”

So over time, leaders stop operating from responsibility and start operating from control, he observed.

Jesus knew how to weight the cost of power. He knew that evil could take control and that what really mattered was keeping his focus on God – worship and serve only God was how he put it.

In our Call to Worship today, we said “It is God who sustains us, not the temptations of this world” so “We follow our faithful Lord.”

In the Psalm we heard – the first of the 150 in the Book of Psalms – we about not following the path of the wicked – those who think bread is just for themselves or who want all of our attention or who cling to power for control. Instead, the writer of the Psalm said those who delight in God are like “trees planted by streams of water…whose leaves do not wither.”

You see, the temptations that Christ was facing in that wilderness place really have some relevance to our lives today. Yes, he later taught his followers to pray “lead us not into temptation,” but first, he showed us what we can do when temptations come along.

Instead of turning stones into bread for ourselves, we can break bread with others as we are nourished on God’s word.

Instead of striving for attention or letting others’ gimmicks distract us, we can keep our focus on God’s love and how we extend that to those around us. 

Instead of making our lives all about seeking and clinging to power, we can sing a song like “Lord, I lift your name on high.” It is God whose power can guide us. 

So as we walk through this season of Lent, let’s watch for opportunities to share what we have, to see the goodness and the needs of those around us and to let God’s power pull us forward.

Amen.

 

A Jefferson son - Eston Hemings - in Madison

As I was exploring Thomas Jefferson’s amazing home at Monticello earlier this month, I thought about the children he had with Sally Hemings. One of them – Eston - and his family are buried at Forest Hills cemetery in Madison.  Therein lies a fascinating story.

Sally Hemings was the enslaved woman who was essentially Jefferson’s mistress for almost four decades – from her time with him in Paris when she went there in 1787 as a 14-year-old to care for his younger daughter until his death in 1826. When they came back to the U.S. from Paris in 1789, she was pregnant – and she had negotiated with Jefferson that he would free any children they had once they reached the age of 21 or upon his death. 

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson had seven children, four of whom survived. Jefferson with his wife, Martha, also had six children, two of whom survived to adulthood. It was one of them who Sally accompanied to Paris. Martha died in 1782 – and was Sally’s half-sister – same white father, different mothers. The two were said to have a striking resemblance.

The youngest of their children was named Eston – named after Thomas Eston Randolph, a favorite Jefferson cousin. He was born at Monticello on May 21, 1808, near the end of Jefferson’s second term as president.

A replica of John and Pricilla
Hemming's cabin

When Eston was growing up at Monticello, he and his two brothers were put under the care of a skilled enslaved carpenter, John Hemmings, Sally’s brother (who spelled his last name with two m’s). Jefferson himself apparently had little to do with them. The third child, Madison Hemings, wrote of Jefferson in a memoir published in 1873, “He was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us children. We were the only children of his by a slave woman. He was affectionate toward his white grandchildren.”

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed wrote that of the four children, Eston seemed to identify the most with Jefferson. “a near copy of Jefferson facially and physically in terms of height and build.”  Music was the passion of Eston’s soul, much as it was for Jefferson. He learned to play the piano and violin and later made his living as a musician. One of Jefferson’s favorite songs was “Money Musk”. (You can hear it on YouTube.) As an adult, Eston made that one of his signature tunes when he played for dances while he lived in Ohio.

When Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, Eston – who was then 19 - and his older brother Madison were freed. (The two older children, Beverly - a man’s name at that time - and Harriet, had been freed earlier when they turned 21 and in time moved to the Washington D.C. area.) When Sally left Monticello in 1826, she lived with Madison and Eston in nearby Charlottesville, later moving in with Madison and his family. 

In 1832, Eston married an 18-year old free woman of color, Julia Ann Isaacs. She was the daughter of the successful Jewish merchant, David Isaacs, from Germany, and Nancy West, a free woman of mixed race. Eston and Julia's first child, John, was born in 1835 and their second, Anna, was born in 1837, both in Charlottesville.

Sally died in 1835. Eston and Madison and their families in 1837 moved to Chillicothe, Ohio, to live in a free state. The third child of Eston and Julia - Beverly Frederick – was born there in 1839. As their children grew, they were educated in integrated schools. 

The house Eston built in Chillicothe

Eston earned a living in Chillicothe as a carpenter and a musician. He built a home for his family there. A local historian in Chillicothe, Beverly Gray, said in the movie Black Fiddlers, that Eston and his group were always sought after because, as one of the persons who attended the dance said, “When he struck up his violin, the only thing you could do was get up and dance.”  (You can find the section on Eston in the movie starting at about 46:30.)

People in Ohio seemed to understand that he was a child of Thomas Jefferson and commented on the resemblance when they saw pictures or statues of Jefferson. 

An artist's imagined image of Eston

A 1902 article in the Scioto Gazette, a Chillicothe newspaper, described Eston this way: 

He was “of a light bronze color, a little over six feet tall, well proportioned, very erect and dignified; his nearly straight hair showed a tint of auburn, and his face, indistinct suggestion of freckles. Quiet, unobtrusive, polite and decidedly intelligent, he was soon very well and favorably known to all classes of our citizens, for his personal appearance and gentlemanly manners attracted everybody's attention to him.”

But people there understood that his mother was of mixed race, as was his wife. That was a social gulf they could not cross. Also, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Eston no longer felt it was safe to remain in southern Ohio, and so in 1852 he moved with his wife and three teen-aged children to Wisconsin. 

They all changed their last name to Jefferson and were light-skinned enough to identify as white. (Sally Hemings was three-quarters white. Her children with Thomas Jefferson were seven-eighths European in ancestry.)

They could start life over in a city that had the same name as his older brother – the brother who got that name at the suggestion of Dolley Madison, the wife of one of Thomas Jefferson’s best friends, James Madison.

Eston only lived for four years after coming to Madison. He was said he be demand as a cabinet maker, drawing on one of the skills he had learned from his uncle, John, and had perfected over the years. 

But he died on Jan. 3,1856 at the age of 47 and is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery. (This new gravestone incorporates the original. It was put up in the early 2020s  by a local group with the permission of Eston's descendants, according to an official at Forest Hill.

Julia was 41 when he died. She lived in Madison for 33 more years until her death on Jan. 1, 1889 at the age of 74. She, too, is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery.

Their children were ages 20, 18 and 16 when Eston died.

Anna died about a decade after Eston, on April 11, 1866, at the age of 29 in the Town of Burke just outside Madison. She had married Albert T. Pearson, a carpenter who was a captain during the Civil War.  They had three children and one of them - Walter Beverly Pearson - became a wealthy industrialist in Chicago, becoming president of the president of the Standard Screw Company.

Beverly and John outside a hotel they managed.

The oldest child, John Wayles Jefferson (John Wayles was Sally’s grandfather), went on to become a Union officer in the Civil War. Before the Civil War, John  Jefferson worked as the proprietor of the American House hotel in Madison. He brought on his younger brother Beverly to help and learn the business, which would play a role in Beverly’s life later.

In 1861, at the age of 26, John Jefferson enlisted in the Union Army and served in the 8th Wisconsin Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. He rose quickly in the ranks, named major one month after enlisting, promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1863, and then to colonel in 1864. He was wounded twice – once during the Siege of Corinth in Mississippi in 1862 and then at the battle of Vicksburg, also in Mississippi, in 1863. He was promoted to commander of the entire 8th Wisconsin in 1864 and mustered out of service later that same year.

Both during and after the war, John Jefferson wrote as a newspaper correspondent, publishing articles about his experiences. After the war, he moved to Memphis, Tennessee,  where he became a highly successful cotton broker, founding the Continental Cotton Company. He also bred trotting horses on his plantation near Memphis. Articles under his name in the Memphis Daily Avalanche covered such matters as improving streets, enlarging the city's boundaries, and preventing cotton-warehouse fires. 

John Jefferson never married. He died on June 12, 1892, at the age of 57 and is buried at Forest Hill Cemetery.

Eston and Julia’s youngest son, Beverly Frederick, played the biggest role in Madison after the Civil War. Like his older brother, he also served as a solider in the Union Army during the war, part of Company E, 1st Wisconsin Infantry.

When he came back to Madison, he built on what he had learned about the hotel business a bit from brother John before the war. In 1864, he also married Anna Maud Smith, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1846. 

Beverly became the proprietor of the Capital Hotel (also known as the Vilas House), located on the eastern corner of Main Street and what is now Martin Luther King Blvd. (formerly Monona Avenue) where there is now a Starbucks. 

Historians described it as one of the finest hotels in the state. His obituary in 1908 described him as a “pioneer boniface” –a term for a jovial innkeeper.

Jefferson Transfer Company

In 1872, Beverly shifted to running the Jefferson Transfer Company - what became the leading firm in the city for using horse-drawn carriages to carry multiple passengers along a fixed route for a fare. Think of it as a precursor to Madison Metro. 

He was a member of Masons, GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) and the Old Settlers Club.

Anna died on died Feb. 5, 1882. They had five sons, one of whom apparently died in childhood. 

Some time after Anna’s death, Beverly moved into the Park Hotel on the Square and lived there for about 25 years before moving to his son Fred’s home in Chicago, where he died on Nov. 11, 1908 at age 69.

Beverly with three of his sons
 around 1900.

The headline in the Madison Democrat the next day read: “A likeable character at the Wisconsin capital and a familiar of statesman for half a century…True friend and genial citizen” 

But all those political leaders never knew of his connection to the third president of the United States.

The legacy of the Hemings/Jefferson family in Madison is only vaguely known. People are surprised to learn that a son of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson is buried here. 

And the story of their family is even less well known, even though their graves are all at Forest Hill. 

This family has touched Madison history in so many ways.

Further resources:
The Hemings of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

Getting Word: African American Oral History Project – This project preserves the histories of Monticello’s enslaved families and their descendants. It is an initiative of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. This link is to the page on Eston Hemings.

Julia Jefferson Westerinen, great-great-great granddaughter of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson speaks on several videos about what she has learned. Her line of succession from Eston is through son Beverly, then his son Carl, then his son William, who was her father.

Family Search family trees for Eston and family