Virginia became more racist as the American Civil War got closer. Jefferson's grandchildren did not want people to know their grandfather had sex with a black woman. They told people that perhaps Jefferson's nephew had been the father of Hemings's children. A man named Edmund Bacon wrote about working as an overseer at Monticello and said Jefferson was not the father of Harriet Hemings. But Bacon was not at Monticello until after Harriet was five years old.