the hemingses of monticello by annette gordon reed

In this book, Gordon-Reed uses both the infamous 1999 DNA analysis which proved a genetic tie between the Jefferson clan and the Hemings and the work of an archeologist at Monticello who validated a correlation in the timing of when Jefferson was visiting Monticello and Sally Hemings’ pregnancies. The paucity of records about their relationship penned by Jefferson compounded the debate, regardless of multiple documents written by their descendants at the turn of the nineteenth century confirming their paternity. Historians dedicated to the life of Thomas Jefferson animatedly disputed how the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence kept humans in bondage, whether the Founding Father forcibly slept with Hemings, and if they conceived children. We know simply that “During that time,” as Madison Hemings wrote of his parents’ final year in Paris, “my mother became Mr. Jefferson did not record how their relationship changed from slave and master to parents in his Farm Book, where he chronicled the names, birth dates, and family trees of all the slaves he owned. By doing this, they enslaved their unborn child. Thomas Jefferson convinced his pregnant fifteen-year-old slave Sarah “Sally” Hemings to leave the bustling Parisian world where she was working for him as a free contractor and return to a life of slavery on his Virginia plantation, Monticello.

In December 1789, Paris was engulfed in the burgeoning French Revolution. Pulitzer Prize winning lawyer and historian Annette Gordon-Reed of Harvard University discusses her new book the Hemingeses of Monticello: An American Family, which chronicles the lives of Thomas Jefferson and the often neglected Hemings Family, owned by Jefferson on his Virginia plantation, including his concubine Sally. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window).Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window).

The hemingses of monticello by annette gordon reed