The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed

There is no clue in the life of this intertwined family that Gordon-Reed does not minutely examine for its most subtle significance.

Jefferson encouraged James Hemings and his brother Robert to learn skills and to move freely in the world. By the perverse logic of this system, any drop of white blood ameliorated the work slaves were assigned and their chances of being freed. The colonists had adopted the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem (you were what your mother was) rather than the English rule (you were what your father was). Sally’s white father was also Martha Jefferson’s father Jefferson’s wife and his slave mistress were half-sisters who owed their radically different destinies to the Anglo-Virginian system of bondage. The author painstakingly sifts through the evidence about their relationship and examines the convoluted attitudes that influenced Jefferson’s behavior.

Back in Virginia, Jefferson installed Sally in a fairly pampered life at Monticello he sired her numerous children and emancipated them upon his death in 1826. In 1787, James’s 14-year-old sister Sally came to Paris with Jefferson’s daughter Polly sometime during the French sojourn, she became her master’s mistress. By 1784, he was a widower living in Paris as head of the American commission, accompanied by manservant James Hemings, whom Jefferson took along so he could receive training as a French chef. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 1997, etc.) grudgingly comes to a sympathetic view of Jefferson, who inherited the mixed-race Hemings family when he married Martha Wayles Skelton in 1772. Gordon-Reed (Law/New York Law School, History/Rutgers Univ. The unusual history of an enslaved family whose destiny was shaped over the course of four decades by Thomas Jefferson.

The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed