First published 2008
Historian Annette Gordon-Reed reconstructs the forgotten story of the Hemings family, whose bloodline intertwined with Thomas Jefferson across multiple generations. She begins with Elizabeth Hemings in 1700s Virginia, born to an African woman and an English sea captain named Hemings. Elizabeth became the mother of twelve children, including six fathered by John Wayles, a Virginia planter whose daughter Martha would marry Jefferson. When the Hemings family became Jefferson's property through this marriage, their lives became inseparable from his. Gordon-Reed follows James Hemings as he trained in Parisian kitchens, Sally Hemings through her thirty-eight year relationship with Jefferson that produced seven children, and other family members as they navigated freedom and bondage across Virginia, Paris, and Philadelphia. The author uncovers new evidence about these relationships that American history had erased. She reveals how Monticello functioned not just as Jefferson's home but as the center of an extended family bound by both blood and slavery, until the estate's slave auction scattered the Hemings descendants after Jefferson's death in 1826.
Genres: biography, family, 20th-century, american, african-american, 21st-century, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family
Setting: Monticello, Paris, Philadelphia, Virginia
Period: 1700s, 1826
798 pages · Hardcover · W. W. Norton Company
Content warnings: slavery