Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America

by Catherine Kerrison

Overview

The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters—two white and free, one black and enslaved—and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America
 
FINALIST FOR THE GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE • “Beautifully written . . . To a nuanced study of Jefferson’s two white daughters, Martha and Maria, [Kerrison] innovatively adds a discussion of his only enslaved daughter, Harriet Hemings.”—The New York Times Book Review

Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America. Harriet Hemings followed a different path. She escaped slavery—apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself. Leaving Monticello behind, she boarded a coach and set off for a decidedly uncertain future.
 
For this groundbreaking triple biography, history scholar Catherine Kerrison has uncovered never-before-published documents written by the Jefferson sisters, as well as letters written by members of the Jefferson and Hemings families. The richly interwoven stories of these strong women and their fight to shape their own destinies shed new light on issues of race and gender that are still relevant today—and on the legacy of one of our most controversial Founding Fathers.
 
Praise for Jefferson’s Daughters
 
“A fascinating glimpse of where we have been as a nation . . . Catherine Kerrison tells us the stories of three of Thomas Jefferson’s children, who, due to their gender and race, lived lives whose most intimate details are lost to time.”—USA Today

“A valuable addition to the history of Revolutionary-era America.”—The Boston Globe

“A thought-provoking nonfiction narrative that reads like a novel.”—BookPage

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101886243
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/30/2018
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	538,156
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Catherine Kerrison is a professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in Colonial and Revolutionary America and women’s and gender history. She holds a PhD in American history from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South, won the Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society. She lives in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

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Chapter 1
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Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Author's Note xiii

Partial Hemings Family Tree xiv

Map xvi

Chapter 1 First Monticello 3

Chapter 2 To Paris 23

Chapter 3 School Life 47

Chapter 4 Families Reunited 73

Chapter 5 Transitions 98

Chapter 6 Becoming American Again 126

Chapter 7 A Virginia Wife 161

Chapter 8 Harriet's Monticello 189

Chapter 9 An Enlightened Household 215

Chapter 10 Departure 242

Chapter 11 Passing 275

Chapter 12 Legacies 309

Acknowledgments 335

Bibliography 339

Notes 351

Image Credits 403

Index 405

Editorial Reviews

Martha Jefferson, the president's brilliant oldest daughter, married a troubled third cousin, raised and educated a passel of children, and settled with her father at Monticello.

Her congenial but less scholarly younger sister, Maria, made a love match with another cousin but died a few years later, leaving only a single son to carry on her line.

Then there was Harriet, Thomas Jefferson's daughter -- historians now mostly agree -- with the enslaved Sally Hemings, half sister to Jefferson's dead wife. With Jefferson's permission and a cash gift, Harriet left Monticello as a young woman, passed as white, and disappeared from history.

The story of all three women is ably told -- to the extent possible, given the gaps in the historical record -- in Catherine Kerrison's Jefferson's Daughters. An associate professor of history at Villanova University, Kerrison has produced a feminist biography that draws on the revisionist consensus that Jefferson fathered Hemings's children.

Her book is, naturally, indebted to the scholarship of Annette Gordon-Reed, author of the Pulitzer Prize−winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). Earlier, in Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed had marshaled the arguments in favor of a decades-long Jefferson-Hemings relationship. DNA testing in 1998 all but confirmed the liaison, linking Jefferson's paternal line -- and not that of his Carr nephews, as some had surmised -- to Sally's son Eston Hemings.

Historians now could no longer dismiss the 1873 account of Eston's brother Madison, who claimed Jefferson as his father and described his mother as Jefferson's "concubine." Madison said he, along with Eston, their brother Beverley, and their sister Harriet, owed their adult manumission to a promise the future president had made to their mother in Paris. Their freedom, Madison told an Ohio newspaper, was a precondition of Sally Hemings's agreement to leave France, where she would have been free, and return to Virginia with Jefferson.

Gordon-Reed, in her Hemings biography, relies on educated guesswork and imagination to tease out the contours of the Hemings-Jefferson relationship, as well as Jefferson's feelings toward their children and the attitudes of Jefferson's white family toward his unconventional (if not entirely uncommon) ménage. Kerrison faces similar difficulties. Relying on extant letters and the inventive use of other sources, her mostly chronological narrative reinterprets these women's lives through a feminist lens and tries to distinguish between the factual and the speculative.

Of the three sisters, Martha, a prodigious correspondent who was both her father's "emotional caretaker" and a woman "universally admired for her lively wit, high intelligence, graceful manners, and animated storytelling," led the best-documented life. The recently widowed Jefferson took Martha -- called Patsy in the family -- with him in 1784 to a diplomatic posting in Paris and enrolled her, at eleven, in an elite convent school. There she quickly learned French, made friends, and (to Jefferson's displeasure) embraced Catholicism. Kerrison devotes considerable attention to her education, not the most bracing of topics. More interesting is the author's take on Martha's abortive courtships and the manner in which Martha's discussions with friends may have prepared her for the "serious business" of marriage.

At five, Maria -- whose childhood name was Polly -- stayed behind in Virginia with her baby sister Lucy (who died at three of whooping cough) and her maternal aunt, Elizabeth Eppes. So happy was Maria with her aunt that she resisted rejoining her family in Paris. She lost that battle and then developed a second attachment, in London, to Abigail Adams, another surrogate mother. Maria eventually sailed to France, attended by the teenage Sally Hemings.

Kerrison emphasizes that the job of middle- and upper-class women in the eighteenth century was to marry well and bear children. Both were fraught enterprises. (Jefferson's wife had died in childbirth.) Martha's marriage to Thomas Jefferson Randolph at first seemed promising, producing eleven children who survived to adulthood. But the relationship was undermined by Randolph's "volatile temper" and financial reverses.

By contrast, Maria, educated in Paris and, later, Philadelphia, enjoyed "a happy union" with her cousin and childhood friend Jack Eppes. Kerrison insists that historians have slighted her "emotional maturity" and "emotional and financial independence." But Maria inherited her mother's frail constitution, and childbirth was difficult for her. She died at twenty-five, leaving a daughter, Maria, who survived only to age two, and a son, Francis, who became a cotton planter in Florida. Martha meanwhile lived to sixty-four.

Their illustrious parentage notwithstanding, their lives were not unusual for women of their era. Their half sister Harriet's was a different story.

In 1994, Barbara Chase-Riboud, author of the bestselling fiction Sally Hemings, imagined Harriet's post-Monticello life in a historical novel titled The President's Daughter. In the novel, the fictional Harriet turns her back on her family, marries twice, and survives the Civil War. Her brother Eston describes her as a "believer in romantic love and race oblivion." Kerrison sets out to uncover what really happened to Harriet after Monticello. The task is not a simple one: "[S]he obliterated her historical tracks so well, there has not yet been a single credible claim of descent from her," Kerrison writes, setting up her own pursuit.

Relying on Madison Hemings and other oral histories, Kerrison posits that Harriet either followed or accompanied her brother Beverley to Washington. As per Madison, she assumes that Harriet married within a few years of her arrival, raised a family, and kept mum about her connection to Monticello and her black ancestry. (As seven-eighths white, Harriet not only looked white but, Kerrison says, would have been considered legally white under Virginia law.)

Using the limited available records, Kerrison tracks a series of Harriets, with various surnames, through the years. It's a prodigious undertaking, and the reader is likely to share the excitement of the chase. Among other clues, Kerrison looks for children's names that echo Monticello and Hemings family traditions. One lead in particular tantalizes her, but the evidence is contradictory, and the conscientious Kerrison doesn't press the case. "I concede defeat," she writes. "Harriet Hemings will keep her secret" -- at least for now. What might have been a headline- making discovery turns out to be yet another lesson in the stubborn mysteries of history, and the contingent fragility of our knowledge of the past.

Julia M. Klein, the Forward's contributing book critic, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.

Reviewer: Julia M. Klein

The Barnes & Noble Review

Jefferson's Daughters, Kerrison's beautifully written book…is a stunning if unavoidably imbalanced book, combining detailed treatments of Martha's and Maria's experiences with imaginative attempts to reconstruct Harriet's life.

The New York Times Book Review - Mary Beth Norton

★ 10/30/2017
Kerrison (Claiming the Pen), associate professor of history at Villanova University, richly textures this tale of the lives of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters. Two daughters, Martha and Maria, came from Jefferson’s marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton. The other, Harriet, was born to the enslaved Sally Hemings. Kerrison demonstrates her deep understanding of post-Revolution America, marshaling an impressive array of sources to illustrate the possibilities for “women, free blacks, and slaves” in the new country. Jefferson’s presence looms throughout, but Kerrison foregrounds the daughters’ stories, brilliantly recapturing the patterns of Southern women’s lives. Martha and Maria lost their mother at an early age and bounced from place to place before settling into homes of their own as married women. Harriet’s story is the most captivating and reveals much about the web of family connections woven in bondage. Harriet never knew Maria and Martha ignored Harriet at Monticello. When Harriet turned 14, Jefferson put her to work in Monticello’s weavers’ cottage. But in 1822, he facilitated Harriet’s departure to Washington, after which she passed as a white woman. Incisive and elegant, Kerrison’s book is at once a fabulous family story and a stellar work of historical scholarship. Maps & illus. Agent: Howard Morhaim, Howard Morhaim Literary. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-09-24
The circumscribed paths of women's lives emerge from a deeply researched history.Kerrison (History/Villanova Univ.; Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South, 2005) illuminates women's experiences in early America through the lives of Thomas Jefferson's three daughters: Martha and Maria, his children by his wife, and Harriet Hemings, the offspring—one of four surviving children—of his relationship with the slave Sally Hemings. As the author acknowledges, Jefferson's long affair with Hemings has been well-documented by Annette Gordon-Reed and Monticello historian Lucia Stanton. Kerrison draws from those works as well as abundant historical and archival sources to portray "the benefits and perils" of each daughter's experiences. Jefferson's enlightened ideas about education extended only to men. He saw little use in educating females, who were not permitted entrance to the University of Virginia, which he founded. After her mother died, Martha accompanied Jefferson to Paris, attended a convent school, learned to speak French fluently, and absorbed France's antipathy to slavery. Still, like her sister, she was expected to embrace "the life of wife, mother, and plantation mistress"—including overseeing slaves—tasks that proved, "after Paris, a trial so arduous as to require heroism to be endured." While Martha was in France, the younger Maria was left behind with relatives; "her peripatetic childhood" was marked "by only brief periods of loving stability that came to sudden unannounced ends." Even after Jefferson returned to America, his political obligations kept him away from the family's home. Kerrison discovered more sources to document Martha's life than Maria's: a talented amateur pianist, Maria died in childbirth at 25, barely a memory for her surviving son. Martha lived into her 60s, keeper of family papers. But the author's greatest challenge was finding evidence of Harriet's life, both at Monticello and later, when she left Virginia and, passing as white, probably lived the rest of her life in Washington, D.C. Despite Kerrison's dogged and thoroughly detailed detective work, Harriet's life remains a mystery.An insightful contribution to women's history.

Kirkus Reviews

Beautifully written . . . To a nuanced study of Jefferson’s two white daughters, Martha and Maria, [Catherine Kerrison] innovatively adds a discussion of his only enslaved daughter, Harriet Hemings. The result is a stunning if unavoidably unbalanced book, combining detailed treatments of Martha’s and Maria’s experiences with imaginative attempts to reconstruct Harriet’s life.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A richly textured and satisfying book . . . a striking portrait of how women in Jefferson’s era lived, bravely and resourcefully, in an age that demanded fealty and absolute obedience to men.”—Newsday

“Intriguing . . . The most poignant literature gives a voice to the voiceless. And in Jefferson’s Daughters . . . Catherine Kerrison tells us the stories of three of Thomas Jefferson’s children, who, due to their gender or race, lived lives whose most intimate details are lost to time. . . . A highlight of Kerrison’s work is that while noting the gender constraints that hemmed in white women, she does not sugarcoat their privileged status, nor deny their racism. . . . A historical narrative that allows us to reflect on the thoughts, fears and motivations of three women coming of age in a turbulent time, Jefferson’s Daughters offers a fascinating glimpse of where we have been as a nation. It is a vivid reminder of both the ties that bind, and the artificial boundaries that painfully divide us.”—USA Today

“Kerrison’s book is a valuable addition to the history of Revolutionary-era America as well as a reminder of how many of its promises have yet to be fulfilled.”—The Boston Globe

“Absorbing and affecting . . . Like all great histories do, Jefferson’s Daughters brings its period vividly to life, a credit to Kerrison’s exhaustive research, her passion for her subject, and her elegant writing.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson, his family and his illegitimate daughter, Harriet Hemings. But historian Catherine Kerrison eloquently manages to shed new light on the Founding Father and his relationships with three of his very different children. . . . Although Jefferson promoted individual liberty, he contradicted this endorsement by owning slaves. Kerrison writes about this contradiction with thoroughness and candor, piecing together massive amounts of research, including letters, journal entries, financial accounts and commentary from family descendants. In meticulous detail, her knowledgeable yet conversational style makes Jefferson’s Daughters a thought-provoking nonfiction narrative that reads like a novel.”—BookPage

“Drawing on letters and journals, Kerrison presents an intimate portrait of a powerful man and his daughters through their respective paths to womanhood at a time of change and tumult that nonetheless held to racial and sexual restrictions.”—Booklist

“Incisive and elegant, [Catherine] Kerrison’s book is at once a fabulous family story and a stellar work of historical scholarship.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher

Narrator Tavia Gilbert candidly delivers the story of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters, Martha, Maria, and Harriet, in this meticulously researched profile. Gilbert’s thoughtful delivery movingly recounts their lives in Paris and early America. His white daughters, Martha and Maria, lived privileged lives yet were undervalued due to their gender. Harriet, his black daughter, was born into slavery but was raised in the family home. At age 14, Jefferson made her work at his mill, where she was exposed to the harshness of slave life. Harriet escaped Monticello around age 21, never to return. This is a well-produced work, although Kerrison’s intricate details on certain topics can overshadow the main subjects. S.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile

Narrator Tavia Gilbert candidly delivers the story of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters, Martha, Maria, and Harriet, in this meticulously researched profile. Gilbert’s thoughtful delivery movingly recounts their lives in Paris and early America. His white daughters, Martha and Maria, lived privileged lives yet were undervalued due to their gender. Harriet, his black daughter, was born into slavery but was raised in the family home. At age 14, Jefferson made her work at his mill, where she was exposed to the harshness of slave life. Harriet escaped Monticello around age 21, never to return. This is a well-produced work, although Kerrison’s intricate details on certain topics can overshadow the main subjects. S.H. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

APRIL 2018 - AudioFile