Product Details

The Washington Post - Fergus M. Bordewich

…monumental and original…Liberating the woman known to Jefferson's smirking enemies as "dusky Sally" from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers…In this magisterial book, she has succeeded not only in recovering the lives of an entire enslaved family, but also in showing them as creative agents intelligently maneuvering to achieve maximum advantage for themselves within the orbit of institutionalized slavery.

Publishers Weekly

This is a scholar's book: serious, thick, complex. It's also fascinating, wise and of the utmost importance. Gordon-Reed, a professor of both history and law who in her previous book helped solve some of the mysteries of the intimate relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, now brings to life the entire Hemings family and its tangled blood links with slave-holding Virginia whites over an entire century. Gordon-Reed never slips into cynicism about the author of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, she shows how his life was deeply affected by his slave kinspeople: his lover (who was the half-sister of his deceased wife) and their children. Everyone comes vividly to life, as do the places, like Paris and Philadelphia, in which Jefferson, his daughters and some of his black family lived. So, too, do the complexities and varieties of slaves' lives and the nature of the choices they had to make-when they had the luxury of making a choice. Gordon-Reed's genius for reading nearly silent records makes this an extraordinary work. 37 illus. (Sept.)

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Thomas J. Davis - Library Journal

This multigenerational saga traces mixed-race bloodlines that American history has long refused fully to acknowledge. Blending biography, genealogy, and history, Gordon-Reed (history, Rutgers Univ.; law, New York Law Sch.; Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy) brings to life the family from which Sally Hemings (1773-1835) came and the family that she and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) created. Sally bore five surviving children for the man who penned the Declaration of Independence and later became the new nation's third president. In a three-part, 30-chapter tour de force through voluminous primary and secondary sources, including Jefferson family correspondence, Gordon-Reed reconstructs not simply the private life and estate of an American demigod but reveals much of the characteristic structure and style of early Virginia society and the slavery that made possible much of the Old Dominion's position and pleasure. Moreover, she ushers forth slaves from the usual shadows of historical obscurity to show them as individuals and families with multifaceted lives. This is a masterpiece brimming with decades of dedicated research and dexterous writing. It is essential for any collection on U.S. history, Colonial America, Virginia, slavery, or miscegenation. [See Prepub Alert, LJ5/1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

The unusual history of an enslaved family whose destiny was shaped over the course of four decades by Thomas Jefferson. Gordon-Reed (Law/New York Law School, History/Rutgers Univ.; 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. 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. 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. 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. The author painstakingly sifts through the evidence about their relationship and examines the convoluted attitudes that influenced Jefferson's behavior. 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 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). By the perverse logic of this system, any drop of white blood ameliorated the work slaves were assigned and their chances of being freed. Jefferson encouraged James Hemings and his brother Robert to learn skills and to move freely in the world. There is no clue in the life of this intertwined family that Gordon-Reeddoes not minutely examine for its most subtle significance. She concludes that Jefferson was above all a most private man, who espoused abhorrent racial theories in public but behaved relatively well (by the standards of the era) toward his own slaves. Ponderous but sagacious and ultimately rewarding.

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Table of Contents