Jefferson’s Three Daughters — Two Free, One Enslaved |
Jefferson’s Three Daughters — Two Free, One Enslaved
Book Review
The New York Times
2018-01-26
Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History History
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
JEFFERSON’S DAUGHTERS
Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America
By Catherine Kerrison
Illustrated. 425 pp. Ballantine Books. $28.
Martha Jefferson Randolph
Credit Thomas Jefferson Foundation
Fawn Brodie would be astonished — and gratified. In 1974, her biography “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History” contended that the third president had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings. For this, Catherine Kerrison, a professor of American history at Villanova University, accurately notes, Brodie was “excoriated by a cadre of Jefferson experts.” A lot has changed, and largely because of the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, who took seriously Hemings family stories and, bolstered by a DNA study, convinced nearly all scholars, including Kerrison, that Brodie was correct. “Jefferson’s Daughters,” Kerrison’s beautifully written book, takes the relationship’s existence as a given.
And so, to a nuanced study of Jefferson’s two white daughters, Martha (born 1772) and Maria (born 1778), she innovatively adds a discussion of his only enslaved daughter, Harriet Hemings (born 1801). The result 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…
Read the entire review here.
Tags: Catherine Kerrison, Harriet Hemings, Maria Jefferson, Martha Jefferson, Martha Jefferson Randolph, Martha Wayles Jefferson, Mary Beth Norton, Mary Jefferson Eppes, New York Times, Sally Hemings, The New York Times, Thomas Jefferson