The Hemingses of Monticello

Summary

A multigenerational history of the enslaved Hemings family, tracing their lives across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their entangled bond with Thomas Jefferson and his household. Gordon-Reed combines legal scholarship with painstaking archival reconstruction to give full personhood to figures long marginalized in Jefferson studies, including Sally Hemings and her children. The book reshaped the historiography of slavery, family, and the founding generation.