The Hemingses of Monticello

The Hemingses of Monticello does something no book about slavery had done at this scale: it takes a single enslaved family and gives it the full multigenerational biography that dynasties get, and the family it chooses shared blood, a house, and a concealed history with Thomas Jefferson. Annette Gordon-Reed follows the Hemingses across four generations, from the African born matriarch and the English sea captain whose children by her became the property of Jefferson's father in law, through Elizabeth Hemings and her children, half siblings to Jefferson's own wife, to Sally Hemings and her brother James in Paris, where Jefferson, the widowed American minister, began with the teenaged Sally the relationship that produced seven children and two centuries of denial. The Paris chapters are the book's hinge: in France the Hemingses were legally free, and Sally negotiated her return to Virginia, extracting Jefferson's promise that her children would be freed, a treaty made by a sixteen year old with the author of the Declaration. Gordon-Reed, a legal scholar as well as a historian, works the archives, farm books, wills, letters, and oral tradition, with a lawyer's rigor about evidence and a novelist's patience for interior lives the record only implies, insisting throughout on the Hemingses as individuals with strategies, loyalties, and limits, not symbols. The book won the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for History, the first for an African American woman, and Joseph Ellis called it the best study of a slave family ever written.