The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
by Annette Gordon-Reed
Summary
Annette Gordon-Reed follows four generations of the Hemings family, enslaved at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, from their origins through Jefferson's death in 1826, building the book from legal records, farm books, letters and the oral history the family itself preserved. Gordon-Reed gives particular attention to Sally Hemings, who traveled to Paris with Jefferson's daughter as a young teenager, where she was legally free under French law, and to the arrangement her son Madison later described in his own 1873 memoir, in which she agreed to return to enslavement in Virginia in exchange for a promise that her children would be freed at twenty one.
Gordon-Reed treats the paternity question this arrangement implies, that Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings's children, as settled fact rather than open dispute, consistent with a 1998 DNA study linking the Jefferson male line to a descendant of Hemings's son Eston and with the documentary record Gordon-Reed had already laid out in her earlier book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. The book follows the Hemings children as individuals with their own choices and relationships within an institution that denied them any legal standing, treating Jefferson's household not as a single narrative about one famous man but as a family history in its own right.
Gordon-Reed writes as both a historian and a trained lawyer, weighing evidence with a legal scholar's care while never losing the family at the center of the story, and reading the book means encountering enslaved people as full individuals rather than supporting characters in Jefferson's biography. It suits a reader who wants Monticello's history told from the Hemings family's own vantage rather than from the plantation house looking outward.
Historical Context & Significance
Gordon-Reed won the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for History, ahead of finalists Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War and G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot's The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s. She became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Fellow Jefferson scholar Joseph Ellis, who had won the same Pulitzer Prize for History himself in 2001 for Founding Brothers, called The Hemingses of Monticello the best study of a slave family ever written, and the book won sixteen prizes in total. Gordon-Reed, who had already reshaped Jefferson scholarship with her 1997 book on the paternity question, received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010 for work the foundation said had transformed the field.