As she matured into a beautiful sixteen year old, possibly pregnant with her first child by Jefferson, she considered staying in Paris with her brother, an aspiring chef.
Later, Sally accompanied Maria (Polly), Patsy’s younger sister when Jefferson brought them to Paris. Martha, Jefferson’s wife, had inherited the Hemings slaves from her mother and had brought them to Monticello when her father died. Kerrigan connects Sally Hemings to the family by identifying her as the daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and his mulatto slave, Elizabeth Hemings. She established a school on the grounds of her home, near Monticello, with study in “mathematics, history, literature, and languages.” She later stressed the importance of educating her own eleven children, giving her daughters more than lessons in drawing and needlework, as expected from society at the time. Patsy had an eclectic education, first learning to read and write with her mother later in Paris with her father, she had five years of rigorous convent education, with forays into French society. The focus of America’s First Daughter is the eldest daughter Martha (Patsy) but she is one of three sisters in Kerrison’s analysis.
Patsy, the eldest daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Martha, was ten years old when her mother died. The accurate depiction of Blythe as Jefferson’s wife evolved into a weary and sickly woman, often left alone to manage a household, or fleeing from the War, who eventually died prematurely at thirty-three. Kerrison reveals how a constant state of childbirth, miscarriages, and infant death took its toll on her. I decided to read the facts fi rst before the fiction.Īlthough stories about Sally Hemings have resurrected and revised Jeffersonian history in recent years, my only recollection of Jefferson’s first wife Martha was the sweet singing Blythe Danner in the musical 1776, before she had children. When a book club picked the 2016 Dray and Kamoie’s America’s First Daughter, a fictionalized historical drama about Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph, I looked for reviews and found the authors’ discussion of their book in Five Lies We Told in America’s First Daughter and How We Got Away With It.Ĭurious to know more about the historical facts, I was redirected to a nonfiction book written in 2018 by historian Catherine Kerrison – Jefferson’s Daughters.
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