Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America by Catherine Kerrison (review)

In Jefferson's Daughters, Catherine Kerrison examines an impressive array of historical sources to distinguish the complex lives of Martha Jefferson Randolph, Mary "Maria" Jefferson Eppes, and Harriet Hemings. The former two women, the daughters of Martha Wayles Jefferson, and the latter, the enslaved daughter of Sally Hemings, led lives that diverged greatly from one another. Aimed mainly at a general audience, the book largely explains in three sections—each roughly dedicated to each daughter—the circumstances foisted upon them, and the decisions they made that sometimes challenged social norms.

The three sections of the book move from Martha to Maria to Harriet, and correspondingly from the largest primary-source base to the smallest. Kerrison relies on personal correspondence, so it is not surprising that she provides readers with substantially clearer and more robust views of the lives and inner thoughts of Jefferson's two white daughters. Her voluminous archive supplies glimpses of Martha and Maria's challenges to their father's authority and their assertions of autonomy. Kerrison reconstructs the intimate conversations and friendships between Martha and her friends in the City of Light to bring readers into the world of their Parisian education and entertainment. Impressive are Kerrison's portrayals of Martha's emerging attraction to Catholicism and her apprehension about leaving France for Virginia. Kerrison convincingly presents a picture of a serious, but playful, and intellectually curious daughter whose interest in "male" topics afforded by her progressive Enlightenment education placed her on track to challenge Jefferson's stagnant expectations about women's roles back home.

In her interpretation of the life of Jefferson's younger daughter, Maria, Kerrison shifts the focus from her relationship with her father to her relationship with her husband (171). She skillfully analyzes a single sentence written by Maria's husband, Jack Eppes, to Jefferson to show how the couple consulted each other before rejecting Jefferson's repeated proposal that they live very near Monticello. Still, Kerrison overemphasizes Maria's emotional maturity, especially during her childhood, given the evidence presented. The decision to leave Monticello due to her husband's career may instead be evidence of Maria conforming to gendered marriage expectations. Regardless, Kerrison productively shifts the primary focus to Maria as a means of de-centering Jefferson's control over her life.

Throughout the book, Kerrison engages numerous bodies of scholarship that provide a foundation and offer an opening for her fresh understanding of Jefferson's daughters. She offers a corrective to scholars who have not taken Maria on her own terms. The thin collection of letters authored by Maria makes that difficult given all of the correspondence about her, yet Kerrison expertly contextualizes her life and impressively triangulates Maria's agency and constraints. She takes issue with Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone, who claimed that Jefferson "did not succeed in molding his daughter [Maria] in his own image" (87). Given the preponderance of evidence that Kerrison marshals, it seems unlikely this was Jefferson's desire given his belief in innate and intended differences between men and women, regardless of their filial relationship to him. Incorporating the scholarship of architectural historians whose work underscores how the design of Monticello conveyed the intended order sought by Jefferson adds further to Kerrison's comprehensive analysis of Monticello's hierarchies. Furthermore, Kerrison's writing is clear and often witty, especially when she details the lives of Jefferson's white daughters, and immediately undercuts their elite pleasures with the harsh realities of the enslaved people toiling to build Jefferson's idea of himself.

On the particular subject of the Hemingses at Monticello, Kerrison is in close conversation with Annette Gordon-Reed's work about the enslaved people at Monticello.¹ Just as Martha passed along the lessons of her French education to her children, Sally Hemings likely passed on to her children...