An Extraordinary Family and the Burdens of Slavery: A Review Essay (The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family) (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2008. Pp. 798. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-393-06477-3.) ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1782, MANTRA WAYLES JEFFERSON DIED surrounded by relatives at her Monticello plantation home. Just short of thirty-four years old, she had always been relatively frail, though the physical toll of at least seven pregnancies in a dozen years would have challenged even a heartier woman's constitution. Decades later, Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph recalled that her mother was tended by her husband, Thomas Jefferson, and by her sisters and sisters-in-law as she fought a losing battle with the illness she contracted alter delivering her last child in May. This was a poignant memory, to be sure, but also a partial one that erased the presence of the enslaved women who nursed, cleaned, and otherwise cared for the many physical needs of young Martha's mother during the final months before she passed away.