Good afternoon. Welcome to the theater here at the National Archives, and the archivist of the united exhibit is a pleasure to welcome you here goes a few that are here in the theater into those of you joining us on a station and a special welcome to our cspan audience. Before we get to todays discussion i would like to know about two other programs coming up soon. Professor chris myers and George Musgrove will be here to talk about their book the history of greece and democracy in the Nations Capital. It is a tumultuous story of race and democracy in washington, d. C. A city that has often served as a National Battleground for contentious issues including slavery and segregation, civil rights and the drug war. After a twoyear absence, the original emancipation proclamation will be on display during president s day weekend. Dont miss this rare opportunity to see the original that will be made available for viewing on the 17th and 18th and 19th between the hours of ten and 5 30 each day. To learn more about these programs and exhibits, consult our calendar of events online. There is a table outside where you can sign up to receive email updates in another way to get involved is to become a member of the National Archives foundation, the Foundation Supports all of our education and outreach activities and advocating membership in the lobby also. Todays Program Takes a close look at Thomas Jeffersons three daughters, martha and Mariah Jefferson and Herriot Hemmings s come up with depicting the life of Thomas Jefferson through their eyes. The author painstakingly researched their lives using primary sources including cases and records off the district courof the districtcourts of thd books on the record of the government of the district of columbia here and at the National Archives. Previous accounts such as Annette Gordon reed indicates jeffersons fathered a daughter of Sally Hemmings. The three daughters right the book takes the relationships existence as a given and the monitor review wrote like all great histories do, it brings this vividly to life the exhaustive research, the passion for the subject and elegant writing. Associate professor of history at the university where she teaches courses in colonial and revolutionary and womens and gender history and holds a phd from the college of william and mary and is the author of several scholarly articles and two books and has presented the work in conferences in the United States and abroad. In the course of her research she associates from organizations such as the National Endowment for the humanities, the Colonial Williamsburg foundation and the Virginia Historical society. Her first book claiming the pen, human and intellectual life in the early American South won the outstanding book award for the history of Education Society in 2007. Please welcome kathryn. good afternoon and thank you so much for being here. I cant tell you what a pleasure it is and how exciting it is for me to be back from washington where ive done so much of a research to bmyresearch to be bs building where id spent weeks working on this project. Its wonderful to be here. Thank you for coming. I thought what i would do today is present first a very brief overview of the book and then zero in on two of the stories that bring out the themes of the book and why i think these stories matter for today. Thomas jefferson had a three daughters martha and mariah by his wife, and herriot by his slave Sally Hemmings. So jeffersons daughters i recount the journey of these three very different women and how their struggle to define themselves reflect both the possibilities and the limitations of the American Revolution. Although all three share the same father, the commonalities are there. He received a fine comments will education where they lived in paris during their fathers diplomatic posting and at that time, paris is a hothouse of intellectual and celebrated the young Martha Jefferson met and even socialize with. Once they return home however they found their Options Limited into nearly independent republic but their father himself hoped to establish. 12 years after their return from france with her halfsister was born and her life would follow a very different path. She would grow up into slavery and leave monticello at age 21 with the assistance of jefferson himself and begin a new life free from bondage. She 50 i had 50 in her pockety jefferson himself had provided and for decidedly uncertain prospects, so their lives providing a unique Vantage Point from which to examine the complicated legacy of the American Revolution itself. And i wrote this book to show how their interwoven stories and individuals struggles to shape their own destinies and shed new light on the challenges we still face in this nation today. For the Ongoing Movement towards human rights. As well as o of course the light it sheds on the personal and political legacy of one of our most controversial founding fathers. So today i thought i would open a stories of martha and herriot. She was 10yearsold when her mother died. She was a witness to the agonized grief and companion when he traveled to france in 1784. So, the young martha learned in life to complet the complete deo her father. She was barely 12yearsold when her father placed her in this school. This is one view from the courtyard and just a partial view of. This is from the inner courtya courtyard. The day that her father dropped her off at the school they would have entered through doors that are concealed, but the mother superior officers were up here it is a gorgeous staircase that takes you from up here to the mother superiors office. From the street view this isnt quite as impressive but its one which martha would attend services as well. Certainly it was the most expensive. It was devoted by the intellectual life martha would have the experience of a lifetime. She quickly learned french and gossip with friends and shop chaperoned pushers at the height of the regime so remember they arrive in august of 1784 and a belief in september 1789. There were ideas about love and marriage into the stories you told me today that really shocked me. Deep thoughts and small preoccupied her. She desperately wished slavery would cease. She poured her father for an advance on her allowance. This four steps at a time shopping for parisian fashions, reporting on the shifting alliances as students move in and out of the school and as he entered paris to the revolutionary west of these are a contrast. This was done in philadelphia about a year and a half before she died. Years later, she woul was told stories of these days is remarked repeatedly that they were the happiest years of her life. It was a vision that he deviated. Before her departure for france, she followed the traditional curriculum. There was a bit of reading and writing. This jefferson once said that the preparation for protecting her family fortunes if she were so unhappy as in his words to marry a blockhead. Things were different. There were arithmetics and modern languages and she wrote deeply entrenched literature attending the opera and theater socialized at the row. It was named because one of the kings relatives found he couldnt afford to live in it and thus enclosed in its one of the most beautiful places of paris and then there were shops and restaurants and this was the place to go to see and be seen aparticularly on a sunday. She was indistinguishable from the nobility when her sponsor because you need a reference to get into panama not recognizing martha on the playground when they she replied she has a very distinguished air. But for english friends even called her your ladyship. So they had come a lon have comy after five years and that is why jefferson whisked her away before she could be swept up by a young french aristocrat she was married to a third cousin thomas randolph. After her years in paris martha tried to make the most of the isolation of life as a virginia planters wife over the course of 28 years, and jeffersons retirement in 1899, she moved back to monticello to live with him and devoting herself to discomfort, she identified with his intellectual life, with the pursuit of the life of the mind and devoted herself to educating her children and particularly her daughter to do the same. So how might it be in the early republic particularly the advantages of the academy of paris or france and when one is the daughter of one of the chief architects of the American Republic it was going to be a challenge as the very architecture suggested. So this photograph im sure any of you have been to monticello. This is taken from jeffersons library looking through another room and then into his cabinet study jefferson became very enamored when he was in europe. So, compared this apartment devoted to the mind of monticello. But this room it isnt quite 15 square feet where all martha managed and taught her own village and it gets the best sense of the context an and the ways that her daughter tries to answer that question about enough education and refused to be bound by the gender limitations. In these letters we can see first the lofty dreams to give her daughters the finest education in america that is to teach them they are rational beings who can strive for the lives of the mind but against those dreams of course were the reality is that theirealities os women and this is clear about the waste of time spent carrying dickies in their words that is when it was their turn to manage the housekeeping chores. So she could finally find time to write to her sister because she had given up the keys after one of the most troublesome months of House Keeping housekr had. The most artistic reminded her of those flying with dust will it was her turn to carry the keys. In these dreams and reality they search for a place to read at if monticello which of course during jeffersons retirement became a magnet for all manner invited in an otherwise. So virginia is seeking out a place where they once find her. When you open that door, there is a 3foot drop into this spa space. So she goes about converting this space that she shared with the wasps to a room of her own with a sofa minus any cushions and a couple of chairs and two small tables. This was her fairy palace which monticello furnished with some furnishings according to the description to try to imagine what she had done with it but she didnt intend except that shed originally cited in othe others. Was a classical education he never considered that for his own children. Martha had learned french, spanish and italian but she wouldnt deprive her girls of latin just because they were not mailed and again it is through heher daughters letters that dae can see this. When she was 23, she recalled the visits to her grandfathers retreat and here she went from room to room in the house savoring the memory is from when she had been able to spend seven to eight uninterrupted hours. Sheshe swore i will would neven tolerate a translation. The difference between the original translation she likened to path between the glass of rich old highfiber fine and the same one thrown into record water. Indeed, trips to the poorest and i have tafter sort of contrast n jefferson has the same thing that he doesn doesnt monticelh is to say this room here is south facing and get gorgeous sunlight. They share a bedroom on the east facing side. So here is the sunny reading room. They were the closest that her daughters would come to realize what would be dreamt up in 1929 a room of ones own in a world with its demand could not intrude. A place devoted only to its intellectual life. Martha attempted to widen the boundaries of jeffersons perfect confidence in the ability to educate in the privacy of his own home was certainly justified by the admiration and praise of all to monticello. But lacking any public expression of her many gifts what more could she hope to be on the road . Very little. Just three years after martha had died in 1836. She has passed away at the world couldnt mourn her. In the recollection of her friends and perhaps of her children a few short years and the remembrance of her name and copies will be gone. For all that Martha Jefferson randolph was it for all that she cultivated with herself and her daughters, she was invisible to the world. Her brilliance confined to the 15th of square sitting room that her father had designed. Martha was left destitute. Her education, brilliant mind and manners and famous connection all against the vagaries of life. Her story deserves as a cautionary tale today of the benefits and the perils even while the wellintentioned Bad Reputation for their lifes meaning that likelihood. Jennings was born in 1801 reinvented herself on the best times that she could as a freeborn white woman and her story opened up an entirely different avenue of investigation and the narrative and i just want to show you this simplified family tree. Heres john wales at the top of it so he marries wife number one, they had a daughter, she marries Thomas Jefferson and has martha and mary later called where i had debate miriah. Theyvthey then brought to the household and have six Children Together the youngest of whom was sally hemming was born in 1773 th1773 that year that johns died, so two things i think worth noticing. First of all, jeffersons wife and sally hemming something other. The other thing to note is jeffersons daughter martha and sally hemming sold within roughly a year of each other so they will be going through their childbearing years together if monticello. So we dont know exactly when she left monticello. Certainly by the end of may when she turned 21yearsold but we do know that it caused quite a church in the little town of charlottesville. There was a great deal of talk abouabout it he later remembere. People said he freed her because he was her own daughter. When they boarded the stage for washington, you could easily see jeffersons home the to home a h mounted. They artheyre on the square, ty discussed among themselves jeffersons relations with sally hemming was into those that look so much like him. Now they sought to explain why jefferson with free. Hemmings. Everyone knew as jefferson himself once said a slave woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best band on the farm. Explain why he had never done such a thing before or never do it again. He told his familys story to a newspaper each and 73. Somewhere on the road north to washington. Washington, herriot had her identity and plus if you sort of do the rough math, but she was seven eighths white. It is a declaration of independence from her origins as to rival that of her fathers. This was her arrival point is. She raised a family of children. He hadnt heard from her in about ten years but was not aware that they had ever been discovered. It became clear to me she dropped the name they had a positive mania for naming children after family members. They were able to stand up and the masses is. Beginning in 1811 because there were no hemmings is in the marriage register, i went through them and listed all of those that made between 1821 and 1830 and by that point she would have been 29 and married. That gave me a list of 59 and that iisstill 59 husbands becauy leavbabiesmuch more historical n the record. Succumb having a discrete list i thought okay ive got something to work with. Still in search of a childrens name, im thinking i can go to the Church Records but then of f course you have to identify which churches were around in the 1820s and 30s and then of course constructed genealogy of those churches because many are merged with other congregations or changed locations altogether. Theres a few that have been your own Family History as im sursure half and count heard hae kinds of challenges. So in these conferences looking for those names they looked through the city directories and here is a sample page from the first city directory happily enough in 1822, the year that were alive and this year james number of residing at the president s house not b to be confused with james number of who was an engineer but they helped me in the landscape to give somethin some kind of an if their economic standing. That is what matheson said. In doing that, there were at least a third on my list and there were a few who had me going for a while. Her last name of the perfect considering that she had walked from monticello and also i have been keeping an eye out for beverly whose first name was william. These monticello. They had a daughter and both disappeared from the historical record. But i managed through the Church Records to establish that they were in fact are so i thought i was onto something until the census records revealed a free man of color and of course at cd have been quite emphatic that his sister married a white man. I thought her baptismal records and in the Church Records she certainly wasnt the herriot whose husband placed a notice in the paper that hed not been responsible for any debts incurred by his runaway wife. The one who had becoming the longest and im still going to keep this search was. Who married a scottish immigrant carpenter who had ten children and whose husband was so successful when he died she could afford to hire 30 carriages for his funeral procession. A man of good standing. If i cannot say definitively that i found her, i certainly learned a good deal about her time and the variety of people who lived there but understood the woman she must have been in her choice to pass. The race right, the long wait for the abolition of slavery in the Nations Capital into those throughout to prove themselves as fully deserving of citizenship in other words seeing the city through her eyes i watched with her fac feet she escaped by passing. For the first when herriot arrived you can see wining pennsylvania ave. The avenue the planted by her path and here is the 1824 view of the capital. Soil cement the people that built the city and serve serve n expanding population of government officials, clerks and many transients. A daily labor of women to sustain their families with gardening, marketing, cooking and sewing and women who rose from childbirth only to bury those that died before they had a chance to live and in spite everything with her intelligence and determination, she blended right in. But of course this isnt a story of triumph. We need to think long and hard about what it means to live ones life this way. Unlike her family who was devoted to one another and of course the legacy of the herriot lived out her life in the oblivious of exile, geographically separate from her mother and her two younger brothers silenced by the wa weit of the institutionalized slavery, she suffered the appalling record of her birth family. We dont know when her correspondence with madison began or what she knew about her familys life after jefferson died. We dont know when or how or even if she band of her mothers death nine years after her father had died. They didnt possess any edge. The rope of captivity made you an offspring rather than an error. Jefferson may have thought of. As the offspring because the daughter of Sally Hemmings and events of the things is the heir of the mind, the first to bury the lineage of the price she had to pay the rights accorded to only rights in america. Legal scholars show its told the story of her grandfather who passed to obtain the job of a Chicago Department store during the Great Depression of the 1930s. He watched the pain when she told the stories of those days remembering the monumental effort that was required. She was transgressing the boundaries crossing borders. He now understands. No longer immediately identifiable because her grandmother moved from mississippi. Her grandmother couldnt enter the world albeit on a false passport not merely passing, but trespassing. Surely echoing the Lesson Learned a century earlier as she shared her family, harriss grandfather knew that, quote, accepting the risk of self annihilation that is not her identity was the only way to survive. Its about survival. Black americans both male and female are incarcerated in Epic Proportions if compared to white. They have to teach lessons about how to survive beyond their front door particularly when dealing with police and the white prints do not. The lone evaluation since the 17th century has created what one commentator called a way of seeing that persists of evidence to the contrary for a figure that is coming this way is about to unleash the force. The lesson that we can take away from all of this is that americans are not colorblind. Quite the contrary it is so significant to know who carries a drop of blood renders a person black. Theyre supposed to understand and this is exactly the problem. Anyone who looked at her she was neither legally three until 1865 because they never gave formal freedom papers but she wasnt a slave because she lived as a free person. She doesnt fit into any of these categories that seem to have such a clear and the meaning to demarcate peoples lives in the experience. And as far as her granddaughters were concerned, properly bound from the privilege of the common dissent from Thomas Jefferson of course which they were so very proud. Justice remains a sore point between recognizing those that claim the right of burial and the Monticello Graveyard and descendents who seek access to that graveyard. In 2002, the association called the proposal down in a dozen years later when jefferson defended and arranged to meet the slave descendent of monticello they walk through the graveyard together. I unlock the gate apparently unconscious of the fullness of that Comment Setting the top two centuries the white person in possession while the other remains locked out. What we need to see and i hope my local show is the legal and social barriers that separate us by race and gender are as much of the work of human hands as that which surrounds the Monticello Graveyard. This only proves the point that we are all connected and need to acknowledge the systems separate us so that we can begin the collective effort to dismantle and embrace our common humanity. And as we can compound the movement to redefine citizenship as we still strive to convince that blackwhite spatter this is as opportune of th a time as evr to think about. [applause] i understand many of you are veterans. Im happy to take questions and comments. Thank yo thank you for your talk. I have two questions. Can you speculate as to whether her husband would have known of her origins and also when you talk about the years. With respect to whether the immediate family have known you are right to use the word speculation. That is a question i was asking myself as i try to conjure up myself various scenarios for various ways to look for. No one has claimed to send from emily or herriot and that leads me to believe that at the very least if her husband knew and if her children knew that information stopped with them. The records show he never owned slaves. He was a carpenter with a scottish emigran immigrant carpo i thought that is how they met. I really have no way of knowing. What is interesting is a descendent as late as world war ii here in washington said that the family of the daughter still lived in washington and they are doing very well so clearly there was knowledge and pattison made the point oa point of saying i i will not. As we all know the civil war did not change the ideas about race. So he wasnt going to reveal the secret. It gets to the pain of the plaintiff passing and did she keep the secret to herself. The utter silence that suggests the secret was held early on. With respect to the first lady, im not particularly comfortable with that designation because she visited her father twice when he was president and was certainly a very congenial and intelligent conversationalist at her fathers dinner table when he had visitors. But neither she nor miriah who accompanied her on the trips were interested. They were there because jefferson wanted them there. Her own son James Madison was born at the white house and so i would say it is less of the first lady and more wanted to please her father. Thank you. I dont have as much of a question as i delete comments. You mentioned the woman who was with tax taylor. I work of monticello now. I wasnt so much longing to get into that site as i was longing to find my familys history. And i would like to say on behalf of myself and on behalf of monticello we are fully committed to telling the complete story of all of the people who live there as my four times great grandfather, not just of Thomas Jefferson that the men, women and children. We would love to find herriot so please dont give up your search. She wasnt the only one. And its important that we all acknowledge and recognize. [applause] i think your presentation is outstanding. I preferred the use of the word enslaved as opposed to slaves because slaves are not born. The second comment i would like to make is the mixture of a race and passing the which means you did something because you wanted to show yourself as something else. The idea is survival as well as freedom. So people who want to be in enslaved person when we were treated so very poorly so i think the choice was the guilt. Your book is bringing out a lot of very interesting facts about the jeffersons and that is all i have to say. I agree with your point of enslaved persons and as a very fraught topic i would absolutely recommend you to take the bike ellison hopes hand listen hopesa presentation here which is this oversized. It was a way of dealing with an atrocious and oppressive system. I guess what i was trying to do in my book and even a little bit in my talk today is prioritized words we are using, white and black. They have no biological meaning. There is no basis for this race and science, but they carry enormous political, social, economic weight. So, there is a way in my book and i thought you put this out in which i am trying to let people see me stumble over these terms because none of them really work. To see the artificiality of the meanings continue to bear. So that is what i am trying to do and if it gets people to try to think about this if they wind up as befuddled to me is progress and if they start questioning these then maybe we need these ways to institutionalize them. Im not going to ask a question, just a comment. Hearing about your book and the experience it appears. Appears. Went through and others is brought to mind what i experienced growing up in johannesburg and i actually havent thought about this for a very long time because a dear friend of mine who has since passed away past and so i know a little bit about what it meant. In the 20th century. The last commentor mentioned i think we need especially people need to be conscious of the ways in which these things we dont even think about are institutionalized sweater that was in south africa or here, we have as you well know problems with the ways in which english settlers treated and continue to treat the indigenous populations