Doris Osborn told Delphi Study Club members of Thomas Jefferson’s two families, one black and one white, during her review of The Hemingses of Monticello by historian and lawyer Annette Gordon-Reed.Speaking at the club’s November meeting in the home of Vivian Pemberton, Osborn described the book as a “historical treatise” and said it gives great insight into life on the plantation from the standpoint of both slaves and landowners. It reveals as much about Jefferson as about the Hemings family.For context, Osborn noted that the Virginia Company founded the colony of Virginia as a moneymaking enterprise. The colony imported slaves from Africa and slavery, based on race, was well established by the 1730s, enabling landowners to develop large, wealthy plantations.Thomas Jefferson, son of a plantation owner, was accustomed to a lavish lifestyle and a wealthy plantation owner in his own right. His wife, Martha, a widow twice over, died shortly after the birth of their sixth child. Jefferson paid some of his skilled slaves at Monticello and freed his favorites but sold others.The Hemings family descended from a slave named Elizabeth, born in 1735, the daughter of a slave mother and an immigrant English father. Elizabeth’s granddaughter Sally was the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. When Jefferson, now a widower, was appointed Ambassador to France, in 1785, he took with him his two young daughters and teen-aged Sally along with other prized slaves to Paris. Marriage to a black woman in Virginia was impossible; however, Sally bore Jefferson seven children altogether, thus founding his black family.Attending the meeting were Mary Allan, Linda Brown, Ann Cales, Beverely Frazier, Osborn, Pemberton, and Marjilea Smithheisler. The club will not meet in December but will resume its regular schedule January 9 in the home of Beverly Frazier.
