Reference
- RANDOLPH, MARTHA JEFFERSON (1772-1836)Martha Jefferson was born at Monticello, Albemarle County, Virginia, the oldest of six children of Thomas Jefferson and Martha Wayles Skelton, and one of only two who survived to adulthood. She married Thomas Mann Randolph, with whom she had twelve children. The Randolph family resided mostly with Jefferson at Monticello. Intelligent and educated, Martha Jefferson Randolph was an accomplished conversationalist and a gracious hostess during two visits to Washington, DC, while Jefferson was president and, after 1809, during his retirement at Monticello.
Martha Jefferson received a superior education. After her mother died in 1782, she accompanied her father to Philadelphia, where she studied music, drawing, dancing, and French with private tutors, practiced reading and writing on her own, and reported her progress to the loving but demanding Jefferson, who oversaw her studies from a distance while he conducted congressional business. In 1784, father and daughter went to Paris, where Jefferson held a diplomatic post until 1789. Though aligned politically and philosophically with enlightened Parisians, Jefferson sent young Martha to an aristocratic French convent, the Abbaye Royale de Panthemont, to be educated, hoping to shield her from what he considered corrupting European luxuries and social customs. The school's curriculum emphasized manners and ornamental accomplishments, but students also learned arithmetic, geography, history, Latin, and modern languages. At a time when most Virginia females were illiterate, Martha Jefferson learned to speak and read four languages.
Although Jefferson championed the education of boys and young men to make them autonomous and productive citizens, he saw Martha's schooling primarily as preparation for domestic life and, indeed, it was. Her intelligence and learning appealed to Thomas Mann Randolph, a devotee of Enlightenment ideals and scientific farming who had attended the University of Edinburgh, and the two married after a brief courtship in 1790. Enlightened parents, Martha and Tom Randolph relied extensively on the childrearing manuals of the Scotsman John Gregory, who advocated cleanliness, a simple diet, outdoor activities, and above all maternal breastfeeding to safeguard the physical and emotional health of mothers and children alike.
As a mother, Randolph took special pride in the health of her offspring—all but one of whom survived to adulthood—but even more so in their intellectual progress. Drawing on her Parisian schooling, she was her daughters’ sole teacher; she also taught her sons their early lessons before they left home to complete their education. Randolph's learning and her talent as a teacher eventually became her family's greatest assets, as both Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Mann Randolph sunk irrevocably into debt in the 1820s. To generate income, she and her unmarried daughters opened a school at Edgehill, her son's Albemarle County plantation, in 1829.
The moral and intellectual ideals of the Enlightenment also informed Randolph's approach to religion, even as many of her Virginia contemporaries embraced Protestant evangelicalism. She remained true to the rational religion of her father, combining the Enlightenment-inflected morality of ecumenical Unitarianism with the familiar and comforting rituals of the American Episcopal Church.
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The Jeffersons
A View from the Mountain: A Close Look at Thomas Jefferson's Life
A story that tears at the heart of America, this critically acclaimed documentary from the director of Bonhoeffer explores Thomas Jefferson and his personal and public dilemma about race and slavery. For centuries people have asked how it was possible that the man who wrote the creed for America, declaring that "all men are created equal and entitled to the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," could also live his life as a slaveholder.
A View from the Mountain confronts this paradox and also highlights recent DNA tests that indicate he had an affair and offspring with a house slave, Sally Hemings. The documentary also brings Jefferson's words and ideas to life through dozens of original handwritten letters, excerpts from original manuscripts, deeds of slave manumission, period newspapers, his will, political cartoons, and every known image of Jefferson painted during his lifetime.
Source: Kanopy
Perspectives
Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello
As the oldest and favorite daughter of Thomas Jefferson, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson Randolph (1772-1836) was extremely well educated, traveled in the circles of presidents and aristocrats, and was known on two continents for her particular grace and sincerity. Yet, as mistress of a large household, she was not spared the tedium, frustration, and great sorrow that most women of her time faced. Though Patsy's name is familiar because of her famous father, Cynthia Kierner is the first historian to place Patsy at the center of her own story, taking readers into the largely ignored private spaces of the founding era. Randolph's life story reveals the privileges and limits of celebrity and shows that women were able to venture beyond their domestic roles in surprising ways. Following her mother's death, Patsy lived in Paris with her father and later served as hostess at the President's House and at Monticello. Her marriage to Thomas Mann Randolph, a member of Congress and governor of Virginia, was often troubled. She and her eleven children lived mostly at Monticello, greeting famous guests and debating issues ranging from a woman's place to slavery, religion, and democracy. And later, after her family's financial ruin, Patsy became a fixture in Washington society during Andrew Jackson's presidency. In this extraordinary biography, Kierner offers a unique look at American history from the perspective of this intelligent, tactfully assertive woman.
Ties that Bound : Founding First Ladies and Slaves
Behind every great man stands a great woman. And behind that great woman stands a slave. Or so it was in the households of the Founding Fathers from Virginia, where slaves worked and suffered throughout the domestic environments of the era, from Mount Vernon, Monticello, and Montpelier to the nation's capital. American icons like Martha Washington, Martha Jefferson, and Dolley Madison were all slaveholders. And as Marie Jenkins Schwartz uncovers in Ties That Bound, these women, as the day-to-day managers of their households, dealt with the realities of a slaveholding culture directly and continually, even in the most intimate of spaces. Unlike other histories that treat the stories of the First Ladies' slaves as separate from the lives of their mistresses, Ties That Bound closely examines the relationships that developed between the First Ladies and their slaves. For elite women and their families, slaves were more than an agricultural workforce; slavery was an entire domestic way of life that reflected and reinforced their status. In many cases slaves were more constant companions to the white women of the household than were their husbands and sons, who often traveled or were at war. By looking closely at the complicated intimacy these women shared, Schwartz is able to reveal how they negotiated their roles, illuminating much about the lives of slaves themselves, as well as class, race, and gender in early America. By detailing the prevalence and prominence of slaves in the daily lives of women who helped shape the country, Schwartz makes it clear that it is impossible to honestly tell the stories of these women while ignoring their slaves. She asks us to consider anew the embedded power of slavery in the very earliest conception of American politics, society, and everyday domestic routines.
Jefferson's Daughters
The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson's three daughters--two white and free, one black and enslaved--and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America FINALIST FOR THE GEORGE WASHINGTON PRIZE * "Beautifully written . . . To a nuanced study of Jefferson's two white daughters, Martha and Maria, [Kerrison] innovatively adds a discussion of his only enslaved daughter, Harriet Hemings."--The New York Times Book Review Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. Although the three women shared a father, the similarities end there. Martha and Maria received a fine convent school education while they lived with their father during his diplomatic posting in Paris. Once they returned home, however, the sisters found their options limited by the laws and customs of early America. Harriet Hemings followed a different path. She escaped slavery--apparently with the assistance of Jefferson himself. Leaving Monticello behind, she boarded a coach and set off for a decidedly uncertain future. For this groundbreaking triple biography, history scholar Catherine Kerrison has uncovered never-before-published documents written by the Jefferson sisters, as well as letters written by members of the Jefferson and Hemings families. The richly interwoven stories of these strong women and their fight to shape their own destinies shed new light on issues of race and gender that are still relevant today--and on the legacy of one of our most controversial Founding Fathers. Praise for Jefferson's Daughters "A fascinating glimpse of where we have been as a nation . . . Catherine Kerrison tells us the stories of three of Thomas Jefferson's children, who, due to their gender and race, lived lives whose most intimate details are lost to time."--USA Today "A valuable addition to the history of Revolutionary-era America."--The Boston Globe "A thought-provoking nonfiction narrative that reads like a novel."--BookPage
America's First Daughter
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In a compelling, richly researched novel that draws from thousands of letters and original sources, bestselling authors Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie tell the fascinating, untold story of Thomas Jefferson's eldest daughter, Martha "Patsy" Jefferson Randolph--a woman who kept the secrets of our most enigmatic founding father and shaped an American legacy. From her earliest days, Patsy Jefferson knows that though her father loves his family dearly, his devotion to his country runs deeper still. As Thomas Jefferson's oldest daughter, she becomes his helpmate, protector, and constant companion in the wake of her mother's death, traveling with him when he becomes American minister to France. It is in Paris, at the glittering court and among the first tumultuous days of revolution, that fifteen-year-old Patsy learns about her father's troubling liaison with Sally Hemings, a slave girl her own age. Meanwhile, Patsy has fallen in love--with her father's protégé William Short, a staunch abolitionist and ambitious diplomat. Torn between love, principles, and the bonds of family, Patsy questions whether she can choose a life as William's wife and still be a devoted daughter. Her choice will follow her in the years to come, to Virginia farmland, Monticello, and even the White House. And as scandal, tragedy, and poverty threaten her family, Patsy must decide how much she will sacrifice to protect her father's reputation, in the process defining not just his political legacy, but that of the nation he founded.
Ladies of Liberty
In Founding Mothers, Cokie Roberts paid homage to the heroic women whose patriotism and sacrifice helped create a new nation. Now the number one New York Times bestselling author and renowned political commentator--praised in USA Today as a "custodian of time-honored values"--continues the story of early America's influential women with Ladies of Liberty. In her "delightfully intimate and confiding" style (Publishers Weekly), Roberts presents a colorful blend of biographical portraits and behind-the-scenes vignettes chronicling women's public roles and private responsibilities. Recounted with the insight and humor of an expert storyteller and drawing on personal correspondence, private journals, and other primary sources--many of them previously unpublished--Roberts brings to life the extraordinary accomplishments of women who laid the groundwork for a better society. Almost every quotation here is written by a woman, to a woman, or about a woman. From first ladies to freethinkers, educators to explorers, this exceptional group includes Abigail Adams, Margaret Bayard Smith, Martha Jefferson, Dolley Madison, Elizabeth Monroe, Louisa Catherine Adams, Eliza Hamilton, Theodosia Burr, Rebecca Gratz, Louisa Livingston, Rosalie Calvert, Sacajawea, and others. In a much-needed addition to the shelves of Founding Father literature, Roberts sheds new light on the generation of heroines, reformers, and visionaries who helped shape our nation, giving these ladies of liberty the recognition they so greatly deserve.
The Slave Families of Thomas Jefferson
Extensive compilation of primary documents, maps, and photographs tracing the genealogical history of the more than six hundred enslaved men, women, and children who lived and worked on Thomas Jefferson's Virginia plantations.
The Founders on the Founders
"I never indeed thought him an honest, frank-dealing man, but considered him as a crooked gun, or other perverted machine, whose aim or stroke you could never be sure of." --Thomas Jefferson on Aaron Burr "[A]lways an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." -- Benjamin Franklin on John Adams "I do now know [Jefferson] to be one of the most artful, intriguing, industrious and double-faced politicians in all America." -- John Nicholas to George Washington "I shall really regret to leave Mr. Jefferson, he is one of the choice ones of the Earth." -- Abigail Adams More than two centuries after the ground-breaking events of the American struggle for independence, its key figures strike us more as players in a myth than as people who lived, worked, and interacted with one another. To recover the human dimension of the founders, we need look no further than their own words. Through a series of revealing quotations, historian John P. Kaminski profiles thirty of the era's best-known individuals, including Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, John Hancock, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry ("all tongue without either head or heart," according to Thomas Jefferson), as well as the early presidents and their first ladies. The discourse is unfailingly respectful, and yet this is no mutual admiration society. The subjects are not afraid to be sharp about one another, but this only makes their words of praise more convincing and poignant. One could hardly ask for a more clear-eyed, and touching, tribute than Thomas Jefferson's appraisal of George Washington: "He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the calmest unconcern.... His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words, a wise, a good, and a great man." Beginning with an introductory essay that provides an overview of the relationships between the founders, the book then presents each individual, providing a biographical sketch and a chronologically arranged series of quotations, clarifying not only each person's place within the independence movement but the contours of their character. The authors strike us with their candor, their insight, and their eloquence as they make their subjects come alive for us. As this book reveals, greatness is not only a matter of responding to the times; the people themselves were remarkable.