I bought this ebook by Laura Kaye and Stephanie Dray years ago because Book Internet wouldn’t shut up about how good it is, and it seemed like something that’s right up my alley. Having read a nonfiction book about all of Jefferson’s daughters a year or two ago, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming, although apparently I had forgotten much of Patsy’s later life. I remembered the trip to France and her time in the convent and the fact that she wanted to convert to Catholicism. I also remembered Jefferson’s estate (including Monticello) was sold after his death, but I had forgotten all about Patsy’s marriage and kids.
I was kind of disappointed that this book didn’t discuss the fact that Patsy mentioned at some point later in life that she still felt a stronger connection to the Catholic faith than to Protestantism, because that was one of the things that stood out to me from the nonfiction book I read.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The book starts with a warning that the British army is coming and the Jefferson family is forced to flee Monticello. They end up staying in a cabin in the woods for a few months until things calm down and they can return home.
Patsy’s mother dies in childbirth shortly after that, making Patsy promise to take care of her father. Keep in mind I think Patsy is about eight or nine years old at this point. Her father is supposed to be taking care of her, but he’s too overwhelmed by his own grief. Patsy has to shove her grief aside and constantly keep an eye on her suicidal father just to avoid losing the one parent she has left, and that needs to be a trigger warning. It’s a very specific, but very powerful trigger that made it hard for me to read the early sections of this book.
But then they go to France and Patsy falls in love and gets proposed to, and all sorts of fun things happen. Also, her younger sister, Polly, joins them with Sally Hemings, one of their slaves, as a companion. I don’t think I had realized until reading this book that Sally was about the same age as Patsy, or maybe I had just forgotten that detail. That just adds a whole new level of ick to that “relationship,” which, BTW, probably started in France.
The big problem I had with this book was that it called Sally Jefferson’s “lover” and portrayed her as a woman (not a teenaged girl) in a consensual relationship with the man who owned her and all her family. Can everyone stop doing that?
But I digress, because while this book does spend a lot of time on Sally and her mostly-white children, it’s really about Patsy. She apparently fell in love with William Short, her father’s secretary, while they were in France, but he stayed behind when the Jefferson’s moved back to Virginia. Patsy is heartbroken, but takes up with Thomas Randolph, the eldest son of another prominent Virginia planter, almost as soon as she gets home.
They get married, and they do have some good times, but it’s hardly happily ever after. Thomas’s father is a miserable old man who enjoys making everyone else around him miserable and pitting his children against each other. I’m probably the only person on the planet who doesn’t watch “Succession,” but from what I’ve heard of Logan Roy, he sounds a lot like Colonel Randolph.
Shortly after Thomas’s mother dies, Colonel Randolph marries a beautiful young heiress, gets her pregnant, names the child Thomas Randolph, and rewrites his will so the baby inherits everything. But his eldest, the Thomas Randolph that Patsy married, is still responsible for paying for the old man’s debts and taking care of his unmarried sisters.
Things go downhill from there. Thomas’s father had given him one of his plantations, but Thomas couldn’t make it profitable, no matter how hard he worked. They ended up moving to Monticello, ostensibly to take care of the place while Jefferson is being a politician in New York, then Philadelphia, then Washington, D.C. Jefferson makes sure to phrase it as though they are doing him a favor, but everyone sees right through it.
So Patsy takes over as mistress of Monticello and never really gives up that position after that point, except for brief periods when she has to go to Washington to help the men in her life win over the other statesmen through their wives. Hence her title as “America’s First Daughter.”
In addition to the questionable portrayal of the nature of Jefferson’s “relationship” with one of his slaves, I also hated that Patsy kept referring to them as “servants” and saying they were part of the family. Bitch, please.
While I’m tempted to blame the authors for that, I think they were trying to accurately portray the problematic beliefs of a problematic woman. After all, her father is known to have given verbal support to abolition while still owning slaves and not doing anything free any of them, much less other slaves in the country.
I do appreciate that other characters in the book call Jefferson out for his hypocrisy, including William Short, Thomas Randolph, and Lafayette. The authors said William Short was known to be radically progressive for his time, and while I don’t know about Randolph, I do know Lafayette was not shy about confronting Jefferson or Washington about their hypocrisy when it came to owning slaves while fighting for freedom.
So, while I would like to fault this book for being problematic, it’s probably most likely due to the fact that the main character was a problematic person. That said, I would really like everyone to stop acting as though there was any such thing as a “good slaveowner.”