The President's Daughter by Barbara Chase-Riboud

First published: 1994

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: 1822-1860’s

Locale: East Coast of the United States

Principal Characters:

• Harriet Hemings, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and his slave wife Sally Hemings who passes for white
• Adrian Petit, who accompanies Harriet to the North and acts as her guardian
• Charlotte Nevell, Harriet’s schoolmate and lifelong friend
• Thance Wellington, Harriet’s pharmacist husband and the father of her four children
• Thor Wellington, Harriet’s second husband, who is the twin brother of Thance Wellington

The Novel

The President’s Daughter opens on the eve of Harriet Hemings’ twenty-first birthday. Her father, former president Thomas Jefferson, has promised all seven of his enslaved children that they can leave his estate at Monticello when they turn twenty-one. Tall, with red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, Harriet bears a striking resemblance to her father. Harriet’s mother is Jefferson’s slave-wife Sally Hemings, who was also the half sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha. Thus, Harriet is enmeshed in a complex intergenerational, interracial family and feels great bitterness toward her aged father. Compelled to find freedom at any price, she cannot comprehend why her mother has remained in slavery, but she wants above all for her father to call her “daughter.”

Harriet travels to Philadelphia in the company of Adrian Petit, Jefferson’s former valet. During their trip, Petit fills gaps in the mournful girl’s knowledge of her family history. In particular, he tells Harriet about her uncle, James, a freed slave who committed suicide after the relationship between Jefferson and his sister Sally became public knowledge. The siblings, James and Sally, served Jefferson in Paris when he was the American ambassador to France, where they were considered free people. James took advantage of this freedom. Sally, however, remained with Jefferson.

At first, Harriet has trouble in Philadelphia, where she must leave behind the identity of a black slave and assume that of a white free woman. She is terrified she will be arrested as a runaway slave. However, she and the ever-faithful Petit devise the story that Harriet comes from an important Virginia family whose other members have all died of smallpox. Petit also enrolls his charge in a prestigious school, and, in appreciation, Harriet takes his name. Soon after, Harriet Petit establishes a friendship that will last a lifetime with Charlotte Nevell and falls in love with up-and-coming pharmacist and explorer Thance Wellington. However, she cannot fully settle into her white identity. Unable to share with Thance the truth about her past, Harriet breaks their engagement and travels to London as a companion to Mrs. Willowpole, an outspoken abolitionist.

In London, where slavery is outlawed, for the first time Harriet finally feels free. During this time abroad, she travels to a convent in Lodi, Italy, where she visits her father’s former mistress, the artist Maria Cosway, who counsels her on the illusionary nature of living. After her return to America, Harriet hears that her father is dying and returns home to Monticello in hopes that her father will free her and her mother on his deathbed. However, although Jefferson’s white daughter, Martha, frees Harriet’s mother, Harriet to her great frustration remains legally enslaved. She manages nonetheless to buy and free her dark-skinned, thirteen-year-old cousin, Thenia.

Meanwhile, the brokenhearted Thance has accompanied his twin brother, Thor, to Africa. There, the twin pharmacists catalog medicinal plants. Although he is taken seriously ill, Thance returns to the waiting Harriet, who has embraced the life she earlier refused. They have four children and live happily, until Thance dies during another exploratory trip to Africa. Thor, who has been in love with Harriet for years, jumps at the opportunity to marry his brother’s widow, and Harriet finds with Thor a continuation of the love she felt for his brother. Although her secret past still concerns her, she finds comfort as part of the Underground Railroad that ferries runaway slaves from the South to freedom in the North.

The last part of the novel deals with the abolitionist movement leading up to the Civil War. As Thor dons the uniform of a general and goes off to serve in the Union army with his sons, Harriet acts as a nurse in some of the war’s major battles, including the Battle of Gettysburg (1863). She loses sons to the war. A series of letters from these sons and other characters help describe the magnitude of the war, the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment freeing the slaves. Before she dies, Harriet reveals the secret she has been carrying her whole life to her astounded granddaughter Roxanne.

The Characters

Above all, Harriet Hemings desires freedom, and she is willing to abandon her family and all that is familiar in her quest. At the beginning of the novel, she is angry with both of her parents: She resents her powerful father, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, for not recognizing her as his daughter and for not freeing her. She is also angry with her mother for choosing love over freedom. However, Harriet comes to forgive her father as she comes to appreciate his role in American history. She sees him in a sense as prefiguring Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, to whom it ultimately falls to free the slaves. As a wife and mother, Harriet also comes to appreciate the significance of her mother’s sacrifice.

Although a minor character, Harriet’s mother, Sally Hemings, plays a major role in the novel. She watches her children leave Monticello one by one when each turns twenty-one. Each goes off to make a life in the North, while Sally remains behind, enslaved, in the South. She clings steadfastly to this mean way of life, despite having once lived as a free woman in Europe, for love of Jefferson. It is not until after Jefferson dies that his daughter, Martha, finally frees Sally, while the rest of her family is sold off to pay Jefferson’s debts.

Critical Context

In an 1802 national scandal, Thomas Jefferson was publicly accused of fathering Sally Hemings’s children. The President’s Daughter is the sequel to Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings (1979), the story of Harriet’s mother. The earlier novel won the Kafka Award for the best novel written by an American woman. The President’s Daughter, Riboud’s fourth novel, explores more directly the historical ambiguities of reality. While Harriet Hemings was a real person, nothing is known about the life she led as an emancipated slave passing as white. Thus, Chase-Riboud is freer to construct a fictive, albeit compelling, life for Harriet than she was when writing within the confines of the better-documented story of her mother.

Bibliography

Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Examination of the representation of history in African American literature; helps contextualize Chase-Riboud’s work.

Dabney, Virginius. The Jefferson Scandals. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1981. Details the Hemings family’s historical connection with Thomas Jefferson and attacks earlier Jeffersonian biographies.

Durey, Michael. With the Hammer of the Truth. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990. Chronicles accusations that were instigated by journalist James Callender regarding Thomas Jefferson’s children by Sally Hemings, including the protagonist of The President’s Daughter.

McKee, Sarah. “Barbara Chase-Riboud, 1939-    .” In Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999. Provides an overview of scholarship pertaining to the work of author Barbara Chase-Riboud.