After thoroughly enjoying Dray and Kamoie’s book on the Hamiltos, I had to go read their first book together about Jefferson’s eldest daughter, Martha “Patsy’ Jefferson and how she shaped the founding father we know today.

It is always said that behind every great man, there was a great woman and this is especially prominant in the 1700s as it seems the wives and daughters often survived their famous male relatives. What, with the dueling and the wars it makes sense. They were often the executors of the personal belongings and in an effort to cement their legacies, edited and collected the reams of documents, letters, etc. They also burned more scandelous papers, all to shape the men we know today.

That’s exactly what happened here after Jefferson died where Patsy and her daughters spent a decade organizing and editing his work to publish even though it is published under her son’s name.

Patsy, of all people, had the greatest right to do so as she was her father’s guardian and as one will read, present during many of his historic and infamous turning points.

It is that love for her father that defines Patsy.

The Jefferson’s partially blamed the British for Martha Jefferson’s death. Jefferson also blamed himself for going back into politics, for being the target on the British’s backs that meant they had to flee Monticello in her frail state. Her dying words were that Jefferson marry no one else, and for Patsy to watch over her father. These were promises neither would break.

The book is split into three sections covering Patsy’s girlhood during the American, and French Revolutions, her marriage and life during the Jefferson adminstration, and her ‘elder’ (aka her 40s) years that celebrated Jefferson in his golden age and the beginning of a new generation shaping the democractic experiment. The two authors did an excellent job in condensing and fleshing out the historic events and people that Patsy experienced in her lifetime, really hitting how much of life and history she lived and she knew the importance too. Jefferson was a great man, and his shadow fell over everything and everyone.

This is most prominant with her love life. Her mother’s dying words became her mantra and seeing her father’s suicidal state, Patsy takes it upon herself to become his protector. She knows he’s brilliant, but also believes him to be taken by his own idealism and thus she must make the pragmatic choices when it comes to protecting his reputation from his enemies.

This is must notable when it comes to the slavery issue aka the Sally Hemmings Affair. This is a point of contention although she never directly confronts her father about the contradictions in his “life, liberty, and freedom for all men,” and the fact he owns slaves. Privately, she struggles with the hypocrisy, but she also sees it necessary in order to upkeep their constant debt (and they are always in debt. They never get out of debt, it’s ridiculous. Don’t ever be a farmer or plantation owner). There is also the white superiority angle that the Jeffersons believe their slaves are better off than if they had to face the lynchings and racism of free men.

This is a complex issue as Patsy herself is complicit in slavery even as she privately denounces it. But she feels it’s more important to maintain her father’s reputation as a revolutionary patriot for freedom. Freeing Sally Hemmings and her children would ruin that image as it would make Jefferson’s illegitimate children a matter of public record. So they keep them to the shadows.

Sally is an enigmatic and compelling figure as well. Patsy tries her best to maintain her control all times within the book (“sunny disposition, ice water in their veins” is a common refrain associated with the Jeffersons) but it is Sally who truly succeeds. She never allows anyone to truly see her unless she allows them. She maintains Jefferson’s privacy perfectly, and because of her mistress status, has an air of self-confience and self-possession like any free woman. Although we never get to hear from her POV, you have a sense of Sally’s regality and complexities, loving a man who keeps her in bondage and what she would do for their children.

But we must remember that this is Patsy’s story as she is narrating this after her father’s death so her POV may be unrealiable when it comes to the treatment of Sally. A previous book I read portrayed Patsy as jealous and abusive towards Sally for taking her mother’s place in Jefferson’s heart. Here, she is silently jealous, affectionate, grieving and at times, in solidarity with Sally for Jefferson being the most important man in their life.

Yes, more important than her love life which I mentioned before where she chooses her father over her first love, and her husband, Thomas Randolph, suspects that Patsy is always comparing him unfavorably to her father, unmanning him in the process. Part of that is true, Patsy acknowledges. Her father is a genius, a legend, and Randolph would have been a great man but in comparison to her father, he’s a failure.

Just as Jefferson’s true love is to the shaping of America’s ideals of freedom, Patsy’s true duty is to her father so he can carry out his larger cause.

As with Sally, Patsy’s relationship with her husband is complex. From the beginning, he was sort of a placeholder. He was a family friend, from a prominatn Virginian family, and a planter. The man she was supposed to marry even though she didn’t totally love him. She’d come to love him, but also come to hate him as the years went on. His good points would be swallowed by the toxic family, bitterness, alcoholism, hot temper and possible mental illness of the Randolph bloodline to the point he represents the father that abused him. He’s a good person and a horrible person, and it’s a very human portrait of a love marriage with potential turning into the worst.

Which an aside, the Randolph family is bonkers. Literally, they live on the Bizarre Plantation and maybe it’s something in the land but the incestuous affair and murder trial stemming from that land lives up to its name.

Back from the aside, the Jeffersons did suffer a lot of loss from Patsy’s mother to her sister to her stillborn (out of tenn children which is pretty good for those days) and her daughter when she suffers under her abusive husband. While Jeffersons feels each loss acutely, Patsy is unable to let go of her emotional fortitude because of her duty to her father.

Another great historical figure that the authors mine is Jefferson himself. Although he is presented with some rose-tint as Patsy loves him, she does go through her own disillusions with her father as any child does when they realize their parent is human. She feels confusion when he pursues a married affair when the paramour doesn’t love him. She never quite reconciles with Jefferson’s affair with Sally and his beliefs on slavery but comes to understand his fears. For all of Jefferson’s idealism, he is also a possessive man. Possessive of Sally, and possessive of Patsy even to their own detriment because they fear leaving him will lead to his suicide.

Dray and Kamoie did an excellent job of making these larger than life figures human and making the past feel real and understandable despite the differences in the way of living. The concerns of the fragility of democracy, racism, corruption and land owning are still, sadly, relevant today. Again I cannot emphasize how impressive how they much they fit into this 600 page book. I’m only skimming the surface of the cast of characters and everything they go through.

They add the big stuff one expects such as the Revolutionary War, his friendships with Madison and Layfette, the frenemies with Adams, the antagonism of Hamilton alongside interesting tidbits. Like Patsy wanted to be a nun, The Randolphs of the Bizarre Plantation and their murder trial, Patsy’s friendship with Andrew Jackson and so much more.

For any historical fiction aficionados, this is a book you don’t want to miss with its well-research novel giving a look into how America was made, what was viewed and what was hidden from the eyes of one who shaped it all.

5 stars.