Author Description

Fifteen years ago Barbara Chase-Riboud made literary history when she published Sally Hemings to critical praise. Now Barbara Chase-Riboud is back with The President's Daughter, the provocative continuation of the irrefutable historical chronology of Sally Hemings - Thomas Jefferson's mistress, the mother of his children, and the slave he would never set free - even when the scandal nearly cost him the presidency. Epic in proportion, yet rendered in exquisite detail by a writer with the eye of a historian and the heart of a storyteller, The President's Daughter begins in 1822 and tells the story of Harriet Hemings, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings's beautiful and headstrong slave daughter. Harriet is allowed to run away from Monticello and pass for white, as Jefferson had promised Sally their children would be able to do. Harriet experiences the turbulent events leading up to the American Civil War and is eventually thrust into the very heart of the Battle of Gettysburg, where she becomes a kind of Philadelphian Scarlett O'Hara. As The President's Daughter draws to a close during the 1876 Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, Harriet receives an anonymous letter that contains the memoirs of her brother Madison Hemings - who is living his life on the black side of the color line. Harriet realizes that someone in her entourage, perhaps even her own husband, knows she is indeed the president's daughter.