ALTHOUGH a bibliography would be long and out of place here, I feel I must acknowledge certain published and scholarly works not previously mentioned and without which this book could not have been written. They are not, of course, responsible for any errors, interpretations, or misinterpretations I have made.
First, Fawn Brodie’s book, Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, and her two articles published in American Heritage, “The Great Jefferson Taboo” and “Thomas Jefferson’s Unknown Grandchildren.”
Second, the memoirs of Madison Hemings, of Edmund Bacon, of the ex-slaves Israel Jefferson and Isaac Jefferson, as well as the diaries of Aaron Burr and John Quincy Adams.
Third, the letters of John and Abigail Adams and the Family Letters of Thomas Jefferson, his Farm Book and his Account Book.
An unpublished paper at the University of Virginia Library by Jean Hanvey Hazelton, “The Hemings Family of Monticello,” must be mentioned, as well as the Jefferson Lectures of Eric Erickson at Princeton University; Cornel Lengyel’s Four Days in July, The Autobiography of John Trumbull and the Nathan Schachner biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr.
Lastly to be mentioned: The Jefferson Papers of Julian Boyd and his article “The Murder of George Wythe,” published in the William and Mary Quarterly; Thomas Jefferson, The Darker Side, by Leonard W. Levy and the catalogue and the exhibition, “The Eye of Thomas Jefferson,” organized by The National Gallery, Washington, D. C.
My last acknowledgment is to a nineteenth-century novel, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, published in England in 1853 by William Wells Brown, a runaway slave, considered the father of the Afro-American novel. Although I read the original version only after I wrote this book, I was touched to the quick by the recognition of cadences, themes, wellsprings of feeling that are the roots of Afro-American writing. That the theme of this novel, the first black novel published outside the United States, is the same and was written by an expatriate in the true sense of the word, only brings the circle full round. I would like to thank my editor Jeannette Seaver, the Schomburg Collection of Black Culture, my researcher Rother Owens, my secretary and editorial assistant Carolyn Wilson, Victoria Reiter, my family and my friends.