Declaration House: Reading Between the Lines of America’s Founding, edited by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Paul M. Farber, and Yolanda Wisher

The importance of Graff House, as the original building was known, had faded by 1883 and it was torn down. Forgotten even more rapidly was the memory of Robert Hemmings, the 14-year-old enslaved valet who accompanied Jefferson to Philadelphia in 1776, encountering a city on the cusp of revolution as he ran errands and tended to his master’s needs. Hemmings likely slept in Graff House’s stuffy garret.

History and Hemmings

As the Black half-brother of Jefferson’s wife Martha, Hemmings was one of about 600 people the Declaration’s author enslaved during his life. “Hemmings was there, behind the scenes, tending to Jefferson and making possible the long work of drafting, debating, and defining ... present with Jefferson at this profound moment of nation building, as intimately close as any person in Jefferson’s inner circle to the process and the pen that birthed our country’s freedom,” writes Paul M. Farber, who edited Declaration House with Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Yolanda Wisher.

Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration denounced slavery. The explosive passage, however, was smothered by Congress in the interest of securing unanimous support for independence. According to an essay by Andrew A. Davenport, vice president for research and director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, Hemmings could read and write, in addition to having proximity to Jefferson’s papers. Was he aware his own freedom was being debated? And did he sense the irony of being edited out of the final draft?

An observation post

Hemmings’s very existence was little more than a footnote in Jefferson’s records until 2023, when his signature was found by the Getting Word African American History initiative at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Since 1993 Getting Word has worked to uncover and preserve family histories of those enslaved at Monticello and other Jefferson properties.

Graff House was reconstructed and dubbed Declaration House by the National Park Service in 1975. The plan to activate the site began in 2022, when the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (owner/operator of Monticello), Independence National Historical Park, and Monument Lab partnered with artist Sonya Clark. The building had been closed to the public for much of this century, for renovation and accessibility issues.

The genius of Clark’s creation is that it did not require public entry: the house itself became the installation, a temporary observation post for the children of Jefferson’s enslaved people, at the corner where in 1776, poetry had wrestled with reality.

Refusing to forget

The book’s editors, Farber (Monument Lab director and cofounder), Arabindan-Kesson (associate professor of Black diasporic art at Princeton University), and Wisher (author, educator, and curator), assembled a collection of essays, poetry, and conversation on the creation and meaning of The Descendants of Monticello.

“As we write this book from the United States in 2025,” Arabindan-Kesson notes, “as websites are taken down, as stories are censored, as language is redacted and speech restricted, the stakes of the struggle are becoming sharper. So, how do we remember what powerful people have decided we should forget?”

Starting to look at America’s truth

After scouring available information and previously untapped sources, Getting Word in 2024 invited known descendants to sit for portraits. The video loop of blinking eyes combined filmed recordings of living offspring with animations of ancestral photographs.

“The Getting Word team is unaware of any living descendants of Hemmings, but many of the Monticello families intermarried and lived in proximity to each other for generations in an interconnected web of social and geographic ties,” writes Niya Bates, Getting Word’s senior fellow for African American history. “Our experiences while making Declaration House show the power of doing the work to connect our family trees so that future generations have a greater awareness of from whom and where they descend.”

In 2025, Getting Word director Auriana Woods spoke with descendants J. Calvin Jefferson Sr. and his grandson Jabari Jefferson. Fortuitously, the elder Jefferson had been an archival technician at the National Archives. Now a consultant to Getting Word, he recalled learning of the project in 1993 through his mother, who’d been contacted in an effort to trace Jefferson descendants.

Though their surname isn’t connected to Thomas Jefferson, the family was found to descend from three of Monticello’s six primary enslaved families. “If you want to learn more about the people who were enslaved and what happened to them, all you have to do is start studying the people who were at Monticello,” J. Calvin Jefferson explained. “[Getting Word] is ... looking at what people did ... and where they fell in society, in order to start looking at the truth of this country.”

The conversation continues

Davenport’s essay fills in Hemmings’s life. In 1791 he married Dolly, who lived 50 miles from Monticello, though Virginia did not recognize enslaved people’s marriages. Three years later, Hemmings became one of just two enslaved persons legally manumitted during Jefferson’s lifetime. He and Dolly moved to Richmond, had a son and daughter, and indications are, operated a livery and produce stand. Hemmings may also have aided others escaping slavery. His signature on his daughter’s marriage document confirms that Hemmings was free, and that his wife and heirs would be, too. When Hemmings died in 1819, his family inherited his estate.

The writing collected in Declaration House offers an opportunity, says Salamishah Tillet, Rutgers University distinguished professor of Africana Studies, “to meditate on the meaning of Hemmings” from varied viewpoints. Tillet quotes a belief expressed by artist Sonya Clark in a 2024 Guardian interview that, though no portrait of Hemmings exists, and direct descendants are yet to be discovered, “Robert Hemmings’s descendants will have his eyes in there somewhere. In the same way that you might have your ... great-grandmother’s eyes or hands or nose, the genetic stuff of him would be in his descendants.”

Though Monticello’s descendants no longer survey the intersection of 7th and Market Streets, their wordless conversation continues in the pages of Declaration House.

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