In a letter to her father, who was in Philadelphia serving as vice-president, Martha Jefferson Randolph apprises him of the news at Monticello and in Virginia; she also informs him of the death of one of Jefferson’s political allies, whom she referred to as “the friends of Liberty.”
In this one-page document, dictated in Washington, D.C., possibly to Virginia Randolph Trist, and dated April 18, 1834, Martha Jefferson Randolph states the terms of her will, which was later superseded. She asks that Sally Hemings be “given time,” a method of informally freeing a slave while sidestepping an 1806 law that required manumitted slaves to leave the state within a year.
