Robert Hemmings’s Signature

A podcast episode from Monticello’s “In the Course of Human Events,” where historians share the recent rediscovery of Robert Hemmings’s signature, a revelation confirming the literacy and the agency of the man that Thomas Jefferson enslaved as his valet. As a teenager, Hemmings was at Jefferson's side in Philadelphia when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, and later gained his own freedom, becoming the first of very few to be freed by Jefferson. Listen here.