Watching the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission would remind someone of an attorney who defends a guilty-as-sin client by tossing everything he could possibly think of against a wall in the hopes that something would stick and change the mind of a single juror. The members of the Scholars Commission seem much like the late historian Dumas Malone, who worked for 43 years on a six-volume Jefferson biography. No matter how much evidence was presented linking Jefferson to Sally and her children, Malone found convenient ways to dismiss the evidence.
A couple members of the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission recently held a press conference, carried on C-SPAN3, to discuss their book The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission. Made up of genealogists, historians, lawyers and scientists, the Scholars Commission presented theories to contradict the overwhelming evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave, Sally Hemings. The commission argued that the original DNA report indicated only that a Jefferson male had fathered one of Sally Hemings’ children and that the available DNA could not specify Thomas Jefferson as the father.
When something can be proven with about 99 percent certainty, how much credence should be given to the other one percent? There are many things that when put together make a compelling case that Jefferson had a long-running affair with Sally and fathered all of her children.
Sally was a logical choice. Sally Hemings probably reminded Jefferson of his late wife. Jefferson promised his dying wife Martha that he would never remarry. Hemings was the half-sister of his wife, with the two having the same father. “Dusky” Sally was described by Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson, as “light colored and decidedly good looking,” according to the article Not Much Is Sure About Hemings, the Person, published in USA Today, Friday, May 14, 1999. In the same article, Isaac Jefferson, a Monicello slave, said, “Sally was mighty near white… very handsome.” Jefferson could keep his pledge not to remarry that he made to his wife on her death bed, take up with someone who probably looked and behaved in a similar way to his wife, and meet his primal urges and needs. Cohabitating with Sally was quite a bargain for him.
Jefferson was present nine months before each of Sally’s children was born. Jefferson, who not only traveled often but also far and wide, was found by his own Farm Book records and accounts to have been present in Monticello nine months prior to each of Sally’s pregnancies, except for her first one. On that occasion she conceived in Paris while Jefferson was serving as a minister to France and Sally was there as his daughter’s servant.
Eston Hemings was the spittin’ image of Jefferson. It was through a descendant of Sally’s youngest child Eston that the DNA match was made linking him through the Y chromosome to the descendant of Jefferson’s paternal uncle Field Jefferson. In an article first appearing in a Chillicothe, Ohio, newspaper where Eston had once lived, Eston is described as having had a “striking resemblance to Jefferson.” The writer of the article, while visiting Washington D.C. and going from Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, came upon a bronze statue of Jefferson that was located on the walk leading from the avenue to the famed mansion. Immediately he thought the statue looked more like Eston Hemings than anyone else he had ever seen. Upon returning to Chillicothe, he relayed the incident to Eston. “Well,” answered Eston, “my mother, whose name I bear, belonged to Mr. Jefferson… And she was never married.”
The notorious Carr nephews were ruled out. There was no denying that Sally’s children possessed a light skin color and a startling resemblance to Jefferson. To explain this dilemma, Jefferson’s grandchildren, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Randolph Coolidge, tried to assign the paternity of her children to Jefferson’s philandering nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr. However, the DNA research spearheaded by pathologist Dr. Eugene Foster in 1998 showed the three Carr descendants who were tested had no Y-chromosome haplotype match to the Eston Hemings descendant, and therefore the Carr nephews did not father Eston.
DNA evidence won over even the toughest skeptics. Joseph Ellis, the history professor who won the 1997 National Book Award for American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, admitted in a U.S. News and World Report (Nov. 1998) commentary that he was “one of those students of Jefferson who had previously questioned” the Jefferson-Hemings affair. In addition, Ellis wrote, “The Eston match is really all that matters because, in conjunction with the circumstantial evidence that already existed, it proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with his mulatto slave.”
Great hypocrisy from the Scholars Commission. The commission was quick to rally behind the DNA evidence that contradicted the claims of the Thomas Woodson descendants concerning Sally’s putative first son. For two centuries the Woodson family had passed along the now discredited notion that Woodson was Jefferson’s first son. If we accept that the DNA rules out Woodson as a Jefferson son, then we should also accept that there is a conclusive link between Jefferson and Eston Hemings. When the British journal Nature presented the results of the scientific tests, they indicated the Jefferson-Hemings findings provided “proof positive of a genetic linkage” and “removed any shadow of a doubt that Thomas Jefferson sired at least one son of Sally Hemings.”
Madison Hemings was spot on. In the late UCLA historian Fawn Brodie’s 1974 book Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate Biography, she reprinted the reminiscences of Madison Hemings that first appeared in the Pike County Ohio Republican in March of 1873. Madison, Sally’s penultimate child, explains the intimate relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. He says their first child Tom died shortly after birth. He also indicates that he and his siblings Beverly, Harriet and Eston are the children of Thomas Jefferson. The DNA tests bore out all of Madison’s claims, from the Eston Hemings link to the Thomas Woodson non match. His account has been proven to be plausible.
Sally’s children had unique access to freedom. Jefferson liberated Sally’s children when they became a certain age, supposedly to fulfill a promise to Sally he had given her in Paris. In France Sally was legally a free person. To entice her to return with him to America, Jefferson reportedly promised to free all of her future children when they turned twenty-one. Jefferson gave freedom to no other slave family and no other Monticello slaves gained their freedom before the age of thirty-one, with one exception.
Report of the Research Committee on other possible paternity. The Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission has speculated that some other Jefferson who shared Thomas Jefferson’s Y chromosome may have fathered Sally’s children. These could include Jefferson’s brother Randolph and his five sons as well as two grandsons of Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle. In February 2000, the monticello.org website, known as “the home of Thomas Jefferson,” released the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. This research was conducted through the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation. The report concluded that “convincing evidence does not exist for the hypothesis that another male Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’ children. In almost two hundred years since the issue first became public, no other Jefferson has ever been referred to as the father.” The report goes on to say there was never any suggestion that Sally’s children had more than one father.
Report of the Research Committee conclusions. Appointed by the then-president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, the research committee was charged with evaluating the DNA study of Dr. Eugene Foster and his associates. The committee reached the following conclusion: “Dr. Foster’s DNA study was conducted in a manner that meets the standards of the scientific community, and its scientific results are valid. The DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings children,” two of whom died in infancy.
Sources:
U.S. News and World Report, Jefferson and Sally, pages 58-69, Nov. 9, 1998 issue
Thomas Jefferson, An Intimate History, Fawn M. Brodie, Bantam Books, 1974
Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, January 2000
C-SPAN3, Sunday Oct 16, 2011
Nature, 396, 27-28 (1998) Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
Not Much is Sure About Hemings, the Person, USA Today, Friday, May 14, 1999