The president and the slave girl

Who was Sally Hemings?

She was the daughter of the half-white slave Elizabeth Hemings and, allegedly, Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles. Jefferson inherited her shortly after her birth in 1773; his personal notes say only that she was one of his “housemaids” and that she had six children, two of whom died in infancy. No pictures of Hemings exist; one of the few reliable descriptions we have comes from a fellow slave who recalled her as “mighty near white ... very handsome, long straight hair down her back.” Sally died at age 62, in 1835. Of Jefferson’s more than 200 slaves, she and her immediate family were the only ones ever freed from his plantation, Monticello.

How did the whispers start?

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On Sept. 1, 1802, a vitriolic attack on Jefferson appeared in a newspaper called the Richmond Recorder. The author was James Thomson Callender, a Scottish-born pamphleteer and bitter political foe. He declared, “It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past has kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY.” Callender went on to insinuate that Jefferson had fathered Sally’s eldest son, “Tom,” later known as Thomas Woodson, because he bore a “striking although sable resemblance” to the president. Jefferson never addressed the charges publicly, leaving partisans on both sides to argue the matter for 200 years.

What have they argued about?

Mainly whether Jefferson, who was one of the most famous, respected, and brilliant men of his era, would have indulged his carnal whims with an uneducated slave woman 30 years his junior. His defenders say there was nothing in the character of this patrician Virginia planter to even hint that such a union was possible. The other side believes that Jefferson was a human being like any other, and that after being widowed at age 39, he must have sought some sexual release. Until 1998, the evidence was largely circumstantial.

Then what happened?

A team led by retired University of Virginia pathologist Eugene Foster set out to compare the DNA of the Jefferson and Hemings families. The key to linking the clans lay in matching their Y chromosomes, which are passed virtually intact down the male line. Jefferson’s only legitimate son died in infancy, so a direct comparison between his offspring and Hemings’ was impossible. But Foster’s team tested, among others, the male-line progeny of Jefferson’s paternal uncle Field Jefferson and of two of Sally’s sons, Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings. The team announced their findings in the prestigious British scientific journal Nature. They found no genetic match between the Jefferson and Woodson families. But they did match the Jeffersons and the offspring of Eston, who was Sally’s last son. The “simplest and most probable explanation,”the researchers said, was that Jefferson was Eston’s father.

Why weren’t the DNA tests definitive?

Because they couldn’t narrow the field to one individual. The best they could do was establish, with 99 percent certainty, that someone with the male Jefferson Y chromosome was Eston’s father. Jefferson himself was the most plausible candidate because Hemings’ pregnancies coincided with times he was in residence at Monticello. But as historian William S. Randall noted, “There were 25 men within 20 miles of Monticello who were all Jeffersons and had the same Y chromosome. And 23 of them were younger than Jefferson, who was 65 years old when Eston was conceived.”

Was there confusion over the results?

Many thought that the mystery was solved. But it wasn’t. Foster declared, “Thomas Jefferson can neither be definitely excluded nor solely implicated in the paternity of illegitimate children with his slave Sally Hemings.” Nonetheless, he maintained that the Sage of Monticello was the most likely culprit. Shortly afterward, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello, appointed a research committee to weigh in on the Foster study. The report, released early in 2000 and drawing largely on documentary evidence and oral histories, concluded not only that Jefferson had probably fathered Eston Hemings, but that “he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’ children appearing in Jefferson’s records.” This did not include Thomas Woodson, who didn’t appear in those records.

Were any other studies done?

Almost immediately a group calling itself the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which included some Jefferson relatives, asked 13 eminent Jefferson scholars to once again answer the question of whether their patron saint was Eston’s father. In their 550-page study, released last year, 12 of the 13 panel members wrote, “Our individual conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false.” They also concluded that Jefferson’s brother Randolph, who was 12 years younger than Jefferson, or any one of Randolph’s five sons was a likelier candidate. It was largely on that basis that the Monticello Association, which represents more than 700 lineal descendants of Jefferson, voted 74 to 6 in April not to recognize the claims of the Hemings family.

Will the truth ever be known?

Probably not, unless someone discovers the historical equivalent of a smoking gun. At a certain point, anyone who ventures a guess must ultimately rely on informed insight about Jefferson’s personality, emotions, and other intangibles. As historian Andrew Burstein put it, “DNA testing can only reveal parentage. It cannot reveal character.”

A founding father’s racism

Some scholars argue that Thomas Jefferson could not have been Sally Hemings’ lover because he was a racist. In Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781, he described blacks as “inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind,” specifying that they were simple-minded, lustful, unimaginative, and lazy. “They secrete less by the kidnies,” he wrote, “and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a very strong and disagreeable odour.” Although Jefferson felt slavery was morally wrong, and believed in gradual emancipation, he never changed his attitude toward blacks as a race. When he was 71, he wrote that “their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character can innocently consent.” But like many other antebellum slave owners, Jefferson may not have practiced what he preached; some historians estimate that 5 percent of slave children born in 1860 had white fathers. “Like the patriarchs of old,” wrote the Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.”