by David Barton
Consider the damage done by this false reporting. Ask any adult today whether it has been scientifically proven that Jefferson fathered illegitimate children with Hemings, and they will likely answer with a resounding “Yes!” The nation certainly heard and still remembers the news barrage following the initial report, but the silence surrounding its retraction was deafening.
Yet notwithstanding the 1998 DNA testing results, the fact remains that charges of a Jefferson moral failure with Hemings had circulated for almost two centuries before the DNA testing was undertaken. Even without the DNA testing results, it is still appropriate to ask why such charges were originally leveled against Jefferson. Did he actually commit the sexual misbehavior with which he has long been charged? After all, we’re often told that where there’s smoke, there’s surely fire; and if it had not been for the charges raised long ago, no one today would have even considered undertaking DNA testing.
Here is some background to this situation. Sally Hemings was a young slave girl who served Jefferson’s daughters at the family home, Monticello. Jefferson had five daughters: Martha (nicknamed “Patsy”), Mary (nicknamed “Maria” but also called “Polly”), Jane (who died very young), Lucy Elizabeth I (who also died very young), and Lucy Elizabeth II. During the American Revolution Jefferson was frequently away from his beloved family, serving in the Virginia legislature, the Continental Congress, and as state governor.
In 1784, following the Revolution, Jefferson was sent by Congress as an ambassador to Paris. His wife had recently died, so he took Patsy, the oldest of his three remaining daughters, with him to France. The other two daughters, Mary and Lucy Elizabeth II, stayed behind with their aunt. But after Jefferson departed Monticello with Patsy, the toddler Lucy Elizabeth II unexpectedly died, so Jefferson sent for his only remaining daughter, Mary, to join him in France. Accompanying the eight-year-old Mary on the voyage as her companion was the fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings, whom Jefferson described as “Maria’s maid.”12
Critics charge that after the girls arrived in Paris, Jefferson began a sexual relationship with Hemings, who was nearly thirty years his junior and the same age as his oldest daughter, fourteen-year-old Patsy13—a relationship that produced some or all of Sally’s children. (Most scholars believe that Hemings had five children.)14
Following the initial DNA testing announcement that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ fifth child, Eston, some historians, including many who had previously believed Jefferson to be innocent of the paternity charges, declared Jefferson guilty, and the two-century-old debate finally closed.15 But the subsequent retraction certainly changed matters. Yet, regardless of the on-and-then-off DNA testing results about Eston, was there a sexual moral failure between Jefferson and Hemings?
The evidence against Jefferson may be divided into three categories:
1. The original 1998 DNA report. While this category of evidence is now discredited, it is important to understand the reason behind the retraction.
2. Oral tradition from two of Sally’s children, the strongest of which involved Thomas Woodson, her first child. Two centuries ago, he claimed (and others repeated) that Sally Hemings was his mother and Thomas Jefferson his father. The fact that Sally had named the boy Thomas was used as evidence to confirm that he had indeed been fathered by Jefferson. Sally’s fourth child, Madison, also made similar claims.
3. Published newspaper reports from Jefferson’s day specifically charging him with fathering Hemings’ children.
Consider the evidence.
Category 1: The DNA Evidence
To delve further into the story behind the retraction of the 1998 DNA testing results, begin with Professor Ellis’ original announcement in Nature, which had declared:
Almost two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson was alleged to have fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings. The charges have remained controversial. Now, DNA analysis confirms that Jefferson was indeed the father of at least one of Hemings’ children [Eston].16
In the two weeks following that announcement, 221 printed news articles repeated the claim, embedding it deeply in the minds of Americans.17 Typical articles declared:
Did the author of the Declaration of Independence take a slave for his mistress? DNA tests say yes. . . . The evidence here, in other words, removes any shadow of a doubt that Thomas Jefferson sired at least one son by Sally Hemings.
—U.S. News Online18
DNA Test Finds Evidence of Jefferson Child by Slave.
—New York Times on the Web19
Jefferson affair no longer rumor. . . . The DNA tests end nearly two centuries of speculation. . . . The evidence has shifted so startlingly that it now appears likely that Jefferson fathered four or five children by Hemings.
—USA Today20
[G]enetic testing almost certainly proves that our third president fathered at least one child by Sally Hemings.
—Washington Post21
The opportunity to announce these results afforded many Deconstructionists in the media a welcome occasion to denigrate Jefferson. One national columnist gloated, “What a relief. Now Jefferson can be brought down off the god-like pedestal on which some have tried to elevate him.”22 He continued, “How are we to view Jefferson now? How about ‘deadbeat dad’? That’s what you call fathers who run away from their responsibilities to their children.”23
Another described him as a “slave-owning, serial flogger, sex maniac.”24 Others portrayed him as a child molester, using an innocent adolescent girl for sex:
We have recently learned through DNA testing that Jefferson was probably the father of Sally Hemings’ youngest child, a boy, and maybe the father of the other four children as well. . . . He took her to Paris when she was 13, and when she returned two years later, she was pregnant.
—Washington Post25
What type of relationship could this have been, considering the profound power differences between master and slave? . . . [S]he was 13 or 14 and he was 43.
—Chicago Tribune26
In 1789, Sally Hemings returned with the Jefferson family to Virginia. By then, Sally was 16 or 17 and pregnant.
—New York Times on the Web27
The hysterics against Jefferson became so great that some questioned why his image appeared on our coins;28 others clamored for “the dismantling of the Jefferson Memorial” in Washington, DC, and “the removal of his face from Mount Rushmore.”29
The DNA evidence as originally presented by Professor Ellis and reported by the media had seemed both unassailable and irrefutable, but there were several critical facts in the report that most Americans never heard.
For example, the original 1998 report contained a significant finding about which scholars and the media remained conspicuously silent:
President Thomas Jefferson was accused of having fathered a child, Tom, by Sally Hemings. Tom was said to have been born in 1790, soon after Jefferson and Sally Hemings returned from France, where he had been minister. Present-day members of the African-American Woodson family believe that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Thomas Woodson, whose name comes from his later owner. . . . [But DNA testing shows] Thomas Woodson was not Thomas Jefferson’s son.30 (emphasis added)
So, the longest rumored charge against Jefferson, originally printed two centuries ago in publications of the day, was now proven wrong. Jefferson had been completely exonerated of that longstanding claim.
Additionally, when Nature issued its embarrassing retraction, it sheepishly confessed, “The title assigned to our study was misleading.”31 Why? Because no DNA sample from the Thomas Jefferson family line had been used in the testing—and the public was never told of this significant omission. It does seem that if someone wanted to test Jefferson’s paternity that his DNA should be used.
Genetic DNA paternity testing requires the testing of a Y chromosome from a male descendant of the subject because the Y chromosome in males remains virtually unchanged from generation to generation. But Thomas Jefferson had n
o male descendants from which to take a DNA sample. His only son had died at birth. Since Jefferson had no surviving male descendants, the researchers therefore chose to test the Y chromosomes from the descendants of Field Jefferson, Thomas’s uncle.
The researchers found that the configuration of the Y chromosomes in the descendants of Field Jefferson—a general configuration common to the entire Jefferson family—was indeed present in the descendants of Sally Hemings’ youngest child, Eston. Therefore, on the basis of DNA testing, the most that researchers could conclusively say was that some Jefferson male—and there were twenty-six Jefferson males living in the area at the time—had a relationship with Sally Hemings that resulted in the birth of Eston. But which Jefferson was it?
A distinguished commission of noted authorities was convened to examine the matter, and it concluded:
There are at least ten possible fathers for Sally Hemings’ children who could have passed down genetic material that might produce children physically resembling Thomas Jefferson and who are thought to have visited Monticello regularly during the years Sally Hemings was having children.32
After investigating the ten possible fathers, the group concluded that the “case against some of Thomas Jefferson’s relatives appears significantly stronger than the case against him.”33 It was these other nine unaddressed paternity alternatives that made the DNA testing announcement suspect. Thomas Jefferson’s own DNA was not checked, and with the exception of Field Jefferson, the DNA was not checked for the rest of the Jefferson males living in the area. World therefore correctly reported:
According to the genetic evidence, the father could have been Jefferson. Or it could have been his brother Randolph. Or one of Randolph’s sons. Or, presumably, his uncle Field, or his son George or one of his sons. . . . Any of these men had access to Monticello and could have been culpable.34 (emphasis added)
National columnist Mona Charen accurately summarized the scope of the testing results:
The DNA data did rule Jefferson out as the father of Thomas Woodson, the eldest of Sally’s sons, and shed no light on the rest. That leaves a scenario in which Jefferson’s sexual liaison with his slave [that produced Eston] is estimated to have begun when he was 65 years old. Possible certainly, but likely? While the DNA data adds to our knowledge—it is clear that there was mixing of Hemings and Jefferson genes sometime in the past 200 years—they do not provide names or dates. They most definitely do not “prove” anything about Thomas Jefferson himself.35
Herbert Barger, the Jefferson family historian and genealogist who assisted in the DNA testing, explained:
My study indicates to me that Thomas Jefferson was NOT the father of Eston or any other Hemings child. The DNA study . . . indicates that Randolph [Thomas’ younger brother] is possibly the father of Eston and maybe the others. . . . [T]hree of Sally Hemings’ children, Harriet, Beverly, and Eston (the latter two not common names), were given names of the Randolph family.36 (emphasis added)
Significantly, a blue-ribbon commission of thirteen leading scholars was assembled to examine the Jefferson paternity issue. Those scholars were all PhDs, and most were department heads from schools such as Harvard, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina, the University of Kentucky, Indiana University, and others.37 The group was not composed of Jefferson supporters; in fact, many believed that Jefferson might indeed be the father of Hemings’ children.38 But after spending a year investigating the evidence, they all concluded that Randolph was indeed the most likely father, explaining:
[T]he circumstantial case that Eston Hemings was fathered by the President’s younger brother is many times stronger than the case against the President himself. Among the considerations which might point to Randolph are:
In Memoirs of a Monticello Slave, former slave Isaac Jefferson asserts that when Randolph Jefferson visited Monticello, he “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night . . .” In contrast, we have not a single account of Thomas Jefferson spending his nights socializing with the slaves in such a manner. . . .
[W]e have Jefferson’s letter inviting Randolph (and presumably his sons as well) to come to Monticello shortly before Sally became pregnant with Eston. It was common for such visits to last for weeks.
Pearl Graham, who did original research among the Hemings descendants in the 1940s and believed the story that Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children, wrote in a 1958 letter to a leading Jefferson scholar at Princeton University that a granddaughter of one of Sally Hemings’ children had told her that Randolph Jefferson “had colored children” of his own.
Until Fawn Brodie [recently] persuaded the descendants of Eston Hemings that President Jefferson was his father, their family oral history had passed down that Eston was fathered by “Thomas Jefferson’s uncle.” That is not possible, as both of his paternal uncles died decades before Eston was conceived. But [according] to Martha Jefferson Randolph [Jefferson’s oldest daughter], who was generally in charge of Monticello during Eston Hemings’ entire memory there, her father’s younger brother was “Uncle Randolph”—and he was referred to as such in family letters.
We don’t know exactly when Randolph’s first wife died, but we do know that he remarried—to a very controlling woman—shortly after Eston Hemings was born. About the same time, Thomas Jefferson retired from public office and spent the rest of his life at Monticello, where he could presumably have had access to Sally Hemings any night he wished. But Sally, although only in her mid-thirties, gave birth to no known children after Eston was born in 1808. Even the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation report acknowledges that Sally’s childbearing years may have corresponded to the years in which Randolph Jefferson was a widower.39
Significantly, in its retraction even Nature ruefully conceded, “It is true that men of Randolph Jefferson’s family could have fathered Sally Hemings’ later children.”40 But this scholars’ report was just as widely ignored by the media as had been both the DNA testing results that exonerated Jefferson and the retraction of its initial errant announcement. In fact, PBS’s Frontline, A & E’s Biography, the Washington Post, and others actually had in their possession reports that tended to exonerate Jefferson but deliberately omitted that information from their reporting.41
Incidentally, Dr. Eugene Foster, who conducted the DNA testing, had been very clear about the limitations of his testing, but his findings were misrepresented by Joseph Ellis, historian and professor at Mt. Holyoke College. Ellis, who opposed what was happening to President Clinton at the time, had written the sensationalistic “announcement” for Nature, but his personal spin went well beyond Foster’s scientific findings, making the story both inaccurate and unfactual. Perhaps this should not be surprising; four years later, in 2002, it was revealed that Ellis was also guilty of publicly lying to his classes on many occasions. (For example, he told students that he went to Vietnam as a platoon leader and paratrooper in the 101st Airborne and served on General Westmoreland’s staff during the war; he did neither. He also said that he did active civil rights work in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement and was harassed by the state police for his efforts; again, neither was true. He claimed that he scored the winning touchdown in the last football game of his senior year in high school; it turns out he wasn’t even on the team.42) As one columnist properly queried, “How can you trust a historian who makes up history?”43
In hindsight, looking back over the complete fiasco, the Wall Street Journal correctly noted of the unreported retraction, “[T]he backtracking comes a little late to change the hundreds of other headlines fingering Jefferson.”44 The effect of the original news flood was toxic. One reporter who covered the story accurately noted, “[D]efective scholarship is difficult to recall.”45 The Jewish World Review therefore properly asked, “Was Jefferson libeled by DNA?”46 The evidence answers “Yes!”
In short, the DNA testing did not show Jefferson to be guilty of any sexual liaison with Heming
s. The so-called smoking gun turned out to be a waterlogged pea shooter.
Category 2: The Evidence of Oral Tradition
The second source of Hemings’ evidence used against Jefferson is oral tradition, but the DNA findings significantly weakened this source. The strongest evidence in this category had long been the two-century-old charge that Jefferson had fathered Thomas Woodson, but the DNA findings were conclusive that no Jefferson—not any of the twenty-six Jefferson males—had fathered Woodson. That original test was later repeated by Dr. Foster with the same results.47 Consequently, that oral tradition is now authoritatively disproved. (Incidentally, DNA testing has been conducted on descendants from two of Hemings’ five children. As already noted, testing on the Thomas Woodson branch was negative for any Jefferson genes. The Eston Hemings branch showed some Jefferson genes, but it did not show from which of the twenty-six Jefferson males they came. The remaining three branches of Hemings’ progeny have so far declined to participate in DNA testing.)
The other major oral tradition challenging Jefferson’s sexual morality came from Sally Hemings’ son Madison (the fourth Hemings child, born in 1805). In an article published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, Madison Hemings claimed that in France “my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte [pregnant] by him” with Thomas Woodson.48 But the DNA testing disproved two of Madison’s major claims: (1) there were no Jefferson genes in Sally’s first child, Thomas; therefore, (2) Sally did not return home pregnant by Jefferson.
Several other of Madison’s claims about Jefferson have also been shown to be erroneous—including his claim that Jefferson was not interested in agriculture.49 Yet modern authors such as Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law at New York University, believe that Jefferson was guilty of all that Madison charged him with; she dismisses outright all evidence to the contrary and even concocts evidence in her attempts to “prove” her claims.
