Sally Hemings

Sally Hemings (c.1773 – 1835) was a quadroon slave. Her mother, Betty Hemings, was initially owned by John Wayles, who died in 1773, leaving mostly all of the Hemings family to his daughter Martha Wayles, wife of Thomas Jefferson. Martha and Sally were probably half-sisters, both fathered by John Wayles.

Martha Jefferson died in 1782, and in 1784 Thomas Jefferson took up residence in Paris as American envoy to France. In 1787 Jefferson sent for nine-year-old Mary (Maria) Jefferson to come live with him. Thomas Jefferson asked that Isabel, an older woman, be sent as a companion for Maria, but because Isabel was pregnant, the teen-aged Sally Hemings accompanied her instead. Hemings returned to the United States with Jefferson in 1789 and lived the rest of her life at Monticello or in nearby Charlottesville, where she moved after Jefferson's death. She bore seven children, who were perceived as having even more European ancestry than she did. The number of children that lived to maturity is disputed.

Sally Hemings served as chambermaid to Thomas Jefferson. As an adult she lived in a room which was accessible to the Monticello mansion through a covered passageway. Hemings was never officially freed by Thomas Jefferson, perhaps because the laws at that time required freed slaves to leave the state within a year; Jefferson's daughter Martha Randolph probably gave Hemings "her time," a form of unofficial freedom [1].

Controversy over Sally Hemings's children

Thomas Jefferson himself publicly stated his opposition to miscegenation. "The amalgamation of whites with blacks," he wrote, "produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent."[2]

However, rumors that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings's children circulated before Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801, and they were published in 1802. The truth of these rumors has long been debated. Evidence in support of the theory includes the facts that (1) Jefferson and Hemings were both in Paris or at Monticello at the time of the conception of all seven of Hemings's children; (2) Madison Hemings, one of Sally's sons, stated in an 1873 interview that Jefferson was his father and the father of all of Sally's other children, and another formerly enslaved worker from Monticello agreed with his account; (3) Hemings's children strongly resembled Jefferson physically; and (4) all of Hemings's children were allowed to slip away from Monticello or were manumitted.

Two of Jefferson's grandchildren stated confidentially, long after Jefferson's death, that the resemblance to Jefferson was because the Hemings children had been fathered by one of Jefferson's nephews, Samuel or Peter Carr, the sons of Jefferson's sister. One grandchild insisted all of the Hemings children were Samuel's; another said they were all Peter's. Thomas Jefferson himself never commented directly on the issue, though people have interpreted some of his remarks as indirect denials.

Around 1900, descendants of the late Thomas Woodson began to publish claims that he was Sally Hemings's first son by Thomas Jefferson, conceived in France and born at Monticello in 1790. Muckraking journalist James Callender had indeed written about an enslaved son named "Tom" at Monticello in 1802. However, historians have not recognized evidence linking Thomas Woodson to either Hemings or Jefferson. Madison Hemings, who was born in 1805, reported that the child his mother Sally bore in 1790 had died young.

After 1998, when DNA testing ruled out the possibility that the Carrs could have fathered Hemings's child, some people who felt they were defending Jefferson's reputation began to circulate an old theory that Eston Hemings was fathered by Jefferson's brother Randolph Jefferson or one of Randolph's five sons.

The historians' debate

Through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, biographers of Thomas Jefferson dismissed suggestions that he had fathered children by an enslaved woman, if they mentioned the issue at all. They generally called Callender's charges too politically motivated to be worth examining, and derided Madison Hemings's statement as an attempt to puff up his status by claiming a famous father. During a visit to Monticello in the 1850s, the biographer Henry Randall interviewed Thomas Jefferson's grandson, who suggested that Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr had fathered the Hemings children; but Randall kept that information confidential at the grandson's request. Some of the grandson's statements about life at Monticello are demonstrably incorrect and cast doubt on his veracity, or at least on the accuracy of his memory.

In his monumental history of early American race relations, White Over Black (1968), Winthrop Jordan treated the Hemings-Jefferson link as plausible and worth consideration, noting that Jefferson was at Monticello every time Sally Hemings became pregnant. Fawn M. Brodie's 1974 biography of Jefferson assembled additional evidence about the Hemings family and the timing of Hemings's pregnancies; but some critics strongly objected to Brodie's psychoanalytic approach to Jefferson. Dumas Malone, Douglass Adair, Virginius Dabney, and other authors produced rebuttals to Brodie's argument, pointing to the Jefferson family's statements about the Carr brothers. While fictional portrayals of the relationship such as Barbara Chase-Riboud's Sally Hemings and the Merchant-Ivory film Jefferson in Paris reached large audiences and persuaded many, most mainstream historians continued to assert that Jefferson was unlikely to have had a sexual relationship with any slave.

In 1997, however, law professor Annette Gordon-Reed published a thorough examination of the arguments and available evidence, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She pointed out how most historians had used double standards to evaluate the evidence for and against the statement of Madison Hemings. For example, Hemings's statement about his father was labeled unreliable "oral history" while the tales passed down in the Jefferson family were treated as trustworthy even though they contradicted each other and the documentary record. Historians accepted statements about Sally's father being John Wayles based on little evidence, but insisted on much more proof about Sally's children.

Gordon-Reed did not argue that documentary records proved Madison Hemings's claim, only that authors had unfairly dismissed it. As to the Hemings children's paternity, she wrote, the answer might lie in developing more evidence through DNA analysis.

November 1998 Nature article

The November 5, 1998, issue of the British scientific journal Nature contained a study on the available DNA evidence by a team led by Eugene A. Foster. The study compared the Y chromosomal haplotypes of four groups of men: descendants of Thomas Jefferson's grandfather; of Thomas Woodson; of Madison Hemings's brother Eston Hemings (who later took the name Eston Jefferson); and of John Carr, grandfather of the Carr brothers. The DNA data from the study is available in more detail here.

In each case, the men had to be patrilineal descendants: sons of sons of sons... Only in those lines did the original Y chromosomes survive. As a result, no direct descendants of Thomas and Martha Jefferson could be included in the study, nor descendants of Madison Hemings. No patrilineal descendants in those lines could be identified.

The study's major findings were that the Y chromosome of the Jefferson family matched that of Eston Hemings family, while the Y chromosomes of the Woodson and Carr families were each different. The implications for the paternity question were clear. The Jefferson grandchildren's contention that Sally Hemings's children had been fathered by one or the other Carr brother was not tenable. Neither was the Woodson family's claim to have been descended from Jefferson. On the other hand, Eston Hemings was undoubtedly the son of a Jefferson.

Of all the accounts of the Hemings children published before 1998, only Madison Hemings's was completely consistent with the DNA tests. Nature therefore headlined the study "Jefferson fathered slave’s last child."

Joseph Ellis and the Clinton impeachment

The controversy became even more heated because of a side issue: in 1998 Congress was conducting the impeachment of Bill Clinton, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis defended Clinton by comparing him to Jefferson. Ellis had previously written that it would have been out of character for Jefferson to have had a sexual relationship with Hemings, but was convinced by the DNA tests and documentary evidence. He now wrote:

President William Jefferson Clinton also has a vested interest in this revelation.... Jefferson has always been Clinton's favorite Founding Father. Now, a sexually active, all-too-human Jefferson appears alongside his embattled protege. It is as if Clinton had called one of the most respected character witnesses in all of U.S. history to testify that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree. The dominant effect of this news will be to make Clinton's sins seem less aberrant and more palatable. If a vote against Clinton is also a vote against Jefferson, the prospects for impeachment become even more remote. [3]

Ellis's claims generated accusations of distortions. Stephen Goode wrote in Insight Magazine that Ellis's statement that the DNA tests established a Jefferson-Hemings relation "beyond any reasonable doubt" was an exaggeration [4]. Foster, principal author of the Nature paper, also asserted the DNA evidence was far from establishing proof of a specific father, though it eliminated other candidates [5].

Of those who have accepted reports suggesting a Jefferson-Hemings relationship, some disagree with Ellis's claim that the relationship would indicate a "distinguished presidential pedigree". Writing about the relationship in the Nashville City Paper, Molly Secours said "for us to call it anything but 'rape' is disingenuous and dangerous." [6] In USA Today, DeWayne Wickham wrote that "to imply that the sex between him and his slave was consensual, even in a TV movie, is a cruelly dishonest portrayal of the dirtiest secret of American slavery" [7].

The Foundation and Commission reports

Following the Nature article, the controversy continued to grow, and in 2000 and 2001 two major studies of the Jefferson-Hemings allegations were released. Both studies drew from a range of sources, including both scientific and historical, to arrive at their conclusions.

In January 2000, a group of specialists from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns and operates Monticello, produced a study on the controversy initiated soon after the Nature paper. Their near-unanimous [8] report [9] stated that "although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings." [10] One member of the committee, White Wallenborn, dissented, noting that "the historical evidence is not substantial enough to confirm nor for that matter to refute his paternity of any of the children of Sally Hemings."

Later in 2000, the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society created a "Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission" to examine the paternity question [11]. On April 12, 2001, they issued a report; at 565 pages, it was far longer than the Foundation report, though many of those pages were devoted to restating the same facts and conclusions.

The conclusion of most of the Scholars Commission was that "the Jefferson-Hemings allegation is by no means proven"; those members' individual conclusions ranged from "serious skepticism about the charge" to "a conviction that it is almost certainly false" [12]. The majority suggested the most likely alternative is that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother, was the father of Eston—a possibility that had not been raised by Jefferson's grandchildren or anyone else in the nineteenth century. (The first person to publicly link Randolph Jefferson to Sally Hemings was playwright Karyn Traut in 1988; her husband, biologist Thomas Traut, became a member of the Scholars Commission.)

The lone dissenter on the Scholars Commission, Paul Rahe, wrote that he considered "it somewhat more likely than not that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings," [13], and added "there is ... one thing that we do know, and it is damning enough. Despite the distaste he expressed for the propensity of slaveholders and their relatives to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family."

Robert Turner, who chaired the commission, suggested that evidence for a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings had been "rushed to press" because of the political climate surrounding the impeachment of Bill Clinton [14], as did David Mayer, a commission member, who was also scathingly critical of the Foundation report [15].

Further findings

Further studies have been conducted. The William & Mary Quarterly published a probabilistic analysis of the timing of Jefferson's visits to Monticello and Hemings's pregnancies which concluded that it was highly likely that the two series of events were related. The National Genealogical Society Quarterly of September 2001 concluded that four children of Sally Hemings were fathered by Thomas Jefferson. Its article was explicitly critical of the Scholars Commission report [16]. The Woodson family continues to press their case in the book A President in the Family. The book points out: (1) an erasure in Jefferson's farm book in the section on slaves born in 1790, (2) Thomas Jefferson's record of gifts in the years 1800 and 1801 to a 'servant' named Thomas. (Callender's "Tom" would have been ten years old at the time of the gifts.),(3) the unethical nature of Ellis' early entry into the reporting process. Dr. Foster, the DNA test organizer, had promised the DNA test participants that historians would not be involved with the test or the reporting, but he lost control of the process.

The current consensus among American historians appears to have undergone a sea-change. Once, most scholars dismissed the idea that Jefferson fathered Hemings's children without examining the evidence closely. Now most historians agree that the story is more likely than not, again without necessarily having read the full record. Scholars remain open to more evidence, but it is unclear where it might be found.

Among the public, the question of Thomas Jefferson's and Sally Hemings's relationship remains controversial. Members of the Monticello Association, who claim descent from Jefferson through his wife, have voted not to admit Hemings's descendants. Nevertheless, through the quirks of history and biology, only one set of Americans can show both that their ancestors were born at Monticello and that they share a Y chromosome with the Jefferson family: the patrilineal male descendants of Eston Hemings, Sally Hemings's youngest son.

Descendants

At least three of Hemings's children passed as white [17]. Frederick Madison Roberts (1879-1952), her great-grandson, has the distinction of being the first person of known African American ancestry elected to public office on the West Coast. He served in the California State Assembly from 1919-1934.

References

• Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy: Annette Gordon-Reed (University Press of Virginia, 1997)
• Jefferson Vindicated: Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions In the Jefferson Genealogical Search: Cynthia H. Burton (self-published, 2005)
• A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson: Byron W. Woodson, Sr. (Praeger, 2001)
• The Jefferson-Hemings Myth, An American Travesty: Eyler Robert Coates, Sr. (Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001)
• "Anatomy of a Scandal, Thomas Jefferson and the Sally Story": Rebecca L. and James F. McMurry, Jr. (Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2002) [18] and [19]
• "Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission Report" (Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001) [20]
• Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History: Fawn M. Brodie (W. W. Norton, 1974)
• Six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson: Dumas Malone (Little, Brown, 1948-1981)
• Jefferson's Children: The Story of One American Family: Jane Feldman, Shannon Lanier (Random House, 2001)
• Monticello account of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
• Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
• The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson: Sam Sloan (Kiseido, 1992) ISBN 4906574009
• Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book: Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2002) ISBN 1882886100
• Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture: Jan Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, editors (University Press of Virginia, 1999)