Claremont McKenna College
Professor Kesler is Director of the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College and former chairman of its Department of Government. He has written extensively on the American founding and American political thought, and is co-editor of a widely-used edition of The Federalist Papers. He is the editor of The Claremont Review of Books.
Alf J. Mapp, Jr.
Eminent Scholar, Emeritus and Louis I. Jaffe Professor of History, Emeritus
Old Dominion University
Professor Mapp is the author of Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity (a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection), Thomas Jefferson: Passionate Pilgrim, and has authored or edited more than another dozen books. A reference source for Encyclopedia Britannica and World Book, his numerous awards include Commonwealth of Virginia Cultural Laureate and a medal from the Republic of France’s Comite Francais du Bicentenaire de l’Independence des Etats-Unis.
Harvey C. Mansfield
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Government
Harvard University
Professor Mansfield has taught at Harvard for nearly four decades, chaired the Department of Government for several years, and is the author or editor of a dozen books, several of which address the era of the Founding Fathers. A former Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, he served as President of the New England Political Science Association and on the Council of the American Political Science Association.
David N. Mayer
Professor of Law and History
Capital University
Professor Mayer holds both a law degree and a Ph.D. in History, and is the author of The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson and numerous book chapters and articles concerning Thomas Jefferson. He earned his Ph.D. under the supervision of Professor Merrill Peterson.
Forrest McDonald
Distinguished Research Professor of History, Emeritus
University of Alabama
Professor McDonald has also taught at Brown University and was the James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at the College of William & Mary. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of The Presidency of Thomas Jefferson and numerous other books, and his many awards and prizes include Thomas Jefferson Lecturer with the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Paul A. Rahe
Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Professor in Western Heritage
Hillsdale College
Professor Rahe was educated at Yale and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He served as Chair of the University of Tulsa Department of History for several years, has also taught at Yale and Cornell, and is the author of the highly-acclaimed, three-volume set, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution. He has received numerous academic prizes and held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for the History of Freedom, and the Institute of Current World Affairs.
Thomas Traut
Professor of Biochemistry & Biophysics
School of Medicine
University of North Carolina
Professor Traut is Director of Graduate Studies and a former Ford Foundation and National Institute of Health Fellow. He is the author or coauthor of more than seventy publications, and shares his interest in Jefferson with his playwright wife, Karyn, who researched the Jefferson-Hemings relationship for seven years in preparation for her play Saturday’s Children.
Robert F. Turner (Chairman)
Cofounder (1981), Center for National Security Law
University of Virginia School of Law
Professor Turner holds both professional and academic doctorates from the University of Virginia School of Law, and is a former Charles H. Stockton Professor of International Law at the U.S. Naval War College and a Distinguished Lecturer at West Point. He has taught both in Virginia’s Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and the Law School, and is the author or editor of more than a dozen books. A former president of the congressionally established U.S. Institute of Peace, he has had a strong professional interest in Jefferson for more than four decades.
Walter E. Williams
John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics
George Mason University
Professor Williams is Chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University and the author of six books. He is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Jean Yarbrough
Gary M. Pendy Professor of Social Sciences
Chair, Department of Government
Bowdoin College
Professor Yarbrough is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Bicentennial Fellow. She has lectured at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, is a consultant to the Jefferson Papers project, and serves on the editorial board of both the Review of Politics and Polity. Her numerous publications include American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People and “Race and the Moral Foundation of the American Republic: Another Look at the Declaration.”
* * *
Footnotes
1. See pages 50–53.
Scholars Commission on The Jefferson-Hemings Matter
* * *
Report
12 April 2001
Summary
The question of whether Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by his slave Sally Hemings is an issue about which honorable people can and do disagree. After a careful review of all of the evidence, the commission agrees unanimously that the allegation is by no means proven; and we find it regrettable that public confusion about the 1998 DNA testing and other evidence has misled many people. With the exception of one member, whose views are set forth both below and in his more detailed appended dissent, our individual conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false.
In an effort to provide further clarification of our thinking about these issues, several members have written statements of individual views, which are appended to this report. They are the views of the scholars whose names appear thereon, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of other members of the group. Although academic or other affiliations of members are listed for purposes of identification, nothing in this report is intended to reflect the opinion of any college, university, foundation, or other entity with which members of the group may currently or in the past have been associated.
Our dissenting member believes that there is not sufficient evidence to state conclusively one way or the other whether Thomas Jefferson fathered any children by Sally Hemings. Based upon the totality of the evidence that does exist, he finds the argument for Jefferson’s paternity in the case of Eston Hemings somewhat more persuasive than the case against. He regards the question of the paternity of Sally Hemings’ other children as unsettled.
Report of the Scholars Commission
on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter
Introduction
The release in November, 1998, of DNA evidence tying one of Sally Hemings’ children to a Jefferson father, and the subsequent report by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, have led to a widespread perception both within the academic community and among the public that science has conclusively proven that Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with one of his slaves that produced one or more children. About a year ago, a number of Jefferson admirers formed the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS), and one of their first acts was to ask a group of Jefferson scholars to reexamine the issue carefully and issue a public report. This report is the result of that inquiry.
Background to the Controversy
On September 1, 1802, the Richmond Recorder published an article alleging that President Thomas Jefferson had fathered several children by his slave Sally Hemings. Its author was James Thomson Callender, a journalist who had fled Scotland for alleged sedition against the Crown and had briefly received financial sup
port from Thomas Jefferson while Callender was supporting the Republican cause by attacking the incumbent Federalists. Callender was a talented writer with a proclivity for attacking those in power, and during his brief decade in America he vehemently attacked, among others, the first five men to serve as President of the United States. His skill with words exceeded his concern for the truth, and many of his allegations proved patently false. As President Jefferson learned more about the man’s character, he rejected Callender’s efforts to build a friendship and discouraged him from moving to the Charlottesville area, rebuffs which clearly stung the mercurial Callender. Callender’s attack on Jefferson was prompted in part by President Jefferson’s refusal to name him to the position of Postmaster for Richmond, Virginia, and was the fulfillment of a threat Callender had made to publish articles that would embarrass the President if the appointment was not forthcoming.
Callender had never visited Monticello, and he admitted that his charges were based upon conversations with people in the Charlottesville area who had noted the existence of light-skinned “mulatto” slaves on Jefferson’s mountain. The story was picked up by the opposition Federalist press, but even some prominent Federalists dismissed it as untrue, recalling some of the falsehoods Callender had written about their own party leaders. Nevertheless, the story resurfaced from time to time over the decades and in 1873 was reinforced by allegations attributed to one of Sally Hemings’ children and another former Monticello slave. Historians continued to discount it, but in 1974 Professor Fawn Brodie published Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, that gave the story new life and—while not well received by many historians—was a commercial success.
The story achieved attention again in 1997, with the publication by the University Press of Virginia of Professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Then, on November 5, 1998, Nature magazine published the results of DNA tests that strongly suggested that Sally Hemings’ youngest son, Eston, had been fathered by someone with the same Y chromosome as Thomas Jefferson. This was not the same kind of precise “99.99 percent accurate” DNA testing that Americans learned of during the 1994 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, but rather was designed primarily to disprove paternity. The test could not distinguish between the offspring of male-line ancestors, and thus pointed the finger at Thomas Jefferson no more than it did at any of the other roughly two dozen known male descendants of Jefferson’s grandfather present in Virginia at the time. Because of the general nature of the test, although no DNA from Thomas Jefferson was available, it was possible to use DNA extracted from the blood of descendants of Jefferson’s paternal cousins. The resulting match did not prove Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, but it did place him within a group of approximately twenty-five known Virginia men believed to carry the Jefferson family Y chromosome.
Nevertheless, the story was presented in much of the press as a conclusive confirmation of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of Eston and presumably other children born to Sally Hemings as well. The issue seemed conclusively resolved in January, 2000, when the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (TJMF)—the organization that maintains Thomas Jefferson’s home at Monticello and has long been a champion of his legacy—issued a research report concluding there was a “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.”
The Scholars Commission
Not everyone was convinced, however, and shortly after the TJMF report was released a group of Jefferson admirers, led by a former President of the Jefferson family’s Monticello Association (MA), decided to establish the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS) in order to promote public education and understanding about the man. Convinced that Jefferson had not received a fair hearing, they decided to assemble a “blue ribbon commission” of prominent scholars for the purpose of reexamining the entire issue. This report is the result of that initiative.
The ground rules of our inquiry were simple: We were to have complete intellectual freedom to pursue the truth, including authority to establish our own procedures, to add new members, and to carry on our work independent of the influence of the TJHS or any other group. To help assure our independence, a private citizen who favored the idea of such an inquiry, but was not associated with the TJHS, generously contributed $20,000 to fund the work of the Scholars Commission—with the explicit understanding that she was funding scholarly research and would have neither influence on the outcome nor advanced knowledge of our conclusions prior to the public release of our report. Those funds have been used for travel, lodging, and publications costs. No member of the Scholars Commission has received compensation of any kind for their work on this project, and several have insisted on paying their own expenses to emphasize the independent nature of their involvement.
The Scholars Commission includes some of the nation’s leading authorities on Thomas Jefferson and his era. Several members have written one or more books about Jefferson, and every member—even the lawyers in the group—holds a Ph.D. or other earned academic doctorate. Most of the members have either chaired their departments or held chaired professorships, and several serve or have served as “Eminent” or “Distinguished” professors. While our membership has fluctuated slightly over the months, the thirteen scholars who have persevered to the end come from prominent universities spread from southern California to Maine and then south as far as Alabama. They are trained in such diverse disciplines as history, political science, law, economics, and biochemistry. Most of us have studied Thomas Jefferson and his era for at least two decades, and we have held teaching or research appointments at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, Bowdoin, and many other respected institutions of higher learning.
We began this inquiry with diverse opinions on various aspects of the issue. Some members of the commission were avid admirers of Thomas Jefferson, others were not. At least one of us had for decades assumed the allegations of a Jefferson-Hemings relationship were true, many held serious doubts. But we each approached this inquiry as a scholarly search for the truth. Our initial work was done individually, with extensive communications by e-mail, letter, and telephone. After we had each had an opportunity to review all of the basic evidence and to pursue additional avenues of research we felt might prove fruitful, we gathered for approximately fifteen hours of face-to-face meetings at a hotel near Dulles Airport. Not surprisingly, our views in the end are not identical; but we have all reached general agreement on the conclusions which follow (with the exceptions noted). In addition, each of us was invited to submit additional views without restriction on any aspect of the issue we wished. It should be emphasized that the individual views which follow this report are only those of the members whose names appear thereon and should not be attributed to the Scholars Commission as a whole. Several of us have also elected to add our names to the individual views of other members; however this reflects a general agreement with their analysis and conclusions only, and responsibility for specific arguments and accuracy of facts belongs in each case to the primary author.
Before turning to the substance of our inquiry and our conclusions, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the cooperation of both John Works and the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, Daniel Jordan and Lucia Stanton of the Thomas Jefferson [formerly Memorial] Foundation, and James J. Truscott of the Monticello Association. None of these organizations has taken part formally in our deliberations, but all three have provided encouragement and have been fully responsive to any requests we have made of them for information. All three organizations received advance copies of our draft report as soon as it was completed earlier this month, and we are grateful for the feedback we have received. None of them, obviously, is responsible for any of our views.
We are also grateful to Ms. Karyn Traut—the playwright spouse of one of our members who researched this issue carefully for seven years more than a
decade ago in preparation for writing Saturday’s Children, who joined us at our Dulles meeting—and to Dr. Michael Moffitt of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society who has handled our finances and provided other administrative support.
Assessing the Evidence
The Almost Total Absence of Information about Sally Hemings
This has been in many respects a very frustrating issue to investigate, because there is so little information about Sally Hemings from which to work. One could probably write everything that we really know about her on an index card. Excluding Jefferson’s various listings of slaves he owned and distribution lists for blankets and other supplies (on which she was treated like all of her relatives at Monticello), a few brief references from others about Sally being “mighty near white” and “very handsome” or “decidedly good looking,” and notations about spending money for clothes and a smallpox vaccination while Sally was in Paris, Thomas Jefferson appears to have made reference to Sally Hemings in but four of his tens of thousands of letters. There is no evidence that he ever wrote to her directly or received mail from her (nor that she could have read them had he written), and the references that do exist consist of a note that “Maria’s maid” (which might not even have been Sally) had a baby, two letters suggesting that “If Bet or Sally’s children” came down with the measles they should be sent off the mountain, and finally a “d.o. Sally” notation in the margin of a letter saying that Jefferson was sending the bedding of Sally’s older brother James Hemings back to America.
Indeed, the only credible surviving descriptions of Sally Hemings’ talents or abilities are found in two 1787 letters from the remarkable Abigail Adams, wife of U.S. Minister to Great Britain John Adams, who kept the fourteen-year-old Sally and Jefferson’s daughter Polly for two weeks when they arrived from Virginia on the way to join Jefferson in Paris. She described Sally as being “quite a child” and said that she “wants more care than the child [Jefferson’s eight-year-old Polly], and is wholly incapable of looking properly after her, without some superiour to direct her.” Based upon the surviving records, Sally Hemings appears to have been a very minor figure in Thomas Jefferson’s life.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 2