Similarly, Thomas Woodson’s descendants passed down this history, but since the recent DNA tests have ruled out Thomas Jefferson as Thomas Woodson’s father, this oral history would seem clearly to be in error. We express no view on whether Thomas Woodson was Sally Hemings’ son, although some members of our group believe that is not an unreasonable conclusion. No descendants of Harriet or Beverly Hemings have been located.
Most interestingly, until they were persuaded by Professor Fawn Brodie in the mid-1970s that Thomas Jefferson was their ancestor, the oral history of the descendants of Eston Hemings was that his father was not Thomas Jefferson but an “uncle”—or perhaps a cousin. This would seem to be stronger evidence than most oral history, as it is essentially an “admission against interest.” Presumably, because of Thomas Jefferson’s great fame, most people would be honored to claim they were his descendants.
More importantly, this history is consistent with the theory that Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, was Eston’s father. This is consistent with the DNA tests. Thomas Jefferson’s last surviving uncle died three decades before Eston Hemings was born, but brother Randolph was often referred to as “Uncle Randolph” because of his relationship to Thomas Jefferson’s daughters, the eldest of whom was in general charge of Monticello during the entire period that Eston Hemings would have remembered.
Other Arguments
We considered as well a number of arguments that have been raised by supporters of the theory that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings. For example, they quote several people who said they believed the story. But as we examined each of these, we found them unpersuasive. Georgia Federalist Thomas Gibbons did allege in an 1802 letter that the story was “as correct as truth itself,” but there is no evidence he ever went near Monticello (he admitted he had never seen any of Sally’s children) and he was a bitter political enemy of the President’s. Among other things, Gibbons was one of the famous “midnight judges” appointed by the outgoing President John Adams, and he was denied his life-tenure job by Thomas Jefferson.
We discovered that another of these “sources,” Vermont schoolteacher Elijah P. Fletcher, who claimed that while traveling through Charlottesville he encountered numerous people who confirmed the truth of the story, had shared a stagecoach from Washington, D.C., to Charlottesville with one of Thomas Jefferson’s bitterest enemies, John Kelly, who gave Fletcher the guided tour of Charlottesville that produced these anti-Jefferson remarks. Kelly had owned the land on which Jefferson originally hoped to build the University of Virginia; but when he learned the offer to purchase was indirectly for the benefit of Thomas Jefferson he remarked “I will see him at the devil before he shall have it at any price.” With Kelly as his tour guide, it is not surprising that Fletcher was exposed to many critics of the President.
We felt that the advocates of Thomas Jefferson’s paternity have dealt too summarily with a variety of pieces of evidence that warrant more serious consideration. For example, the only eyewitness account pertaining to Sally Hemings’ sexual behavior was made by Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon, who noted the rumors that Harriet Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s child and remarked: “She was not his daughter; she was ________’s daughter. I know that. I have seen him come out of her mother’s room many a morning when I went up to Monticello very early.” Bacon appears to be a credible witness, and unlike both the Hemings and Jefferson descendants, does not have an obvious interest in the outcome. But the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation report dismisses his statement as having “problems of chronology” and moves on—without the slightest evidence beyond her son’s assertion—to conclude that Sally must have been monogamous.
It is true that Harriet Hemings was conceived in 1800, and Bacon did not begin his service as overseer until six years later (although he worked at least some at Monticello prior to that). But if he saw another man repeatedly leaving Sally’s room in the early morning hours, that strongly refutes the assumption that Sally Hemings was involved in a monogamous sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson; and if his observations occurred after he became overseer they become tremendously more important in our search for the father of Eston Hemings, who was conceived around August 1807. Indeed, Bacon’s statement may be the single most important piece of evidence in the case, given the general lack of reliable information.
We have as well a variety of surviving statements by, or attributed to, Jefferson’s descendants, including his daughter Martha, grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge. Some of these statements seem credible, either because the witness was writing in confidence to a loved one or because they included “admissions against interest” that one would not normally expect to find in a “coverup.” Several of them also reinforce each other on various points, suggesting that if the information was not believed to be accurate there must have been a conspiracy to conceal the truth. There are various accounts attributed to Thomas Jefferson Randolph, for example, asserting that he claimed to have overheard Samuel and Peter Carr admitting paternity for at least some of Sally’s children.
Ellen Randolph Coolidge’s letters seem particularly credible, in part because she seems to have been willing to make public embarrassing family secrets (including the erratic behavior of a father she dearly loved). We discovered that a key sentence in one of her most important letters about this issue had been mistranscribed so as to reverse her clear meaning in the appendix to one scholar’s book on this controversy, and the transcription error has unfortunately clearly influenced the scholarship of others.
We also looked at the fact that certain types of evidence that one would normally expect to find had this relationship existed do not appear to exist. Both in Paris and at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson was surrounded by visitors, with as many as fifty unannounced guests showing up at one time at his home. His children, grandchildren, and overseer allegedly had regular access to his room day or night, and no one could have entered without being subject to observation by others. And yet, throughout all the years with hundreds and hundreds of visitors, there is not a single record of anyone ever observing the slightest hint of behavior linking Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings romantically. No one reported seeing so much as a glance between them that suggested Callender may have been right.
Nor is there any clear evidence that Sally Hemings or any of her children ever alleged that Thomas Jefferson was her lover or their father, save for the statement attributed to an aging and clearly bitter Madison Hemings nearly five decades after Thomas Jefferson’s death. Surely, if they believed the famous President to be their father, they would have found it to their benefit to make this fact known to others before 1873.
Among the strongest arguments against Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of any of Sally’s children are the things that one must accept as true to believe the story. Whatever one thinks of Thomas Jefferson’s actual character, there can be little doubt that he was deeply concerned about his reputation. Nowhere was this more clear than in his desire for the love and respect of his daughters and other family members. While Jefferson presumably could have had his pick of a large number of beautiful and talented women in Paris, and he wrote flirtatious letters to several women after the death of his wife, it is not clear that any of these well-documented flirtations led to sexual “affairs.” Yet we are asked to believe that Jefferson would have entrusted his reputation to the discretion of a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old child, who in the judgment of the respected Abigail Adams required more “care” than Jefferson’s eight-year-old daughter, and who was presumably in daily contact with his young daughters.
Had Thomas Jefferson had such a sexual relationship, we find it very difficult to believe that he would have selected as his companion the teenaged maid to his young daughters. Many scholars who believe the allegations acknowledge that it would have been very difficult to keep the relationship secret from his daughters. We share that view, and we think it highly unlikely that Thomas Jef
ferson would have placed at risk the love and respect of his young children in this manner. Further, a prominent scholar who now embraces the story of a Jefferson-Hemings sexual liaison—and who has also studied the unpublished papers of Jefferson’s daughter Martha—concluded that she must have been “in denial,” as there is no indication that she was intentionally covering up her father’s relationship with Sally Hemings. We believe a simpler explanation is that she honestly did not believe the relationship existed.
To accept the allegations, we must believe that Thomas Jefferson—whose deep love and open displays of affection for his daughters and grandchildren was so evident—totally rejected the sons born to him by a woman some would have us believe he dearly loved. We must believe as well that, in his final days, as he prepared his will, he freed the two sons he had always ignored—presumably knowing that freeing Sally’s remaining children would be viewed by his critics as evidence of his guilt—yet made absolutely no provision for Sally Hemings’ future.
Only a single one of Thomas Jefferson’s known friends, University of Virginia co-founder John Hartwell Cocke, has been identified as believing the Callender allegations; but General Cocke did not become close to Jefferson until long after all of Sally Hemings’ children were born. Nor does he provide any hint that his belief was based upon more than speculation and rumors. Other disparaging comments that he made about Thomas Jefferson suggest that his feelings about his famous associate in the founding of the University of Virginia may have been a bit cooler than believed by some, and indeed may have been affected by a measure of jealousy. In contrast to this single voice (one can not even characterize him as a “witness,” since his observations of Thomas Jefferson occurred long after the events at issue occurred), the people who lived with Thomas Jefferson and worked with him most closely uniformly rejected the allegations, as did many of his most bitter political enemies.
And finally, to accept the allegation that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, we must accept the allegations of Jefferson’s personal enemies like scandalmonger James Callender and Georgia Federalist Thomas Gibbons—neither of whom had apparently ever even been to Monticello, and both of whom wrote about Sally Hemings in the most racist and defamatory manner—over the family traditions of Eston Hemings’ own descendants, who passed down the oral history that he was not Thomas Jefferson’s child but rather the son of an “uncle.” (Could this have been “Uncle Randolph?”) Since this account is essentially an “admission against interest” (assuming that most Americans would take pride in being descendants of the famous President), surely it warrants more respect than this.
Other Candidates for the Paternity of Eston Hemings
If Thomas Jefferson was not the father of Eston Hemings, the obvious question arises: “Who was?” Jefferson scholars for nearly two centuries have until very recently dismissed the Callender allegations, and without a great deal of apparent thought simply accepted the various reports that Thomas Jefferson Randolph had overheard Peter and Samuel Carr confessing to the paternity of Sally Hemings’ children. But the 1998 DNA tests clearly ruled out any member of the Carr family as a possible father of Eston Hemings.
Candidly, we don’t know who fathered Eston Hemings. The DNA tests narrowed the possible fathers down to a group of about two dozen known Jefferson males in Virginia at the time, and there is at least a theoretical possibility that there may have been illegitimate sons carrying the Jefferson Y chromosome among the slaves passed down from Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather, through his father, to the President. But when we consider things like the geographic location of many of these Jefferson men, the list of “most likely suspects” narrows quickly to Thomas Jefferson and perhaps a half dozen of his relatives. We know almost nothing about many of them.
Emphasizing again that we are not reaching a finding that Randolph Jefferson was Eston’s father, it does appear that the 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.
As already noted, we 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 Professor Fawn Brodie 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 to Martha Jefferson Randolph, 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.
Randolph Jefferson had at least four sons between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven when Eston was conceived, and if one accepts the data relied upon in the Monticello report the number was five. One might expect the sex drives of young men in this age bracket to be greater than that of the sixty-four-year-old President, and with their father’s reported example there is no reason to assume they were under strong social pressure at home to refrain from sexual relations with female slaves. Again, we have not the slightest bit of direct evidence that any of them ever fathered a child by Sally Hemings; but that puts them in essentially the same category as Thomas Jefferson as possible suspects.
A review of Thomas Jefferson’s visitation patterns to Monticello does, indeed, show a remarkable correlation between his arrivals and Sally Hemings’ pregnancies—some of the time. Indeed, she seems to have become pregnant remarkably quickly (in less than a month for three of her children) after he returned home; with the caveat, again, of some of the time. But between the years of her first conception and the birth of her last child, Thomas Jefferson came to Monticello more than twenty times, and Sally Hemings is believed to have become pregnant only about five or six times. Why did she become pregnant within days of his arrival on some occasions, and not become pregnant when on other occasions he returned and stayed months at a time? Why, if the alleged relationship began in Paris, did it take her more than five years to conceive a second child? Why did Sally stop having children when Thomas Jefferson returned permanently to Monticello?
The answer to all of these questions is we don’t know; but it is not difficult to realize that there may have been another variable in the equation. When Thomas Jefferson returned home, his friends and relatives often came to Monticello to welcome him home; and some of those times Sally Hemings very quickly became pregnant. (Recent scientific studies strongly suggest that fecundity—a man’s ability to father a child within a given period of time—decreas
es significantly as he ages.) Could the explanation for Sally getting pregnant in a matter of days on some of Thomas Jefferson’s visits, and her not becoming pregnant on numerous other occasions when he remained at Monticello for many months at a time, be that her lover was one of his relatives who did not make it to Monticello every time the President returned home? We don’t know, but it is among the simpler explanations—and it has the further virtue of being consistent with the eyewitness testimony of Edmund Bacon that while arriving for work early in the morning he often saw a man who was not Thomas Jefferson leaving Sally Hemings’ room.
We were not tasked with the job of identifying the father(s) of Sally Hemings’ children, and that has not been a primary focus of our inquiry. Our mandate was to examine the case against Thomas Jefferson. Trying to prove a negative is usually difficult. But we have found most of the arguments used to point suspicion toward Thomas Jefferson to be unpersuasive and often factually erroneous. Not a single member of our group, after an investigation lasting roughly one year, finds the case against Thomas Jefferson to be highly compelling, and the overwhelming majority of us believe it is very unlikely that he fathered any children by Sally Hemings. Certainly, there were far more likely suspects, including brother Randolph and his sons, for the paternity of Eston and perhaps other Hemings children. The evidence that the Carr brothers might have fathered some of Sally’s older children remains unchallenged by the DNA tests, and may be true. Given Edmund Bacon’s eyewitness account, making an assumption that Sally Hemings could not have had more than one father to her children makes no sense unless one is prepared to exclude Thomas Jefferson as a possible father. We make no finding that Sally was not monogamous (with someone other than Thomas Jefferson), because the evidence is simply not there to resolve that issue either way. Madison asserts that Sally’s mother had at least four different fathers to her children, and the Bacon testimony makes it very illogical to assume that Sally was both monogamous and sexually involved with Thomas Jefferson.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 4