Conclusions
We do not pretend that this is the final word on the issue, and it is possible that future developments in science or newly discovered evidence will warrant a reconsideration of our conclusions. We understand that DNA might be obtained from the grave of William Beverly Hemings, son of Madison Hemings, which could provide new information of relevance to this inquiry. If his Y chromosome did not match that of Eston Hemings and the descendants of Field Jefferson, that would confirm that Sally Hemings could not have been monogamous. A match with the Carr family would also be significant. A match with Eston might strengthen the case for Sally’s monogamy, but would not conclusively establish even which Jefferson male was the father of either child. Our thoughts here are further tempered by our concerns about the ethical propriety of disturbing the remains of the dead in the interest of historical curiosity. It may also prove useful to search for evidence concerning the whereabouts of Sally Hemings over the years. This could prove decisive, but we are not optimistic about the existence of additional records of this nature at this point in history.
In the end, after roughly one year of examining the issues, we find the question of whether Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by his slave Sally Hemings to be one about which honorable people can and do disagree. However, it is our unanimous view 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 into believing that the issue is closed. With the exception of one member, whose views are set forth both below and in the more detailed appended dissent, our individual conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly untrue.
For the Majority
Lance Banning
Professor of History
University of Kentucky
Professor Banning formerly held the John Adams Chair in American History at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and this fall will serve as Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Two of his award-winning books (The Jeffersonian Persuasion and Jefferson and Madison) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
James Ceaser
Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs
University of Virginia
Professor Ceaser is the author of Reconstructing America and has taught at Harvard University, the University of Montesquieu, the University of Basel, and Marquette University.
Robert H. Ferrell
Distinguished Professor of History, Emeritus
Indiana University
Professor Ferrell was educated and has also taught at Yale University. He is the author or editor of more than forty books and was described as “the dean of American presidential historians” by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Charles R. Kesler
Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
University of Virginia
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 nearly 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 and the Notes on Virginia,” in the Journal of Politics.
Minority Report
With the report of the majority, I am in general agreement. I dissent only in believing it somewhat more likely than not that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings.
I am particularly impressed by two pieces of evidence—the DNA tests showing that Eston Hemings is very likely to have been a direct lineal male descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s grandfather, and the fact that all of Sally Hemings’s known children were conceived at a time when Thomas Jefferson was in the place where she almost certainly was as well. This suggests the possibility that Thomas Jefferson fathered all of her known children, but it does not prove that he fathered even one. What it does establish is a strong probability that her
pregnancies during the period when she appears to have resided at Monticello were occasioned by his sojourns there.
It is, this fact notwithstanding, a mistake to jump to the conclusion that Jefferson must have been the father of Sally Hemings’s children—for there were other events that normally coincided with his visits to Monticello, and among these one is pertinent to this inquiry: the presence of visitors whose offspring are tolerably likely to have looked like Thomas Jefferson—visitors such as Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph, Randolph’s four or five sons, and Peter and Samuel Carr, sons of his sister.
As is made clear in the majority report, Randolph or any one of his sons could have been the father of Eston Hemings, and there is reason to believe that Randolph and quite possibly his entire family were at Monticello on the occasion of a visit by his twin sister at the very time when Sally Hemings became pregnant with her son Eston. On the available evidence, it is impossible to be certain which Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings. Randolph Jefferson’s known pattern of behavior makes him a likely suspect, but Thomas Jefferson is known to have been present and, in Randolph’s case, his presence is only a likelihood.
I am also impressed by the testimony of Thomas Jefferson’s grandchildren, by that of Edmund Bacon, and by that of Madison Hemings. It is obvious that someone lied but it is by no means clear who did so. I am not especially impressed by the argument that it would have been out of character for Thomas Jefferson to have abused his position as a slaveholder, for, in my judgment, in his public life he was a highly devious man. On the available evidence, I think the case open. Only with regard to Eston Hemings do I think it more likely than not that Thomas Jefferson was the father. I remain agnostic as to the paternity of Sally Hemings’s other children.
There is, however, one thing that we do know, and it is damning enough. Despite the distaste that 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. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self indulgent about the man.
For the Minority
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.
* * *
Footnotes
1. Jefferson’s sister, Martha, married his best friend, Dabney Carr, and they had three sons. Two of these, Peter and Samuel Carr, were alleged to have confessed to paternity of some of Sally’s children, and were assumed by many to have been the father of all of her children.
Individual Views of Scholars Commission Members
Individual Views of
Professor Robert F. Turner
joined by
Professor Alf J. Mapp, Jr.
Professor David N. Mayer
Professor Forrest McDonald
and
Professor Thomas Traut
Introduction
* * *
The Sally Hemings Scandal and
the Origins of the Scholars Commission
On September 1, 1802, one of the most disreputable scandal-mongers in the history of American journalism, James Thomson Callender, published an article in the Richmond, Virginia, Recorder alleging that, while Thomas Jefferson was America’s Minister to France, he had begun a sexual relationship with a young1 slave girl named Sally Hemings. Callender claimed that this affair had produced a ten- to twelve-year-old son named “Tom” whose features bore a striking resemblance to those of the President.
Callender’s motive in writing the story is clear: He felt he had helped elect the third President by his vehement attacks on Jefferson’s Federalist opponents, including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and especially President John Adams, whom Jefferson had defeated in the election of 1800. Callender demanded compensation for his services in the form of appointment as postmaster for Richmond. When Jefferson sent word the appointment was not going to happen, Callender responded that if the appointment were not forthcoming he would turn his pen on the new President and publish articles that would cause him great embarrassment. The Callender allegations, which will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three, were written by an angry and unprincipled drunkard for the purpose of fulfilling a blackmail threat. As Callender himself explained his behavior, he was seeking to extract “ten thousand fold vengeance”2 against Thomas Jefferson.
In an (unrelated) 1819 letter to John Adams, Jefferson observed, “the proof of a negative can only be presumptive.”3 But few people who knew Thomas Jefferson well, even among his bitterest political enemies, took the Callender charges seriously. Despite Callender’s gloating that he had destroyed the President’s reputation, Jefferson and his Republican allies won decisively in the congressional elections of 1802 and Jefferson won reelection two years later by a nearly twelve-to-one landslide. But Callender’s allegations were reprinted widely by some Federalist editors, and anti-American writers in Great Britain delighted in giving the story life across the Atlantic as well. Decades later, the story was reborn within the abolitionist movement to illustrate the terrible evils of the institution of slavery.4 Miscegenation between master and slave was common enough on southern plantations to make such a charge credible, especially to those Americans who had also been led to believe that Thomas Jefferson was an atheistic tool of French radicals who were plotting to destroy the new Constitution.5 But until the 1970s, prominent Jefferson scholars who even bothered to take note of the story consistently rejected it as being without foundation and totally inconsistent with Jefferson’s reputation.6
The modern rebirth of the story can be attributed in the first instance to Professor Fawn Brodie, whose 1974 Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History was a commercial success, despite being sharply criticized by scholars.7 Dr. Brodie relied heavily upon an 1873 newspaper article purporting to record the testimony of Sally’s son Madison Hemings, who reportedly claimed that Thomas Jefferson was the father of all of his mother’s children and had (as Callender had charged more than seventy years earlier) commenced the relationship in Paris. Given the absence of hard evidence of the relationship, Professor Brodie sought to apply the tools of psychoanalysis to the issue by a careful study of Jefferson’s letters and records.
The first evidence she finds of a Jefferson-Hemings romance was that, while traveling through Europe in the spring of 1788, Jefferson used the term “mulatto” several times in a journal to describe soil color—which Brodie saw as evidence that he was longing for the arms of his mulatto mistress back in Paris. As will be discussed in Chapter Nine, among the problems with this theory is that “mulatto” was an eighteenth-century term-of-art used by geologists to describe soil color—a term Jefferson had also used during previous travels before Sally Hemings arrived in Paris. In a review of Brodie’s book, historian Garry Wills observed that during his 1788 trip Jefferson used “red” or “reddish” nearly five-times more frequently than he used “mulatto,” and wondered why Brodie did not interpret this as a subliminal expression of his lust for his red-headed, nine-year-old daughter, Polly.8
Professor Brodie explained the absence of any significant references to Sally in Jefferson’s letters and records by suggesting that someone probably destroyed the incriminating documents; or, alternatively, she saw it as proof that Jefferson was covering up his affair. Sh
e interpreted ambiguous notes in Jefferson’s memorandum books about giving small sums to “charity,” or leaving money in his dresser, as recording secret payments to Sally, despite the fact that similar notations appeared in Jefferson’s records years before Sally arrived in Paris.
Almost all serious scholars remained highly skeptical, but the story was kept alive in the public mind by a series of novels and Hollywood productions. For every reader who waded through Dumas Malone’s masterful six-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning series Jefferson and His Time, a thousand or more learned about Jefferson on the silver screen or their television sets. There, they viewed seemingly realistic video of the dashing Thomas Jefferson waltzing the beautiful young slave girl across the ballrooms of Paris. The story was titillating, and more and more visitors to Monticello began asking to see the “pictures” of Sally or the nonexistent “secret staircase” or the “hidden chamber” above Jefferson’s bed where they had been taught the illicit romance had been consummated.9 Many assumed the story in the movies and novels had to be true, for how could a work of pure fiction use the names of real people in such a scandalous way without being sued if the charges were false?
Yet another development contributing to the credibility of the “Sally” story has been the growth of investigative journalism during the past four decades and the resulting public disclosure of numerous scandals involving sexual misconduct by elected leaders who have often initially proclaimed their innocence. Scholars have entered the fray as well, accusing Presidents throughout history of similar misconduct. Sometimes their case is clear, but at other times they appear to have begun from a presumption of guilt, repeating partisan accusations or unsupported allegations as fact.10 When Americans see a popular elected political leader such as President William Jefferson Clinton impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about sexual encounters with a woman thirty years his junior, and senior legislators forced to resign over sexual misconduct, perhaps it is not surprising that they are cynical when told Thomas Jefferson had absolute control over a handsome young slave girl and remained a gentleman.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 5