This “mistake” (unlike those in Figures 1–3) was noted in the 2001 version of our report and has been corrected in the latest edition of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (below). The issue—particularly in the light of the other alterations to her “evidence”—is whether such dramatic changes by an obviously able scholar can be explained as mere “mistakes.”
Also troubling is Professor Gordon-Reed’s omission from both her analysis and her genealogical chart of five of the most likely suspects for the paternity of some of Sally’s children. Professor Gordon-Reed qualifies her genealogical chart of “The Jeffersons and Randolphs” by adding “(Relevant Connections Only)”33 and she then omits potentially highly relevant people. Similarly, the index to her book does not even mention President Jefferson’s younger brother Randolph or any of Randolph’s five sons.34 While one would again wish to be charitable and assume that perhaps—like many scholars who have written about Thomas Jefferson—she was simply unaware of these obscure relatives, her bibliography includes both a volume that provides a contemporary slave account of Randolph’s habit of spending his evenings at Monticello playing his fiddle among the slaves and dancing “half the night,”35 and Bernard Mayo’s Thomas Jefferson and His Unknown Brother.36 The Mayo book documents Randolph’s apparent drinking problem and includes a letter from Thomas Jefferson indicating that he expected to welcome Randolph (and, one might assume, Randolph’s five sons) to Monticello about the time Sally Hemings became pregnant with Eston—her only child later shown by DNA tests to have probably been fathered by a Jefferson.37
There is yet another problem with Professor Gordon-Reed’s book. Despite her impressive legal training, she has written the brief for the wrong side—proceeding in the manner of a defense lawyer. Like Professor Brodie and novelist Barbara Chase-Riboud,38 Professor Gordon-Reed’s approach is not to try to prove that Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of Sally Hemings’ children, but merely to argue that it was possible that such a relationship could have existed. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is replete with assertions that Sally “might have been Thomas Jefferson’s lover,”39 that “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings could have been involved in a relationship,”40 and that this or that factual allegation “could have” or “might have” been true.41 And since, as will be discussed in Chapter Two, we have almost no reliable information about Sally Hemings, this possibility is of course true. But such statements, even if technically accurate, are probative of very little. (One might argue with similar logic that Sally “might” have been a wizard at Newtonian mathematics and perhaps the actual inventor of the mold-board plough for which Jefferson received so much acclaim—as disproving a negative is difficult.)
In the legal profession, these are the arguments of a defense brief; whereas, to win a paternity case against Thomas Jefferson, Professor Gordon-Reed would have to clear the much higher hurdle of proof of the alleged facts by “clear and convincing evidence.” If she were the defense counsel for Peter Carr or Randolph Jefferson, and wished merely to raise sufficient doubt that her client was the father of one of Sally Hemings’ children, it could be very effective to point out that Sally “might” have been seeing Thomas Jefferson or another man at the time of conception. Noting that Sally was reported to be physically attractive (motive), that she and Thomas Jefferson were living in reasonable proximity to each other much of the time (opportunity), and that other circumstances showed that they “could have” or “might have” had a relationship, a defense lawyer for another suspect might well succeed in introducing enough doubt about the guilt of his or her client to avoid an unfavorable verdict. But such arguments seldom even attempt to establish that the other suspect is guilty, or even that he or she is more likely to be guilty than the accused client. The goal of the defense lawyer is merely to convince the court that there is sufficient uncertainty about the client’s guilt to avoid a finding of paternity.
All Professor Gordon-Reed attempts to do in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings is to demonstrate, given the almost total absence of reliable factual information, that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings could have had a relationship. But she doesn’t even allege that the story of their romance is true, much less present clear and convincing evidence to support it. To be sure, she has constructed what at times is a very clever and creative argument; but it is an argument for the wrong brief.
For most Americans, scholars and public alike, by far the most convincing evidence that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by Sally Hemings came after Professor Gordon-Reed had published her book. In November 1998 it was reported in the press that scientists had used DNA tests to establish a genetic link between Thomas Jefferson and one of Sally’s sons. In reality, as will be discussed in Chapter One, many of the press reports were factually wrong. The DNA tests had not linked any of Sally Hemings’ children with Thomas Jefferson, whose DNA is not known to exist today. The tested DNA was extracted from the blood of several modern descendants of some of Thomas Jefferson’s cousins. The scientific tests, which were professionally done and unexceptional in their methodology, supported two broad conclusions of relevance to our inquiry:
Thomas Woodson, long thought to have been the child allegedly conceived in Paris and born to Sally Hemings in 1790 (even by many who were convinced that his father was not Thomas Jefferson), whose existence was the central focus of James Callender’s 1802 allegations about a Jefferson-Hemings sexual relationship, could not have been the son of Thomas Jefferson; and
Eston Hemings, the youngest son of Sally Hemings, almost certainly was fathered by one of more than two dozen Jefferson men (including the sixty-four-year-old President) who are known to have lived in Virginia at the time of Eston’s conception.
A big part of the public misunderstanding of the DNA testing resulted from the fact that the tests involved were quite different from the highly precise “DNA fingerprints” Americans learned about during the O.J. Simpson trial. Instead of trying to link two individuals with 99.99 percent or greater reliability, the DNA tests performed in the Jefferson-Hemings study were designed primarily to eliminate paternity suspects. In this case, they showed that neither Peter nor Samuel Carr was the father of Eston Hemings and that some male Jefferson probably was. To most people, including some historians and the scientists who conducted the tests (who did not even know that Thomas Jefferson had a brother and five nephews living a few miles from Monticello), Thomas Jefferson was the only suspect once the Carr brothers had been eliminated. In fact, as will be discussed in Chapter Ten, that is not true. But the common perception was that DNA tests had proven Thomas Jefferson fathered Sally Hemings’ children, and that certainly remained the “conventional wisdom” until the original version of this report was released in April 2001.
Jefferson’s fate seemed further sealed in January 2000, when the respected Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, keeper of Monticello and long dedicated to promoting scholarship and education about America’s third President, issued a staff report following an investigation of the DNA evidence and other available information. In announcing this report to the press, Foundation President Daniel Jordan said that 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.”42
Feeding Frenzy
For a variety of reasons, for a brief period the Jefferson-Hemings controversy seemed finally resolved. Scholars and commentators rushed forward to embrace the new conventional wisdom, many of them proudly announcing they had always known Jefferson was guilty. For example, on November 8, 1998, the late historian Stephen Ambrose (discussed earlier in connection with a 2002 plagiarism charge43) appeared on the CNN program, “Both Sides with Jesse Jackson,” and announced: “For my own part, I never doubted that he had a liaison with Sally. Whether there were children out of it or not was, you know, the hardest part, there’s no doubt about it. What the hell do you think slavery was?”44
; Ambrose went on to say: “This man has given us more than anyone except Washington and here he is a hypocrite, a liar, a misogynist, which he denounced very vehemently.” Perhaps a bit more of the exchange will capture the spirit of the program:
JACKSON: Do you think the same people who would want to impeach William Jefferson Clinton would want to impeach Thomas Jefferson?
AMBROSE: We don’t have ex post facto impeachment in this country.
JACKSON: Why do you think so many historians have denied this Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship and why have they just denied it, lied about it, covered it up?
AMBROSE: Well, Jefferson was the first one to lie about it and the first one to cover it up and they’ve taken their lead from him. …[E]verything about it stinks. I think the worst thing, he didn’t educate his own children. This is Thomas Jefferson. This is the founder of the University of Virginia. He did not teach his own children how to read and write. And that’s, it seems to me …
JACKSON: Which makes …[Jefferson] a dead-beat dad.
AMBROSE: That’s, you have a way with words and you picked it up there. That’s right.
JACKSON: It’s in common parlance. Give us some historical perspective on how this 200 year Jefferson-Hemings story, it just surfaced and just kept staying alive. It just kind of wouldn’t go away.
AMBROSE: It wouldn’t go away because it was true. The first to break it was a newspaperman named Callender, who was pretty disreputable. He would be called an investigative reporter today. And he started making the charges when Jefferson was living in the White House. And he continued to make ‘em and Jefferson continued to deny them and at one point Jefferson tried to buy his silence, tried to bribe him. Now, the Jefferson people deny that, but anybody else looking at it, this was a straight out attempt to bribe Callender. …[O]ne of the aspects that I’d like to comment on [in] this business is the use of Sally as a sex slave is deplorable and we could use a lot worse words than that. …
JACKSON:. …I suppose that would mean in the end it would be we’ll judge William Jefferson Clinton by what he has been as a leader and not just by this present crisis which is so current and on TV by day and by night.
AMBROSE: Yeah, that’s right.45
At times, the response seemed almost like a feeding frenzy, with the scholarly sharks circling the gravesite lusting after a piece of the fallen dead white male. Even Jefferson’s own University of Virginia seemed anxious to embrace the new-found truth. Professor Ellis notes that shortly after the DNA results were released, a “hastily convened scholarly conference” took place at the University of Virginia in May 1999. According to Professor Ellis, the conference “made its major focus the complicity of the historical profession in rejecting the existence of the sexual relationship prior to the DNA findings, suggesting that those who had found the circumstantial evidence unconvincing were harboring racist prejudices that now required purging.”46
In fairness, the DNA evidence was but additional fuel for an assault on Jefferson that began more than a decade earlier.47 In 1989, Dr. Peter S. Onuf was named the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, bringing to the chair some very different perspectives than previous chair-holders Dumas Malone and Merrill Peterson—each of whom was widely recognized as the world’s preeminent Jefferson scholar of his era.48 But Professor Onuf matured in a more radical academic environment, and in 1993 he published an influential article in the prestigious William & Mary Quarterly. Writing in the same journal seven years later, Professor Ellis gave this account of the growing assault on Thomas Jefferson:
Matters became even worse soon after Onuf’s article appeared. In the volume [co-edited by Onuf] on Jefferson’s legacy published to recognize the 250th anniversary of his birth, Paul Finkelman declared in prosecutorial tones that Jefferson should be banished from the American pantheon as a slave-owning racist. Michael Lind and Connor Cruise O’Brien wrote books actually calling for the dismantling of the Jefferson Memorial and the removal of his face from Mount Rushmore.49
The DNA evidence thus found a very receptive audience among many revisionist historians. Professor Onuf worked closely with the staff research committee that prepared the Monticello Report (discussed below), and according to two individuals who served on the committee, when asked whether he had “proof” for a factual assertion he had made about Jefferson, Professor Onuf replied: “We don’t need proof. We are historians, we write history the way we want to.”50
Published accounts suggest that Professor Onuf takes seriously this freedom from the constraints of historical facts. At a February 1999 forum on “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: The Facts and Their Significance,” he reportedly asserted that the DNA revelations provided a “wonderful opportunity for rethinking and reconstructing Jefferson,” and alleged that the only slaves Jefferson ever freed “were Hemings’ children.” Professor Onuf added that “Jefferson’s days as an icon” were “limited.”51
Even the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, for decades perhaps the greatest champion of the legacy of America’s third President, seemed to get with the new program. It formally changed its name to “Thomas Jefferson Foundation”—deleting “Memorial” from its title—and subsequently a Monticello guide was reportedly chastised for being a bit too enthusiastic in his praise of Jefferson during a house tour. The guide asserts that he or she was cautioned that “we are not in the business of memorializing Thomas Jefferson any longer.”52
The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society
Still, not everyone was convinced. Several people with strong interests in Thomas Jefferson looked beyond the headlines and realized that the public had been misled about the nature of the DNA “proof.” One was a retired University of Virginia Medical School Professor, Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn, who as a Monticello guide had been a part of the Monticello Research Committee and had resigned in protest when he learned that his minority report had been concealed from others on the committee for eight months and was not released when the majority report was given to the press.53
Several skeptics joined together to form the “Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS),” including lawyers, doctors, a consultant with a Ph.D. in environmental science, a retired Library of Congress expert whose extensive database of Thomas Jefferson quotations is featured on the University of Virginia website, an immigrant from Iran who became a highly successful building contractor, a retired Air Force veteran with a strong interest in genealogy, and some rather extraordinary54 “ordinary people” with the common bond of a strong admiration for Thomas Jefferson and a sense that he had been “convicted” without receiving a fair trial. They asked a Jefferson descendant named John Works—an attorney working at the time as a petroleum company executive in Romania, who had once served as president of the Monticello Association (the family organization of descendants of Thomas Jefferson that owns the small family graveyard at Monticello)—to serve as their president.
One of the first decisions of the new TJHS was to establish a blue-ribbon panel of Thomas Jefferson scholars to reexamine all of the evidence and issue a public report. Thus was conceived the Scholars Commission on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter.
About the Scholars Commission
Between the spring of 2000 and April 2001, a number of American scholars who have long had a professional interest in Thomas Jefferson and/or his era engaged in a reexamination of all of the available evidence and arguments concerning Thomas Jefferson’s alleged paternity of one or more children by his slave Sally Hemings. While our membership fluctuated slightly over the months, the thirteen scholars who persevered to the end come from prominent universities spread from southern California to Maine and south to Alabama. They are trained in such diverse disciplines as history, political science, law, economics, and biochemistry. Collectively, our professional careers span well over three centuries and include teaching or research appointments at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Smith, Virginia, and many other respected institution
s of higher learning.
Most of the scholars have risen to national prominence in their field. Several hold or have held such titles as “distinguished” or “eminent” professor, and most have held at least one chaired professorship or have served as chairman of their department or its graduate studies program. Every member of the group, even the lawyers, holds an academic doctorate, and among us we have authored or edited more than one hundred books, many of them dealing specifically with Thomas Jefferson.
None of this, of course, guarantees that we have reached the correct conclusions. We invite readers to consider our conclusions and the supporting arguments on the merits, to compare them to the conclusions of others, and to draw their own conclusions about where the truth may lie.
After decades of study, it would be remarkable if there was a single member of the Scholars Commission who did not enter the project with opinions both about Thomas Jefferson and about the allegation that he was sexually involved with Sally Hemings. Most, but not all, of us consider ourselves admirers of Thomas Jefferson; and most, but not all, of us had over the years been skeptical about the Sally Hemings story prior to the release of the DNA tests and the Monticello Report.
Our mission appeared at first to be a simple one. In the finest Jeffersonian tradition, we were asked to “pursue the truth, wherever it might lead,” examining all of the known evidence and any new evidence we could find, considering all of the arguments on both sides of the issue, and then to issue a public report giving our best professional judgments about the likelihood that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by Sally Hemings. We have done so to the best of our abilities. But it was not an easy task given the paucity of reliable information and the passage of roughly two centuries of time.
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 7