I start by recognizing clearly that the case for Jefferson’s paternity of the Hemings children is strong enough that we can readily understand why so many able scholars have come to think it likely. Their argument stands basically on five substantial pillars:
(1) The mountaintop at Monticello was populated by numerous mixed-race slaves, some of whom resembled Jefferson and one of whom (probably Eston Hemings) was said by Jefferson’s grandson to bear him such a striking resemblance that, at a distance, in the dusk, they might have been mistaken for one another. Jefferson, moreover, was privately and publicly accused during his lifetime of being the father of Sally Hemings’ children and sometimes of other slaves as well, most famously, perhaps, in an 1802 blurb in the Richmond Recorder by the notorious scandal-monger James Thomson Callender. President Jefferson, Callender wrote, “keeps and for many years has kept as his concubine, one of his own slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is TOM. His features are said to bear a striking although sable resemblance to those of the President himself. The boy is ten or twelve years of age.”;
(2) In an interview with an Ohio newspaper reporter in 1873, Madison Hemings, another of Sally’s sons, said that he and his siblings were Jefferson’s children (and his only slave children) in a report which accords in much of its substance with what we know from other sources. According to this interview, Thomas and Sally initiated an affair while they were together in Paris from 1787 to 1789. Sally became pregnant and agreed to return to the United States after they entered into a “treaty” in which Jefferson promised “extraordinary privileges” for Sally and freedom for her children when they reached age 21;
(3) Sally Hemings conceived all her children when Jefferson was at Monticello and no children when he was not;
(4) DNA tests show that a descendent of Eston Hemings carries a Jefferson gene; and
(5) DNA tests are incompatible with the possibility that Eston Hemings was fathered by Peter or Samuel Carr, the sons of Dabney Carr and Jefferson’s sister Martha and the most often mentioned and most plausible alternatives to Jefferson himself as a father.
The case for Jefferson’s paternity, in brief, is strong enough that the burden of persuasion has shifted to the skeptics. This may be true if we apply the test of Occam’s razor: the logical standard that tells us that the simplest of workable, competing explanations of a set of facts should be preferred. It certainly seems true in a political sense: in an atmosphere inflamed by suggestions that to doubt this story is somehow to denigrate African Americans and deny them their rightful place in American history.
Nevertheless, it is by no means true that no reasonable person can continue to doubt—not, at least, for this occasional participant in modern life, who, in any case, confesses a great deal of puzzlement over the implications some have found in the story. It seems to me quite evident that unconscious bias and, in some cases, professed political objectives are as plainly at work on one side of this issue as the other. For example, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation staff report, which is presented in a tone of dispassionate historical inquiry, is nevertheless, to my mind, markedly one-sided: it makes a strong case for Jefferson’s paternity, on much the lines I’ve just sketched out, but barely touches on serious grounds for doubt; and it is nearly as biased in its differential weighting of evidence as some of the earlier discussions condemned by Gordon-Reed and others. Thus, despite the genuine strength of the contrary case, there remains, I think, ample reason for continuing skepticism about a claim which, if false, gravely libels a great American founder and, if true, compels a serious reconsideration of his moral character, though a claim which, either way, does not strike me, as it strikes so many others, as greatly affecting either our understanding of this founder’s public contributions or our understanding of African American history.
Space and time will not permit a thoroughly detailed discussion of every instance of biased treatment of evidence or slips of logic in the case for Jefferson’s paternity. That would be work for an article or even a book. But there should be room, at least, to stress that there are remarkably few uncontested or uncontestable facts in this matter. It is very much a problem of weighing and interpreting the thin and disputable evidence we have—and, ideally, of being wary of our own predispositions and examining this record with as much dispassion as we can possibly muster.
Critics have advanced stronger or weaker responses to virtually every element in the pro-paternity case in rebuttals already in circulation, some of which are powerful if by no means temperate. Briefly, though, let me run again through those five main pillars as a way of getting a bit more deeply into the subject:
(1) A supposed resemblance between Thomas Jefferson and some of Sally Hemings’s children (or other Monticello slaves) is certainly evidence of his possible paternity, but it is hardly evidence of a very substantial kind. A resemblance between one person and another is seen by some people and denied by others. It may not even be the best of evidence that some of Sally’s children had a Jefferson (or a Carr) for a father, which was generally conceded long before the DNA results.
(2) Madison Hemings’ “Memoir,” which is actually a reporter’s account of an interview with him, first published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873, is entitled to the same respect and should be considered with the same skepticism and the same concern for corroborating evidence—no more, no less—as similar reports of conversations with others. Like virtually all those others, it is an “as told to” account in which we cannot tell with certainty which words and statements came from Madison Hemings and which may have been changed by the reporter—a report, moreover, in which both the interviewee and the reporter might or might not have been telling the truth. In this case, many of its details can be corroborated from other sources. Some can be disproved.2 And some suggest that Madison Hemings or the interviewer was leaning on previously published accusations by Callender or others.3 I am strongly inclined, for my own part, to believe that Hemings was telling the truth as he understood it. But, obviously, he could not have known first-hand who was the father of Sally’s children or whether all of them were fathered by the same man. It is not even certain (although it seems likely) that he had the story of the affair and the “treaty” from Sally herself, who left no reported statement that it was true. That Madison Hemings’ descendents also believed the story is not surprising and adds nothing that Madison did not say himself. This “Memoir,” in brief, is a valuable historical resource and was dismissed too easily, sometimes with prejudice, by earlier historians. But it is not inherently racist to question its details, nor does the memoir, in my judgment, unquestionably outweigh the countervailing testimony of Edmund Bacon, a former overseer at Monticello, and of several members of the family of Thomas Mann and Martha Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter. Neither is Madison’s story consistent as I understand it with the oral tradition in the family of Madison’s brother Eston, who apparently passed down a claim that he was the son of a close relative of Jefferson, not of Jefferson himself. We can well doubt that Sally Hemings became pregnant in France and would have had any reason to enter into the improbable “treaty” that Madison described. No one has solved the mystery of the baby that Madison said was born in 1790 but lived only a short time, the baby that may have become the twelve-year-old “Tom” of James Thomson Callender’s public accusation against Jefferson in 1802. It is not clear that Thomas Woodson, said to be that baby in another oral tradition, was Sally Hemings’ son, and it now seems certain that, if he was, he was not the son of Thomas Jefferson too.4
(3) The facts about Sally Hemings’ conceptions—at least about the conceptions after 1789—are certainly among the strongest elements in the case for Thomas Jefferson’s paternity. They do strongly suggest that Jefferson (or someone who was at Monticello only when Jefferson was there, or someone whose sleeping arrangements were altered by his presence) fathered her several children.5 Occam’s razor would point to Jefferson himself as the simplest of the
workable answers. But it is curious that Jefferson’s grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, and the historian Henry Randall both believed that they had independently confirmed Martha Randolph’s insistence that the child who most resembled Jefferson (presumably Eston) could not have been his, since he and Sally were “far distant” from one another for fifteen months before the baby’s birth. We know that Jefferson was at Monticello during those fifteen months and, indeed, for most of the specific period during which Eston would have been conceived. We have no documentary evidence that Sally was ever away. But we have no reason either to believe that all these other people were simply lying.
(4) The DNA results certainly do not prove Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of any of the Hemings children. They were widely misreported as having done that, and this misperception may well have spread indelibly among the public. But every knowledgeable authority, including the scientists who conducted the tests, has denied that this is what was found and even that it was possible to make such findings from the sort of tests that were done. These tests compared 19 markers on the y chromosomes of 14 individuals: 5 living male-line descendents of 2 sons of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle, who was assumed to have the same y chromosome as Jefferson’s father and thus of Jefferson himself; 3 male-line descendents of 3 sons of the paternal grandfather of Peter and Samuel Carr; 5 male-line descendents of 2 sons of Thomas Woodson; and one male-line descendent of Eston Hemings. The results showed a match between the haplotypes of the Jefferson descendents and the Hemings descendent, but no other matches. In plain words, they showed that a descendent of one of Sally Hemings’ children carries a Jefferson gene, not a Carr one, and that neither the Carrs nor the Jeffersons are related to the Woodsons.
(5) Although they implicate a Jefferson, not a Carr, as Eston Hemings’ father, the DNA results cannot exclude the Carrs as possible fathers of Sally Hemings’ earlier children. Neither can they show, in and of themselves, that Thomas Jefferson was any more likely to have been Eston’s father than any of Thomas’s male-line relatives who might have had relations with Sally Hemings at the relevant times. To me, the absence of a wholly plausible alternative to Jefferson as a father is another of the strongest elements in the pro-paternity case. Thomas’s younger brother, Randolph Jefferson, or one of Randolph’s sons, might possibly have fathered Eston. Randolph was probably at Monticello at the right time, perhaps with some of his sons; and Randolph, unlike Thomas, was known to dance and play his fiddle with the slaves. But Randolph or one of his sons seems so unlikely to have fathered all of Sally Hemings’ children that respondents will continue to protest that this is a grasping at straws by Jefferson’s defenders. Peter or Samuel Carr, the nephews who were believed to be Sally’s lovers by Jefferson’s grandchildren and who were reported to have confessed it to him and another witness by Thomas Jefferson Randolph, might still, to be sure, have fathered all of Sally’s children except Eston. But this would not explain why Sally became pregnant only when Thomas was at home. So far as we know, one or both of the Carr brothers was usually at Monticello or quite nearby from 1794 to 1808.
Given greater space and time, I might continue at greater length to review the chinks in the case for Jefferson’s paternity. But rebuttals are widely available as is, and others will be forthcoming. Moreover, even if I were to fill in the heads of this sort of critique, the case for Jefferson’s paternity might still seem stronger, in terms of Occam’s test, than the arguments against it.
On the other hand, Occam’s razor tells us to prefer the simplest theory only when the simplest theory seems equally true. And here, it seems to me, the simplest explanation of most of the salient facts—that Jefferson fathered all the children born between 1795 and 1808—seems sound only when we focus so intently on the points I have reviewed thus far. I remain a skeptic, and I remain one principally because of a long list of highly implausible things we have to believe in order to accept the Jefferson-Hemings story in anything like the terms advanced by Madison Hemings and assumed to be likely in much recent work—a good part of which dismisses countervailing evidence too easily and passes very lightly over these implausibilities when they are mentioned at all.
Thomas Jefferson was not a saint. He was capable, on demonstrable occasions, of mendacity, hypocrisy, and even, when young and single, an untoward advance toward a married woman. (This, he said, was the only one of the Federalist charges against him in which there was any truth.) But neither was Thomas Jefferson a moral monster—unless, of course, we think that everyone who was born and died a slaveholder deserves that epithet. Rather, the Jefferson we know from the records was profoundly concerned with personal morality and religiously convinced that conduct would be punished or rewarded after death. He was deeply affectionate toward his family and intensely jealous of his public and private reputation. He was fastidious about feminine delicacy, cleanliness, and such, no sort of womanizer, perhaps even celibate after the death of his wife. He was invariably attracted in the few cases we know of for sure to accomplished, mature women. But in 1788 or 1789, we are asked to believe, this U.S. minister to France, a man with ready access to some of the most beautiful and accomplished women in Europe, living in a society (as he put it) where “beauty goes begging on every street,” initiated an affair with a 15- or 16-year-old slave girl, whom Abigail Adams had recently described as more in need of care than the 8-year-old she had attended across the ocean. This girl was the personal servant (and likely something of a confidant) of Jefferson’s two daughters—he would refer to her years later as “Maria’s maid” [1799]—an individual, that is, whose discretion the accomplished politician and diplomat could not possibly have trusted. Although it may well be that Sally lived, during much of her time in Paris, in the cross-town convent where Patsy and Polly were being schooled, we are to assume that Thomas and Sally carried on their affair in the crowded two-bedroom townhouse where Jefferson lived—and did so without arousing the suspicion of David Humphreys, who slept in one of the bedrooms, or of anyone else who was there. She became pregnant with Jefferson’s child, the story continues, entered into an agreement with him, and (with Jefferson taking care that she would have a berth convenient to his daughters) sailed back to the U.S. in this condition with him, his two girls, and her brother James.6 (The baby, if it existed, either died soon after birth, without leaving a trace other than Madison Hemings’ statement, or became the elusive, unrecorded 12-year-old of Callender’s 1802 accusation, who, if he later took the name Tom Woodson, was not Thomas Jefferson’s child.)
Well, in any event, infatuated enough to make this improbable “treaty” with his slave, Jefferson would continue in a monogamous and fertile relationship with Sally for nearly 20 years, according to this story, ultimately fathering five or six more children (the first of whom, however, was not born until 1795). During these twenty years, he was content, as was she, to confine the relationship to the times when he was at Monticello, although he took other slaves with him wherever he went and as many as a dozen to the White House. Both he and Sally were so extraordinarily cautious as never to arouse the suspicions of anyone around them. On these terms, he continued in the relationship until at least age 64, when Eston Hemings was conceived, five years after he had been publicly accused of a relationship with Sally and while he was completing his second presidential term. He carried it on, all this while, while constantly surrounded by visitors and by a large white family, none of whom—and least of all the daughters who would have known Sally best—ever had the least suspicion that he was involved with any of his slaves or ever saw the slightest indication that he was closer to Sally than to any other servant. Indeed, the grandchildren who grew up at Monticello and managed it during Jefferson’s last years did not just say that any such relationship was wholly unsuspected—never a touch or a word or a glance—they said it was simply impossible in this particular house. I slept within sound of his breathing, his grandson said, in a room across the hall. “His apartment,” his granddaughter told her husband, �
�had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze.” In fact, apart from Madison Hemings, no one who ever lived at Monticello and none of the uncounted visitors who stayed there overnight ever said that he was involved with Sally—not Sally herself, though she lived in practical freedom in Charlottesville for 10 years after his death, and not Eston Hemings, whose only known statement on the subject neither affirmed nor denied that Jefferson was his father.7 It is possible, of course, that everyone except Madison Hemings was lying or covering up or engaged in psychological “denial.” Jefferson’s family had an interest in protecting his reputation, much as Madison Hemings had an interest in claiming descent from a famous man. But, again, I see no reason to think that any of these people were deliberately making things up. And what of the only two witnesses who had no obvious interest in the matter either way? Isaac Jefferson, a former household slave, mentioned Sally Hemings in a “memoir” of his own; he was the one who described her as attractive and “mighty near white.” But there is not a hint in Isaac’s reminiscences that Sally stood out otherwise from the rest of her mother’s family. And Edmund Bacon, who was overseer at Monticello when Eston was conceived and may have worked there for years before that, poses an even larger problem for the pro-paternity story. In an interview of his own, Bacon raised the subject of the accusations against his employer8:
The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy Page 49