One of the most famous examples, which has altered the way many historians have framed U.S. history, is that of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Hemings has long been described as the slave mistress and mother of many children fathered by Jefferson, who was the key author of the Declaration of Independence and the third American president, serving in office from 1801 to 1809. Historians, both professional and amateur, battled for centuries about the paternity of Hemings’s children. Although some still debate the matter, it wasn’t until the results of a DNA test were published in the magazine Nature in 1998 that historians and public institutions began to accept what many African-Americans had long believed: that those children were indeed fathered by Thomas Jefferson.
In 1802, the American journalist James Thomson Callender set off a political firestorm that has lasted more than two centuries when he published an article in the Richmond Recorder titled “The President Again.”
It began with these words:
It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps, and for many years past 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. His mother went to France in the same vessel with Mr. Jefferson and his two daughters. The delicacy of this arrangement must strike every person of common sensibility. What a sublime pattern for an American ambassador to place before the eyes of two young ladies!
For having the temerity to suggest that the president of the United States had conducted a long-term affair with a black woman, Callender was vilified over the years as “obnoxious,” “a liar,” “a scoundrel,” “tempestuous,” “unsavory,” and “generally odious” — to quote just a few epithets. The allegations did not appear to damage the political career of Jefferson, who was easily re-elected two years later.
Like many others, Jefferson’s daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph denied that the president had had a relationship and children with Hemings. Two of Jefferson’s grandchildren also claimed that, for moral and practical reasons, the liaison would not have been possible. In 1979, Jefferson historians persuaded the CBS television network to drop plans to air a television miniseries (based on the best-selling novel Sally Hemings, by Barbara Chase-Riboud) about the relationship. One 1979 letter to CBS chairman William Paley from Merrill Peterson — a prominent University of Virginia historian who had written a book dismissing the Jefferson-Hemings story, as created on “the flimsy basis of oral tradition, anecdote, and satire” — said the network should “reconsider lending its name and network to mass media exposure of what can only be vulgar sensationalism masquerading as history.”
For his part, Thomas Jefferson was well known for taking strong public positions on slavery and miscegenation. He considered slavery an evil but owned hundreds of slaves himself, keeping many of them at his Monticello plantation in Virginia. In an outburst that spilled into his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, but which was later excised from the final version, Jefferson blamed Britain’s King George III for the institution of slavery. The rebellious American colonies were waging their War of Independence against Britain when Jefferson wrote his first draft in 1776, so some of the vitriol can be chalked up to the fever of war. Still, Jefferson was adept at leaving himself and other American perpetrators of slavery out of the portrait when he wrote of King George III: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation hither . . .”
On the page, Jefferson was also clear about the sin of miscegenation. In one of his most often repeated quotes on the subject, Jefferson wrote in 1814: “The amalgamation of whites with blacks produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character, can innocently consent.” Most historians agree that Jefferson was still involved with his slave mistress when he wrote those words. If it is true that Jefferson fathered Hemings’s son Eston Hemings, the child would have been just six years old when Jefferson railed on the page about the evils of miscegenation.
The details of Sally Hemings’s life are on one hand astounding, and on the other hand they profoundly reflect experiences of many women enslaved in the Americas. Dolley Madison, the wife of James Madison (the fourth American president, who took office in 1809, after Jefferson’s presidency ended), is widely quoted as saying that the Southern white wife was “the chief slave of the master’s harem.”
To complicate the interracial nature of Jefferson’s Monticello — a five-thousand-acre tobacco plantation where about 130 slaves worked at any one time — Sally Hemings was actually the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, Martha Wayles Skelton. Hemings’s father was a white planter by the name of John Wayles, who had Sally (and five other children) by his long-time slave mistress, Betty Hemings, and Martha (wife of Thomas Jefferson) by his first wife, Martha Eppes. Sally herself was light-skinned and considered a “quadroon” — meaning that one of her four grandparents was black and the other three were white.
At the age of about fourteen, Hemings travelled to Paris to serve Jefferson for about two years in his capacity as the American ambassador to France. Her sexual relationship with him is thought to have begun there, or shortly after their return to the United States. According to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which maintains a museum on the grounds of Jefferson’s former plantation, “Most historians believe that, years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson became the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson’s records, including Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings.”
Hemings’s relationship with Jefferson is thought by many historians to have lasted for nearly forty years, until Jefferson’s death in 1826. The man who entered meticulous notes about the fathers of his slaves did not record in his plantation slave register any name for the father of Hemings’s children at Monticello. Although he did not free Hemings while he lived or in his will, he freed her children and other relatives — the only nuclear slave family on his massive estate to be freed — and asked the Virginia legislature to allow them to remain in the state after they were freed. (Normally, freed blacks had to move to another state.)
In this case, DNA was able to put to bed (more or less) a centuries-old debate about blood and ancestry. What was disputed in the blood was resolved (most believe) by means of genetic analysis. Perhaps the fact that the chapter is closing on this two-hundred-year-old debate signifies that we will be able to move away from thinking about racial identity as a function of blood.
GENETIC RESEARCH TODAY TAKES us far beyond historical debates about who fathered whom in the nineteenth century, and gives ordinary citizens the hope of pinpointing ancestral connections that they might not otherwise discover.
Many people long to know more about the secrets of their ancestry. When we have children, and as we age, we often crave more details about our distant family history. It’s part of how we come to know and identify ourselves, and part of the legacy that we want to pass on to our children. For the centuries that genealogists have been digging into family histories, they have been largely confined to paths connected to blood ancestors and the people who came into those ancestors’ lives. Who were our parents? Grandparents? Great-grandparents? How about our great-great-great-grandparents? Going seven generations back, we have 128 parental relations with five greats before the word grandparent. How many of us know some or all of them? How many of us are able to leap across continents and seas and trace distant ancestors in distant lands?
The blood trail dries up the further back we go, and many people — especially those whose lives or whose ancestors’ lives have been interrupted by forced migration, genocide,
slavery, or other such misfortune — lack the combination of dumb luck, contacts, tools, and skill to map our family tree many generations back. Regardless of your ancestry, if the knowledge of your family tree runs into a roadblock two, three, seven, or ten generations back, DNA testing offers the possibility of knowing what was previously unknowable, to behold the breadth of your history in ways that had once seemed unthinkable.
Many companies have sprung up to take saliva from clients, analyze the DNA, and not just tell them about the physical locations of their ancestors, but to name people with whom they may share ancestry. The Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates ran a television show called African American Lives, which offered to unearth — via genetic analysis — the family history of numerous famous African-Americans. His book In Search of Our Roots explores the same thing. Gates and a team of researchers and experts combined old-fashioned genealogical sleuthing with DNA tests on Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Turner, Maya Angelou, and other celebrities. In each case, Gates presented them with information about the “admixture” of their ancestral heritage. In addition to her African ancestry, Oprah Winfrey was declared to have 11 percent Native American ancestry. Analysis of her mitochondrial DNA (reflecting maternal lineage) revealed that she had genetic traits in common with people in Liberia, Cameroon, and Zambia, as well as the Gullah people of South Carolina. Gates told Whoopi Goldberg that she had an ancestral admixture that was 92 percent sub-Saharan African and 8 percent European. The European admixture in Goldberg’s heritage was lower than usual for African-Americans, who, Gates said, usually have about 20 percent European heritage. In Goldberg’s case, DNA testing along her matrilineal line revealed that she shared genetic signatures with people from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Bissau. In concluding his chapter on Goldberg, Gates writes in favour of exploring one’s genealogical background: “This sort of knowledge can ground you . . . Knowledge of your ancestry can provide a certain sense of calm about the past, where before there were only questions — hundreds of years of unanswered and seemingly unanswerable questions.”
So far, there are limits to what genetic ancestry tests can tell us. In her book The Juggler’s Children: A Journey into Family, Legend and the Genes That Bind Us, the Globe and Mail science journalist Carolyn Abraham tells us that when she began exploring her own family history, the first genetic test she encountered declared that she was of 22 percent Native American ancestry. When she investigated this detail, she wrote, she was told that the portion of her ancestry that had been presented to her as Native may just as well have been Asian.
Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University, warns that genetic testing — for family ancestry, or for the purposes of determining the racial profile of suspected criminals — offers up details that are taken as fact, but which are often based on partial information or derived from subjective or racially biased starting points. He has explored the issues in a book entitled Backdoor to Eugenics and an essay entitled “Ancestry Testing and DNA,” published in 2011 in the anthology Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture. In the essay, Duster notes that since 2002, nearly half a million people have purchased ancestry-tracing DNA testing kits from at least two dozen companies in the market. Henry Louis Gates was told by one company that his maternal lineage traced back to Egypt, but by another company that his maternal ancestors were neither Egyptian nor African, but most likely European. An African-American woman, he said, took three DNA tests and was given three different results: depending on the test, her ancestors were located in Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, or Senegal.
By analyzing the Y chromosome, Duster says, it is possible to determine whether a certain male descends from a specific father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on, along paternal lines. Through analysis of mitochondrial DNA, it is also possible to determine whether a woman descends from a specific mother, maternal grandmother, and other maternal ancestors. Mitochondrial DNA tests helped re-establish family connections in Argentina, after the dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 forcibly removed children from their parents, murdered the parents, and gave the children into the care of adoptive parents. When the “Dirty War” ended, DNA testing helped reunite grandmothers with their rightful grandchildren.
However, Duster says, the two genetic tests along sex-linked ancestral lines will point to only two among a vastly increasing number of distant ancestors. For example, looking back over eight generations, each person has 256 great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. Sex-linked ancestral tests for males and females could be used to identify only two out of those 256 ancestors. The other ancestors also contributed to any descendant’s genetic makeup, but they are left out of the picture when we are told about our distant, genetically defined ancestors. Therefore, just because a sex-linked ancestral test does not suggest genetic matches with a certain group of people — say, Seminoles in the United States or the Mende people of Sierra Leone — it does not mean that the person being tested does not have ancestors from that group. It just means that a very limited test did not turn up a positive connection.
In addition, Duster casts doubt on the reliability of genetic tests that purport to establish “ancestry information markers,” which claim to tell a person what portion of his or her ancestry is, say, sub-Saharan African, European, or East Asian. These tests have several problems, according to Duster: they rely on the dubious idea that certain groups of people have shared genotypes that are pure and distinct from those of other groups of people; they suggest some ancestral connections while ignoring other possibilities; and, although they are based on genetic tests comparing the subject’s DNA to that of contemporary people living in distant places, the ancestors of those same contemporary people may have migrated over many centuries.
DNA analysis can be used to determine a person’s direct paternal or maternal lineage, Duster concludes, but “claims to determine links to ancestral populations of many prior centuries must be necessarily incomplete, tentative, speculative, and of little use . . . Since we are witnessing a surge in ancestry testing across the globe, the best advice for the unsuspecting consumer is caveat emptor (buyer beware).”
Genetics has opened a door to further explanation of our ancestral identities, but it appears to be just as fraught and contested as blood. It is only natural that we should look to science, genealogical sleuthing, direct knowledge of our family ancestors, and all other possible means to put together the ever-shifting puzzle of our identities. Just as poetry and paintings help define us, we also look to family trees to enrich our notions of identity. Genetics, in the year 2013, has not displaced blood as a means to tell us who we are. It helps complicate the picture, and that will be a good thing if it forever shatters the notion that one person’s blood may be “pure” Catholic (during the Inquisition), white (during the time of slavery), Aryan (during the Holocaust), or heterosexual (during tainted blood scandals that rocked Canada, the U.K., France, the United States, and Japan), and therefore superior to the blood of Jews, Muslims, blacks, gays, or others.
WE IMAGINE SCIENCE TO BE PURE, inviolable, and absolutely true, but we have only to look at the evolving theories of human blood and human circulation, over the millennia, to realize that scientists — like everyone else — move at least partly in step with the social biases and subjective limitations of their time.
Science will contribute to our understanding of who we are, and of how blood enters into the picture. Perhaps one day we will find a cure for AIDS, so that we no longer have to experience the dreadful fear that the stuff inside our veins will turn toxic and kill us if we receive a tainted transfusion. There will be other diseases down the road, however, and some of them are surely to be carried by blood, passed from human to human through transfusion, sexual intimacy, mosquitoes, or some other vector. Two hundred years ago, we didn’t even know that mosquitoes transmitted malaria by sucking virus-laden blood from one human and biting another. Who can say what we will know in
two hundred years?
Let’s imagine that we are still roaming the planet two centuries from now, writing books, designing buildings, making love, combing the nits out of children’s hair, dethroning corrupt politicians, paddling canoes, and being seduced by the Northern Lights. Let’s say that we have not succumbed to complete and utter folly and exterminated ourselves through war, environmental destruction, or disease. If we do survive as a species for another two hundred years — enough time for our next six generations of descendants to be born and to procreate — we will surely look back with a certain amusement and astonishment at how humans were thinking about blood today.
Looking back, we will be no less amused and horrified than we are now when we remember that as recently as the eighteenth century, a French physician was trying to calm a man’s psychiatric disorders by transfusing the blood of a calf into him. Just imagine how people may speak of us, in the future. There was this thing called leukemia, people might say. They had the insane idea of blasting the body with toxins and damn near killing a person, and then replacing the bone marrow so that the body could manufacture an entirely new batch of blood. It was not until the year 2079 that a scientist by the name of Artemisia Peters of Zambia discovered that instead of x, y, z, all one had to do was a, b, c. And it was not until the year 2124 that the Chinese physician Ling Xiabo was awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering how to create safe, effective artificial blood that ended up eliminating the need for human blood transfusions.
Who knows what we will know in two hundred years? None of us will be around to see it. But we are still likely to be thinking about our blood, not just as a function of our health and vitality, but also in regard to how it defines us in our families and countries, and in our personal and collective identities. Who do we descend from? Who do we belong to? What do we hope to transmit to our children and grandchildren, and to their offspring? How does blood come to be associated with truth and integrity? Will we ever transcend the nasty tendency to tumble into depravity by vilifying as impure the blood of the ones we most fear or revile? We have nobody but ourselves to blame for these lapses in humanity. There is nothing but our own biases blocking the way to a path that allows us to enjoy blood as a metaphor for our distinctiveness and group belonging, without using it as an excuse to pillory the most convenient scapegoat. Blood, I hope, will eventually unite us. Blood fills our imaginations just as fully as it fills our veins. Thus it has always been, and will always be.
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