Thomas Jefferson paternity dispute

DATE: Began in 1802

THE EVENT: Investigations into long-standing allegations that Thomas Jefferson fathered one or more children by an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings involved both social science and forensic science.

SIGNIFICANCE: Forensic evidence in combination with other forms of evidence can play an important role in resolving paternity disputes even if the parties are deceased and the disputes are decades, if not hundreds of years, old.

As long ago as the early years of his US presidency (1801-1809), Thomas Jefferson was accused of having a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, who bore six or more children, although she was unmarried. James Callender, a disreputable journalist once employed by Jefferson who turned against him and worked for his political opponents, made these charges in newspaper articles he wrote for the Federalist press in 1802. Initially, some believed the charges because it was reported that Jefferson had made a promise to his wife, Martha, on her deathbed in 1782 that he would never remarry; it was alleged that his dying wife had suggested that Jefferson take an enslaved person as a mistress, as her father had done. Sally Hemings was the child of Martha’s father and had lighter skin. It was said that Sally bore a strong resemblance to her half sister, Martha. Thomas Jefferson’s immediate family denied the charges that Hemings’s children were fathered by Jefferson and attempted to account for the fact that the two youngest Hemings boys looked exactly like Jefferson by opining that the father might have been one of two of Jefferson’s nephews, Peter or Samuel Carr.

Given that Callender had a clear political for smearing Jefferson, it was fairly easy for Jefferson to avoid answering the charges in print, although contemporary sources indicate that Jefferson denied the charges implicitly. The press representing Jefferson’s party—the Democratic Republicans—denied the charges and successfully portrayed the attack as a smear. After Jefferson’s death, most mainstream historians paid no attention to the charges, although they surfaced again in 1873 when one of Sally’s sons, Madison, asserted that he was the illegitimate son of Thomas Jefferson in his memoir, part of which was published as a newspaper article.

For more than one hundred years, the story was largely ignored until Annette Gordon-Reed published the results of her exhaustive research on the subject. Gordon-Reed’s work showed that it was highly probable that Jefferson and Hemings were involved in a long-term monogamous relationship. The compelling included the fact that Hemings conceived her children only when Jefferson was at his home, Monticello, where Hemings lived, and Hemings never conceived any children when Jefferson was absent—as was frequently the case when he was in Washington.

Gordon-Reed’s findings also lent support to the 1873 claim of Madison Hemings that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship began when Sally Hemings was a teenager, while she was staying with Jefferson in Paris. France prohibited slavery at the time, and Hemings threatened to refuse to return to the United States with Jefferson unless he promised that he would emancipate her and any of her children by him upon his death. Jefferson’s estate was so financially depleted by the time he died that it could ill afford to emancipate any of those enslaved, but five enslaved people were freed, all members of the Hemings family.

Analysis

Gordon-Reed published her findings without knowing that plans had been made to conduct mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comparisons with samples from individuals claiming to be descended from Jefferson and Hemings. Because no surname-bearing descendants of Thomas Jefferson were alive to act as a positive control, the researchers used mtDNA from the five living male descendants of his paternal uncle, Field Jefferson, who cooperated in the effort. The mtDNA samples of these five men were compared with a sample from a male descendant of one of Sally Heming’s sons, Thomas Eston Hemings. (Sally Hemings’s oldest known son, Beverly, had no male heirs; her son Madison had heirs, none of whom have yet been tested.)

The mtDNA match was perfect except for a minute, inconsequential difference. It is safe to say that forensic evidence has established at the least that a male Jefferson, most likely Thomas Jefferson, fathered one of Sally Hemings’s sons. Technically, the father could have been Thomas’s brother, Randolph, but there is no evidence that he was even likely to have been present when Sally Hemings conceived Thomas Eston Hemings, and there is evidence that Thomas Jefferson was. The mtDNA evidence also refutes the Jefferson family’s initial attempts to shift the focus to Jefferson’s nephews, as the mtDNA for their male descendants does not match that of Thomas Eston Hemings’s male descendant.

In the late 2010s, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation announced that the issue of the paternity matter had been settled and Jefferson was indeed the father of Sally Hemming’s children. The foundation cited DNA results from a 1998 study published in the journal Nature, as well as two hundred years of written evidence and family records as the basis for its decision.

Bibliography

Beran, Michael Knox. Jefferson’s Demons: Portrait of a Restless Mind. New York: Free Press, 2003.

Burstein, Andrew. Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.

James, Stuart H., and Jon J. Nordby, eds. Forensic Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Investigative Techniques. 2d ed. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2005.

"Monticello Affirms Thomas Jefferson Fathered Children with Sally Hemings." Monticello, www.monticello.org/thomas-jefferson/jefferson-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-a-brief-account/monticello-affirms-thomas-jefferson-fathered-children-with-sally-hemings/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2024.

Scheffler, Immo E. Mitochondria. 2d ed. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.