Sally Hemings

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Sally Hemings (c.1773 – 1835) was a slave, probably born at Guinea Plantation, Cumberland County, Virginia, who was initially owned by John Wayles, who died in 1774, leaving Sally to his daughter Martha Wayles, wife of Thomas Jefferson. Martha and Sally were half-sisters: both were fathered by John Wayles.

Martha Jefferson died in 1782, and in 1784 Thomas Jefferson took up residence in Paris as American envoy to France. In 1787 after the death of Lucy Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson sent for 9 year old Mary (Maria) Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson had requested that Isabel, an older woman be sent as a companion for Mary, but as Isabel was pregnant Mary (Maria) Jefferson was accompanied by 14 year old Sally Hemings instead.

Thomas Jefferson controversy

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were sexually involved circulated well before Jefferson assumed office in 1801, and they were published in 1802. The truth of these rumors has long been debated. Evidence in support of the theory that Jefferson was father of Sally Hemings' children is that (1) Jefferson and Hemings were both at Monticello at the time of the conceptions of her children; (2) Madison Hemings, Sally's son, stated in an 1873 interview that Sally named the President as the father of all her children; (3) Sally's children were said to resemble Jefferson physically; and (4) Sally's children, unlike Jefferson's other slaves, were allowed to slip away, or were manumitted, before Jefferson's death, and the two who remained were provided for in Jefferson's will.

Some had argued that the resemblance to Jefferson was because the children had been fathered by one of Jefferson's nephews (Samuel or Peter Carr), sons of Jefferson's sister, by his brother Randolph Jefferson or one of Randolph's five sons.

November 1998 Nature Article

In the November 5, 1998 issue of the journal Nature, a study on the available DNA evidence was published. In the study, the Y chromosomal haplotypes of several of Sally Heming's descendants (in the male line) were compared with the Y chromosomal haplotype of several of Thomas Jefferson's grandfather's descendants (in the male line). Some of these (descendants of Thomas Woodson) did not match, ruling out a Jefferson as direct male line ancestor, but the descendants of Eston Hemings did match, providing strong evidence that a member of the Jefferson family had fathered at least one of Sally Hemings' children.

According to Madison Hemings, Sally had said that all of her children had been fathered by Thomas Jefferson and the DNA tests proved that this was not the case. This point is disputed, however. Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book, written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand, says that Sally had five children: Harriet (who died in infancy), Beverley, Harriet II, Madison and Eston. Thus, Jefferson never wrote that Sally had a son named Tom. It is the Woodson Family, rather than Jefferson himself, who insisted that Jefferson was the father of Tom Woodson.

Joseph Ellis and the Clinton Impeachment

The controversy became even more heated later in 1998 when, during the impeachment of Bill Clinton, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis defended Clinton by comparing him to Jefferson, whom he said had also been sexually dalliant, claiming that DNA tests proved Jefferson fathered a child by Hemings:

President William Jefferson Clinton also has a vested interest in this revelation.... Jefferson has always been Clinton's favorite Founding Father. Now, a sexually active, all-too-human Jefferson appears alongside his embattled protege. It is as if Clinton had called one of the most respected character witnesses in all of U.S. history to testify that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree. The dominant effect of this news will be to make Clinton's sins seem less aberrant and more palatable. If a vote against Clinton is also a vote against Jefferson, the prospects for impeachment become even more remote. [1]

Ellis' claims generated accusations of distortions. Stephen Goode wrote in Insight Magazine that Ellis' statement that the DNA tests established a Jefferson-Hemings relation "beyond any reasonable doubt" was an exaggeration [2]; pathologist Eugene Foster also asserted the DNA evidence was far from establishing proof [3].

Of those who have accepted reports suggesting a Jefferson-Hemings relationship, some disagree with Ellis' claim that the relationship would indicate a "distinguished presidential pedigree". Writing about the relationship in the Nashville City Paper, Molly Secours said "for us to call it anything but 'rape' is disingenuous and dangerous." [4] In USA Today, DeWayne Wickham wrote that "to imply that the sex between him and his slave was consensual, even in a TV movie, is a cruelly dishonest portrayal of the dirtiest secret of American slavery" [5].

The Foundation and Commission Reports

Following the Nature article, the controversy continued to grow, and in 2000 and 2001 two major studies of the Jefferson-Hemings allegations were released. Both studies drew from a range of sources, including both scientific and historical, to arrive at their conclusions.

In January 2000, a group associated with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, produced a study on the controversy initiated soon after the Nature paper. Their near-unanimous [6] report [7] stated that "although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the 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." [8] One member of the committee, White Wallenborn, dissented, noting that "the historical evidence is not substantial enough to confirm nor for that matter to refute his paternity of any of the children of Sally Hemings."

Later in 2000, the newly-formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society created the Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission to conduct a substantial examination of the paternity question [9]. On April 12, 2001, they issued a 565-page report detailing their findings.

Their conclusion was that "the Jefferson-Hemings allegation is by no means proven" and, except for one dissenter, the members' individual conclusions ranged from "serious skepticism about the charge" to "a conviction that it is almost certainly false" [10]. Rather, they suggest the most likely alternative is that Randolph Jefferson, Thomas's younger brother, was the father of Eston. The dissenter on the report, Paul Rahe wrote that he considered the case "open" [11], and added "there is ... one thing that we do know, and it is damning enough. Despite the distaste the 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."

Robert Turner, who chaired the comission, suggested that evidence for a sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings had been "rushed to press" because of the political climate surrounding the Clinton impeachment of Bill Clinton [12], as did David Mayer, a commission member, who was also scathingly critical of the Foundation report [13].

Further studies have been conducted, and the issue remains controversial. The National Genealogical Society Quarterly of September 2001 concluded that four children of Sally Hemings were fathered by Thomas Jefferson; the report was explicitly critical of the Commission report [14].

References

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