In November 1998, a short DNA study titled “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child” was published in the prominent British weekly publication Nature.
The title misled. The study showed merely that someone with the Jefferson Y chromosome, common to all male Jeffersons, fathered Eston Hemings, the son of Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings, and that someone could have been Thomas Jefferson. That someone could also been one of at least two dozen other male Jeffersons, with the identical Y chromosome, who are known to have been in Virginia at the time.
The DNA study was “confirmed” by a report by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which examined the study and the known historical circumstances and gave “high probability” to President Jefferson being the father of Eston Hemings and added that it was “most likely” that Jefferson was the father of Sally’s other children.
The DNA study and foundation report set astir the media and historians. Newspapers across the nation chronicled the scientific “proof” of Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Hemings. Other media followed suit. Historians in droves changed their minds about Jefferson’s noninvolvement with Hemings, and Jefferson’s paternity of Eston Hemings and Sally Hemings’s other children rapidly became the received view.
Two of the most prominent scholars to take full advantage of the DNA study and the foundation report were Annette Gordon-Reed and Andrew Burstein. Gordon-Reed went from arguing in 1997 against a relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (though she admitted “there is no proof one way or another”) to the near certainty or actuality of a mutual fulfilling relationship in “The Hemingses of Monticello” in 2008.
Burstein, formerly holding the view that a relationship was very likely inconsistent with Jefferson’s character in “The Inner Jefferson” (1996), argues in “Jefferson’s Secrets” (2006) that Jefferson had a lengthy, no-strings-attached sexual relationship for reasons of health. According to each scholar, the relationship went on for some 38 years with no one the wiser.
Why did Burstein make such an about-face? What now makes Gordon-Reed so sure that there was a relationship and that it was mutually fulfilling?
Having read the DNA study and the foundation report, I was at a loss that the so-called experts could be so confident of Jefferson’s involvement with Hemings and of his paternity. The DNA study showed only that Jefferson could have been a “candidate” for paternity — a claim too insubstantial to incriminate Jefferson. The foundation’s report, with its “evaluation” of the known historical circumstances, much of which is hearsay, offered no compelling evidence of Jefferson’s paternity.
Scrutiny of the revisionist literature on the avowed relationship shows a rather incautious, Aesopian approach to history. Revisionists focus on Jefferson’s personal life (about which so little is actually known), have a selective approach to evidence and use pure imagination to fill in gaps in the narrative.
Gordon-Reed’s and Burstein’s latest books typify such an approach. Gordon-Reed begins on assumption of a relationship between Jefferson and Hemings and weaves together speculative strands to shape a coherent narrative about the nature of the relationship between the two. Jefferson is “cut down to size” and Hemings “must be seen as a figure of historical significance.” Burstein claims that Jefferson justified his relationship with Hemings as a salve to the wound of his daughter Maria’s death. (Maria died in 1804, and the relationship began some 15 years earlier!)
There is plenty to cast doubt on the current scholarship. For instance, Thomas Jefferson is not the only Jefferson who could have provided the DNA. His younger brother, Randolph, was diffident and indiscrete, who had both opportunity and character for an affair. Other Jefferson males are possible candidates as well.
From what we know about the man, meanwhile, it is clear that Jefferson would have found a relationship with Sally to be unethical — and he was a man with high moral standards, which he typically met.
It is impossible for me to say that Jefferson did not stumble from that moral high ground. But it is just as impossible for those who state with certainty that he did. We have scrimpy biological evidence and scrimpy historical evidence, and “scrimpy” applies to both accusers and defenders of Jefferson.
Until more conclusive evidence is produced, the father of Sally Hemings’ children is a question for historians to examine, not treat as fact. The only justifiable stance is skepticism.
M. Andrew Holowchak is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and the author of “Framing a Legend: Exposing the Distorted History of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings” (Prometheus), out now.