Sally Hemings - Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

The Jefferson-Hemings controversy has related to the question of whether, after Jefferson became a widower, he had an intimate relationship with Sally Hemings, resulting in his fathering her six children of record. The controversy dates from the 1790s. In the late twentieth century, historians began reanalyzing the body of evidence. In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed published a book that analyzed the historiography of the controversy, demonstrating how historians since the nineteenth century had accepted early assumptions, including Jefferson family testimony over Hemings family testimony, and failed to note all the facts. A consensus began to emerge after the results of a DNA analysis in 1998, which showed no match between the Carr male line, proposed for more than 150 years as the father(s), and the one Hemings descendant tested. It did show a match between the Jefferson male line and the Eston Hemings descendant.

Since 1998 and the DNA study, many historians have accepted that the widower Jefferson had an intimate relationship with Hemings, and fathered six children with her, four of whom survived to adulthood. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF), which runs Monticello, conducted an independent historic review in 2000, as did the National Genealogical Society in 2001; both reported scholars who concluded Jefferson was likely the father of all Hemings' children. In an article that appeared in Science, eight weeks after the DNA study, Eugene Foster, the lead co-author of the DNA study, is reported to have "made it clear that the data establish only that Thomas Jefferson was one of several candidates for the paternity of Eston Hemings."

In an interview in 2000, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed said of the change in historical scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings: "Symbolically, it's tremendously important for people . . . as a way of inclusion. Nathan Huggins said that the Sally Hemings story was a way of establishing black people's birthright to America."

Critics, such as the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS) Scholars Commission (2001), have argued against the TJF report and reached different conclusions about the DNA tests. All but one of the 13 scholars expressed considerable skepticism about the charge, and some went so far as to express a conviction that it is almost certainly not true that Jefferson was the father of Eston or other Hemings' children. The TJHS report suggested that Jefferson's younger brother Randolph Jefferson could have been the father, and that Hemings may have had multiple partners. Three of the Hemings children were given names from the Randolph family. Herbert Barger, the founder and current Director Emeritus of the TJHS and the husband of a Jefferson descendant, assisted Foster in the DNA study. In the Science article, Foster is reported to have agreed that the Nature report should have given credit to Barger, who was "fantastic" and "of immense help to me."

In 2012, the Smithsonian Institution and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation held a major exhibit at the National Museum of American History: Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty; it says that "evidence strongly support the conclusion that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children."