The Jefferson-Hemings Affair
If you thought it happened, think again.

By NR’s John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
April 12, 2001 2:00 p.m.

aybe Thomas Jefferson didn't have a fling with Sally Hemings after all. That's the conclusion of a blue-ribbon panel of professors who today released an extensive report on America's most famous case of miscegenation, and their language is actually quite strong: "Our individual conclusions range from serious skepticism about the charge to a conviction that it is almost certainly false." One dissenting member said that there not sufficient evidence to say for sure whether the allegations are true or not, but the commission is unanimous in believing "the allegation is by no means proven" and that "public confusion ... has misled many people into believing the issue is closed."

The question of whether Jefferson and his slave Hemings had children together is an old one. The accusation goes back to 1802, when an enemy of Jefferson leveled it in a Richmond newspaper. The evidence in favor has been scant — one of Hemings' children said it was true, half a century after Jefferson had died — and often implausible. Yet the speculation has persisted for two centuries, and the story won a new lease on life in 1974 when author Fawn Brodie wrote about it in her popular book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. Most Jefferson scholars continued to reject the idea.

But they were thrown on the defensive in 1998 when Nature performed a DNA analysis which, as Jefferson expert Joseph Ellis wrote in U.S. News & World Report, "proves beyond any reasonable doubt that Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with his mulatto slave." The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which maintains Monticello, said in response that it believed there was a "strong likelihood" that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings's children. A few weeks after the tests were published, NR editorialized that the burden of proof had shifted from the Hemings claimants to Jefferson defenders who had denied paternity, and said the latter's arguments now sounded "vaguely Clintonian."

Not so fast, says the new Jefferson commission, which was led by Robert F. Turner of the University of Virginia: "While the [DNA] tests were professionally done by distinguished experts, they were never designed to prove, and in fact could not have proven, that Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of Sally Hemings' children. The tests merely establish a strong probability that Sally Hemings' youngest son, Eston, was fathered by one of the more than two-dozen Jefferson men in Virginia at the time, seven of whom there is documentary evidence to believe may well have been at Monticello when Eston was conceived."

The full report is extensive, and includes both scientific and documentary evidence on such matters as Jefferson's whereabouts at the time when Hemings presumably would have conceived her several children. It is a compelling document which, at the very least, ought to reopen the debate.

There's no guarantee it will. Jefferson's having had an affair with a slave is a much better new story (or feature film) than his not having had one. But this is an excellent piece of scholarship that clearly lays out all the evidence on both sides and then makes what seems to be a judicious ruling against the affair. It is worth noting that some of the commission members, such as Forrest McDonald of the University of Alabama, are not Jefferson admirers.

In addition to Turner and McDonald, the commission's members include Lance Banning of the University of Kentucky, James Caesar of the University of Virginia, Robert H. Ferrell of Indiana University, Charles R. Kesler of Claremont McKenna College, Alf J. Mapp, Jr. of Old Dominion University, Harvey C. Mansfield of Harvard University, David N. Mayer of Capital University, Thomas Traut of the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine, Walter E. Williams of George Mason University, and Jean Yarbrough of Bowdoin College.

The dissenting member, whose "minority report" is included in the commission's findings, is Paul Rahe of the University of Tulsa. "I dissent only in believing it somewhat more likely than not that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings," he writes. "There is, however, one thing that we do know, and it is damning enough. Despite the distaste that he 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. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man."