IF JEFFERSON IS WRONG, IS AMERICA WRONG?

On November 1, 1998, the British science magazine Nature announced the imminent publication of an article titled “JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE’S LAST CHILD.” The text stated that tests conducted by pathologist Dr. Eugene M. Foster revealed that the DNA of a descendant of Sally Hemings’s youngest child, Eston Hemings, matched the DNA of a descendant of Thomas Jefferson’s uncle, Field Jefferson. “The simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings,” Dr. Foster wrote, “are that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson…”¹

A media explosion tore across America and the entire world. In an article in the Washington Post, David Murray, head of the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, D.C., counted 295 editorial and news citations, 8 pieces in newsweeklies, and 31 broadcast transcripts. National Public Radio announced, “The proof is finally in…DNA testing has ended [the] debate.” The Des Moines Register proclaimed Jefferson was an “adulterer on Mount Rushmore.” The New York Times quoted a Jefferson scholar who said, “If people had accepted this story, he never would have become an American icon…The personification of America can’t live 38 years with a black woman.”²

II

Behind this uproar lay 250 years of debating Thomas Jefferson’s reputation. His fame had continued to expand in the decades before the Civil War, but his public image became more complicated as Americans began to argue about slavery. Both the enemies and the defenders of the “peculiar institution” found support in his life. His writings were full of denunciations of slavery. But he also revealed grave doubts about African-Americans’ intellectual abilities and was a strong advocate of states’ rights in the ongoing argument about the power of the federal government. Jefferson feared a bloody race war if slavery were abolished instantly, as growing numbers of its northern critics, soon called abolitionists, demanded. In 1820, he lamented that southerners had “the wolf by the ears” and could not let him go. He saw in the growing disagreement “the [death] knell of the union.”³

Some abolitionists revived James Thomson Callender’s 1802 accusation about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings. They saw it as proof of the moral degeneracy of slavery. “The best blood of Virginia flows in the veins of slaves, even the blood of Jefferson,” they declared. Soon a story was circulating in anti-slavery circles that one of Sally Hemings’s daughters had been sold in a New Orleans slave market for $1,000. According to Dr. Levi Gaylord of Sodus, New York, it was “attested to by a southern gentleman” who had witnessed the ghastly event. Next a novel, Clotel, or the President’s Daughter, written by a fugitive slave and first published in France, created another sensation. The book opened with a slave auction in which Sally Hemings and two of her daughters were sold to the highest bidders.⁴

Visiting British writers such as Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope eagerly participated in the uproar. They told their readers about “hospitable orgies” at Monticello and claimed that Jefferson was the father of “unnumbered generations of slaves.” They portrayed him sitting at his dinner table, waited on by a half dozen of his own black children. The British used these supposed facts to ridicule the idea that all men were created equal. Jefferson’s sins became a weapon to blunt America’s worldwide appeal as a universal democracy.⁵

III

In 1861, the Civil War erupted, killing 620,000 young Americans. Thomas Jefferson’s reputation collapsed. He became linked in many northern minds with “The Slave Power” that they blamed for bringing this catastrophe upon the nation. In the South he was equally execrated because he was considered responsible for the antislavery crusade that had led to the region’s defeat and desolation. For a while, it looked as if he were destined to be a dismissed and derided founding father.

Jefferson’s fame was reborn in 1871 with the popularity of a book by his great-granddaughter, Sarah Nicholas Randolph, The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson. Randolph’s introduction declared the seemingly modest purpose of the book: “I do not…write of Jefferson either as of the great man or as of the statesman. My object is only to give a faithful picture of him as he was in private life—to show that he was, as I have been taught to think of him by those who knew and loved him best, a beautiful domestic character.”

The book barely mentioned politics. That contentious world was viewed, if at all, as an intrusion on the family’s happiness. Randolph’s goal was to give readers an appreciation of “the warmth of his [Jefferson’s] affections, the elevation of his character, and the scrupulous fidelity with which he discharged the duties of every relation in his life.” No public man’s character “had been more foully assailed than Jefferson’s,” she continued. “And none so fully exposed to the public gaze, nor more fully vindicated.”⁶

The Domestic Life was warmly reviewed in newspapers and magazines in the North and South. The Nation, a magazine hitherto given to damning Jefferson, praised it extravagantly. One of his iciest New England critics admitted that the man Randolph portrayed with so many convincing quotations from his letters was “entirely amiable and charming” and deserved to be “more mildly judged” than he had been in recent years.⁷

In 1874, James Parton’s Life of Thomas Jefferson did even more to revive Jefferson’s reputation. Parton insisted that the essence of Jefferson’s character was love: “In every other quality and grace of human nature he has often been equaled, sometimes been excelled, but where has there ever been a lover so tender, so warm, so constant, as he? Love was his life…. He knew no satisfying joy, at any period of his life, except through his affections.”

Parton also projected an image of Jefferson as a hero of American culture. At thirty-two he could “calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, dance a minuet and play a violin.” Totally carried away, Parton declared: “If Jefferson was wrong, America is wrong. If Jefferson was right, America is right.” The biographer convinced himself—and hundreds of thousands of readers—that Thomas Jefferson and America were virtually one indissoluble entity.⁸

IV

In 1873, The Pike County Republican published a story about Thomas Jefferson that struck a very different note. The editor of this small Ohio newspaper was fifty-three-year-old Samuel F. Wetmore, an abolitionist who had been born in Ohio and had worked on several newspapers in the Midwest before launching the Republican in 1868. His friend and future son-in-law, Wells S. Jones, a Union brigadier general in the Civil War, owned 1,700 acres in Pike County and had announced his intention to make this slice of southern Ohio a Republican bastion. That proved to be a difficult task. Jones lost a run for the state senate in 1867, largely because he proposed giving African-Americans the right to vote in Ohio. The defeat led him to persuade—and probably finance—Wetmore to start the Pike County Republican. Helpful patronage came from Washington, D.C., where Republicans were in power under President UIysses S. Grant. They made Wetmore the postmaster in Waverly as well as a U.S. marshal.

By 1873, Wetmore was a worried man. The Republican Party was in trouble, both in Ohio and in the nation. President Grant had won the war as a consummate general, but he left a lot to be desired as a political leader. Washington, D.C., swirled with rumors of scandals in his administration. Worse, Grant had signed into law a bill raising the pay of the members of Congress and the Supreme Court. Angry Democrats and not a few worried Republicans denounced the “salary grab” as little more than theft. The Democrats of Ohio were especially vociferous.

This was the atmosphere in which Samuel F. Wetmore announced a series of articles about the ex-slaves who were now living in Pike County. He called the series “Life Among the Lowly.” For readers in 1873, the title had an instant familiarity. The phrase was the subtitle of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wetmore’s great-grandmother had been a Stowe. He was also friendly with the family of Dr. Levi Gaylord, the man who had first published the fictitious story about a daughter of Thomas Jefferson being sold in New Orleans.⁹

Wetmore’s choice to launch the “Lowly” series was Madison Hemings, Sally Hemings’s son. The newsman began by admitting that his subject had not experienced many of the physical cruelties of slavery. But “we must say the system was cruel at best. To keep such a man in the condition of a slave, however well treated in other respects, was a sin of very deep dye…If he had been educated and given a chance in the world he would have shone out as a star of very great magnitude. But he was kept under, by his own father, an ex-president of the United States, and a man who penned the immortal declaration of independence which fully acknowledges the rights and equality of the human race!”

Wetmore described Madison as five feet ten inches tall, “sparely made, with sandy complexion and a mild grey eye.” These details “accord[ed] very nearly with the description given of Thomas Jefferson, except that he was six feet one and a half inch in height.” Thereafter, the story was told in Madison’s words, ghostwritten by Wetmore. The heart of the brief narrative was his description of Sally Hemings’s experience in Paris as nine-year-old Maria Jefferson’s companion and nurse:

Their stay (my mother’s and Maria’s) was about eighteen months. But during that time my mother became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine, and when he was called back home she was enceinte by him. He desired to bring my mother back to Virginia with him but she demurred. She was just beginning to understand the French language well, and in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved. So she refused to return with him. To induce her to do so he promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years. In consequence of his promise, on which she implicitly relied, she returned with him to Virginia. Soon after their arrival, she gave birth to a child, of whom Thomas Jefferson was the father. It lived but a short time. She gave birth to four others and Jefferson was the father of all of them. Their names were Beverly, Harriet, Madison (myself) and Eston—three sons and one daughter. We all became free agreeably to the treaty entered into by our parents before we were born…

Madison went on to tell how he was “named…by the wife of James Madison, who was afterward President of the United States. Mrs. Madison happened to be at Monticello at the time of my birth, and begged the privilege of naming me, promising my mother a fine present for the honor. She consented and Mrs. Madison dubbed me by the name I now acknowledge, but like many promises of white folks to the slaves she never gave my mother anything.”

Madison said he learned about Jefferson’s great fame only after he died. “About his own home he was the quietest of men. He was hardly ever known to get angry.” He was “uniformly kind to all about him.” But he “was not in the habit of showing partiality or fatherly affection to us [slave] children. We were the only children of his by a slave woman.” Toward his white grandchildren, however, he was “very affectionate.”¹⁰

Madison’s story was brought to the attention of James Parton, who was publishing installments of his forthcoming biography of Jefferson in the Atlantic Monthly. In July 1873, Parton discussed the story of “Dusky Sally” and stated politely that Madison Hemings was “misinformed.” His real father was a “near relation” of Mr. Jefferson, “who need not be named.” Parton had been told by Henry S. Randall, author of a biography of Jefferson published in 1858, that the father of Sally’s children was Peter Carr, the son of Dabney Carr, Jefferson’s brother-in-law. Peter and his younger brother Samuel had been raised at Monticello. Randall’s source was Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Jefferson’s grandson.¹¹

John A. Jones, the editor of Pike County’s Democratic newspaper, The Waverly Watchman, also dismissed Madison Hemings’s story, with a minimum of politeness: “Hemings, or rather Wetmore, gives a very truthful account of the public and private life of the Jefferson family; but this no doubt, was condensed from one of the numerous lives of Jefferson which can be found in any well regulated family library…There are at least fifty Negroes in this county who lay claim to illustrious parentage…They are not to be blamed for making these assertions. It sounds much better for the mother to tell her offspring that ‘master’ is their father…”¹²

V

Eight months later, Wetmore published another installment of his “Life Among the Lowly” series—an interview with Israel Jefferson, also an ex-slave from Monticello. By this time, the political sky was darkening for the Republicans. In September, the American economy had collapsed and the Panic of 1873 had plunged the nation into a severe depression. Ohio voters elected William “Foghorn” Allen as governor, the first Democrat in twenty years, and gave the party a majority in the state legislature. Not a single Republican was elected from Pike County. Wetmore’s newspaper crusade was a dismal failure.

Israel told Wetmore that after Jefferson’s death, he was sold to a neighbor. Later he married a free mulatto woman who inspired him to purchase his freedom from his new master, to be paid over several years. In this process Israel had to take a last name, and chose Jefferson because “it would give me more dignity to be called after so eminent a man.”

Israel recalled how he participated in the “exciting events attending the preparations of Mr. Jefferson and other members of his family on their removal to Washington DC” in 1800, when he was elected president. Four years later, Israel started working as a waiter at Jefferson’s table and claimed that thereafter “the private life of Mr. Jefferson was very familiar to me.” For fourteen years, he had “made the fire in his bedroom and his private chamber, cleaned his office, dusted his books, run…errands and attended him at home.” He often escorted important visitors into Jefferson’s chamber. Israel said that “Sally Hemmings” (Wetmore’s spelling) was “employed as [Jefferson’s] chamber maid.” He [Jefferson] was “on the most intimate terms with her…. in fact, she was his concubine.” Based on his “intimacy with both parties,” Israel confirmed that Madison Hemmings [sic] was “the natural son of Mr. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, and that his brothers Beverly, Eston and sister Harriet are of the same parentage.”¹³

VI

Sometime in 1874, Thomas Jefferson Randolph received in the mail a copy of Israel Jefferson’s recollections in the Pike County Republican. The founder’s grandson was still living on his farm, Edgehill, four miles from Monticello. Randolph wrote a six-page letter responding to Israel’s claims. According to Thomas Jefferson’s Farm Book, a record, Randolph noted acerbically, “in Mr. J’s handwriting,” Israel was born on December 28, 1800. Mr. Jefferson left for Washington on December 1, 1800. Israel was describing as his earliest recollection something that happened twenty-eight days before he was born.

As for Israel becoming a waiter at Jefferson’s table in 1804 (when he was four years old), Randolph acidly reported that from 1801 to 1809 Israel and his entire family were on the list of slaves leased to a Mr. Craven, who had a farm some distance from Monticello. Again he was quoting from the Farm Book, “in Mr. J’s writing.” A record of February 10, 1810, places Israel among Jefferson’s farm workers, not at the Monticello house. When he went to work in the house (at an unspecified future date) he labored as a “scullion” in the kitchen. It was unlikely that he would know anything about the private life of Mr. Jefferson. “Israel was never employed in any post of trust or confidence about the house at Monticello.”

Another reason why Randolph rejected Israel’s confirmation of Madison Hemings’s story was the living arrangements inside Monticello: “Mr. Jefferson and his daughter with her large family occupied the same wing of the building. The private access to their apartments was contiguous.” There was no possibility of Mr. Jefferson conducting a clandestine love affair with Sally Hemings with any hope of secrecy. That was why “every member of this family repelled with indignation this calumny.”

Turning to the motive for Wetmore’s version of Israel’s and Madison Hemings’s stories, Randolph asked, “Can it be other than the necessity which the[se] writers [northern abolitionists] feel to pander to that morbid hatred of the southern white man which devours with obscene malignity every calumny or absurdity which can blacken or degrade his character?”

Thomas Jefferson Randolph never mailed this letter. Further study of the Pike County Republican probably convinced him it would be a waste of a stamp. The letter was found decades later in the files of the University of Virginia library.¹⁴

VII

Madison Hemings’s Wetmore-ghosted story and Israel Jefferson’s dubious confirmation of it vanished from the public mind. The Democratic Party, struggling to escape the stigma of favoring slavery and failing to give more than half-hearted support to the Civil War, turned to Thomas Jefferson as their savior. William Jennings Bryan, the orator who virtually took over the party in 1896 and was nominated for president three times, constantly invoked his name. In the 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt became convinced that he and Jefferson shared a political destiny. FDR participated vigorously in a fundraising campaign to purchase Monticello and make it a national shrine. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation took possession of Monticello on July 5, 1926, the day after the national celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Roosevelt joined the foundation’s board and remained a member to the end of his life.¹⁵

In 1929, the stock market crashed and FDR emerged as the leader of the Democratic Party and the spokesman of Jefferson’s ideals.¹⁶ He ordered White House aides to make sure that a wreath was laid on Jefferson’s grave at Monticello every year during his presidency. He constantly quoted Jefferson in his speeches. In 1938, the mint issued the Jefferson nickel and the U.S. Post Office issued the Jefferson three-cent stamp. On April 13, 1943, the two hundredth anniversary of the man from Monticello’s birth, President Roosevelt dedicated the Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the edge of the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. World War II made the occasion doubly meaningful. “Today,” FDR said, “in the midst of a great war for freedom, we dedicate a shrine to freedom.” It was, he declared “a debt long overdue.”

Jefferson took his place in the ultimate American pantheon, within sight of George Washington’s soaring monument and Abraham Lincoln’s brooding seated statue. It began to look more and more like James Parton was right. Jefferson and America were one and the same glorious spiritual entity.

VIII

Thirty years later, Samuel F. Wetmore’s ghostwritten account of Madison Hemings’s recollections experienced a rebirth. The historical currents that had levitated Thomas Jefferson’s reputation for more than a century underwent a drastic reversal in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. For many people, America became a flawed superpower and Jefferson, the symbol of her greatness, no longer merited unquestioning respect. A series of biographers, novelists, and movie producers accepted Madison’s story as true and portrayed Jefferson as Sally Hemings’s lover, while a chorus of historians insisted they were wrong. Readers interested in this evolution will find a detailed account of it in the Appendix.

In 1997, historian Joseph Ellis summed up the prevailing view of the scholarly community: “Short of digging up Jefferson and doing DNA testing on him and Hemings descendants,” they had come as close to the truth as the available evidence allowed. The stage was set for the media explosion.

IX

At a Charlottesville, Virginia, dinner party in 1996, wealthy Winifred Bennett asked Dr. Eugene Foster whether DNA could be used to resolve the uncertainty surrounding Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Foster had recently retired after many years as a professor of pathology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He knew that scientists had made large strides in the science of genetics. One of the breakthroughs was the identification of individual Y chromosomes in male DNA. Over generations, these tiny entities develop distinctive mutations, which become the genetic hallmarks of a particular family. If an individual’s Y chromosomes matched those of another individual, the chances were good that they shared a common ancestor.¹⁷

The procedure resembles seeking an exact match from DNA found in blood or other body substances to decide paternity lawsuits and convict criminals, especially sex offenders. In such cases the matches or mismatches are virtually unchallengeable in court. The odds in favor of certainty are well over a million to one. But DNA identification of an ancestor through Y chromosomes does not come close to such exactitude. The most it can deliver is a probability. This crucial point was ignored in the media explosion.

Dr. Foster expressed an interest in obtaining DNA samples of Jefferson and Hemings descendants. Mrs. Bennett said she would pay the costs. Since Thomas Jefferson had no sons, it was necessary to find other male Jeffersons with the family’s chromosomes. Foster contacted Herbert Barger, a leading member of the Jefferson Family Association, who supplied him with phone numbers for seven descendants of Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s uncle. One of them agreed to give samples of his blood.

Next came the task of finding male descendants of Sally Hemings. Barger suggested contacting the Thomas Woodson Family Association, which had 1,400 members who claimed descent from Jefferson through their ancestor, the young slave identified by James Thomson Callender in his 1802 exposé as resembling Jefferson so closely, sarcastic neighbors called him “Master Tom.” (The Woodson name came from a later owner.) Barger also found descendants of Peter Carr and his brother Samuel; the latter had been named by a Jefferson granddaughter as Sally’s lover. Next, Barger helped Foster find a descendant of Eston Hemings. Unfortunately, there were no known male descendants of Madison Hemings.

Dr. Foster flew to England with the blood samples and had them analyzed by British DNA specialists. He summarized the results in his brief article in Nature. But Foster did not write the article’s headline: JEFFERSON FATHERED SLAVE’S LAST CHILD. Those words, chosen by Nature’s editor, triggered the media explosion.

Few people bothered to evaluate the significance of two additional conclusions from the DNA tests. The Y chromosomes of five descendants of Thomas Woodson failed to match the Jefferson DNA. Did this mean “Master Tom” had been fathered by someone else? The DNA of the descendants of those prime suspects, the Carr brothers, also failed to match the Jefferson DNA. At first glance, this failure seemed to refute the assertions of Thomas Jefferson Randolph and other members of the Jefferson family. But this conclusion would turn out to need further evaluation.¹⁸

X

On November 9, 1998, four days after the Nature article appeared in print, Dr. Foster published a letter in the New York Times. Earnestly, with a hint of muted indignation, he stated that “the genetic findings my collaborators and I reported in the scientific journal Nature do not prove that Thomas Jefferson was the father of one of Sally Hemings’s children. We never made that claim.” Apparently, Dr. Foster was laying heretofore invisible stress on the word “prove.” He insisted that he had repeatedly said before the tests began that they would “not prove anything conclusively.” All he ever hoped to do was provide some “objective evidence that would bear on the controversy.” He and his fellow researchers “had not changed our position.”¹⁹

Three days before Dr. Foster’s letter appeared, Thomas B. Moore, a lawyer with a wide background in medical litigation, wrote an even more critical letter to the New York Times. On the basis of the evidence Foster presented, Moore declared, “no court of law would hold that Thomas Jefferson had a child by Sally Hemings.” The most Foster’s evidence could prove, Moore maintained, was that “sometime over the last 300 years or so, a descendant of Jefferson’s grandfather had a relationship that produced a male child who is an ancestor of one of the living and tested male descendants of Sally Hemings.” This could have happened “in the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries.” Foster began his letter to the Times by agreeing with Moore. No one seemed to realize it, but James Thomson Callender’s 1802 story had entered the ambiguous wonderland of statistical probability.²⁰

XI

At a November 1, 1998, press conference, Daniel P. Jordan, president of The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, said that he had seen Dr. Foster’s article only “forty-eight hours ago.” The foundation would need “more time to evaluate it carefully.” Fourteen months later, on January 26, 2000, the foundation issued a report by a research committee that declared Thomas Jefferson was the father, not only of Eston Hemings but of all of Sally Hemings’s children. They based their conclusion on Madison Hemings’s story and on the fact that Jefferson was at Monticello when Sally conceived each of her children. The committee bolstered their conclusion with a statistical study by staff archaeologist Fraser D. Neiman that concluded the probability of Jefferson’s guilt was a near certainty—99 percent.

The committee admitted that “many aspects of this likely relationship remain unclear.” The nature of the relationship, the longevity of Sally’s first child, and the identity of Thomas Woodson were among the mysteries. Finally, “the implications of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson should be explored to enrich the understanding and interpretation of Jefferson and the entire Monticello community.” One of these implications soon became apparent. President Daniel P. Jordan announced that the word “Memorial” was being dropped from the foundation’s title. Apparently, the foundation no longer thought Thomas Jefferson was worthy of being “memorialized” by them—and presumably by the American people.²¹

XII

Behind the scenes, an angry confrontation was taking place at Monticello. One member of the research committee, Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn, retired professor of clinical medicine at the University of Virginia, had written a minority report, disagreeing with the majority conclusion. Dr. Wallenborn’s opinion was not mentioned in the press release announcing Jefferson’s guilt. This omission led to some heated exchanges between Wallenborn and Daniel Jordan. An obviously reluctant Jordan finally released the report in April 2000, two months after the majority report. With it came a fierce rebuttal from Lucia C. Stanton, Monticello’s senior research historian.

The lone dissenter admitted there was “significant historical evidence” that Jefferson could be the father of Eston Hemings.” But Dr. Wallenborn argued there was “significant historical evidence of equal stature” that indicates Jefferson was not Eston’s father, and was also not the father of Sally Hemings’s other children. Wallenborn maintained that the Carr brothers were by no means eliminated by the DNA test on Eston Hemings’s descendant. One of them could still have been Sally’s lover and fathered some or all of her other children. He noted that the Carrs had been identified as Sally’s lovers not only by Jefferson family members but by Monticello overseer Edmund Bacon. As for the statistical study, Wallenborn dismissed it because it lacked information on Sally Hemings’s whereabouts at the times of her conceptions and where Randolph Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, and other males with Jefferson DNA were at these times.

Lucia C. Stanton refuted Wallenborn’s arguments in a style that radiated contempt. Her four-page statement was organized under headings that dismissed each argument before it was discussed: 1. Jefferson denied the relationship (and by implication, Jefferson would not lie). 2. Edmund Bacon denied the relationship (and by implication, Bacon would not lie). 3. Thomas Jefferson Randolph denied the relationship (and by implication, Thomas Jefferson Randolph would not lie). Stanton is a respected scholar who has written a fascinating book, Free Some Day, about the lives of Monticello’s slaves. The tone of her rebuttal is a good example of the overheated atmosphere that pervaded Monticello at this time.²²

XIII

Later in 2000, CBS Television ran a four-hour miniseries starring Carmen Ejogo as Sally Hemings, Diahann Carroll as Sally’s mother, Elizabeth, and Mario Van Peebles as Sally’s brother, James Hemings. The film was written and co-executive produced by former actress Tina Andrews. “It’s a love story,” insisted Ms. Andrews in an interview. “The fact that they were together 40 years and remained so despite extraordinary circumstances makes me want to believe that there was some tenderness and emotion involved.” Ms. Andrews and her co-producers cited the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s findings as the basis for their drama.²³

In the same year PBS Television’s investigative show Frontline produced a documentary, “Jefferson’s Blood,” that explored the controversy. Although there were occasional comments that the DNA findings were “not definitive,” most of the participants assumed Jefferson’s guilt. “Blood tests all but confirmed” went one statement. “DNA subjected this great man to a fall” was another remark.

At one point, a descendant of the Woodson family dismissed the DNA findings, which disproved Jefferson’s role in his ancestor’s birth. He insisted his family’s oral history was true—that Jefferson had fathered “Master Tom” in Paris with Sally Hemings. He added that today Jefferson would be convicted of the rape of a child. The show distributed print interviews with principal witnesses, such as Dr. Foster, who reversed himself and said, “It would be possible, but highly, highly, highly highly improbable” that Jefferson was not the father of Eston Hemings. His words reflected the importance of Fraser Neiman’s follow-up statistical study in confirming Jefferson’s paternity.²⁴

XIV

The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society was created by Jefferson family descendants and others who disagreed with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s conclusions. In 2000, the TJHS played a leading role in convening a Scholars Commission of thirteen historians, many of them authors of books on Jefferson. After a year of study and fifteen hours of face-to-face discussions, they concluded that while reasonable people could differ on the question, they found no convincing evidence of Jefferson’s paternity, either of Eston Hemings or of Sally Hemings’s other children.

The Scholars Commission hoped to garner major publicity for their five-hundred-page report. It was released to the public at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2001, the eve of Jefferson’s birthday. They were more than a little disappointed. Another meeting a few blocks away won far more media attention. Hemings family descendants and some Jefferson family members who sided with them met at the White House with President George W. Bush.

Backers of the Scholars Commission angrily maintained that the meeting was arranged by members of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation board. President Bush knew nothing about the Scholars Commission press conference and saw no reason why he should not welcome the Hemings descendants and their Jeffersonian friends. The episode suggested the dispute about Sally Hemings was becoming a publicity war, aimed at controlling public opinion. The truth seemed almost—but not quite—irrelevant.

XV

What seemed to journalists and historians probabilities strong enough to be called certainties in 1998–2000 have slowly been eroded by doubts. After reviewing the report of the Scholars Commission, American Heritage magazine concluded: “whatever one’s views, it is hard to deny that honorable people can and do disagree about Jefferson and Hemings…It’s important for the public to realize that the purported Jefferson-Hemings liaison remains a disputed possibility, not an established fact.”²⁵

On February 24, 2003, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation revised their statement about Sally Hemings. They admitted that the evidence for a relationship between her and Jefferson was “not definitive” and “the complete story may never be known.” The Foundation encouraged visitors to Monticello and their website “to make up their own minds as to the true nature of the relationship, based on what evidence does exist.” This was close to a reversal of their previous statement: The Thomas Jefferson Foundation stands by its original findings—that the weight of evidence suggests that Jefferson probably was the father of Eston Hemings and perhaps the father of all of Sally Hemings’ children. The foundation’s new stance was—and still is—remarkably close to the one urged by Dr. White McKenzie Wallenborn.²⁶

The mystery of who fathered “Master Tom” Woodson has had a growing impact on the believability of the pro-paternity argument. In an article published not long after the DNA tests, Michele Cooley-Quille, a Thomas Woodson descendant, described in impressive detail the history of her family, which includes distinguished people in every generation. Ms. Cooley-Quille is a clinical psychologist. Dismissing the DNA conclusions, she asked, “From what should the tapestry of history be woven? Hairy threads of DNA? Stories told? Or words written?”²⁷

This writer discussed the Woodson conundrum with Dr. Kenneth Kidd, a Yale Medical School geneticist, who said it was possible that a male with different Y chromosomes had intruded into the Woodson family line at some point in its history and the Woodson volunteers from whom DNA samples were taken had descended from him. Dr. Kidd cited a well-known genetic motto, “the father is always uncertain.” The dictum adds weight to Thomas Moore’s contention (seconded by Dr. Foster) that the Jefferson DNA of Eston Hemings’s descendant could have come from anyone who had acquired the same Y chromosomes in the decades before Jefferson’s death or in the two and a half centuries since his demise.

While one sympathizes with the Woodsons’ desire to believe their oral tradition, the answer to Cooley-Quille’s large question about the tapestry of history would seem to be complexity. History is written from scientific, written, and oral data. The key criterion for achieving certainty is evidence that is verifiable. Here oral history falls short, especially when it is confused with oral tradition.

Oral history is collected by trained interviewers and is an important part of today’s historical profession. But it has recognized limitations. The human memory is a very unreliable recording instrument. Oral tradition has far more serious limitations. Its unreliability is inevitable as it travels down the generations. It remains a valuable part of historical memory. But in a court of law it would be banned as hearsay evidence. That makes it hard, if not impossible, to see what role oral tradition can play in proving Thomas Jefferson’s paternity.

Recently, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, one of the nation’s leading African-American historians, published an article in which he described his family’s oral tradition that they were the descendants of former slave Jane Gates and her owner, Samuel Brady. Professor Gates set out to “prove or disprove” the story. He found white descendants of Samuel Brady who gave him blood samples for DNA testing. He compared the DNA results with DNA-tested blood from his black relatives—and was amazed to discover “the tests established without a doubt that Brady was not the father of Jane Gates’ children.” One of his relatives dismissed his findings. “I’ve been a Brady eighty-nine years and I’m still a Brady,” she told him.²⁸ Though Mr. Gates does not do so, his relative could cite Dr. Kidd’s motto, “the father is always unknown,” and argue that an interloper in the family line has disrupted the descent of Samuel Brady’s DNA. The story testifies to the unreliability of both oral tradition and DNA evidence.

XVI

In 2008, two biostatisticians, William Blackwelder and David Douglas, found grievous fault with archaeologist Fraser Neiman’s statistical study that declared Jefferson’s guilt a 99-percent certainty. Neiman used a sampling method called Monte Carlo, which is often used by businessmen to evaluate investments. Another version is used by insurance companies. But experts warn that Monte Carlo has serious flaws. People put too high a probability on outcomes produced by the method. A whole industry called AIE, Applied Information Economics, has been developed to train Monte Carlo practitioners to develop more realistic probabilities.

Blackwelder and Douglas published their critique on a website to invite further discussion. The man who asked them to undertake this task is Steven T. Corneliussen, a science writer who works with physicists in Virginia. Blackwelder is a biostatistical consultant at the National Institutes of Health; Douglas is a physicist and senior scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News. Statistics and probability theory and computer simulations are Douglas’s specialty. All three men were troubled by what they saw as a serious misuse of science in Neiman’s study.

Blackwelder condemned Neiman’s conclusion, that “doubt about Jefferson’s paternity can no longer be reasonably sustained.” The veteran biostatistician called this “a gross misinterpretation” of the study. Douglas’s criticism was equally harsh. He found that Neiman miscounted the probable conception “windows” for Sally Heming’s pregnancies. (The term refers to the interval between the end of a menstrual cycle and the start of another one during which a woman may be fertile.) In four of her six pregnancies, Sally could have conceived while Jefferson was absent from Monticello. Douglas even found a distinct possibility that Jefferson was absent from Monticello at the time of Eston Hemings’s conception—the only child to which DNA has linked a Jefferson. With Blackwelder’s full agreement, Douglas concluded the probability of Jefferson’s presence at all six conceptions was less than 50 percent. Douglas also faulted Neiman’s unscientific presentation, which omitted crucial details that would enable other statisticians to replicate the study.²⁹

XVII

These surges of uncertainty have led to increasing doubts about the reliability of Samuel F. Wetmore’s ghosted narrative of Madison Hemings’s life in the Pike County Republican. It seems only fair to apply the same standard of proof to Wetmore’s journalism that Jefferson paternity advocates have applied to the testimony of Thomas Jefferson Randolph and others who have denied Jefferson’s fatherhood. They claim these people’s affection and loyalty to Thomas Jefferson prompted them to lie about his relationship with Sally Hemings.

What was Wetmore’s motivation in claiming Jefferson’s paternity? The answer: hatred and contempt for Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic Party. Viewed in this light, the Wetmore-Hemings story begins to look more and more like a recycling of James Thomson Callender’s vindictive 1802 assault, with Wetmore in control.

Recent research has added strength to this suspicion. In his opening sentences, Wetmore claims that Madison Hemings was five feet ten and one half inches tall, giving him a strong resemblance to Jefferson. In the Virginia census of 1833, Madison was measured as five feet seven.³⁰ Why did Madison Hemings tolerate this distortion? It seems likely that Wetmore had convinced him it was important to “improve” his story in various ways to make it more appealing to readers. If Hemings were willing to agree to let Wetmore misstate his size, would he not be equally ready to say that his mother had only one lover, Thomas Jefferson? This would correct the cruel accusation that James Thomson Callender had flung at Sally: she was “a slut as common as the pavement.” It would make an innocent Sally another victim of Thomas Jefferson, the uncaring slave owner.

Madison Hemings was the only one of Sally Hemings’s children who never passed for white. In census after census, he was listed as a Negro. That makes a reader dubious about his “sandy complexion,” which supposedly added to his resemblance to Jefferson. Madison’s brother Beverly and sister Harriet left Monticello with Jefferson’s permission in the early 1820s and vanished into the white world. His brother Eston moved from Ohio to Wisconsin and passed there. The nasty remark Wetmore has Madison make about “white persons” for Dolley Madison’s failure to give his mother a gift after his birth suggests he had few if any warm feelings for whites, and especially for Thomas Jefferson, the man who had enslaved him. These feelings were probably exacerbated by Madison’s experience in Pike County, Ohio. The largely Democratic citizens of Waverly, the county seat, refused to permit blacks to live within the town limits.

Wetmore’s presence as the narrator is visible in other ways. At one point, Hemings tells how familiar he was with Martha Jefferson Randolph’s children. He claims they taught him to read—and he reels off the names of the eleven who lived to adulthood: Ann, Thomas Jefferson, Ellen, Cornelia, Virginia, Mary, James, Benjamin Franklin, Lewis Madison, Septemia, and George Wythe. Madison had not seen any of these people for forty-seven years. This is surely Wetmore the ghostwriter at work, with The Domestic Life of Thomas Jefferson or some other biography of Jefferson on the desk beside his manuscript.

In the same category is Madison’s astonishing knowledge of Jefferson’s early life. “Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was educated at William and Mary College, which had its seat at Williamsburg. He afterwards studied law with Geo. Wythe and practiced law at the bar of the general courts of the Colony. He was afterwards elected a member of the provincial legislature from Albemarle county.” Jefferson was sixty-two years old when Madison was born. This passage is almost certainly Samuel F. Wetmore copying word for word from a popular biography.

Equally dubious is Hemings’s claim that he never knew how famous Jefferson was until after his death. Even granting that Jefferson left the presidency when Madison was a toddler, wouldn’t the teenage Hemings notice and wonder why hundreds of visitors came to Monticello each year to pay homage to Jefferson’s fame? Again, this is Wetmore the ghostwriter at work. He is trying to make readers sorry for Hemings, whose famous “father” paid so little attention to him. Once more we see that contempt for an unfeeling Thomas Jefferson is the desired outcome of Madison’s story.

Another dubious statement is Hemings’s claim that Jefferson was extraordinarily healthy: “Till within three weeks of his death he was hale and hearty and at the age of 82 years walked erect and with a stately tread. I am now 68, and I well remember that he was a much smarter man, physically, at that age than I am.” When Jefferson was sixty-eight, Madison was six years old. That puts this recollection in the same class as Israel Jefferson’s story about waiting on Jefferson’s table at the age of four. Throughout his later life, Jefferson suffered from crippling attacks of rheumatism, which he frequently mentioned in his letters. In 1794, 1797, 1802, 1806, 1811, 1813, and 1819 agonizing pain in his back, hips, and thighs often kept him from walking.³¹

Several historians have pointed out with not a little sarcasm that records make it clear Dolley Madison was not at Sally Hemings’s bedside when Madison was born, as Wetmore-Hemings claim in their narrative. Madison was born on January 19, 1805. On this date Dolley was in Washington, D.C., with her husband, James Madison, Jefferson’s secretary of state. Paternity proponents have come up with a theoretical answer—Dolley made a documented visit to Monticello in the fall, and that was when she promised Sally a gift if she named the child after her husband. Underlying the entire story is the assumption that the deeply religious Dolley and her husband were aware of—and approved of—Jefferson’s relationship with Sally. There is not a shred of proof for this assertion. The only documented evidence is a James Madison statement we have already seen: he said Callender’s accusation was “incredible.”³²

Further doubts about the reliability of Madison Hemings’s narrative arise when we discover how many details can be traced to Callender’s original account, published three years before Madison was born. Madison traced his mother’s birth back to Elizabeth Hemings’s relationship with John Wayles. Callender misspelled the name as “Wales” and so did Wetmore-Hemings. Wayles is called a “Welchman”, in both accounts, when his background was English. These errors are of no great import, but they tell us who was in control of the story. Clearly, it was not Madison Hemings; it was Wetmore writing with copies of Callender’s articles or quotations from them on his desk. This is another reason to suspect that Madison’s story is Callender with the window dressing of a first-person narrative.

Newspaper ethics in the nineteenth century did not put a high value on accuracy. “Faking” a story (embellishing it or inventing it wholesale) was accepted journalistic practice. Indifference to facts was virtually universal, as the example of the newspaper reporting on George Washington’s supposed father-son relationship to Thomas Posey make dolorously clear. When we consider Israel Jefferson’s story and its veritable tissue of lies (documented by Thomas Jefferson Randolph), the evidence strongly suggests Samuel F. Wetmore was a practitioner of the shoddy art of faking the truth.³³

Two years after he wrote the Madison Hemings article, Wetmore was fired as postmaster of Waverly for stealing $155 from his accounts. He resigned as editor of the Pike County Republican and vanished from the local scene. This was not the first time Wetmore revealed a dishonest streak. In 1871, a man sued him for failing to repay a debt of $362—about $5,000 in today’s money. Toward the end of the Civil War, on March 31, 1865, when Wetmore was forty-four, he joined the army and received a $100 signing bonus, then complained of “rheumatism” and was mustered out thirty-nine days later. He never repaid the balance he owed on his $150 clothing allowance or his $100 munitions allowance. A few months before Wetmore disappeared, he was sued in the Waverly court on behalf of an infant, Adaline Rose. Unfortunately, the archival records of this lawsuit have been lost. But it has some of the earmarks of a paternity suit. Could the man who wrote Madison’s Hemings’s story be guilty of the same indiscretion for which he pilloried Thomas Jefferson? Such ironies are not uncommon in history.³⁴

Wetmore’s brother Josiah took over the newspaper and issued a statement that betrayed not a little agitation. At one point, he claimed Samuel was “severely ill.” At another point he admitted that Samuel had “given rise to scandal, by withdrawing without consultation.” The new editor added that Samuel had sent a message “from a distant city, hinting at a continued journey,” which suggested “a prolonged absence.” So great was the turmoil inside the Wetmore family, no one seemed to notice how incongruous it was to claim someone was severely ill and then report he had left his wife and three children to flee to a distant city.

Samuel Wetmore’s absence turned out to be permanent. No one in Waverly ever heard from him again. Although the Pike County Republican frantically eulogized him as “a man who never used tobacco or any other narcotic in any form,” it seems likely that an erratic character had come to a bad end.³⁵

XVIII

The difference between the short, tan-skinned Madison and his tall younger brother, Eston, who had reddish hair and a striking resemblance to the Jeffersons, suggests that the two men had different fathers. That casts further doubt on the Wetmore-Hemings assertion that Sally Hemings never had sexual relations with anyone except Jefferson. Further fueling this doubt are the recollections of a French visitor, Comte de Volney, who spent three weeks at Monticello in 1796. He was amazed by the atmosphere of sexual freedom. “Women and girls…do not have any censure of manners,” he wrote in his journal, “living freely with the white workmen of the country or hired Europeans, Germans, Irishmen and others…” Another French visitor made similar observations around the same time.³⁶

The most important person in Sally Hemings’s life almost certainly was her mother, Elizabeth Hemings. She had six children by John Wayles and eight more by other fathers, some white, some black, after she came to Monticello. This makes it seem likely—or at least plausible—that Sally, too, had several lovers. The relaxed sexual atmosphere at Monticello also reduces the significance of various slave children, from Callender’s “Master Tom” (Woodson) to Eston Hemings, resembling Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation made this one of the chief points in their 2000 conviction of Jefferson—now withdrawn. If Peter Carr fathered some of Sally’s early children, they might well resemble Jefferson. He or his brother Samuel might also have fathered children by other Hemings women. As we shall soon see, there is another Jefferson relative who also might have enjoyed Monticello’s relaxed sexual mores.³⁷

XIX

Dr. Walllenborn had a point when he called for a reexamination of the role of Peter Carr in Sally’s life. The two men who named him as Sally’s lover, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and overseer Edmund Bacon, admittedly had motives to shade or deny the truth. But they did not testify at the same time or in the same place. On the contrary, their accounts are separated by many years and several hundred miles. Randolph spoke at his Edgehill farm, virtually in the shadow of Monticello, in the mid-1850s; Bacon talked in Kentucky after the Civil War had begun. There is no evidence that either was aware of what the other man had said. This lends a modicum of credibility to their words.

One historian has proposed a scenario that would explain why Sally might have told her son Madison that Jefferson was his father. Peter Carr married a Baltimore heiress in 1797, after Sally had conceived but not yet given birth to her second child. If Sally were his mistress, the situation may have been charged with explosive jealousy. Bitterness and anger may have led her to turn to other lovers and toward the end of her life to say Thomas Jefferson was their father, as an act of revenge against Peter Carr. This scenario makes Sally a woman with a broken heart—a victim not only of the monstrous injustices of the slave system but the duplicity of a faithless lover.

Peter Carr’s heart, too, may have been damaged. Thomas Jefferson had regarded him as the son he never had and expended a great deal of time and money to educate him, hoping he would become a national leader. But his political career faltered and expired early, and he bumbled through the rest of his life like a man in a daze. Thomas Jefferson Randolph reported hearing Carr express his shame over his affair with Sally and the embarrassment it had caused Jefferson. This underscores the possibility that he felt lifelong regret.³⁸

XX

In recent years there has been a growing inclination among historians to take Randolph Jefferson seriously as a potential lover of Sally Hemings. He lived twenty miles from Monticello and often visited his famous brother. Randolph was twelve years younger than Thomas Jefferson, and this rather large age gap meant there was not much intimacy between them. But they remained friendly, and Jefferson was always ready to help his brother out of financial and personal difficulties. Randolph inherited 2,200 acres of prime farmland on the south side of the James River and enough slaves to make a comfortable living. But he was a poor businessman, often in debt.

Isaac Jefferson, a Monticello ex-slave interviewed in 1843, described Randolph as “a mighty simple man [who] used to come out among the black people and play the fiddle and dance half the night.” Monticello’s slaves called him “Uncle Randolph”—a glimpse of how friendly and down-to-earth they found him. Randolph seems to have been such a frequent visitor to Monticello that his appearance there was no cause for special comment. In a letter to her father, Martha Jefferson Randolph remarked on “Uncle Randolph” being “in the house” and giving a “dram” to a sick slave, which made him feel better. It is unlikely that each of his visits was noted in any formal way. This subtracts not a little from the claim by the Jefferson Foundation Research Committee that Randolph could be dismissed as a paternity candidate because there is no “documented” evidence of his being at Monticello when Sally Hemings conceived.

Randolph was too fond of drams for his own good. At one point, Thomas Jefferson urgently advised him to get his drinking under control. It is not hard to envision Randolph—and Sally—participating in the late-night revels Comte de Volney described. When Eston Hemings was born, Randolph was fifty-one years old and had been a widower for a decade. A letter from Thomas Jefferson has survived, inviting Randolph to Monticello during the “window” of time when Sally conceived Eston.

Shortly after Eston’s birth, Randolph married again. His new wife was considered “a controlling woman.” Someone with a sharper tongue called her a “jade of genuine bottom.” She seems to have been more than capable of ending Randolph’s inclinations for Sally and any other woman toward whom his eye wandered. Sally had no more children after Eston. For generations, Eston’s children and grandchildren described themselves as descended from a Jefferson uncle. Only after Fawn Brodie, the first Jefferson biographer to assert his guilt, talked to later descendants in the 1970s did they begin to claim Thomas Jefferson was their ancestor.³⁹

XXI

A sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings will always remain a possibility. But is it a probability? The writer of history must factor into the puzzle so many contrary realities, from Samuel F. Wetmore the abolitionist propagandist to explanations of how Eston Hemings’s descendants might have acquired Jefferson DNA to eyewitness claims that other men were Sally’s lovers. Not to be dismissed is Thomas Jefferson Randolph’s documented refutation of the Wetmore-ghosted Israel Jefferson’s story. That prompts a skeptic to suspect a similar indifference to the truth in Wetmore’s Madison Hemings story, which has been proclaimed by some pro-paternity advocates as a kind of gospel truth. At least as important is Thomas Jefferson’s acute sensitivity to slurs on his reputation and his denial of Callender’s accusation to close friends. In this light, the word “probability” retreats from the certainty that the pro-paternity advocates claim for it.

Hardest of all the pro-paternity claims to believe is the assertion that the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings lasted thirty-eight years. Thirty-eight years of furtive sex in a house swarming with visitors and grandchildren? A respected historian of Monticello has suggested that the entire controversy should be considered a historical Rorschach test that tells us more about the person who believes—or doubts—than it reveals about Jefferson.⁴⁰

One thing seems clear: the American public remains emotionally involved with the story. In the fall of 2007, this writer discussed the current atmosphere at Monticello with a young historian on the University of Virginia faculty. He had been asked to serve as a guide at Monticello for several weeks. The foundation’s latest policy, he was told, was not to mention Sally Hemings. He obeyed this dictum, but at the end of virtually every tour he conducted, someone asked him. “Is it true about Jefferson and Sally?”

The controversy has unquestionably played a part in the reevaluation of Jefferson’s role in America’s founding. A new generation of historians has faulted him for his failure to take a stronger stand against the continuation of slavery. A focus on his duplicity in his political dealings with George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams has made it hard to see him as a spotless icon of American idealism. Doubt has even been cast on his role as the author of the Declaration of Independence.⁴¹

Jefferson’s fame will nevertheless remain large. But he is no longer a demigod who looms above the other founding fathers as a unique symbol of America. In a 2001 poll, when Americans were asked to rate the greatest president, Jefferson received only 1 percent of the vote. In recent polls he has done better. A 2009 C-Span survey ranked him number seven behind Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy.⁴²

This moderation of Jefferson’s fame is not such a bad thing. Whether Thomas Jefferson is right or wrong—whether he is, in the words of historian Peter Onuf, “a proxy for America”—should not be, and never should have been, crucial in Americans’ political vision of themselves. None of the founding fathers, not even George Washington, need or deserve that sort of sanctification to retain their importance in our national memory.

Beyond these large political thoughts, we should not allow differences about Sally Hemings to obscure the other women in Jefferson’s life. Hundreds of vivid letters tell us how much he loved those two beautiful tragedy-haunted “seraphs,” Martha Wayles Jefferson and Maria Jefferson Eppes, whom he hoped to greet beyond death’s darkness—and the tall, earnest daughter who devoted her life to him, Martha Jefferson Randolph.