ALL IN THE FAMILY

Compelling evidence suggests Jefferson fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings. More than two centuries later, the divide between the “real” Jeffersons and their blood relatives opens a window onto race in America

BY ANITA HAMILTON

Family members pay their respects to Thomas Jefferson at a 2004 reunion at Monticello

Two-year-old Tiana Norvell wiggles on the shoulders of her mother Monica Steed at a Hemings reunion in ’03

LATE ONE AFTERNOON IN May of 2004, a large group of people wearing name tags gathered in the shade of a giant tulip poplar tree on the south terrace of Monticello. As the last of the day’s tourists were taken by shuttle bus down the winding, single-lane road leading away from the hilltop home, this lingering band nibbled on cheese cubes and sipped red wine as they admired the building’s imposing white columns and soaring rotunda. They were more than tourists, more than guests. They were Jefferson’s family. Many breathed a sigh of relief that the 90°F midday heat was giving way to such a perfect spring evening.

The good weather wasn’t the only thing putting them at ease. This was the first time in six years that the Monticello Association, which comprises some 650 descendants of Thomas Jefferson, had held its annual reunion without a horde of reporters and photographers in attendance—or the extended-family members who had triggered the controversy. The once obscure association, which administers the graveyard at Monticello, got caught in a media storm in 1998 after a DNA study confirmed to the satisfaction of many that a male member of Jefferson’s family had fathered at least one child with a mulatto slave named Sally Hemings (she gave birth to at least six, and possibly seven, children in all). If that Jefferson was the third President, as many historians believe, it means at least some of Hemings’ descendants were Thomas Jefferson’s too. After a very public invitation on The Oprah Winfrey Show in November 1998 by an association member, dozens of Hemingses began attending the group’s annual reunion, albeit as guests, not members.

Being invited, as it turned out, wasn’t the same as being welcome. While a handful of association members supported the Hemingses’ inclusion, most did not. In 2002, the group voted 74 to 6 to deny them full membership. The already strained relations turned decidedly frigid the following year when the association restricted the number of Hemingses allowed to attend its reunion and attempted to bar them from setting foot inside the graveyard at Monticello. ­Paulie Abeles, the wife of the association’s president at the time, even admitted to having secretly infiltrated an online discussion group that the Hemingses had been using, in order to spy on their messages. “It was just an ugly, ugly situation,” says Lucian Truscott IV, the Jefferson descendant and association member who originally invited the Hemingses.

So what began as an extended-family reunion disintegrated into a bitter family feud between Jefferson’s white family and his black one. For the first time since the DNA results came out, not a single Hemings attended the association’s annual reunion in 2004. And they never returned. “Nobody wants to be where they aren’t wanted. The environment felt stuffy and very formal,” says Shannon Lanier, a Hemings who works as a TV host in New York City and co-authored a book about the family called Jefferson’s Children: The Story of One American Family.

Instead, the Hemingses began holding reunions of their own, the first of which took place at Monticello in 2003 and included a sunrise graveyard service at the slave burial site on the estate. While the Hemingses were once focused on persuading the Monticello Association to accept them as part of the family, eventually “people just gave it up and said they don’t care anymore,” says Lanier. “We’re trying to be more focused on our individual relationships with each other instead.”

As a whole, the Monticello Association hasn’t warmed to the Hemings clan, either. John Works, a white descendant who is an active member and energy consultant in Washington, D.C., told TIME in an email this spring, “If anything, I and others are more convinced than ever that Thomas Jefferson didn’t father any children with Sally Hemings or any other slave child.” While the group is planning to expand the graveyard in the coming years to allow more Jefferson descendants to be buried there, Hemings descendants remain ineligible, says association president Hugh Randolph.

It would be easy to chalk up the entire family squabble to racism. After all, a primary reason the Hemings liaison was widely doubted before the DNA results were published was that testimony from former black slaves was dismissed by white historians as unreliable gossip. Blacks were not the only ones who supported the story, however. Numerous white journalists in Jefferson’s time reported it and believed it to be true. Jefferson’s fellow Founding Father John Adams, who had seen Hemings’ beauty firsthand (she was known as Dashing Sally), also seemed to believe that Jefferson had had an affair with her and called it a “natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character—Negro slavery.” But several Jefferson descendants interviewed by TIME said they could not believe that he would become sexually involved with a slave, even one as young and beautiful as Hemings. “Jefferson could date any eligible woman in the world,” says Works. “Why would he have an affair with a 15-year-old slave?”

Warren Hughes gathers up genealogical charts and Jefferson materials during a gathering of Sally Hemings’ family

While the standoff underscores America’s continuing struggle to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, the controversy is as nuanced as the many shades of “black” that the present-day Hemings family embodies. In the end, the divisive reunions of the association actually helped create new family bonds among the very people it excluded—and motivated a few Jeffersons to cross the racial divide and embrace their once distant cousins.

Joining the Club

According to the constitution of the Monticello Association, founded in 1913, one of its missions is “to protect and perpetuate the reputation and fame of Thomas Jefferson.” Patrilineal pride runs high. Matthew Mackay-Smith, 82, a retired horse doctor from White Post, Va., told TIME, “I’ve never shied away from acknowledging and treasuring my connection to the great man.” Nat Abeles, a former president of the group, says he proposed to his wife Paulie at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.

The association’s primary task is to maintain the graveyard at Monticello. Located just down the hill from the mansion, the half-acre plot is enclosed by an ornate wrought-iron fence and dominated by a granite obelisk that marks the Founding Father’s grave. A key benefit of membership is the chance to be buried within a stone’s throw. Much of the battle between the Hemingses and the Jeffersons centered on that privilege.

Several members of the association have become empathetic with the other side of the family. John Works’ brother David Works is one of those converts. An eighth-­generation descendant of Jefferson, he says of the connection, “I bragged about it as a kid.” When the Hemingses first showed up at an association meeting, in 1999, “I was really turned off by the press and what I perceived to be the Hemingses’ really pushy approach. We just gave them ugly looks and were generally surly and mean,” says Works, a computer-­systems administrator in Colorado Springs. “Because of the nastiness of the fight, I never got back to the facts of the argument.” But on Christmas 2002, he finally decided to sit down and research the facts by reading the DNA study by Dr. Eugene Foster in the scientific journal Nature as well as a report issued in 2000 by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs the Monticello estate. Works’ conclusion: “When you put it all together, the simplest and most likely answer was that Thomas Jefferson fathered Hemings’ children.”

Since then, Works has forged numerous friendships with the Hemingses and helped organize the 2007 reunion of the Monticello Community, which was open to the families of anyone who lived and worked at Monticello. Some 250 people attended. He and several of his Jefferson and Hemings cousins have also been involved with a related group, Coming to the Table, which aims to bring together descendants of slaves and slave owners for conversations aimed at healing the legacy of slavery. As someone who has observed the family dynamics of both clans, Works remarks, “On the Hemings side, everything is always friendly. It’s a lot more fun on this side of the fence.”

But it’s a difficult fence to cross. In fact, David Works’ brother John was among the most vocal opponents of the Hemingses’ quest to be ­acknowledged by the association. “They thought they could bulldoze their way into the family,” says John Works, who admits that the disagreement with his brother over the ­Hemingses has fractured an already strained relationship. Responding to charges that the association is excluding the Hemingses for racial reasons, he told TIME in 2004, “Absolutely not. Ninety-three percent of the family can’t be racist,” he says, referring to the portion that voted to exclude the Hemings. “It’s impossible.”

Jefferson descendant David Works has worked with the Hemings side of the President’s clan to mend the splintering of his kin’s ancestral tree

An Academic Point?

To explore the matter more deeply, John Works helped form a separate organization called the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, which commissioned a study by 13 university scholars to assess the likelihood that Thomas Jefferson fathered Hemings’ children. In 2001 the group concluded, by a vote of 12 to 1, that his parentage was unlikely. One author of the study, Professor Lance Banning of the University of Kentucky (who died in 2006), told TIME in 2004, “The case for his paternity is not without its chinks and limitations.”

Members of the Hemings branch of the family unite at the President’s grave. They continue to seek acknowledgment of their birthright

Chief among Banning’s doubts was the fact that the DNA test was not a true paternity test, which would have required exhuming Jefferson’s remains as well as those of Hemings’ children to get DNA samples. The test that was done proves only that a Jefferson male, not necessarily Thomas, was the father, and there were other adult males in Jefferson’s family who lived nearby. What’s more, there are several documented denials of the relationship, by Jefferson’s former overseer at Monticello and Jefferson’s daughter, granddaughter and grandson. Jefferson himself never acknowledged a ­sexual ­relationship.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard University history professor who won a Pulitzer Prize in history for her 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, is one of many scholars who believe that Jefferson and Hemings were intimately involved. Her earlier book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy provides a critical analysis of the historical evidence supporting the liaison. In reviewing Jefferson biographies that dismissed the relationship, Gordon-Reed says, “I realized that a lot of what they said was based on prejudice, and they were not taking the words of black people seriously.” One example is the skepticism with which historians assessed an interview with Madison Hemings, one of Sally’s children, which was published in an Ohio newspaper in 1873. In the interview, Madison stated that his mother was Jefferson’s “concubine” and that Jefferson was the father of all her children. “We were the only children of his by a slave woman,” he said.

It was not until the DNA study was released in Nature in 1998 that the tide began to turn among historians. Although the article was misleadingly titled—the headline read “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child,” when in fact the study concluded only that a Jefferson male had fathered that child—it provided the missing link that many historians needed. And there was other evidence: records indicate that Jefferson was at Monticello at the time of the conception of all of Hemings’ children; Israel Jefferson, another slave at Monticello, corroborated Madison Hemings’ story that he was the son of Jefferson and Hemings; and John Hartwell Cocke, one of the founders of the University of Virginia, wrote in his diary in 1853 and 1859 that Jefferson had a slave mistress. “I feel a bit stupid that I felt otherwise,” says Philip Morgan, an early-­American historian and professor at the University of Virginia, who once doubted the relationship. “I should have picked up on it sooner.”

A Family Reunited

Since learning of her link to the Hemings side, Julia Westerinen (left, with fellow descendant Shannon Lanier) has sought to heal the rift

Shannon Lanier, who is black, had a very personal reason to accept the story all along. His mother had told him as a child that he was related to the third President. Descended from Hemings’ son Madison, Lanier recalls standing up in his first-grade class in Atlanta and announcing his presidential heritage: “I said, ‘Thomas Jefferson was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.’ The teacher told me to sit down and stop telling lies.”

Despite the chilly reception at the Monticello Association reunions, one person Lanier met there has turned out to be not just a relative but also a good friend. Julia Westerinen, 80, looks white, but she is descended from Sally Hemings’ youngest son, Eston. Growing up in Madison, Wis., in the 1930s and ’40s, Westerinen was not allowed to play with black children. “My parents told me to stick to my own kind,” she says. Even as an adult, she realized that her friendships with blacks had been super­ficial. “I thought we were friends, but I never had them over to my house, and they never had me to theirs,” she says. She never knew of her ancestor Eston. That is because Eston was light-skinned enough to pass for white. In order to hide his ­connection with his darker-­skinned Hemings relatives, he changed his name to E.H. Jefferson and cut ties with his black family. Westerinen finally discovered her connection in 1974, after Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, a biography by Fawn Brodie, uncovered the details about the Hemings family.

When Westerinen met her black cousins on the Oprah show in 1998, she was finally able to embrace her biracial heritage. “My life has changed a lot,” says Westerinen, an artist and birder who lives in Little Falls, N.J. In addition to helping organize Hemings reunions, she joined with Shay Banks-Young, who is black and descended from Madison Hemings, to give talks about race relations for over a decade. As Westerinen told TIME in 2004, “I have a new mission in life, which is to expose the fact that there is still a lot of work to be done. We want to heal the racial scars of this nation.” As for the association members who still won’t acknowledge the Hem­ingses’ heritage, she says, “If they want to hold on to their prejudices, then let them. We’re moving on.”