Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account
The claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a slave at Monticello, entered the public arena during Jefferson's first term as president, and it has remained a subject of discussion and disagreement for two centuries. Based on documentary, scientific, statistical, and oral history evidence, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (TJF) Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (January 2000) remains the most comprehensive analysis of this historical topic. Ten years later, TJF and most historians believe that, years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson's records, including Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings.
Historical Background
In September 1802, political journalist James T. Callender, a disaffected former ally of Jefferson, wrote in a Richmond newspaper that Jefferson had for many years "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves." "Her name is Sally," Callender continued, adding that Jefferson had "several children" by her.
Although there had been rumors of a sexual relationship between Jefferson and an enslaved woman before 1802, Callender's article spread the story widely. It was taken up by Jefferson's Federalist opponents and was published in many newspapers during the remainder of Jefferson's presidency.
Jefferson's policy was to offer no public response to personal attacks, and he apparently made no explicit public or private comment on this question (although a private letter of 1805 has been interpreted by some individuals as a denial of the story). Sally Hemings left no known accounts.
Jefferson's daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph privately denied the published reports. Two of her children, Ellen Randolph Coolidge and Thomas Jefferson Randolph, maintained many years later that such a liaison was not possible, on both moral and practical grounds. They also stated that Jefferson's nephews Peter and Samuel Carr were the fathers of the light-skinned Monticello slaves some thought to be Jefferson's children because they ressembled him.
The Jefferson-Hemings story was sustained through the 19th century by Northern abolitionists, British critics of American democracy, and others. Its vitality among the American population at large was recorded by European travelers of the time. Through the 20th century, some historians accepted the possibility of a Jefferson-Hemings connection and a few gave it credence, but most Jefferson scholars found the case for such a relationship unpersuasive.
Over the years, however, belief in a Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship was perpetuated in private. Two of her children--Madison and Eston--indicated that Jefferson was their father, and this belief has been perpetuated in the oral histories of generations of their descendants as an important family truth.
DNA Evidence and Response
The results of DNA tests conducted by Dr. Eugene Foster and a team of geneticists in 1998 challenged the view that the Jefferson-Hemings relationship could be neither refuted nor substantiated . The study--which tested Y-chromosomal DNA samples from male-line descendants of Field Jefferson (Thomas Jefferson's uncle), John Carr (grandfather of Jefferson's Carr nephews), Eston Hemings, and Thomas Woodson--indicated a genetic link between the Jefferson and Hemings descendants. The results of the study established that an individual carrying the male Jefferson Y chromosome fathered Eston Hemings (born 1808), the last known child born to Sally Hemings. There were approximately 25 adult male Jeffersons who carried this chromosome living in Virginia at that time, and a few of them are known to have visited Monticello. The study's authors, however, said "the simplest and most probable" conclusion was that Thomas Jefferson had fathered Eston Hemings.
The DNA testing found no genetic link between the Hemings and Carr descendants, refuting Jefferson’s grandchildren’s assertion that his Carr nephews fathered Sally Hemings’s children.
Additionally, the DNA study found no link between the descendants of Field Jefferson and Thomas Woodson (1790-1879), whose family members have long held that he was the first son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Madison Hemings, Sally's second-youngest son, said in 1873 that his mother had been pregnant with Jefferson's child (who, he said, lived "but a short time") when she returned from France in 1789. There is no indication in Jefferson's records of a child born to Hemings before 1795, and there are no known documents to support that Thomas Woodson was Hemings's first child.
Shortly after the DNA test results were released in November 1998, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation formed a research committee consisting of nine members of the foundation staff, including four with Ph.D.s. In January 2000, the committee reported that the weight of all known evidence--from the DNA study, original documents, written and oral historical accounts, and statistical data--indicated a high probability that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings, and that he was likely the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children listed in Monticello records--Harriet (born 1795; died in infancy); Beverly (born 1798); an unnamed daughter (born 1799; died in infancy); Harriet (born 1801); Madison (born 1805); and Eston (born 1808).
Since then, a committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, after reviewing essentially the same material, reached different conclusions, namely that Sally Hemings was only a minor figure in Thomas Jefferson's life and that it is very unlikely he fathered any of her children. This committee also suggested in its report, issued in April 2001 and revised in 2011, that Jefferson's younger brother Randolph (1755-1815) was more likely the father of at least some of Sally Hemings's children.
From the Historical Record
The following summarizes what is known about Sally Hemings and her family.
- Sally Hemings (1773-1835) was a slave at Monticello; she lived in Paris with Jefferson and two of his daughters from 1787 to 1789; and she had at least six children.
- Sally Hemings's duties included being a nursemaid-companion to Thomas Jefferson's daughter Maria (ca. 1784-1787), lady's maid to daughters Martha and Maria (1787-1797), and chambermaid and seamstress (1790s-1827).
- There are no known images of Sally Hemings and only four known descriptions of her appearance or demeanor.
- Sally Hemings left no known written accounts. It is not known if she was literate.
- In the few scattered references to Sally Hemings in Thomas Jefferson's records and correspondence, there is nothing to distinguish her from other members of her family.
- Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello at the likely conception times of Sally Hemings's six known children. There are no records suggesting that she was elsewhere at these times, or records of any births at times that would exclude Jefferson paternity.
- There are no indications in contemporary accounts by people familiar with Monticello that Sally Hemings's children had different fathers.
- Sally Hemings's children were light-skinned, and three of them (daughter Harriet and sons Beverly and Eston) lived as members of white society as adults.
- According to contemporary accounts, some of Sally Hemings's children strongly resembled Thomas Jefferson.
- Thomas Jefferson freed all of Sally Hemings's children: Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822; Madison and Eston were released in Jefferson's 1826 will. Jefferson gave freedom to no other nuclear slave family.
- Thomas Jefferson did not free Sally Hemings. She was permitted to leave Monticello by his daughter Martha Jefferson Randolph not long after Jefferson's death in 1826, and went to live with her sons Madison and Eston in Charlottesville.
- Several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings's children.
- Eston Hemings changed his name to Eston Hemings Jefferson in 1852.
- Madison Hemings stated in 1873 that he and his siblings Beverly, Harriet, and Eston were Thomas Jefferson's children.
- The descendants of Madison Hemings who have lived as African-Americans have passed a family history of descent from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings down through the generations.
- Eston Hemings's descendants, who have lived as whites, have passed down a family history of being related to Thomas Jefferson. In the 1940s, family members changed this history to state that an uncle of Jefferson's, rather than Jefferson himself, was their ancestor.
According to Madison Hemings, Sally's mother Elizabeth Hemings (1735-1807) was the daughter of an African woman and an English sea captain. By Madison Hemings's and other accounts, Sally Hemings and some of her siblings were the children of John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law, making her the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson (1748-1782). Elizabeth Hemings and her children lived at John Wayles' plantation during his lifetime.
Questions remain about the nature of the relationship that existed between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; whether she had a child at Monticello shortly after they returned from France in 1789; and whether there is anything to connect Jefferson, Hemings, and Thomas Woodson.
To learn more, consult the readings, some with differing points of view, listed here.
RELATED RESOURCES
- Report of the Monticello Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
- Sally Hemings (a brief biography)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary Accounts:
1847. Jefferson, Isaac. "Memoirs of a Monticello Slave." In Jefferson at Monticello, edited by James A. Bear, Jr., 1-24. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1967. See p. 4.
1858. Coolidge, Ellen Randolph. Ellen Randolph Coolidge to Joseph Coolidge, 24 October 1858. In Malone, Dumas. "Mr. Jefferson's Private Life." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 84 (1974): 1-8.
1862. Bacon, Edmund. "Jefferson at Monticello" In Jefferson at Monticello, edited by James A. Bear, Jr., 25-117. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1967. See pp. 99-100, 102.
1868. Randall, Henry S. Henry S. Randall to James Parton, 1 June 1868. In Flower, Milton E. James Parton: the Father of Modern Biography. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1951. See pp. 236-9.
1873. Hemings, Madison. "Life Among the Lowly, No. 1." Pike County Republican, March 13, 1873. In Reed, Annette-Gordon. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
1873. Jefferson, Israel. "Life Among the Lowly, No. 3." Pike County Republican, December 25, 1873. In Reed, Annette-Gordon. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Secondary Accounts:
Adair, Douglass. "The Jefferson Scandals." In Fame and the Founding Fathers, edited by Trevor Colbourn, 160-91. New York: Norton, 1974.
Bear, James A., Jr. "The Hemings Family of Monticello." Virginia Cavalcade 29, no. 2 (1979): 78-87.
Bennett, Lerone. "Thomas Jefferson's Negro Grandchildren." Ebony, November 1954, 78-80.
Brodie, Fawn M. "The Great Jefferson Taboo." American Heritage 23, no. 4 (1979): 48-57, 97-100.
---. Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History. New York: Norton, 1974.
---. "Thomas Jefferson's Unknown Grandchildren: A Study in Historical Silence." American Heritage 27, no. 6 (1976): 23-33, 94-99.
Onuf, Peter S., and Jan E. Lewis, eds. Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture. Charlottesville, Va.:University Press of Virginia, 1999.
Burstein, Andrew. Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello. New York: Basic Books, 2005.
Burton, Cynthia H. Jefferson Vindicated: Fallacies, Omissions, and Contradictions in the Hemings Genealogical Search. Keswick, Va.: Cynthia H. Burton, 2005.
Dabney, Virginius. The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981.
---. "The Monticello Scandals: History and Fiction." Virginia Cavalcade 29, no. 2 (1979): 52-61.
Ellis, Joseph J. American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Knopf, 1997. See pp. 303-307.
French, Scot A. and Edward L. Ayers. "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993." In Jeffersonian Legacies, edited by Peter S. Onuf, 418-56. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: Norton, 2008.
---. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Graham, Pearl M. "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings." Journal of Negro History 46, no. 2 (1961): 89-103.
Hyland, William G., Jr. In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2009.
Justus, Judith. Down From the Mountain: An Oral History of the Hemings Family. Perrysburg, Ohio: Jeskurtara, 1990.
Leary, Helen F. M. "Sally Hemings's Children: A Genealogical Analysis of the Evidence." National Genealogical Society Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2001): 165-207. There are other relevant articles in this issue.
Malone, Dumas. Jefferson the President: First Term, 1801-1805. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. See Appendix II, pp. 494-8.
Malone, Dumas, and Steven Hochman. "A Note on Evidence: The Personal History of Madison Hemings." Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 523-8.
McMurry, Rebecca L., and James F. McMurry, Jr. Anatomy of a Scandal: Thomas Jefferson & the SALLY Story. Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 2002.
Moss, Sidney P., and Carolyn Moss. "The Jefferson Miscegenation Legend in British Travel Books." Journal of the Early Republic 7, no. 3 (1987): 253-74.
Neiman, Fraser D. "Coincidence or Causal Connection? The Relationship between Thomas Jefferson's Visits to Monticello and Sally Hemings's Conceptions." William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2000): 198-210.
Randolph, Laura B. "Thomas Jefferson's Black and White Descendants Debate His Lineage and Legacy." Ebony, July 1993, 25-29.
Turner, Robert F., ed. Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission Report on the Jefferson-Hemings Matter. Charlottesville, Va.: Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, 2001. (New edition to be published in fall 2009.)
Wilson, Douglas L. "Thomas Jefferson and the Character Issue." Atlantic Monthly, November 1992, 57-74.
Woodson, Byron W. A President in the Family: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Thomas Woodson. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001.
Woodson, Minnie Shumate. The Sable Curtain. Washington, D.C.: Stafford Lowery, 1987. See appendix.
Discussion
My God! It's amazing how centuries later this topic creates such emotion, such dislike and denial among caucasians. Learn your history Americans. The truth is whatever type of President he was, Jefferson was a hypocrite, like thousands of white men at that time and some in our time who used Sally Hemmings and helpless black women for their own selfish and egotistical purposes. What do you expect from people who kept people as property? When he and his ilk said 'all men are created equal', Jefferson did not mean all humans, he meant all white men... not women, not blacks. Like Strom Thurmond, the infamous US lawmaker, who oozed and embraced racism and segregation and battled against civil rights 'for black people' WHILE he raped black women, (these liaisons were not romantic), AND FATHERED BLACK CHILDREN. His quote: "all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement." Imagine that!! The truth always comes to light as it did for him. You should not try to rewrite and twist history to soothe your consciences and dress up the truth to appear like something else. Back then, ALL white men did it. Jefferson was no different.
Allegations that the "oral history" of Sally's descendants identified the president as the father of all of Sally's children are also incorrect. Eston's descendants repeatedly acknowledged—before and after the DNA tests—that as children they were told they were not descendants of Thomas Jefferson but rather of an "uncle."
A more plausible candidate is Thomas Jefferson's younger brother, known at Monticello as "Uncle Randolph."
Posted from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230421180457750087007672836...
Please update the site and your tours appropriately
Personally I don't care for a many opinions in this matter as it happens to be about my family history. Plenty of slave owners fathered house slaves children; however, not all slave owners gave whole entire familys their freedom either! Arnold is a prime example of a political figure having relations with the help and resulting in a child and that's in this day and age! With all due respect Thomas Jefferson was an excellent President none the less.I respect the fact he kept his promise to his wife but that didn't mean he would not ever touch another woman, let alone one whom was as attractive as Sally Hemmings was said to be; in addition she did lived most of her life with him; although he was her master doesn't mean he wasn't capable of developing a genuwine affection or attraction to her that is basic human nature. One thing about DNA daughter cells are almost exact replicas of one another it's call mitosis and meiosis I and II Biology 101 people! Anyhow have a awesome day. Oh and Barry FYI coloured people are AFRICAN AMERICANS now !
it is safe to say that thomas jefferson probably fathered children with martha. it wasn't uncommon in that day. he was a man like another man. so many beautiful slave women around. the important thing is that the man was private and complex. history is fluid.
I visited Montecello in 2011 and listened to a young coloured lady explain the story of Sally Hemmings and whilst she was talking and got to the part about Jefferson being the father of her children several white families left! They did have children with them and may have left for that reason but it seemed more likely to me that they did not wish to hear the story. Is it true? Most probably it is, simply on the basis that it was extremely common at that time. Equally slavery was a worldwide phenomenon at that time and is was only the spread of knowledge about it that caused it to be abolished in most of the civilised world. It was later of course that it was abolished in America but at the time of Jefferson the French revolution, an anti slavery revolt of sorts, and (later) Wilberforce in England was active in ending slavery worldwide. Probably one of the most decisive moments in the abolition of slavery was the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 which made the Royal Navy dominant enough to enforce the abolition of transportation when it was passed by Parliament. Jefferson was no worse than any other great man of his day, Napoleon and Wellington? Just the same and the phrase "born on the wrong side of the blanket" refers to illegitimate children. Where we go wrong is where we try to deify men and women from history and deny the truth or most probable truth of any historical incident.
We should be content with what they did both good and bad, but we should not judge 'bad' by today's standards but rather by the standards of the time in question.
The real shocking thing is that Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" but he did not say "all men and women are created equal" as that was not in their common thought, and nor was all men of all races.
Well said, Patty49er. The real question is "should it even matter?" No. it should not. However, the old saying "in a hundred years from now, nobody is going to care anyway" should read "in a hundred years from now, let it rest, for God sake".
I did not expect that he would pull the same idiotic move like Alexander Hamilton did by publishing it in the newspaper.Gentlemen did not do that of course his friends defended him that is how it was done.
http://eyler.freeservers.com/JeffPers/jefpnotg.htm
This last result of the DNA tests has devastating results for those who claim that Thomas Jefferson began a 38-year affair with Sally Hemings in 1787 when Sally accompanied his daughter to Paris. According to Annette Gordon-Reed in her recent book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, Sally was pregnant with her son, Thomas (Hemings) Woodson, when she returned with Jefferson and his daughters in 1789, and the child was born shortly after her arrival back in the States. But the DNA tests prove conclusively that this child was NOT fathered by Jefferson! Moreover, according to Ms. Gordon-Reed, Sally did not want to leave Paris and return to the U. S. with Jefferson!
In the article reporting on the DNA test results from the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature, page 27, is the following statement:
"Four of the five male-line descendants of Thomas Woodson shared a haplotype (with one MSY1 variant) that was not similar to the Y chromosome of Field Jefferson but was characteristic of Europeans. The fifth Woodson descendant had an entirely different haplotype, most often seen in sub-Saharan Africans, which indicates illegitimacy in the line after individual W42 [i.e., after the 4th generation]."
Therefore, the DNA tests do indeed prove conclusively that Jefferson did NOT father Sally's child born after her return from France, and that this child's Y chromosome was unquestionably of the EUROPEAN, not the African variety. In fact, the DNA tests prove this more surely than they do that Sally's son, Eston, was fathered by Thomas Jefferson, since any of about twelve or more descendants of Field Jefferson could have been the father and have provided Eston with the Jeffersonian Y chromosome.
It takes very little insight to figure out from these facts what was actually going on. Having a child by another man, and resisting the return to the U.S. with one's reputed "lover," is hardly suggestive of the beginning of a love affair. Rather, it is reasonable to infer from this evidence that Sally had an affair in France, but not with Thomas Jefferson. She had an affair with someone who lived there, and she wanted to stay there with her new-found lover.
It should also be noted that after Sally returned to Monticello and gave birth to her first child, there was a period of more than five years before she gave birth to her second child. If, indeed, she and Thomas Jefferson were having a love affair that began in France, this absence of births at the beginning of the alleged affair, and a recommencement at a much later date, would be quite puzzling and without explanation. Rather than an affair with Jefferson, it suggests that the affair was with someone in France that Sally had left behind when she returned to the United States, and that the absence of births was because her lover was no longer present.
According to Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson was only able to persuade Sally to return with him by promising her that her child would be granted freedom when the child reached age twenty-one. This evidence, and its clear implications that there was no "affair" between Sally and TJ, has been completely ignored. William Safire even made the ridiculous statement in a syndicated column that the much maligned James Callender, the muck-raker who started the accusations in 1802, was wrong then, but was actually right, because DNA indicates Jefferson was the father of a child born six years later!
Without a doubt, Thomas Jefferson returning from France with a young slave girl who was pregnant, raised a lot of eyebrows. And, no doubt, these suspicions and the gossip they generated were the source of the Callender accusations. But the recent DNA evidence has demonstrated that these accusations were false. Jefferson, however, did not have the benefit of DNA tests, and almost never attempted to defend himself against gossip at any time -- certainly not in the public press. As a result, the accusations gained some level of currency, and have persisted to this day.
The "Jefferson-Hemming Matter" tells us as surely as any disclosure that no small amount of what a good many who pass for "scholars" inflict on the public is not history at all but merely the most transparent political propaganda.I see that you are using your Saul Alanski text book.Calling someone racist or implying such: Is the Progressive 'get out of logic free card.
I love history but it has to be based on facts not fiction or speculation. You can not claim paternity on a man who's DNA you do not have. There is no evidence.Period.
For those of you who have not studied French culture at the time of Jefferson the ideas of courtly love and flirting outrageously was something everyone just did even the rotund Franklin flirted.
Are you also implying there should be some type of "white guilt" associated with the slave trade of the 1600- 1800?
I see no reason for it MY ancestors were involved in that trade as slaves as were many other AMERICANS.If you have IRISH ancestry you were probably in a British slave ship.The history they NEVER teach you is that only 6% of the slaves brought to America were black 2/3 of the labor were white and the slaves ships of Britain were built not for black slaves but for ridding the Isles of the accursed Irish.
Most of the black slave trade went to south America and to the West Indies for the sugar trade of the Portuguese,Spanish,French and only later the Brits.See BBC SCOTLAND
video Barbado'ed
http://www.veoh.com/watch/v1835859553zDf2sP?h1=Barbado%27ed%3A+Scotland%...
Before there was a Botany Bay in Australia there was Jamestown in Virginia.
Google Oliver Cromwell and Irish slave trade.They stole children in Ireland and Scotland That's were we get the words spirited away and Kid Nabbed= kidnapped from.Aberdeen Scotland almost the whole town was involved in stealing children.
The Irish, probably the people with the most tragic history of all, because it has been forgotten.
The Irish Slave trade and genocide under Oliver Cromwell.
Books :
To Hell or Barbados
The Irish Slaves
White Cargo
http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/re...
http://www.scoilgaeilge.org/academics/slaves.htm
http://www.raceandhistory.com/cgi-bin/forum/webbbs_config.pl/noframes/re...
Not an easy task for staff at Monticello but it would appear they have established a balanced approach based on the information available. Obviously, a great man in the history of your nation and the entire world.
In Canada, we tend to revile all revolutionaries and staunch Loyalists would say very nasty things about 'slave-raping, Indian exterminating, Frenchified, Rebels' like Jefferson.
Those who vilify the man are ignoring the contributions of Jefferson in the advancement of democracy, not only in the U.S. but around the planet. Those who deify the man are ignoring the complex society he lived in and good old-fashioned human nature.
Thank you for your work and dedication.
I would encourage you to update this page by posting pages 231-235 of The Real Thomas Jefferson. The book provides evidence that Sally Hemmings was the mistress of Jefferson's nephew, Peter Carr. This relationship was well known at Monticello. Carr being related to Jefferson would have familial DNA.
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There seems to be evidence on both sides, but no proof either way that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings were intimate. Rather than entertain a detailed argument forming one opinion or another, I would simply say, there is no proof, only circumstantial evidence. Consequently, I may accept the possibility, but choose to conclude, based on lack of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Jefferson did not father the children of Sally Hemmings.