Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, Again

A new book entitled History by a Hair, written by anthropologist Dr. Richard Kurin, is set to publish on September 22. The book uses advances in genomic science to explore a question that has been examined for more than two centuries: the paternity of Sally Hemings’s children. 

The study doesn't change what we know about Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, their children, or their world. But it offers occasion to reflect on how we came to know it, and why we share that knowledge. 

The understanding that Sally Hemings bore children fathered by Thomas Jefferson has a long history. In 1802, family and local knowledge entered the public record when James Callender published in the Richmond Recorder, writing that “there is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story.” In the decades ahead, knowledge of Jefferson’s paternity continued to circulate both publicly and privately. In 1873, an Ohio newspaper published his son Madison Hemings’s own account of his family history. 

Over time, scholars assessed this evidence in different ways. Black scholars, including W.E.B. Du Bois, were among those who first took the historical record seriously, by the 1930s. Most mainstream scholars eventually followed. Research at and supported by Monticello—including documentary editing, oral history, archaeology, and archival work—helped deepen our understanding of the Hemings family and Jefferson’s relationship to it. In January 2000, after an extensive study involving outside experts, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded that “the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood” that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and probably all six of Sally Hemings’s children listed in Jefferson’s records.

Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, 2000

History is an interpretive discipline. Historians find documents, weigh them against one another, account for their limitations and biases, draw conclusions, and show their work. Genomic science has its own rigorous methods for gathering and interpreting evidence. Each discipline can contribute to our understanding of the past. Should peer-reviewed scientific publications verify the results of Dr. Kurin’s new study, the new genomic evidence will further reinforce the conclusion supported by these decades of scholarship. 

Is there room for doubt? The scientific method, like the historical method, insists there is, always. As Monticello noted in 2018, “it remains possible, though increasingly unlikely, that a more comprehensive documentary and genetic assemblage of evidence could emerge to support a different conclusion.” The Kurin study submits an enhanced assembly of genetic evidence. Further evidence could surface tomorrow. New techniques will emerge. The frontiers of knowledge can only move forward with humility. 

The vital question before us is not whether Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had children together more than two hundred years ago. As far as it’s possible to know, they did. Israel Gillette Jefferson, childhood companion of Madison Hemings and, like Hemings, born into slavery at Monticello, said much the same in 1873: that he could “as conscientiously confirm” Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings’s surviving children as he could “any other fact which I believe from circumstances but do not positively know.” 

The more important question is how and why that knowledge—family knowledge turned local knowledge turned historical knowledge reaffirmed by scientific knowledge—still matters. At Monticello, it matters because we share this history, braided among many others, with a vast and varied American public. Our fellow citizens are capable of engaging with the many layers of Jefferson’s life: that these children, born into slavery, existed, and that the Declaration of Independence and the self-evident truths it asks us to hold also existed, and still exist, as our shared inheritance. 

We believe Jefferson’s authorship of that quintessential American creed is the most important thing about him. His relationship with Hemings is part of his biography, but it is only one part of the larger history of Jefferson, slavery, and freedom. Understanding Jefferson requires us to consider these histories together. 

And Sally Hemings’s life contained more than her relationship with Thomas Jefferson. That relationship profoundly shaped her life and the lives of her children. Yet she was also a person with aspirations that the surviving historical record can scarcely reveal. What did Sally Hemings dream? What did freedom mean to her, and how did she help her children make lives after slavery? Scholars may never be able to answer those questions. Even still, asking them reminds us of the limits of historical inquiry, and of the complexity of human lives, past and present. 

The Hemings family was one of many enslaved at Monticello. Every day, scholars here work to learn and share more about Thomas Jefferson, and also about the Evanses, Fossetts, Gillettes, Grangers, Herns, Hubbards, Hugheses, and others who lived and labored at Monticello. Each new piece of evidence, whether found in an archive, preserved by descendants, uncovered through archaeology, or carried in a strand of hair, deepens that understanding. Together, these histories give us a fuller picture of Monticello, of Jefferson and his world, and of the generations of Americans who have worked to realize the Declaration’s promise.