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Jefferson–Hemings liaison. Among scholars, Malone’s views
went mostly unchallenged for decades. But Annette Gordon-
Reed (1997), a lawyer, accumulated considerable evidence in
support of Madison Hemings’s story, though she did not think
it proven. The next year a forensic pathologist compared a
DNA sample of a descendant of Field Jefferson, Thomas
Jefferson’s uncle, to that of a descendant of Eston Hemings. A
genetic sequence matched. Eston had been fathered by a
Jefferson. Some scholars pointed to Jefferson’s younger
brother, Randolph, as the father, but most Jefferson scholars
concluded that Thomas Jefferson was the more likely father.
Such revelations cannot diminish Jefferson’s significance as
statesman, but they further complicate our understanding of
one of the nation’s foremost apostles of freedom.T
he photo of Thomas Jefferson’s bedroom at Monticello
shows the alcove he designed to ensure privacy. A page
from his farm accounts in his own writing lists as slaves Sally
Hemings and several of her children, including Madison, born
in 1805, and Eston, born in 1808. In 1787, Sally Hemings, a
young slave from the Jefferson plantation, was sent to Paris to
serve Thomas Jefferson, U.S. minister to France, and his two
daughters. Jefferson’s wife had died five years earlier. When
Jefferson was first elected president, a newspaper claimed
that he had fathered all of Hemings’s children. Jefferson
ignored the charges and his political allies denounced them
as lies. In 1873 Madison Hemings told an Ohio reporter that
his mother, Sally Hemings, had said that his father was
Thomas Jefferson. Few took the story seriously. Jefferson
scholar Merrill Peterson (1960) was the first to mention
Madison Hemings’s story, which he attributed to Federalists
seeking to embarrass Jefferson and abolitionists seeking to
discredit slavery. Dumas Malone (1948–1981), the preeminent
Jefferson biographer, flatly rejected the possibility of a
DEBATING THE PAST
Did Thomas Jefferson Father
a Child by His Slave?
Source: Merrill Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind(1960);
Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, 6 volumes (1948–1981); Annette
Gordon-Reed,Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings(1997) and The Hemingses of
Monticello(2008). See also Joseph Ellis, American Sphynx(1998).