Notes for Sally Hemings

Apart from Jefferson's philosophical stance on slavery, there was the paradox inherent in his own life. Though he undoubtedly believed that slavery violated the principles of natural law he had included in the Declaration of Independence, he was a wealthy slave owner whose lifestyle depended upon the institution. Jefferson viewed himself and his slaves as victims of mankind's failure to rid itself of this terrible institution, and he contented himself with the idea that he would be a benevolent master to those he owned, until the "peculiar institution" met with its rightful end.

In hindsight, Jefferson's stance on slavery is inescapably hypocritical. History's view of him has been complicated even more by the increasingly unavoidable conclusion that he was sexually involved with one of his house servants, Sally Hemings, and that he fathered at least one, if not several, of her children. Allegations that he was sexually involved with Hemings surfaced as early as 1802, when the disgruntled journalist James Callendar (allegedly the same man Jefferson had hired to libel Adams during the 1796 presidential election) published the accusation, which had been circling as gossip in Virginia for several years. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, contradictory evidence surfaced: Madison Hemings, born in 1805, claimed to be Jefferson's child; just a year later, an account was published claiming that Jefferson's nephew, Peter Carr, had confessed to Jefferson's daughter Martha that he had been the father of all or most of Sally's children. Jefferson's direct descendants, Thomas Jefferson Randolph and Ellen Randolph Coolidge, stood by the conclusion that either Peter or Samuel Carr (both Jefferson's nephews) had fathered Hemings' children.

The question of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison remained a bone of contention among branches of the Jefferson, Randolph, and Hemings families as well as Jefferson scholars throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In November 1998, dramatic new scientific evidence became available through the analysis of the DNA of male descendants of both Hemings and Jefferson. After comparing the Y-chromosome component of the DNA of a descendant of Jefferson's paternal uncle, Field Jefferson, with that of a descendant of another of Hemings' sons, Eston (born 1808), Dr. Eugene Foster of the University of Virginia found an exact match of certain portions of the DNA (the odds of a perfect match in a random sample are less than one in a thousand). In January 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation accepted the conclusion, supported by Foster's DNA evidence, that Jefferson and Hemings were sexual partners, and that they had between one and six children between 1790 and 1808.
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