| Episodes |
"Thomas, you are the father!": An Overview
Listen to "Through the Looking Glass" (20 minutes):
Until November 1, 1998, the official narrative of the Jefferson-Hemings relationship inscribed by historian James Parton over a century before -- that is, that there was no relationship and the Carr brothers were the likely fathers of the Hemings children -- enjoyed acceptance but an increasingly tenuous one. Though vigorously attacked from Fawn Brodie's unqualified acceptance not only of a relationship but a loving one in 1974 onward through Annette Gordon-Reed's trenchant deconstruction of previous interpretations in 1997, the official narrative survived, if only barely. In his 1997 award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson, for instance, Joseph Ellis reported that, "after five years mulling" over the evidence and -- ironically -- after first affirming that "on the basis of what we know now, we can never know," he concluded that "the likelihood of a liaison with Sally Hemings is remote," thus, in effect, siding with the "Virginia gentleman ethos" of the Jefferson defenders.
The need for prolonged mulling, however, ended dramatically with the Nature magazine headline blaring on this date that "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." And Ellis (who was the premier Jefferson scholar of the day) and co-writer Eric Lander immediately registered the advent of the tipping point in a companion Nature article:
For two centuries Thomas Jefferson's legacy has been haunted by the first US presidential sex scandal -- the charge of an illicit relationship with his mulatto slave Sally Hemings. From the day the story broke in a Richmond newspaper in 1802, "Tom and Sally" has become the longest running mini-series in American history. Because the evidence was all circumstantial, no authoritative resolution has been possible. Until today, that is.
In an instant, as it were, the Jefferson-Hemings controversy went through the looking glass. "Today" roles reversed. "It is fair to say that proponents of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison have the burden of proof," Annette Gordon-Reed had said in 1997. But as of "today" Ellis would say that the "likelihood of a long-standing sexual relationship . . . is now proven beyond a reasonable doubt." Henceforth, those denying the relationship would be the underdogs.
The tipping point of the controversy, the subject of this episode of our miniseries, was a DNA study suggested by Mrs. Winifred Bennett and performed by Dr. Eugene Foster on Jefferson, Hemings, Carr, and Woodson descendants. Here Foster sums up his findings: "The simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings are that Thomas Jefferson, rather than one of the Carr brothers, was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson, and that Thomas Woodson was not Thomas Jefferson's son." Samuel and Peter Carr, remember from episode 4, were identified as Sally's lovers by, respectively, Elizabeth Randolph Coolidge in 1858 and Thomas Jefferson Randolph (via Henry Randall) in 1868, and Tom Woodson was thought to be Sally's first child, the one conceived in Paris. Foster goes on to say that he "cannot completely rule out other explanations" -- and, indeed, we'll see that some qualifications were necessary -- but that "in the absence of historical evidence to support such possibilities, we consider them to be unlikely." In public consciousness, then, science had spoken, and media around the country and, in fact, around the world linked Jefferson and Hemings together under such headlines as the Boston Globe's "Modern Science Confirms Old Rumor." The primacy of the official narrative for all intents and purposes collapsed under the combined pressure of the god-like authority of modern science and the pervasiveness of modern media.
What to make of this new knowledge? Or, as Ellis put it, "What difference does it make?" The immediate commentary on the implications of the DNA results was dizzyingly varied. Gordon-Reed chided scholars for needing the science when "a more disciplined, rigorous and less prejudiced application of historical method could have yielded the same answer." William Safire wondered why the results were released so suspiciously close to important decisions on the impeachment of President Clinton for similar sexual dalliance and noted the "political spin" designed to save Clinton, whose middle name, after all, was "Jefferson." African American Orlando Patterson felt that the longevity of Jefferson's relationship with Sally "humanized" him, reduced his alienation among African Americans, made him "part of the family," and suggested national problem-solving possibilities of ethnic intermarriage and "ecumenical [racial] synthesis." Ellis saw Jefferson's reputation secure, maybe more "lustrous" than ever before; in fact, Jefferson has "metamorphosed into the new role model for our postmodern temperament . . . a 90s kind of guy." Richard Cohen, on the other hand, found that in humanizing Sally, the DNA results made Jefferson "harder, meaner, selfish -- an exploiter," a "diminished man" even though his "epic achievements" stand. And, Harold Barger, who aided in locating descendants for the study, vehemently recoiled at the way Thomas Jefferson was solely targeted by the DNA results when there were other males in the Jefferson line -- especially Jefferson's brother Randolph, of whom we will hear more in episode 16 -- who were candidates for the fatherhood of Sally's children.
It is true, as Barger makes clear, that some reins were needed on the rush to judgment in the general public consciousness: the DNA only proved that some Jefferson male fathered one of Hemings's children not that Thomas Jefferson fathered any one or all of Hemings's children. So, some more in-depth consideration of the findings was certainly necessary, for instance, before the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which operates Monticello and which might be thought of as the most visible guardian of the Jefferson image in the country, took a position on the implications of the DNA results. Foundation director Daniel Jordan immediately exhibited a generous open mind: "In the Jeffersonian tradition, the Foundation welcomes new information and insights. . . . The Foundation will evaluate carefully Dr. Foster's findings and any other relevant evidence on the subject; and then, in the Jefferson tradition, the Foundation will follow truth wherever it may lead us." Thus, the Foundation appointed the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Research Committee, chaired by Dianne Swann-Wright, a staff committee "that included four Ph.D.'s (one with advanced study in genetics) and an M.D." with a charge "(1) to gather and assess critically all relevant evidence about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; (2) to consult with outside experts as well as with two long-standing TJF advisory committees."
After a year of study, Jordan reported that "Although paternity cannot be established with absolute certainty, our evaluation of the best evidence available suggests the strong likelihood that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship over time that led to the birth of one, and perhaps all, of the known children of Sally Hemings." The nine "uncontested historical or scientific facts" on which the Research Committee based its conclusion included the DNA results, Hemings's birth patterns, Jeffferson's Monticello visitation patterns, explicit belief by contemporaries, Madison Hemings's memoir, the freeing of the Hemingses, the strong oral tradition, and the strong family resemblance. Reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that another Jefferson male fathered Hemings's children included lack of any other suspects besides the Carrs, lack of anyone else with sustained access to Sally for that long a period of time, and lack of any allegation that the Hemings children had more than one father. The report's final conclusion that "the implications of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson should be explored and used to enrich the understanding and interpretation of Jefferson and the entire Monticello community" was perhaps the most threatening to the Jefferson defenders, for it signaled support for the positive implementation of a profoundly revisionist history.
Shortly after this TJMF report and in direct response to it, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS) formed and immediately constituted its own research committee. This Jefferson-Hemings Scholars Commission, chaired by Robert F. Turner, took another year of study to report that "the allegation [that Jefferson was the father of one 'and perhaps all' the Hemings children] is by no means proven," with individual member responses ranging, with one exception, from "serious skepticism" to "almost certainly untrue." The Scholars Commission report mirrored the TJMF report, rebutting its nine major bases plus adding an examination of James Thomson Callender's contribution to the case for a Jefferson-Hemings relationship. But the report went substantially further in looking at such evidence against a relationship as the statements by Edmund Bacon and Elizabeth Randolph Coolidge, Jefferson's relationship with his daughters, his concern for his reputation, and his lack of concern for Sally Hemings in his will. Perhaps most significantly, however, the TJHS report considers in some detail the "other candidates" for paternity, those "more likely suspects" such as Jefferson's brother Randolph (more on him in episode 16), as well as advancing the idea of the multi-paternity of Sally's mother Betty's children to suggest that Sally was not monogamous and reminding us that the Carr brothers could still have been fathers of Sally's other children.
So, the best that can be said -- though it is a lot -- is that the DNA results propelled the Jefferson-Hemings controversy through the looking glass, completely reversing its poles, completely turning it around, but did not totally end it. The issue, in truth, may never be totally resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Miscegenation, especially by a "founder," for some just cuts too close to the bone. Henceforth, however, the story was less about Jefferson than about Sally and the Hemingses. The immediate reaction by Lander and Ellis was to think of the effect of the DNA on Jefferson's reputation, how the lesson of the DNA was to remind us that "Our heroes -- and especially presidents -- are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all of the frailties and imperfections that this entails." But other currents were bubbling, evident in the references to family by African Americans Patterson and Gordon-Reed. "The Jefferson-Hemings story is really more about family than just about sex," said Gordon-Reed, and gestating on the November 1, 1998 horizon was the apotheosis of Sally and the idealization of the domestic Tom and Sally in Tina Andrews' Sally Hemings film (2000) and Gordon-Reed's mammoth reconstruction project The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008).
