Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemmings

[gumbomoop]

I volunteer to start this new thread, though my own enthusiasm for pursuing it is limited. But as it might draw passionate opinions, it is perhaps best to separate it from the already passionate thread on secession.

We start with these two posts from the secession thread:


I have no interest in starting a new thread, but I am curious why you feel so resolute that the Jefferson/Hemmings story is a myth, when there is a lot of circumstantial evidence and strong (but nowhere near certain) DNA evidence.


I am not a big fan of Jefferson, but I firmly believe the "evidence" against him is extremely circumstantial -- almost non-existant.

To begin with, the DNA provided that one of Sally Hemmings' sons was fathered by a male of the Jefferson line. But even the director of the 1998 DNA test asserted that the likelihood that Thomas Jefferson was the male involved was 12.5 percent.

The whole story started with a political attack dog named James Callender, who published in 1802 that Jefferson had a slave mistress named Sally and that her first born son was named Tom -- after the president. The trouble is that Sally never had a son named Tom. Later, a former slave named Tom Woodson claimed he was the Tom ... and the family narrative of the Woodson family was that Thomas Jefferson was the his father. But the 1998 DNA test that provided that Hemmings' youngest son Easton was descended from a Jefferson male, also proved that the Woodson line was not genetically linked to the Jefferson DNA.

Was Thomas Jefferson Easton's father? It's funny, but Easton's family never claimed that. Instead, in a 1847 Memoir of a Monticello Slave, describes how Jefferson's younger brother Randolph used to frequent the slave quarters at Monticello. Easton Hemmings and his descendents never claimded to be descended from the president -- their family oral history identified not Jefferson, but "an uncle."

The myth of Jefferson's paternity has been gathering steam since Fawn Brodie's absurd "psychological" proof in her 1974 biography.

It's a great story, but the evidence for it is ridiculously thin.

I'm not the biggest fan of Thomas Jefferson -- but I don't believe that Jefferson was the greatest hypocrite that ever lived, which he would be if he had sex with Sally Hemmings (or any other slave). He was the loudest and most ardent opponent of miscegenation.

I'm not 100% sure I'm up to date on the scholarly discussion of the DNA evidence. Still, until persuaded otherwise, I think the majority view among historians might be that there is evidence that Jefferson likely fathered one or more of Hemings's children.

So, essentially, I am substantially (but not totally) dissenting from Olympic Fan's post. First, Fawn Brodie's 1974 psychobiography was 2 decades ago superseded by Annette Gordon-Reed's brilliant historiographical study, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997). Gordon-Reed later published a Pulitzer-winning study, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008).

As to the 1998 DNA study, perhaps the most interesting development was the subsequent independent study of the DNA evidence undertaken in 2000 by the Jefferson Foundation at Monticello (not sure if this is its official designation). Here's link to the Report of the Research Committee on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:

https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/report-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings

The money quote from this Report's Conclusions is: "The DNA study, combined with multiple strands of currently available documentary and statistical evidence, indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he was most likely the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children appearing in Jefferson's records.

And here's link to a Minority Report:

https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/minority-report-monticello-research-committee-thomas-jefferson-and-sally

A money quote here is: "There is historical evidence of more or less equal stature on both sides of this issue that prevent a definitive answer as to Thomas Jefferson's paternity of Sally Hemings' son Eston Hemings or for that matter the other four of her children."

Now, I do not know whether subsequent DNA testing or other scientific and/or scholarly research has produced a different consensus.

As to Olympic Fan's view that Jefferson was not "the greatest hypocrite that ever lived," I would not contest that view, principally because neither as word nor concept can "hypocrisy" possibly cover the many, many complexities of Jefferson's decades-long confrontation with race and slavery. There's a whole historiography of Jefferson's complicated, contradictory, often agonized views on race and slavery. That the author of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves might be labeled inconsistent, or hypocritical, or something not good. Yet that is muddied by the intriguing fact that Jefferson included in his draft of the Declaration a lengthy complaint about slavery. Because of protests from Georgia and South Carolina, and from some Northern slave-trade interests, this antislavery blast at King George III was removed from the final Declaration of Independence. More than merely an ironic tidbit and historical factoid, but I'll leave it at that.

[gus]

...extremely circumstantial -- almost non-existant.

As an aside: people use "circumstantial" to devalue evidence. However, circumstantial evidence can be very powerful. Phone metadata is extremely circumstantial, for example, but the NSA saw great value in collecting it. Paraphrasing a talk I saw recently on cyber security, if you know that Anna made several calls to planned parenthood, and then made a call to Betty, who then called a doctor and her office, you can reasonably guess that Betty is getting an abortion. And you can know this without hearing a single word from the conversations.

But I digress from my digression. Thanks for the response -- I don't know enough about Jefferson/Hemmings to debate. I was just curious, as you were so emphatic about it.

[Olympic Fan]

I want to make my position clear.

My hobby is collecting books about various historical conspiracies or controversies. I have dozens of books about the Shakespeare Authorship question, the Roosevelt knew-about-Pearl Harbor in advance theory, the JFK assassination debate and several more (haven't gotten into did the Queen have Diana killed or did Bush engineer the 9/11 attacks?)

My general approach to all these theories is based on a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Grand theorems demand grand proofs"

In most of these cases, I don't see "grand proofs" ... in fact the more I study these issues, the flimsier the evidence seems to be. I'll go to the mat over the idea that Shakespeare -- the actor from Stratford -- wrote Shakespeare (and not the Earl of Oxford or any of the other claimants), that Roosevelt didn't know about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance and that Oswald acted alone.

I'm actually less certain that Jefferson never fathered a child by Sally Hemmings. If you asked me in legal terms, I wouldn't say I believed that beyond a shadow of a doubt ... but by the preponderance of the evidence. I would argue very strongly that the defenders of the theory have no come close to proving their case beyond a shadow of a doubt in that direction. I would argue that they haven't proved it by a preponderance of the evidence, but I understand that's more of a question.

I cited the Fawn Brodie book earlier, not because it's strong evidence that Jefferson raped Sally Hammings (and that's what it would have been had they had sex), but because that's when the theory entered the mainstream, even though her "evidence" was a absurd reading of Jefferson's journal (much like the Oxfordians read the Shakespeare plays and try to relate the stories to incidents in Oxford's life).

But before Brodie in 1974, the story that Jefferson fathered a child with Hemmings was considered a historical myth -- originated by Callender as payback for Jefferson's refusal to give him a government job. Before her biography, no reputable historian believed the Callender story. Since then, the popular pendulum has swung 180 degrees and it's now generally accepted that Jefferson kept Hemmings as a mistress.

I still don't see any compelling evidence for this. I guess the turning point was the 1998 DNA test, which was originally reported as "proving" that Jefferson fathered Hemmings' fifth child. Dr. Eugene Foster, who headed the study, told US News and World Report that there was less than a 0.1 percent chance that the DNA match was coincidental.

Suddenly, everybody "knew" that Jefferson fathered Eston Hemmings.

Only it turned out that the first reports from Dr. Foster were greatly exaggerated. He didn't have a complete DNA match -- he had only a Y-chromosome match that indicated that Eston Hemmings' descendants had descended from a male in the Jefferson line - and there were seven adult Jefferson males living in and around Monticello at the time Hemmings was fathered. Foster later clarified his results, admitting that there was just a 12.5 percent chance -- based on DNA -- that Thomas Jefferson was the father. But that didn't get the front magazine covers and the 6 p.m. news coverage that his first report did.

The DNA evidence showed one more thing -- there was no DNA match with descendants of Thomas Woodson. That was important because there was a strong oral history in the Woodson family that they descended from the ex-President. Oddly, there was no such narrative in the Eston Hemmings family -- Easton was quoted in 1847 as saying his father was "an uncle" of Jefferson.

But fired by the DNA mania, historians have spent a lot of time checking old letters and journals to show that Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello at about the time Eston Hemmings was conceived. Of course, there is equally strong evidence that Randolph Jefferson was there at the same time ... and Uncle Randolph (as he was known at Monticello) was described in an 1847 memoir as spending nights in the slave quarters.

Is that proof that Randolph, not Thomas, fathered Eston Hemmings? No ... but I think it's stronger evidence (based on 1847 accounts -- long before any respectable historians were trying to make the case that Thomas Jefferson was the father).

There's so much more ... can I suggest similarities in all of my favorite conspiracy theories -- the same lies and mistakes keep being repeated over and over without challenge.

Allow me to offer you one in the Jefferson/Hemmings case -- If you've read anything about the case, you've read that Jefferson freed Hemmings' two youngest children. Evidence that he fathered the two children? Well, it's true that he did free the two children -- but what isn't usually reported is that he freed all but two of the known grandchildren of Betsy Hemmings (the mother of Sally. Betsy did not live at Monticello -- nobody has suggested that he fathered any children with Betsy, she was described as his daughter's "Beloved Mammy" and lived with her family). Several of the other Betsy Hemmings' grandchildren inherited land and property -- but not the two Sally Hemmings' children ... and Sally herself was never freed.

Again, nothing I have written is proof of Jefferson's innocence in this case ... but I hate the way the popular wisdom has decided that the Jefferson-Hemmings relationship is a proven fact. It's a great story -- celebrated in film and fiction -- and maybe has appeal for those who see it as a romance ... or by those who want to denigrate Jefferson. But it is not a proven fact ... not nearly so.

[BD80]

... can I suggest similarities in all of my favorite conspiracy theories -- the same lies and mistakes keep being repeated over and over without challenge. ...

Did you mean to post this in the 2016 Presidential Race thread?