Originally Posted by
Olympic Fan
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.