The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy

The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy by Robert F. Turner

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1G6BSMWJKHSE0?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

An “anti-racist” article condemning Thomas Jefferson as an undoubted and unquestionable pedophile rapist sparked an interest in me to dig into the vexed question of the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. It's hard to say what my mindset was before I read a few books on the issue. I probably thought that there was more evidence for the relationship than there was, mostly thanks to the confident tone of those who fall on the side of “Relationship? Yes.” What I learned was that the evidence for “the Relationship” is surprisingly weak - not non-existent, but nearly so.

Also, I was surprised to discover that Sally Hemings (“SH”) was white. The closest African or African-American that she could point to in her family was a grandmother on her mother's side, which made her 75% white. (In Nazi Germany, a Jew would have passed as German with that pedigree.) When Sally was given her liberty, she was subsequently listed as “free white” on local census rolls.

That is, parenthetically, a fascinating point. Race is defined as much by social status as ancestry. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson kept slaves who were racially white. One wishes that someone would follow up on this from a social history perspective. (BTW - this is not the only place this fact appears. The mystery in Puddinghead Wilson by Mark Twain involves the mix-up of a slave child with a master's child. Apparently, this kind of thing was not something unbelievable.)

This book was written by a consortium of scholars who took upon themselves the burden of reviewing and analyzing the evidence. The diversity of voices adds to the power of this book, although the same evidence and arguments are recapitulated because of the scarcity of evidence. Virtually all of the scholars came to the conclusion that charge of a sexual relationship between Hemings and Thomas Jefferson was not more probable than not on the basis of the evidence, although one did think the evidence rose to that level. That scholar - Paul Rahe - was impressed by the timing of SH's pregnancies with TJ's sojourns at Monticello, which normally occurred within the first month of his visits. Rahe acknowledges that we don't have affirmative evidence that SH was even at Monticello on those occasions, but also that we don't know that she wasn't. Ultimately, Rahe concludes:

“What we do know, however, is damning enough. Despite the distaste that he expressed for the propensity of slaveholders to abuse their power, Jefferson either engaged in such abuse himself or tolerated it on the part of one or more members of his extended family. In his private, as in his public, life, there was, for all his brilliance and sagacity, something dishonest, something self-serving and self-indulgent about the man.

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 352). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

This is a fair point, but, again, I would like to know more about the attitudes of the culture. Would TJ not have known about his white slaves having whiter children? Was there a concern about the sexual behavior of slaves? Were trysts among masters and slaves something that Jefferson knew about? Who knows. A lot is presumed rather than explained.

In the same vein, Rahe's conclusion has a scent of woke moral condemnation, which is not evidence and not a basis for weighing evidence. Even if Jefferson was self-indulgent, that doesn't make inadequate evidence more probable than not.

A lot of the arguments and evidence in this area is redundant, cumulative, and repetitive because there is so little evidence. Virtually nothing is known of SH. She is mentioned in passing by TJ's records perhaps two or three times. There are no letters from TJ to SH. SH is mentioned as immature by Abigail Adams in a single letter. No witness ever mentioned SH having any kind of relationship with TJ. We know that SH accompanied TJ's younger daughter to Paris as a chambermaid, which is where her immaturity was commented upon by Mrs. Adams, but nothing is known from the Paris period. We know that SH had six children. This is essentially the sum total of everything that is known about SH.

There are four bits of evidence in support of The Relationship, but each bit of evidence has a “defeater,” sometimes several.

First, there was the testimony in the form of slander written by James Thomson Callender, a political opponent of TJ - who was angry at not being given a federal office - claiming that TJ had a “more sable” son who would have been the right age if he had been conceived in Paris. The problem here is the bias of Callender and the fact that there was no Heming's son of the right age. There was a contender named Thomas Woodson, who was the right age at the time and whose family had a tradition of being descended from TH, but a DNA analysis from his descendants showed that they were not related to the Family Jefferson. If we can't trust Callender for his actual claim, why should we trust him at all?

Second, SH's son Madison Hemings in 1873 told a reporter that he was the son of TJ. The problem here is that other Hemings had a family tradition of being descended from an “uncle” of TJ (although probably TJ's younger brother.) Likewise, there was an eyewitness, Edmund Bacon, an overseer at Monticello, who testified that someone other than TJ left SH's room in the morning. Obviously, there are problems with Madison's credibility and recollection. There were a lot of reasons why Madison would have wanted to claim descent from TJ as a way of elevating his social status, and it seems very strange that the other branches of the family didn't get the message, plus who was this other guy visiting mom. Madison Hemings might simply have been recirculating the Callender slander as memory, which also happens when memory is involved.

Of course, he could have been right, but we don't know.

Third, there was the DNA analysis of the descendants of Eston Hemings, another son of SH. This analysis was touted as proving TJ's paternity, but it did no such thing. It simply establishes that the Heming family is related to the larger Jefferson family, perhaps through an uncle or younger brother.

Fourth, some statistical analysis has been done, generally indicating that SH got pregnant sometime around when TJ was at Monticello, although she stopped getting pregnant when TJ fully retired to Monticello, which seems like a problem. The fly in the ointment of this evidence is that when TJ was in residence at Monticello, so were his Jefferson-gene carrying relatives.

The bottom line is that we don't know. We certainly cannot say that the evidence for The Relationship is more probable than not and anyone who thinks they can has their finger on the scale for some reason other than an impartial interest in historical truth.

One problem I had with this and other books of this kind was that there is background evidence I would like to have to shed light on this conundrum. For example, what was the attitude of master-slave sex? Was it condemned as sinful or considered to be one of the privileges of the elite? I don't know. Where was SH's room in relation to TJ's room? Don't know. Where was the bedroom that Bacon saw the person other than TJ coming out of? Again, don't know. What did slave-owners say when they started noticing that their slaves were producing whiter slaves? Not a clue. Was that considered to be a problem or was it ignored? Don't know.

These are all issues that I would like to know more about.

Nonetheless, at the present time and on the strength of the evidence, I would agree that The Relationship might be something that actually happened, but it is in the realm of speculation on the evidence we have.

I want to call special attention to the contribution of David N. Mayer who observed:

I write my own separate report to state my views on the matter and to discuss the Jefferson-Hemings controversy in a broader context. As I see it, belief in the paternity allegation—which, to me, is quite literally a myth—is a symptom of a disturbing trend in the history profession in recent years, discussed below.

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 285). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.

We are now 20 years on and this trend has gotten worse.

Obviously, I sensed that there was a deep political game involved in this issue. I assumed that it was on the level of Marxists undermining American traditions. What I didn't realize was how banal and puerile the political partisanship was. The traction this new trend obtained was due to the momentary need to salvage a particularly lusty president from his own scandals, i.e., Clinton was being impeached:

“Thus began the “spin” on the DNA test results—and the most recent telling of the Jefferson-Hemings story. No doubt referring to his own book which portrayed Jefferson as an enigmatic “sphinx,” Professor Ellis wrote, “Recent work has also emphasized his massive personal contradictions and his dexterity at playing hide-and-seek within himself. The new evidence only deepens the paradoxes.” And, further evidencing new uses for the Jefferson image in modern American politics, Professor Ellis concluded, “Our heroes—and especially presidents—are not gods or saints, but flesh-and-blood humans, with all the frailties and imperfections that this entails.”20
The timing of the Nature article's publication—on the eve of the November 1998 Congressional elections and just weeks before the U.S. House of Representatives' vote to impeach President Bill Clinton—was not purely coincidental. Professor Ellis' accompanying article also noted, quite frankly, “Politically, the Thomas Jefferson verdict is likely to figure in upcoming impeachment hearings on William Jefferson Clinton's sexual indiscretions, in which DNA testing has also played a role.” In television interviews following release of the article, Professor Ellis elaborated on this theme; and Clinton's apologists made part of their defense the notion that every President—even Jefferson—had his “sexual indiscretions.” (It should be added that Ellis was among the so-called “Historians in Defense of the Constitution” who signed an October 1998 ad in the New York Times opposing Clinton's impeachment.)
Others besides Clinton apologists seized upon the alleged DNA “proof” of Jefferson paternity to advance their own ideological agendas. British journalists and commentators used the story much as they had in the 19th century, to denigrate American Revolutionaries by associating them with slaveholding. Thus, for example, Christopher Hitchens suggested in The Nation that Jefferson henceforth be described as “the slave-owning serial flogger, sex addict, and kinsman to ax murderers.” (One is reminded of reviews in the British press of the Mel Gibson movie, “The Patriot,” last summer. The Express noted that the real Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” on whom Gibson's Benjamin Martin character was based, “raped his slaves and hunted Red Indians for sport.”) And for many scholars of race and race relations in America, the Jefferson-Hemings story and reactions to it (particularly by those who continued to be skeptics) provided further evidence of the racism they say permeates American society. Indeed, for many, acceptance of the paternity thesis has become a kind of litmus test for “politically correct” views: those of us who continue to question it have been denounced as racially insensitive, if not racist. (For more on this, see the discussion of Annette Gordon-Reed's views, below.)

Turner, Robert F.. The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy (p. 291). Carolina Academic Press. Kindle Edition.


So, a partisan defense by a partisan masquerading as a scholar - one being fired for his own lies because he was so useful to the partisan left - and - voila!!!! - we mint new conventional wisdom that can't be questioned on pain of cancellation by “anti-racists.”

The monopolization of the academia by the Left has paid loathsome dividends.