Letters

From the April 1999 issue

In Defense of Jefferson

Nick Gillespie's editorial "The Slave and the Intern" (January) omits a number of relevant facts.

First, Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Thomas Jefferson's late and much loved wife. Having children by her was a way of continuing his late wife's heredity. While this does not excuse a sexual relationship in which one party could not legally give or withhold consent, it is certainly mitigating. Sally Hemings spent her time in the Jefferson household and nursed both his wife and daughter through terminal illnesses. She was more a family member than a slave, and it is likely that the relationship was de facto consensual.

Thomas Jefferson did consider freeing his slaves, but the commonwealth of Virginia mandated that slave owners put up a bond for each slave freed so that no former slave would be on the public dole. Jefferson was land poor and could not comply.

Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers realized that a stand against slavery would have at that time prevented or significantly delayed the formation of a United States. They were anxious to form a nation with a derivative sense of nationhood. Absent that, the colonies might prove easy prey for European powers.

Thomas Jefferson did not commit perjury nor did he obstruct justice vis-à-vis his affair with Sally Hemings. There is no analogy with our current president. When Jefferson ran for his second term, his opponents made liberal use of his affair to attack him. It was no secret. I suspect that the timely appearance of the article in Nature was motivated more by its political spin than by any other factor.

Gloria M. Stewart
Thousand Oaks, CA
[e-mail]

I expect more of REASON than editorials based on New York Times and Washington Post editorials. Had Nick Gillespie chosen to do his research elsewhere, he might have found that our third president has no acknowledged living direct descendants. The DNA samples used in the study were taken from descendants of Mr. Jefferson's uncle, Field Jefferson. Eugene A. Foster, the head of the team of geneticists who conducted the study, told The Washington Times that "the simplest, most easily explained, and most probable explanation of our data is that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson."

The last three sentences of the Nature article suggest the weakness of this conclusion. "We cannot completely rule out other explanations of our findings based on illegitimacy in various lines of descent. For example, a male-line descendant of Field Jefferson could possibly have illegitimately fathered an ancestor of the presumed male-line descendant of Eston. But in the absence of historical evidence to support such possibilities, we consider them to be unlikely."

Given the times, the lack of evidence is hardly surprising. Based on a career as a criminal investigator, the only possible summation of this evidence I could report would be that the evidence proves it is more likely than not that someone in the Jefferson family was the father of Eston Hemings. There is no evidence that any male Jefferson had greater access to Sally Hemings than Thomas Jefferson, but neither is there evidence that no other Jefferson male had access to Sally Hemings. Hearsay evidence does exist that a nephew of Thomas Jefferson visited Monticello with some frequency and resided there for some period. The precise timing of such visits and residence is not established.

The first charge that Thomas Jefferson sired a child by Sally Hemings was published on September 1, 1802, in the Richmond Recorder. Staff writer James Callender alleged that Jefferson fathered Sally's eldest son, Tom. It should be noted that the Recorder was as much a foe of Thomas Jefferson's presidency as Salon is a friend of William Jefferson Clinton's presidency.

Callender's article further stated that Thomas Woodson's looks bore a "striking though sable resemblance to those of the president himself." Jefferson did not personally respond to these charges, but he never responded to attacks on his character by newspapers on principle. He later did make statements that indirectly denied Callender's charges. The Nature study showed that the known descendants of Thomas Woodson do not carry the distinctive Y chromosome and are not the descendants of any Jefferson. Callender died in 1803; Eston Hemings was not born until 1808 and could not have been the child Callender referred to.

As Dr. Foster told The Washington Times, reporters "went too far" in the conclusions they reported. Geneticist Carl Ladd, supervisor of the DNA unit of the Connecticut State Police, told the Times the study "doesn't mean bingo as to whether Jefferson is or is not the father." As for the accompanying Nature article by MIT geneticist Eric S. Lander and Mt. Holyoke historian Joseph J. Ellis, Dr. Foster rejected their conclusions, telling the Times, "They unnecessarily politicized something that was intended to be a piece of scientific work."

The reporting of this issue served the purposes of some. To see your publication adopt the lack of critical thinking which characterizes the "major media" belies the title of the magazine and disappoints me.

Edward F. Haertel
Scurry, TX
[e-mail]

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