Letters

From the April 1999 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

It's disappointing to see REASON join the ranks of such media sources as U.S. News & World Report and National Public Radio in falsely reporting that a recent DNA study proves that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings. Contrary to Nick Gillespie's assertion, the DNA study reported in Nature does not provide "irrefutable evidence," nor does it "settle" the matter of the paternity of Hemings' children. Rather, the Nature article is only the latest chapter of a nearly 200-year-old story of how the allegation has been used by various groups to exploit Jefferson symbolically to advance their own partisan agendas.

The paternity allegation against Jefferson originated in 1802 as a libel raised by James Callender, a hatchet journalist and disappointed job seeker, and spread by Jefferson's political opponents in the bitterly partisan Federalist press. The story then was resurrected about 50 years later by abolitionist Whig and Republican newspapers that found in the oral tradition of the Hemings descendants a convenient vehicle for bashing Jefferson and the Democratic Party.

Today, as Nick Gillespie notes, the supposed confirmation of the Hemings story is being used by Bill Clinton's apologists as part of their "every President has done it" defense. In fact, what the genetic study by Eugene Foster found was a match in Y chromosome DNA between descendants of Sally Hemings' youngest male child, Eston, and descendants of Field Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's paternal uncle. By itself, the study suggests only that a lineal male descendant of Thomas Jefferson's paternal grandfather was the father of Eston Hemings. Genetically, the test results cannot positively show paternity by Thomas Jefferson; it's equally possible that the father was Thomas's brother, Randolph, or one of Randolph's six sons, who were frequently at Monticello and for whom there's at least as strong circumstantial evidence of paternity as there is for Jefferson himself.

The possibility that Randolph Jefferson or one of his sons was the true father of Eston Hemings has been overlooked by virtually all scholars who have written about the Sally Hemings story, including historian Joseph Ellis and law professor Annette Gordon-Reed, who devotes much of her book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, to casting doubt on the claim by various Jefferson scholars that the real father of Hemings' children was one of Jefferson's nephews, Peter and Samuel Carr, the sons of Jefferson's sister. Dr. Foster's study weighs against paternity by the Carr brothers, just as it also finds no Jefferson DNA match with the descendants of Sally Hemings' oldest son, Thomas Woodson, who was the subject of the original allegation. Undeterred, Woodson's descendants have noted that the DNA evidence could have been lost through subsequent illegitimacy in the Woodson line--the fundamental flaw that casts doubt on all the results of Foster's study, including the findings of no match with Carr descendants as well as the match with Field Jefferson descendants.

In short, the DNA tests prove nothing. It's understandable why Hemings' descendants so passionately wish the DNA study to confirm the oral tradition they've taken as a matter of faith. It's even understandable why leftist historians today might want to use the story of Jefferson's "slave mistress" somehow to defend Bill Clinton's use of presidential power for sexual gratification. What's less clear is why so many other Americans--including many reputable scholars--continue to be so obsessed with the Sally Hemings story. Is it just because it adds additional tragedy to the irony that Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and champion of individual rights, was himself a slaveowner? Or could it be that by focusing on Jefferson's private life, they'd like to distract us from his public legacy, including the clear, undisputed evidence of Jefferson's ideas about limited constitutional government?

David N. Mayer
Columbus, OH
[e-mail]

Nick Gillespie plays somewhat fast and loose with the historical record in his portrayal of the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. First, Mr. Gillespie insinuates that Jefferson coerced Hemings into having this relationship. What evidence is there for this? Surely not the bare fact that Hemings bore Jefferson a child, for a child can be the product of consensual sex. While Hemings' status as a slave suggests the possibility that she was raped, there is also the possibility that human passions may have stirred the hearts of Thomas and Sally to transcend the roles of master and slave, and face each other as lovers instead. We just don't know enough about their relationship to condemn the sexual aspects of it as exploitative.

Mr. Gillespie further argues that the failure of Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers to abolish slavery is a "moral failure of the first rank" in view of the fact that abolition was widely debated during Jefferson's lifetime but not adopted. However, Mr. Gillespie neglects to tell his readers that Jefferson was engaged in this debate on the abolitionist side. Specifically, Jefferson advocated gradual emancipation coupled with a return of ex-slaves to Africa, a process he hoped would keep the peace and minimize dislocations in the economy. It is clear that he had no desire to deny the fruits of liberty to Sally's descendants; the opprobrium for that falls on those contemporaries of Jefferson who refused to support the various plans put forward for emancipation.

To be sure, Jefferson's advocacy of emancipation doesn't excuse his own failure to compensate and manumit his own slaves. However, this particular moral shortcoming was well known long before Jefferson's paternity of one of Hemings' children was proven. The confirmation of the Jefferson-Hemings affair does not diminish Jefferson further, though it does seem to unduly provoke certain modern observers who are uncomfortable with the reality of interracial relationships.

Vincent Cook
Berkeley, CA
[e-mail]

Nick Gillespie replies: There is some verbal slippage in my editorial about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. In the first paragraph, I wrote of "seemingly irrefutable evidence" that Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings' children. In my second paragraph, however, I eschewed any qualifications whatsoever, a conclusion not fully supported by the genetic analysis published last year in Nature by pathologist Eugene A. Foster.

Edward F. Haertel is right that Foster has taken journalists to task for their less-than-careful interpretation of his work. While Jefferson's paternity has not been proven beyond all doubt, it remains, I think, the most likely interpretation of the available data, both genetic and historical. As Foster himself wrote in a letter to Nature that criticized the journal's sensationalistic presentation of his findings, "When we embarked on this study we knew that the results could not be conclusive, but we hoped to obtain some objective data that would tilt the weight of the evidence in one direction or another. We think we have provided such data and that the modest, probabilistic interpretations we have made are tenable at present."

In any case, as I emphasized in my piece, Jefferson's probable parental status only adds to what I called the "scandalous paradox" of his life: simultaneously articulating universal human rights while owning slaves. As I made clear in my editorial, I find historian Joseph J. Ellis and geneticist Eric S. Lander's cheap, partisan use of Foster's study to somehow exonerate Bill Clinton nothing short of grotesque. But I disagree emphatically with David N. Mayer that dwelling on Jefferson's paradox is only a means by which historians can "distract" us from Jefferson's notions of limited government.

Such a motive hardly exhausts the reasons why people might brood over such a massive contradiction in one of the most important figures in U.S. history. Slavery, as Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. and others have pointed out, "stood out as the most direct challenge to American liberalism" and it remains intriguing and disturbing that Jefferson--of all people--could have participated so actively in it even as he acknowledged its absolute illegitimacy. I feel no need to save Jefferson from his own hypocrisy even as I recognize that he articulated the rights by which his actions could be fully condemned (or, for that matter, a slave revolt justified). If nothing else, his life underscores the need to be a nation of laws and not of men. Indeed, Gloria M. Stewart and Vincent Cook suggest reasons why Jefferson did not free his slaves that do little more than illustrate his unwillingness to sacrifice his material well- being and position for his ideals.

Stewart suggests that the Jefferson-Hemings "relationship" was "de facto consensual," which may well have been the case. But it hardly seems a feather in Jefferson's cap that he may have only bedded those slaves who wanted to sleep with him. Cook's suggestion that continued attention to the relationship is due to "modern observers" who are "uncomfortable with the reality of interracial relationships" similarly ignores the fact that the troubling aspect of the relationship has nothing to do with race and everything to do with slavery.