“Jefferson to a slave child.”
That story has been going around for a number of years. Sally Hemings grew up in the Jefferson house and did, 6 years after Jefferson’s wife died, have an affair with Jefferson in France and did bore him children in time according to the different studies.
People wonder why he didn’t free her but according to the laws at that time in Virginia, a freed slave had to leave the state and she would have been homeless and living in very unsafe conditions. And mixed marriages were unlawful in Virginia at that time.
Hemings was of mix race and was Jefferson’s passed wife half sister. So the only way he could have taken care of her was for her to remain a slave. She was freed by Jefferson’s daughter along with her family after his death. But that was in later years and the laws were being stretched a lot.
As for the DNA, the design and methodology of the DNA analysis reported by Dr. Eugene Foster et al. in the journal Nature is sound and straightforward and meets the current standards of the scientific community. But this study was done not with Thomas Jefferson DNA, but with in line descendants and a matching of the chromosomes. The only thing they did come up with was some chromosomes that matched the Jefferson line. Blurred.
rwood
“Hemings was of mix race and was Jefferson’s passed wife half sister. So the only way he could have taken care of her was for her to remain a slave. She was freed by Jefferson’s daughter along with her family after his death.”
Jefferson freed ten slaves, five while alive, five in his will. Eight of the ten were the children or kin of Sally Hemings. When Sally was freed, she went to live with two of her sons, near Charlottesville. They had been freed by Jefferson before his death. In the 1830 census, Sally and her sons are listed as white.
On a side note: The folks that maintain & operate Monticello are restoring the bedroom that Sally Hemings lived in. Her room was close to Jefferson’s bedroom.
I looked up Sally Hemings. She was an octoroon, (one eighth black) and paintings of her depicts Sally as a beautiful woman who, in our times, a white man of taste would be proud to have on his arm.
There’s also the question of which one of the Jefferson brothers fathered the black Jefferson line.
As for Washington’s dentures, he had lost all his natural teeth by age 30. He had several dentures made by different dentists, but only the one made with hippopotamus ivory allowed him to chew comfortably.
Probably the reason Washington was reluctant to free his slaves.