Giving Thomas Jefferson the Business: The Jefferson-Hemings Hoax

In today’s America, a race hoax industry manned by black activists and their white benefactors in the media, politics, and academia produces one outrage after another, with the aim of denigrating white heroes, elevating often obscure blacks, making black racists rich and powerful, and waging race war.

So it is with the smear invented in 1802, and in recent years conscripted anew to sully the name of arguably the most brilliant of all of America's Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). The Jefferson-Hemings Hoax claims, without any evidence, that the third president, renaissance man, and author of the Declaration of Independence fathered the children of slave Sally Hemings (1773-1835). Hoaxers seek to drag Jefferson through the mud, expropriate his legacy on behalf of Hemings' descendants, and supplant scholarship with Afrocentric propaganda. The perpetrators of the Jefferson-Hemings hoax seek, without firing a single shot, to rob the American people of their patrimony.

In July, the New York Times published articles by Jefferson descendant, Lucian Truscott IV, and Times staffers James Dao and Brent Staples, insisting that “most everyone knows” (Truscott) that Jefferson had fathered some or all of Hemings’ children. Dao alleged that “compelling” DNA evidence existed, while Staples spoke of a “new reality” that vindicated the claims made for generations by “the black oral tradition.”

Truscott, Dao, and Staples all left out of their tales, that there is no evidence that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings ever were lovers, that based on genetic evidence, any one of at least 25 men on Jefferson’s side of the family may have fathered one or more of Hemings’ children (Jefferson family historian Herbert Barger argues persuasively that Jefferson’s brother, Randolph, was Hemings’ lover.), and that the Jefferson paternity story was born as the fabrication of a disappointed office seeker (James Thomson Callender) with a history of libeling the Founding Fathers. Truscott and Staples resorted instead to insinuating that only a racist would deny the story.

The same race-baiting strategy prevails in academia, where scholar David N. Mayer observes, “…among many proponents of the Jefferson paternity claim there has emerged a truly disturbing McCarthyist-like inquisition that has cast its pall over Jefferson scholarship today. Questioning the validity of the claim has been equated with the denigration of African Americans and the denial of their rightful place in American history.”

Here’s what is known: Thomas Jefferson owned a slave named Sally Hemings. Hemings bore at least six children, but otherwise, little is known about her. During Hemings’ childbearing years, not even within the Jefferson clan, was she known as Thomas Jefferson’s lover.

In 1798, scandal-mongering newspaper editor James T. Callender, was imprisoned by President John Adams, under the Sedition Act. When Jefferson was elected president, and Callender freed, Callender demanded the job of postmaster of Richmond, Va. The demand was also a veiled threat. Although Jefferson had been Callender’s benefactor, he refused to meet the latter’s demand. Callender responded, in 1802, by loosing his libel on the world, claiming that Jefferson had a slave “concubine” named “Sally,” with whom he had fathered a child named “Tom.” (There is no evidence Hemings then had a son named Tom; her son, Thomas Eston, was not born until 1808.) Callender sought unsuccessfully to destroy Jefferson politically. In 1805, Jefferson privately denied the claim, and the myth died off.

After Jefferson’s death, propagandists periodically dug up the Callender hoax.

In 1954, racist Ebony magazine editor, Lerone Bennett Jr. (who later, in Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, would claim that African seafarers had reached America before Europeans did), revived the hoax in an Ebony story.

In the 1970s, the myth was recycled by white “psychohistorian” Fawn Brodie, who simply projected her whimsical speculations onto the historical record.

The modern turning point in the hoax came with black law professor Annette Gordon-Reed’s 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Gordon-Reed uncritically accepted certain black oral traditions, heaped abuse on leading Jefferson biographers, and misrepresented the contents of an 1858 letter by Jefferson’s granddaughter, Ellen Randolph Coolidge, to her husband, in which Coolidge had denied the possibility of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison.

Bryan Craig, research librarian at the Jefferson Library, at Monticello, Jefferson’s estate, faxed this reporter a photocopy of the original Coolidge letter.

The letter actually said, "His [Jefferson’s] apartments had no private entrance not perfectly accessible and visible to all the household. No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be there and none could have entered without being exposed to the public gaze."

In Prof. Gordon-Reed’s hands, the second sentence changed, as if by magic, to "No female domestic ever entered his chambers except at hours when he was known not to be in the public gaze."

Gordon-Reed’s changes turned the letter’s meaning on its head, supporting claims that Jefferson could have had secret trysts with Hemings. Either Gordon-Reed committed one of the most dramatic copying errors in the annals of academia, or one of the most egregious acts of academic fraud of the past generation.

Ironically, it was Prof. Gordon-Reed, who politely, promptly, directed me to the Jefferson Library, where I obtained a copy of the original Coolidge letter. After I e-mailed her three times about the discrepancy, Prof. Gordon-Reed finally responded, “As to the discrepancy, there was an error in transcription in my book. It was corrected for future printings.”

In January, 2000, a panel of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (TJMF, since renamed the Thomas Jefferson Foundation), which owns Jefferson’s Monticello home, released its Monticello report claiming there was a “strong likelihood” that Jefferson had fathered ALL of Hemings’ children.

The “scholars” who prepared the tendentious, 2000 Monticello report, led by Prof. Gordon-Reed’s reported friends, Dianne Swann-Wright and Lucia Stanton, could not be bothered to study the original Coolidge letter, and instead cited the false version published in Gordon-Reed’s book. Likewise, in 2000, Boston PBS station, WGBH, presented a “documentary,” Jefferson’s Blood, which perpetuated the hoax. The Monticello Report still cites the altered Coolidge letter (on p. 6, under "Primary Sources", and the PBS/WGBH web site for Jefferson’s Blood still has the phony version posted, in its entirety,, three years after it was proven to be false, a practice typical of the Jefferson-Hemings hoax industry as a whole.

While in her book, Prof. Gordon-Reed purports not to take a position on whether Jefferson and Hemings were lovers, she takes the lawyer’s tack of “Plan B” made famous by the TV show, The Practice. She attacks all of the most celebrated white biographers of Jefferson, such as Dumas Malone, while accepting at face value dubious black oral traditions. Thus does Prof. Gordon-Reed set up the reader to fall for the hoax, with the false Coolidge letter providing the knockout punch. Supportive reviewers insisted that Gordon-Reed had proved the “possibility” of such an affair, ignoring the fact that unlike fiction, history is about what DID transpire, not what COULD HAVE transpired.

The party of tenured academic hoaxers now insists that the burden of proof rests on those who deny the existence of a Jefferson-Hemings liaison, to prove a negative! And so does the politics of racism enjoy yet another triumph over the truth.

In November, 1998, Nature magazine published an article based on the research of a team of scientists led by Dr. Eugene Foster, with the dishonest title, “Jefferson Fathered Slave’s Last Child.”

Although Foster & Co. could not possibly have confirmed (as opposed to disconfirming) Jefferson’s paternity, they leaped over the evidence to Foster’s desired conclusion: “The simplest and most probable explanations for our molecular findings "are that Thomas Jefferson … was the father of Eston Hemings Jefferson [sic] …”

Foster & Co. studied DNA from male-line descendants of Thomas Jefferson’s paternal uncle, Field Jefferson (who would have the same male Y chromosome as Thomas Jefferson), and from male-line descendants of Hemings’ last son, Eston, determining that one Jefferson male was Eston’s father. But that left at least 25 Jefferson men as candidates!

(An accompanying article in Nature by liberal historians Joseph Ellis and Eric Lander, sought to exploit the hoax, to rescue the authors’ sexually compromised hero, Bill Clinton.)

Descendants of Sally Hemings' son, Madison, refused to permit Madison's son, William, to be exhumed. Such cooperation would have resulted either in Madison's being shown to be the offspring of some male-line Jefferson, or of his being genetically excluded from the Jefferson line.

But male-line descendants of slave Thomas Woodson, whose family oral tradition insists he was born to Jefferson and Hemings, were genetically excluded from the Jefferson line. (The Thomas C. Woodson Family Association has ignored the finding.) Woodson has been assumed by the hoaxers to be the slave whom James T. Callender claimed was Hemings' first child (“Tom”). Either Woodson was not Hemings' son, or Hemings was not monogamous. If the former case is true, James T. Callender was a complete and utter liar. If the latter case is true, black oral traditions and contemporary pseudo-scholarship that have claimed that Hemings carried on an almost 40-year, monogamous love affair with Thomas Jefferson are refuted, and Hemings was not involved with ANY Jefferson male in late 1780s Paris, the time and place the legend insists the affair began.

Unscrupulous journalists and professors immediately insisted that the Foster study had “proven” that Jefferson was the father of Hemings’ children. The spirit of James T. Callender was alive and well.

The other source of claims of Jefferson’s paternity is the “black oral tradition.” However, the hoaxers have ignored Hemings descendants’ mutually contradictory oral traditions, the DNA evidence, the fact that Eston Hemings never claimed to be Jefferson’s child, and scholars’ persuasive argument that the “black oral tradition” that insists on Jefferson’s paternity, is itself the bastard offspring of the Callender hoax.

Racist black professors and journalists, and their elite white allies, now insist that black oral history be given pride of place over documentary evidence. But oral history has always been the stuff of myth, and in the case of the black tradition, often racist myth. Relying on “oral history” would open the door to instant historical rewrites through contemporary black race hoaxes.

Scandalized by the TJMF’s conduct, a group of scholars formed a blue-ribbon Scholars Commission. Excepting one dissent, its members found no evidence to support the Hemings story. Dissenter Paul A. Rahe, determined that although it was for him somewhat likelier than not that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings (1808-?), ultimately the case was inconclusive. The Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society was also formed, and in 2001 published the invaluable book, The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty, that is highly critical of the Foster and TJMF reports, and accompanying media and academic circus.

The Jefferson-Hemings story is a case study in the use of scholarly and journalistic fraud and racial intimidation by people for whom the written word functions solely as a weapon in a race war. The Jefferson-Hemings hoaxers seek to steal America’s history, and replace it with a counterfeit version, in order to oppress America’s white majority.

Let me begin by saying that I am not completely convinced that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children- I would say that I am 60/40 towards believing that he was. I responded to this thread because the author was, IMO, overly certain that he was not the father, and I tend to cringe when I see either 100% yes or no- we simply cannot be sure.

I am assuming that all of Sally's children had the same father, true (I will get to Woodson in a moment), simply because almost all accounts assume she did (or maybe two at most). Certainly, those who sought to clear Jefferson would have pointed out that she slept around if she did- she was a black woman and a slave, and if it were true it would been in their favor to do so. Also, it seems to me that she would have had more children if she was with lots of men- she had, if I recall, six in a period of eighteen years. And again, she only got pregnant when Jefferson was around, despite the fact that during this time he was hardly at Monticello as Sec of State, VP, and President. Now it is possible that she was pregnant more times and suffered miscarriages- but it seems funny to me that babies who made to birth were all conceived while Jefferson was around. In my opinion, Jefferson (Thomas or Randolph or someone else) who she was with was probably the only man that fathered the children, but there is no definite proof. As for Woodson, when I did research on this topic for a school paper sometimes before the DNA results, I read about Woodson. We know that Jefferson fathered Woodson but we assume that Sally mothered Woodson. In fact, there is no evidence of a slave in Thomas Woodson (or Hemings) at Monticello born in 1790. Jefferson kept excellent records on his slaves (which how we know when the other Hemings were born) in his Farm Book, yet he is not in the book. In addition, Madison Heming's account indicates that the baby Sally was carrying upon her arrival in Virginia from France died at birth or soon after. So there is a serious question, IMO whether Woodson is Sally's son.

Unfortunately, we cannot test the other children, since the test requires a unbroken line of Y-chromosomes. Of the five children commonly discussed, Woodson, I already talked about, Beverly and Harriet (as a daughter, naturally there is no Y-chromosome to test) passed for white as adult so their descendent believe themselves to be white and probably have no clue about being a decendent of a black slave. Madison lived as a black person, but his Y-chromosome line was extinguished generations ago. (Although, as the article points out, they still could test the body of his son). Eston also passed for white, but the Jefferson/Hemings story remained in their family so they were easy to find.

Sorry for the long post, I just love history and I am only my vacation from law school, so forgive me. The whole topics is interesting to us, because it is an historical mystery and because to 21th century society, it contains two of the major obsessions of our time- race and sex. But certainly true or untrue it could never diminish the accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson- those are far too important and stand the test of time, long after people stop caring about who he slept with.

We know that Jefferson fathered Woodson

Not true. DNA testing showed Woodson was conclusively NOT fathered by any Jefferson male.

There is a William B Hemings, who died in 1910, who could be exhumed and DNA probably obtained (the Jefferson family asked it be done), but the Hemings descendents have said "no."

There is no more reason to believe Sally Hemings had children by one man only than there is to believe she had children by many men. The Carrs confessed to fathering some of the children, and there is contemporary evidence (a former slave's memoir) that Randolph was busy cavorting with the slaves. He was something of a ne'er-do-well in any event. What is more natural and plausable after an evening dancing and fiddling in the cabins than to bed a comely wench? Far more natural and plausable than sneaking down (or sneaker her up to the house) after a formal dinner family and distinguished visitors from abroad. You are correct that we cannot be completely certain, but it seems to me Randolph, who was probably present when Sally conceived Eston, is a far more likely candidate than Thomas.

I'm sorry...I am a bad typist and I meant of course he DID NOT father Woodson. Is William Hemings's Madison's son? Yes, he would be helpful to test him as well. I just argue that she would have been with men closer to the plantation, especially if she was pretty- her mother Betty was also reputed to be beautiful, and she had fourteen children- literally one every other year with four different men.

Far more natural and plausable than sneaking down (or sneaker her up to the house) after a formal dinner family and distinguished visitors from abroad.

Wasn't Sally a house slave, if I recall? Most of the Hemings were house slaves.

I am very supicious of your post. The primary reason is your use of the word misogny (Of or characterized by a hatred of women.) for miscegenation( The interbreeding of different races or of persons of different racial backgrounds.) Pardon my suspicion, but one intimately familiar with the issue as you say you are, would be unlikely to make that mistake.

You post while true in all respects fails to give due weight to the the probability that Jefferson is the father of Hemming's child. As you say conception can occur from when circumstance. It also true that the statistical likelyhood increases dramatically with multiple efforts.

If you compare the number of possible opportunites of other genetic candidates with those of Jefferson the statistical probabilities of Jefferson being the father of Hemmings child are dramatically larger. It isn't ultimately definitive But if you had to bet the deed to your home which is the strongest probability?..Jefferson..by far.

Does it really matter?
I don't see this as particularly slanderous, nor did the acusations seem to have hurt him during his lifetime. I don't think the revelations that were acknowledged true today about Strom Thurmans 'love child' are going to damage his reputation.
Whether we are speaking of Thurman or Jefferson, it is a non-issue.
Thomas Jefferson was a radical in every sense of the word. It was not until the 20th Century that norms had changed enough that even the Democrat Party wanted to claim him as one of their own.

No one is gonna prove any of this either way.

It's some kind of weird control thing, as in controlling the writing of American history. Also, Jeffeson was opposed to race-mixing, and so, they want to paint him as a hypocrite. Last, and weirdest of all, they think they can somehow claim "community property" for the descendants of Jefferson's slaves for everything he accomplished.

I plead guilty to the misuse of words, as others have already pointed out. Laziness, ignorance, public school education, and the deliterious effects of Jack Daniels are my only excuses. I may be considered unlikely to make that mistake, but make it I did and did so my falling victim to the MS Word Spellchecker trap. Oh, what will my English teachers say?

Thomas Jefferson is no doubt among those who comprise the set of individuals were genetically capable of fathering Eston Hemings. The evidence is clear in that regard. But, that is not the contention of the media and much of the academic community. They have declared that Jefferson was, without doubt, the father, case closed. This is not science, nor is it history. Of course, there's no story, and no agenda if it turns out to be Randolph or another lesser known Jefferson. That's my point, and I'm sticking to it, my limited proficiency with the English language notwithstanding.

Abigail apparently read the Calander accusations and said she thought all the slave owning southerners took liberties with slave women.

Not much is spoken in our history books on the significance of miscegeny in maintaining slavery. Wherever men and women mix, sex often becomes an unspoken, undocumented, but overriding factor. Was there any doubt what the purpose of a light-skinned, young female slave would be on any plantation?

No one ever speaks of it, but I think sex is also a large part of what attracts men to radical Islam. Women have no rights. Men can marry four women at a time. A man can escape a rape charge simply by saying the sex was consensual.

...liberal historians Joseph Ellis and Eric Lander, sought to exploit the hoax, to rescue the authors’ sexually compromised hero, Bill Clinton.

Eric Lander is not a "liberal historian". He is a research scientist who is head of the Whitehead Institute at MIT, which does cutting-edge research on DNA. Eric Lander is not trying to "rescue" Bill Clinton.

More importantly, this article claims that there are up to 25 persons from the Jefferson family who could have fathered Sally Hemming's children. Jefferson only had one brother who lived and no sons. So any other man with the same Y chromosome would have to come from a more distant branch of the family. But how would such a person have contact with Sally Hemmings over a period of many years? No one has given a plausible explanation of this. Thus there is actually only one other person other than Jefferson who could have fathered the children, his brother Randolph. But is has been shown that the dates when all these children were conceived coincides with dates when Thomas Jefferson had access to Sally Hemmings.

Given the DNA evidence, which should not be taken too far, but is nevertheless irrefutable, a lot of the arguments in this article are irrelevant.

Now I am even more suspicious. As any descendant of Thomas Jefferson and a Virginian would know, there are no deleterious effects of Jack Daniels save mixing imbibing God's libation and the operation of a motorcar. In fact, I have found that several healthy drams of Jack Daniels tends to improve ones spelling, provides a singular grace to one's prose, and I suspect, improves one singing skills.

Be that as it may however, time to grip the old toro by the horns here. Do you agree that, on balance, that Thomas Jefferson is most likely to be the father of one or more of Sally Hemmings children?... though it is a diffcult task could you apply some subjective percentage likelyhood that Thomas Jefferson was the father of one of Hemming's children?...I'll be bold here....I would say it is 80-90% likely that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Hemming's children.

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