The Fable of Tom and Sally

Insight on the News, May 21, 2001 by James P. Lucier

The claim that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his slave Sally Hemmings has been shown to be baseless by a learned group of nation's most distinguished scholars.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, which owns and manages our third president's home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va., came to a startling conclusion in January 2000, just as it was about to announce a $100 million capital-gifts campaign: Jefferson was a man who secretly conducted a sexual liaison with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, and fathered her six illegitimate children -- a sordid affair covered up by a conspiracy of silence on the part of Jefferson and all of his legitimate descendants. The implication is that he was not the man of high probity and moral principles portrayed by historians.

The report issued by an in-house committee at Monticello seemed clear enough. The committee said its review of the subject "indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Heming's children appearing in Jefferson's records." Rather than being embarrassed by the new twist, the authors concluded that "the implications of the relationship between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson should be explored and used to enrich the understanding and interpretation of Jefferson and the entire Monticello community." Thus was born a new Jefferson for a new age. Shortly thereafter, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation dropped the word "Memorial" from its name.

Critics noted that the membership of the in-house committee included very few names of persons experienced in analysis of historical data. It was chaired by Dianne Swann-Wright, a Ph.D. candidate still struggling to write her dissertation. She apparently has published no peer-reviewed work and nothing on Jefferson himself. After repeated phone inquiries, she promised to call back with examples of her work but never did. In other writing, she has portrayed herself as a child of the civil-rights generation, identifying with the four young girls brutally murdered in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala. Critics have charged that she was overly influenced by the work of Annette Gordon-Reed, whose book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, seemed to provide a road map for the subsequent Monticello study.

Other members included an architect, an archaeologist, a geneticist, the head guide and a communications officer. A medical doctor wrote a dissenting report, only to have it ignored when the majority report was first published. The only recognized historian in the group was staff researcher Lucia Stanton, known for her meticulous work on Jefferson's notebooks.

But now after a year of study and deliberations a committee of 13 distinguished scholars -- the cream of U.S. historical researchers -- has released a 565-page report demonstrating in a gentlemanly way that almost all of Monticello's presumptions are thin at best and based on shoddy scholarship, improbable assumptions and even doctored documents. The report was unanimous, although one professor expressed several minority reservations.

Moreover, another rebuttal issued at the same time by a third group, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, took a tougher attack based on firsthand accounts of dissidents from the Monticello group as well as legal and philosophical arguments.

Is this just a tempest in an academic teapot? Not so, according to experts interviewed by Insight; it is a battle for the interpretation of America's heritage and the way future generations view the founders of the nation. University of Virginia law professor Robert Turner, chairman of the distinguished scholars committee, is a man who cares deeply about such things. "For a few weeks, I thought the Monticello report was right" he tells Insight. "But I went to a luncheon, and as we went around the room everybody said it was a poor piece of work. Then I downloaded it from the Web, and it read like an advocacy piece. I've been studying Jefferson for close to 30 years and I thought he deserved a fair hearing."

Then Turner began to put together the group of Jefferson scholars to examine the evidence piece by piece -- authors mostly with several Jefferson books to their credit, history department chairmen, directors of graduate studies [see sidebar]. "We had a diverse group" says Turner. "I wanted people of exceptional ability. But I also wanted people of courage. I told them I don't care what you think, but you must agree to pursue the truth."

The scholars examined the evidence individually, then got together for 15 hours of face-to-face meetings. "We have found most of the arguments used to point suspicion toward Thomas Jefferson to be unpersuasive and often factually erroneous" they wrote. "Not a single member of our group, after an investigation lasting roughly one year, finds the case against Thomas Jefferson to be highly compelling, and the overwhelming majority of us believe it is very unlikely that he fathered any children by Sally Hemings."