Now that DNA evidence conclusively proves the third U.S. president
fathered the child of a slave, scholars weigh in on what it means for
the discipline of American History
It came as little surprise to law professor Annette Gordon-Reed
that DNA testing conclusively proved that Thomas Jefferson fathered a
child by Sally Hemings, a slave woman he owned.
“I was ninety-eight percent sure the test would reveal the connection,” the New York Law School professor said.
Before the scientific testing had gotten underway, Gordon-Reed, a
legal scholar and an authority on Jefferson, had already written that
the 200-year debate would require nothing short of hard scientific
evidence to prove that the nation’s third president had a sexual
relationship with a slave.
“I suspect that if [verifying the story] is ever done, it will be
the result of the miracles of modern science and all the wonders of DNA
research, and not because of any interpretation of documents and
statements,” Gordon-Reed wrote in her 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.
Last month, a scientific experiment conducted by a retired
University of Virginia medical school professor showed that Jefferson
had fathered Eston Hemings, the youngest son of the seven children born
to Sally Hemings. Dr. Eugene Foster, a retired pathology professor,
established a similar or exact male chromosome link between a living
descendant of Field Jefferson, the former president’s uncle, and John
Weeks Jefferson, a living descendant of Eston Hemings. A link between
the Field Jefferson line, however, was not established with the living
male descendants of Thomas Woodson, the first child of Sally Hemings.
The test applied to males descending from their direct line of male
forefathers.
Nonetheless, the DNA evidence coupled with the historical evidence
known about Hemings’s descendants is leading the academic community to
accept the argument that Jefferson had a long-term relationship with
Hemings, fathering possibly all seven of the children born to her.
