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.

I just read your correspondence with the man who has been "a published author for 33 years," blah blah blah, been on Oprah, blah blah blah ...

Well, one thing's for sure. Truscott is narcissistic enough to drown ten men. And there's really no substitute for family connections, since none of his blah blah blah would otherwise have come about. "Fatuous" is the word!

I notice that he emphasized the story about the elderly Sally Hemings tending to Jefferson's grave three times a week, being from the Hemings family oral tradition. I think we can thus safely discount the story, as a prop fashioned to hold up the myth that she was Jefferson's lover. Keep in mind, that Truscott is at best indifferent to the truth. He's just interested in whatever will support the story he's peddling, so that he can continue playing the Great White Father.

The whole story revolves around the Jefferson in Paris myth: he seduced the young girl in Paris, got her pregnant, and she bore his child shortly after their return. Except that she was not pregnant with any child of his upon her return from Paris, and apparently wasn't pregnant at all at the time.

If the pillars that held up the "big house" have collapsed, there is no reason to try and resurrect the structure.

Your dichotomy is false. Slave girls got pregnant all the time, without their masters necessarily having slept with them, or having "pimped [them] out."

Devastating expose of one of the biggest race hoaxes in recent years.

It's not a hoax; the DNA tests were conclusive.

Of course it's a hoax. The DNA tests were only conclusive in disconfmirming that any Jefferson male was the father of slave Thomas C. Woodson, who is the main pillar of the story. And so, anyone who claims that DNA tests proved Thomas Jefferson was the father of any of Sally Hemings' children, is perpetuating the hoax. The author of the original story, later admitted that it was inaccurate.

It's also a hoax, because documentary evidence was deliberately altered, in order to support the paternity claim. And it's a hoax, because supporters of the paternity claim have harassed and race-baited anyone failing to roll over. And it's a hoax, because supporters of the paternity claim have used different rules of evidence for adjudging claims supporting their story, than they have for adjudging claims that contradict their story.

Moreover, I can't picture how something like that amounts to any sort of a "smear" against Jefferson.

I can't either, but it clearly functions as one for the hoaxers.

The only people in the picture deserving of "smearing" are a number of neo-antebellum southern "historians" who apparently are still in denial over it.

I don't know which historians you are referring to, or why you use scare-quotes, when it is the hoaxers who are pseudo-historians.

BTW, did you bother reading the article through?

I guess they can find some strained method to question the DNA evidence or come up with a very convoluted and tortured explanation for it. But is you put Occam's Razor to the question it isn't all that complex.

I don't see how Occam's Razor is going to help you to join the Hemings Party. The Hemings Party has adduced no evidence that Thomas was the father; hence, there is no reason to accept the radical, new theory that Thomas was the father. (And you can't call it an old theory, because Callender was merely a libelist.)

It would not destroy Jefferson's legacy, were it true, but the Hemings Party certainly does aim to "libel" Jefferson (legally, you can't libel a dead man). Why they think that would discredit him is a matter of their particular political psychopathology.

The key to the issue is the preponderance of evidence standard. While it does not meet the " beyond a reasonable doubt" standard that isn't the historical standard used. Jefferson is not on trial ( though by the agonized writhings of the far right and far left on this issue you would swear that they have Jefferson in the dock.)

Given the historical record and contemporary DNA evidence one thing we know for absolute certainty. Someone in the Jefferson clan was the genetic contributor to one or more of Sally Hemmings children. Given that fact, you are faced with deciding who was the most likely to be that contributor. Given the frequency of access, the kinship relationship of Jefferson's widow to Sally Hemmings and comparing it to frequency of access of other possible candidates it is, on balance,most likely that Thomas Jefferson was that genetic contributor. This does not exclude other possibilites but is based on a "most likely standard". The distinction is the diffrence between words probability and possibility.

As an editorial comment I don't think Jefferson is any greater or lesser as a result of this probability. Those on the tub thumping left would have you believe that Jefferson was something lesser as result ( hypocrite, racist, rapist yadda..yadda.), while those on the sanctimous right are outraged at the suggestion that Jefferson probably fathered one or more of Hemming's children. ( He was a secular God who would never deign to stoop so low as to have sex with a mulatto women yadda yadda).

Jefferson was a man. He was a man of his time and operated under the social strictures and patterns of behavior of his time. He was a widower who owned a woman who was his dead wife's half sister.She gave birth to a son who ancestors bear the distinct genetic markers of the Jefferson family. Now given those facts who do you believe is the mostly likely genetic contributor?

If they stripped out the name Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings and its historical implications and substituted Josephus L Smith and Suzie Q. Brown the analysis of probablity becomes much more easy. It is less fraught with the biases and expectations of the observers.

Now, I don't have a dog in this hunt, as far as being a Jefferson-worshiper or hater, though I do tend to believe that (with rare exceptions) any one of the Founding Fathers had more character in his little finger, than all of his contemporary, pc detractors have in their entire bodies and souls. Then again, we're talking sex here.

You and I have some seriously incompatible standards, so we may have to simply agree to disagree. You speak of "probability" and of "the preponderance of evidence standard." Now, while I'm insufficiently corrupt to be an academic historian, I have conducted some historical research here and there (unsoiled by academic interference), and done some work on philosophy (of the social sciences, physical sciences, etc.), which I hope you won't hold against me.

History doesn't work based on probability or preponderance of evidence (civil court standard). It doesn't even work based on "beyond a reasonable doubt" (criminal court standard). You wouldn't happen to be a civil attorney, would you?

David Hume came up with a standard for the examination of claims of miracles, that I believe applies perfectly to radical, new social scientific and educational claims. I believe it works for all three so well, because the three types of claims have the same structure. In each case, someone makes an experiential claim that contradicts all commonly known experience based on the senses and scientific laws. The miracle claimiant would have us suspend all experience and scientific laws, and give him the benefit of the doubt. But as Hume argues, someone making miraculous claims must be held not to a lower standard of proof, but to a much higher one, if we are to trash all prior experience and science, on his behalf.

The Hemings Party demands that we throw overboard everything we know about Thomas Jefferson, and accept their miraculous claims. But those claims fall apart under scrutiny. Hence, we have no reason to accept them. And we certainly have no reason to accept the rules of inquiry the Hemings Party would foist upon us.

No...I'm not a civil attorney but perhaps their influence has become apparent over the years. I am a forensic accountant and work with civil attorneys in the preparation of suits arising out of fraud and malfeasance. Perhaps they have stained my thinking through the years.

In this issue I strive to stick to the issue of probablities versus cultural assumptions arising out of myth, politics, race or hero worship. Jefferson is one of my heroes based upon his intellect, vision, and decency. If there was ever a man with an inherent concept of noblesse oblige it was Jefferson. It is imcumbent upon me to divorce myself form my admiration of Jefferson. But as you say, Jefferson was also a man and subject to the same passions and digressions from some idealized path as other men of great and lesser character.

I do object to the phrase " The Hemming's Party" which tends to clearly telegraph the position long before the analysis. A kind of verbal variant of the Texas Sharpshooter effect. Much like those who assert that Jefferson is absolutely and incontrovertibly the father of Hemming's child, those who absolutely deny the probability, (or in some case even the possibility) that Jefferson is the father of Hemming's child use much the same process. Each draws his target around the requisite number of bullets to score the appropriate and specious bulls eye.

I've a colleague who has coined what he humorously calls " The Man Fron Planet Borgon Approach" In any issue that is larded with vested interest or close held belief he suggests you hand it off to a notional " Man From Borgon". The man from Borgon has no experience with the culture, history or values of the question at hand. You hand him the data as it is and let him count and then give a summation of the probabilities. He isn't black, white, liberal or conservative, He's a Borgonian. In fact he hasn't clue what the hell the issue is about merely that he has been asked to decide. He most assuredly "has no dog in this hunt". The Man from Planet Borgon doesn't even know what a dog is.

Now...It is my opinion that The Man from Planet Borgon would come to the reasonable conclusion that on the totality of the evidence it is more likely than not that Jefferson was the father of one or more of Hemming's children. While it is difficult to put some numerical expression to that likelyhood I would put it at about 70% I do not exclude the possibility that some other Jefferson relative was the father. I put that possibility as significantly less at 30%.

While that may seem subjective it is, to some degree, based upon some familiarity with the data. It has to do with number of total access days of each of the possibles. While Randolph is often bruited as the " real father" and it is possible, his total number of access days in the requisite period are extremely limited.

There you have it..

Jefferson is still my hero and all's right in the cosmos.

The key to the issue is the preponderance of evidence standard.

The problem with your argument is that it is too reasonable to stand any chance in the present political climate. As Herbert Barger so naively discovered when asked to help find the genetic markers for this study - those interested in this subject are not involved in a search for the truth. They have an agenda. That agenda is only served by Thomas Jefferson being adjudged as the father of one or more of Sally Heming's children. They do not care that others might be culpable, and that any scientifically credible conclusion would point out all of the probabilities. No, they are only interested in jumping to the conclusion that suits their agenda.

I have no objection to the reasonable approach that you champion - your arguments are rational, are supported by the facts as we know them, and help shed light on this complex issue. But, your argument is of no interest to those who have advanced this debate. They will only accept one conclusion, facts, statistics, and truth be damned.

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