In the 1970s, Fawn Brodie wrote a biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. The book, which as its title suggests, was a look at the third President's private life, was one of what was then a new genre, a psychohistory. Many well-known historians, particularly some of the leading Jefferson biographers, pilloried Brodie's work, especially her detailed speculations that this American icon had carried on an affair over three decades with Sally Hemings, his slave, called, in the terminology of the time, a quadroon.
Consequent to this lengthy affair, Brodie wrote, several children, including Eston Hemings (1808-1856), may have been born. The rumor of mixed-race Jefferson children was published in his own time, and the repetition of what heavily credentialed historians considered calumny brought some sharp criticisms Brodie's way, especially since she had no PhD and her two degrees were in English. Nonetheless, the book became a much-talked-about best-seller in 1974, and I count myself lucky to have a "Best Wishes" signed copy acquired during the author's book tour at the time. It's a fine piece of writing.
An obituary in Saturday's Los Angeles Times caught my eye. It was for 81-year-old Eugene Foster.
Eugene Foster, the retired pathologist who orchestrated the DNA testing that showed Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of the children of slave Sally Hemings, died Monday at the University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville, according to his son-in-law Brian Pusser. He was 81.
Historians had speculated for nearly two centuries that Jefferson's affair with the household slave had produced offspring, because of rumors at the time and because the children strongly resembled the nation's third president.
Some of the children also said they were Jefferson's descendants. But most experts had dismissed the speculation as idle gossip.
In 1996, after suffering mockery from experts who said it couldn't be done, and using what was then a new DNA technique to track down male ancestry, Foster and amateur historian Winifred Bennett found...
...four male lineages to test: Jefferson's lineage, descended from his paternal grandfather because Jefferson himself had no direct male heirs; the lineages of Thomas Woodson and Eston Hemings Jefferson, Sally Hemings' oldest and youngest sons; and that of the Carrs, two of Jefferson's sister's sons, who were widely thought to have fathered Hemings' children.
Hemings' other children left no surviving male heirs.
Their conclusion: The Y chromosome of a descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson matched that of Jefferson's lineage, that of Woodson's descendants did not, and none of them matched the Carrs'.
One of those Foster and his team found was a direct descendant of Sally's son Eston Hemings, John Weeks Jefferson. Members of his family had decided in the 1940s not to tell the children about any connection between themselves and President Jefferson because to do so would have meant acknowledging black ancestry, not something a prominent white family in Evanston, Ill., would risk at the time.
The Foster study was released a decade ago, and published in Nature. But it didn't end the controversy. The view of some Hemings's descendents and the majority of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is that Jefferson did father children with his slave, perhaps all of her children.
After extensively reviewing Foster's findings, the TJF reported in January 2000:
The results clearly show that the male-line descendants of Field Jefferson and Eston Hemings have identical Y-chromosome haplotypes (the particular combination of variants at defined loci on the chromosome). Scientists note that there is less than a 1 percent probability that this is due to chance. Thus the haplotype match is over one hundred times more likely when Jefferson and Eston Hemings are genetically related through the male line. This study by itself does not establish that Hemings’s father was Thomas Jefferson, only that Hemings’s father was a Jefferson.
A year later, scholars commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society argued the opposite case, that Hemings only played a minor role in Jefferson's life and that he fathered none of her children.
Subsequent to the DNA report, descendants of Hemings and descendants of Jefferson have met in various venues, including on the Oprah show, where their similarities to each other and to Thomas Jefferson were noted.
White and black descendants of the two have also met at tense reunions held by the Monticello Association. Although some positive connections were made, the members of the association, which, among other things owns the cemetery where Jefferson is buried, voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to refuse membership to any of Hemings's descendants, arguing that the evidence for Jefferson-Hemings progeny remains disputed. No new vote has been taken.
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