African-American Heritage of United States Presidents - Significance of Claims

Significance of Claims

See Slavery in the United States

Citizenship and associated claims split on two dimensions: formal legal citizenship, and full social and political citizenship. While claims of African ancestry may have created social scandal (and that varied in time and place), even in Thomas Jefferson's time, a person of less than one-quarter African ancestry could be considered legally white. Later this was changed so that a person must have one-eighth or less African ancestry to be legally white. Jefferson's mixed-race children from his relationship with Sally Hemings, were seven-eighths white. There is ample evidence in historical records that people of mixed race could be accepted in communities, as they were documented as exercising the rights of citizens to bear arms and vote. Social acceptance by the majority white community was often the key as to whether a person was considered white, more than details about ancestry, especially in early periods when few records were kept.

This classification of ancestry and social class was separate from the legal status derived from partus sequitur ventrem, the law that made all children of enslaved mothers also slaves. This law hardened slavery as a racial caste system. But, it was not until after the end of slavery and regaining of power by conservative whites in the late 19th-century South that they passed laws to create racial segregation and Jim Crow. From 1890 to 1908, southern states of the former Confederacy passed constitutional amendments and legislation making voter registration more difficult, essentially disfranchising most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. Such disfranchisement essentially lasted until the civil rights movement gained Congressional passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to protect constitutional rights of citizens to vote.

In the early 20th century, southern states tried to find more ways to enforce segregation. Beginning with Tennessee in 1910, through Oklahoma in 1931, most southern states adopted the one-drop rule, and hardened racial lines so that a person of any African ancestry was to be considered black. During the same period, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Utah retained their old "blood fraction" statutes de jure, but amended these fractions (one-sixteenth, one-thirty-second) to be equivalent to one-drop de facto.

In recent decades, United States historians have more thoroughly explored the years of slavery and opened up discussion of race relations. They have noted the number and variety of mixed-race families that arose in colonial and antebellum United States. In award-winning research, Paul Heinegg traced the ancestry of free black families in North Carolina in the 1790 census, finding that most descended from free people of color in colonial Virginia who migrated to other areas. They were mostly descendants of unions between white women, indentured servant or free, and African men, slave, indentured or free, from years when associations among the working class were fluid. The historian Dr. Ira Berlin praised Heinegg's "meticulous research" in his Foreword to his work.

Nell Irvin Painter examined issues of power in Southern History Across the Color Line (2002). Joshua Rothman looked closely at antebellum Virginia and numerous mixed-race families in Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861 (2003). In two books, the scholar Annette Gordon-Reed showed how historians had ignored evidence of Thomas Jefferson's and Sally Hemings' long affair and mixed-race children. In her deep research, however, she did not support claims that Jefferson was of mixed-race descent. DNA studies in 1998 showed a match between the Jefferson male line and a descendant of Eston Hemings, leading experts to conclude that Jefferson was likely the father of Hemings' children. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation agrees that the weight of historical evidence supports this.

Legally, by the Constitution, a President has to be a natural born U.S. citizen, but exactly what "natural born" means in that context has not been decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and it even might never be, one question being whether a person qualified even if born abroad if both of their parents or only one of them had been born in the U.S., but the terminology does not include a naturalized citizen.