Jefferson-Hemings Controversy - Current Scholarship

Current Scholarship

Andrew Burstein is a historian who, before the DNA test results, had denied in his last book on Jefferson that he could have been the father of Hemings' children. Since then, he has published Jefferson’s Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (2005). Burstein said in an interview about his book,

"On Jefferson’s isolated mountaintop, sex took place as part of a hierarchy that everyone involved understood. Jefferson, and those of his class, did not share our current understanding of sexual morality. Sally Hemings was his servant, and had little power. She was dependent economically, though this does not mean her feelings were irrelevant. But it does mean that he had extraordinary power, and she very little, and so, as his concubine, she likely replicated her mother’s relationship with Jefferson’s father-in-law; for she was, in fact, Jefferson’s late wife’s half-sister, and I have described the Hemings family as a parallel, subordinate family to the all-white Jeffersons."

Christopher Hitchens wrote a new biography of Jefferson in 2005, whom he had always admired and praised. While continuing that praise, he assessed the president and his views. In an interview on NPR about the book, Hitchens discussed Jefferson's views against the co-existence of whites and blacks in the United States. He said,

"Then there's the odd, of course, fact that he had a very long love affair with a woman who he owned, who he inherited from his father-in-law, who was his wife's half-sister, and produced several children by her, whose descendents have mainly been brought up on the white side of the color line. So in a strange way, his own patrimony disproves his own belief that there couldn't be coexistence between black and white Americans."

In The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008) historian Annette Gordon-Reed recounts the history and biography of four generations of the enslaved Hemings family, focusing on their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson. Based on her extensive study, she discusses Jefferson's complex relationships as the family's master, Sally Hemings' partner, and the father of her children.

William G. Hyland, Jr., a trial lawyer, published In Defense of Thomas Jefferson: The Sally Hemings Sex Scandal (2009), in which he argues that Jefferson's younger brother Randolph is a more likely candidate as father to Sally Hemings' children. He emphasizes that James Callender's reporting of Jefferson's alleged relationship in 1802 arose from his disappointment as an office seeker, and contends that current interests try to use the controversy. He is a member of the board of the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society.

In 2012, the Smithsonian Institution and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation collaborated on a major exhibit held at the National Museum of American History, Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty (January–October 2012). The "groundbreaking exhibit" is the first on the national mall to address Jefferson as slaveholder and the lives of his slaves. Members and descendants of six families, including the Hemings, are documented. The exhibit notes that "evidence strongly support the conclusion that Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings' children." Both the United States National Park Service and the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs note in their online biographies that Jefferson's paternity has been widely accepted.