Jefferson-Hemings Controversy - Dissenting Views

Dissenting Views

In 1999 the newly formed Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society (TJHS) commissioned its own report. (Its founder and current Director Emeritus Herbert Barger, a family historian, had assisted Dr. Eugene Foster by finding descendants of the Jefferson male line, Woodsons and Carrs for testing for the DNA study. Its Scholars Commission included Lance Banning, Robert F. Turner and Paul Rahe, among others. In the Science article, Foster is reported to have agreed that the Nature report should have given credit to Barger, who was "fantastic" and "of immense help to me."

In 2001 it published its report, in which the majority concluded there was insufficient evidence to determine that Jefferson was the father of Hemings's children. Their report suggested that his younger brother Randolph Jefferson was the father, and that Hemings may have had multiple partners. They emphasized that more than 20 Jefferson males lived in Virginia. Paul Rahe published a minority view, saying he thought Jefferson's paternity of Eston Hemings was more likely than not.

In response to a PBS Frontline special on the DNA study in 2000, John H. Works, Jr., a Jefferson descendant and a past president of the Monticello Association, a lineage society, wrote that DNA tests indicated that any one of eight Jeffersons could have been the father of Eston. The team had concluded that Jefferson's paternity was the simplest explanation and consistent with historic evidence, but the DNA study could not identify Thomas Jefferson exclusively of other Jefferson males because no sample of his DNA was available.

In the fall of 2001, articles in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly criticized the Scholars Commission Report for poor scholarship and failure to follow accepted historical practices of analysis, or to give sufficient weight to the body of evidence.

In 2001 the historian Alexander Boulton reviewed both the TJHS report and The Jefferson-Hemings Myth: An American Travesty, published by the TJHS. In the William and Mary Quarterly, he noted that Randolph Jefferson had never been seriously proposed as a candidate by historians before the findings of the DNA study of 1998. It had disproved Carr paternity of Eston Hemings, showing a genetic match between the Hemings descendant and the Jefferson line. He noted "previous testimony had agreed" that Hemings had only one father for her children, so criticized the idea that she had multiple partners for her children. Jeanette Daniels, Marietta Glauser, Diana Harvey and Carol Hubbell Ouellette conducted research and in 2003 found that Randolph Jefferson had been an infrequent visitor to Monticello.