Family
In 1974 the historian Fawn McKay Brodie published a biography of Thomas Jefferson in which she explored the evidence related to his alleged relationship with Sally Hemings. Her book Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (1974) noted that Jefferson was in residence at Monticello for the conception period of each of Hemings' children, and that Sally Hemings never conceived when he was not there. Her book met mixed reactions: excellent reviews from literary critics and opposition to her psychological approach and conclusions about Jefferson's paternity from mainline biographers of the president.
After she published her biography, descendants of Carl Jefferson (a grandson of Eston Hemings Jefferson) read it and contacted her. Their knowledge of the family connection to Thomas Jefferson had been lost in the 1940s, as the Jefferson brothers decided not to pass on the story, for fear their children would face racial discrimination because of descent from the slave Sally Hemings. The senior Jeffersons instead told their children that they were descended from an uncle of Jefferson.
In 1976 Brodie published an article in American Heritage magazine about the grandchildren of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, and covered the Pearson family. A 1998 DNA study found that a male descendant of Eston Hemings Jefferson matched the rare Y-chromosome of the Jefferson male line. Most historians took this result as affirming other historical evidence related to the paternity issue, and have acknowledged that the president and Sally Hemings had a 38-year relationship in which he fathered her six children of record. While some historians disagree, most Jeffersonian scholarship has changed to incorporate this. Pearson and his Jefferson cousins were great-grandchildren of Thomas Jefferson.
As the Monticello Website says:
"Through his celebrity as the eloquent spokesman for liberty and equality as well as the ancestor of people living on both sides of the color line, Jefferson has left a unique legacy for descendants of Monticello's enslaved people as well as for all Americans."
In 2012 the Smithsonian and Monticello collaborated on an exhibit entitled Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: The Paradox of Liberty, which explored several slave families and their descendants, including the Hemingses.
Read more about this topic: Walter Beverly Pearson
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.”
—Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)
“Wherever the citizen becomes indifferent to his fellows, so will the husband be to his wife, and the father of a family toward the members of his household.”
—Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835)
“In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation—and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside.”
—J.M. (John Millington)