Are you going to print a retraction of your Straight Dope article concerning Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings [Return of the Straight Dope, pages 219-21]? The column called the evidence that Jefferson had an affair with his slave “dubious.” Is it still the contention of the Straight Dope that Jeffy’s relatives were the ones to blame? Will Cecil hire Johnny Cochran to refute the DNA evidence? –EdGein14, via AOL
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To review: In 1802 James T. Callender, a disgruntled ex-employee of Jefferson’s, publicly accused the president of a dalliance with Hemings that had apparently produced three children, the oldest of whom, Thomas, was then 12. What made the charge plausible was the strong resemblance between Jefferson and the light-skinned Hemings kids. Sally herself was only one-quarter African, allegedly the child of Jefferson’s father-in-law and a half-white slave. That would make her half-sister to Jefferson’s wife, Martha (who died before the supposed affair began). The real scandal wasn’t so much that Jefferson had impregnated a slave–a common occurrence in those days–but that he’d kept her as his concubine in the midst of his white family.
In recent times the question came up for another look, and it occurred to some that genetic testing might shed some light. The Y (male) chromosome changes very little when transmitted from father to son. So pathologist Eugene Foster and others decided to take the Y-chromosome DNA of male-line descendants of Hemings’s eldest son, Thomas Woodson (so surnamed because of a later owner), and her youngest son, Eston Hemings Jefferson, and compare it with the DNA of male-line descendants of Jefferson’s paternal uncle (TJ had no surviving sons) and of Samuel and Peter Carr’s grandfather. The results:
Still, think where this leaves us. Hemings’s youngest son wasn’t born until 1808. The most obvious interpretation of the DNA results is that Jefferson didn’t father Tom, the kid who inspired the initial rumor, but he did father the kid who was born six years after the scandal broke. Doesn’t this seem odd? Uncertainty about Tom further confuses matters: Callender cited him by name, but Jefferson’s records don’t mention him, and other sources are contradictory. We aren’t sure if Sally even had a son named Tom.
