The Secret Family of Thomas Jefferson

In November of 1998 the press was filled with headlines such as “Third President of the United State Saddled with Paternity Suit” and “DNA Proves Jefferson Father of Slave Children.” For students of history, however, this was old news. As early as the 1790s rumors were circulating among the landed gentry of Virginia that Jefferson had taken a slave at Monticello as a concubine. In September, 1802, during Jefferson’s first term as president, James Callender, a journalistic muckraker with an axe to grind against the president, published a newspaper article claiming that Jefferson had “kept a dusky mulatto wench, named Sally,” as his mistress. Jefferson neither confirmed nor denied this allegation during his lifetime but whispers about it continued for almost two centuries until the 1970s, when a number of articles, books and Hollywod films began to appear strongly suggesting that the story was true.

In 1998, science, in the form of DNA analysis, introduced another dimension to the controversy. Dr. Eugene Foster and a team of geneticists from Oxford University reasoned that the techniques of Y-chromosome analysis could be applied to the Jefferson-Hemings problem, but since Thomas Jefferson had no sons they had to approach the question of what his Y-chromosome would have looked like in a rather indirect fashion. On the diagram below Thomas Jefferson, his father Peter Jefferson, and his uncle Field Jefferson are shown to all have had essentially the same Y-chromosome structure, which they had inherited from Tom’s grandfather. All of the male descendants of Field Jefferson in turn should have had the same Y-chromosome structure as Tom, allowing the researchers to test living male descendants of Field Jefferson to establish a base line or reference point with which to compare the Y-chromosomes of any of those that claimed to be descended from the Tom-Sally union.

In addition to five known descendants of Field Jefferson, tested for purposes of the baseline, the research team tested eight other men in order to evaluate the three main hypotheses that had been put forward to explain Jefferson’s alleged relationship with Sally Hemings. They tested five descendants of Thomas Woodson, claimed by some to have been Jefferson’s oldest son by Sally Hemings. They tested three descendants of John Carr, a Jefferson cousin, claimed by many members of the Monticello Association to be the real father of Sally Hemings’ children. And they tested John Weeks Jefferson known to be a descendant of Eston Hemings, Sally’s youngest son. As shown in the diagram below the John Carr descendants and the Thomas Woodson descendants were not a genetic match to the Field Jefferson profile. John Weeks Jefferson’s Y-chromosome, on the other hand, was a perfect match to the Field Jefferson descendants, thus establishing the high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one child with Sally Hemings.